BEIJING — China's reaction to North Korea's nuclear test announcement early this week was unusually swift and forceful. Within hours, the normally slow-to-react Chinese government characterized Pyongyang's action as \o7hanran\f7, meaning brazen, a term generally reserved for its worst enemies.
By midweek, however, China was sounding more like its old self: calling for dialogue, eschewing confrontation and warning against comprehensive economic sanctions, even as it redoubled efforts to bring its longtime ally back to the negotiating table.
As North Korea's top supplier of energy and food, Beijing is viewed as the key to a tough international response at the United Nations to North Korea's declared nuclear test Monday in defiance of Security Council warnings. And Washington argues that China must be a "responsible stakeholder" if it wants a leading role in international politics.
But with its go-slow stance, Beijing has been exposed to criticism that it is squandering a golden opportunity to display global leadership.
The problem, analysts say, is that China draws much different conclusions than Washington, even in the middle of a nuclear crisis, because it has a very different idea of what's important and what it needs to prosper.
Whereas the U.S. and Europe view a nuclear North Korea as a fundamental threat to the global order, China sees it less as a problem in its own right than as a catalyst for other headaches, including the possible destabilization of the Korean peninsula and militarization of Japan.
"America wants to see North Korea go away, representing the final victory of the Cold War," said Alexandre Mansourov, a security expert with the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. "China's interests, however, lie in keeping North Korea in place. China's not doing this because it loves [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il, but because it wants the buffer to remain."
Furthermore, Beijing appears to be less worried about a nuclear-armed North Korea.
"There's a big perception gap," said Jin Linbo, Asia-Pacific director at Beijing's China Institute of International Studies. "China has a different assessment of the danger."
Beijing already lives in a tough neighborhood where nuclear neighbors are abundant. It nearly went to war with a nuclear Soviet Union in the 1960s and more recently watched Pakistan and rival India join the club. China is not all that impressed by Pyongyang's nuclear technology, analysts add, nor does it see itself as a potential target.
