The only good solution is regime change. It is my understanding that the few defectors there are have been waging a campaign to float balloons into North Korea with USB drives or something like that, with videos showing life here, and calling for resistance and true revolution. The defectors who made it across the border were starving, their intestines filled with worms, and the most recent one apparently had anthrax antibodies in him. I’m not sure what to make of that, other than that Kim seems to be telling the truth when he says he is trying to weaponize anthrax for delivery on warheads, which I will point out can obviously be projectile warheads too. I don’t think I’m giving anyone ideas there.
So China would gain, economically, by not losing economically, if North Korea were to fall into the hands of the “people” it has always allegedly existed to serve. As it exists today it is a Fascist oligarchy characterized by extreme disparities in privilege and wealth, with the vast mass of people living in conditions likely WORSE than those suffered by most serfs in the medieval period. Not only do they face regular starvation, but they also face concentration camps I read are worse than those of the Nazis, and which have been a feature of life there for decades. It is hard to imagine a more soul-killing, horrific regime.
And China itself is presumably still run by an enormously unpopular Fascist oligarchy, which is able to keep power mainly through allowing the very Capitalism/free trade to happen which its Communism would lead it to reject in principle. But they found they could not feed their people any other way. They could not fund their military any other way. They could not fund their internal Geheime Staatspolizei, and Schutzstaffel any other way, and who else could keep the oligarchs in power, when the people are rioting everywhere as often as they can (or were a few years ago)?
So one can, in a way, see the logic. Even though economic logic and rational self interest should lead the Chinese to support what we are now calling “regime change” in North Korea, some combination of sentimentalism (some Chinese leaders may well have come out of the Cultural Revolution, and frankly likely did, and have somehow managed to avoid seeing the patent contradictions inherent in the wealth and privilege they enjoy compared to the brutal repression they visit on an often hungry and impoverished populace), and violent calculation that “as North Korea goes, so go we.”
The fact is, “The People’s Republic of China” contains two lies. It is China, certainly. But it is a regime no different than that which Hitler would have operated if he had won all his wars. There is the same censorship, the same relentless propagandizing, the same knocks in the middle of the night, the same concentration camps, the same elites drinking champagne and eating the Chinese equivalent of caviar. There is no concern for the people.
And as I have said before, I actually respect the Nazis more than the Communists, more than the Communist Chinese. Hitler did, to all appearances, genuinely feel a sense of kinship and affection for the German Volk. He was a psychopathic mass murderer, certainly, but there was at least some group he seems genuinely to have wanted, at least early on, to care for.
Had Hitler won the wars, there would have been slaughter on a scale never seen before. Tens of millions of Russians and other Slavs would have been simply eradicated, as well as of course all Jews and other “undesirables”. Large sections of the globe would have been enslaved. But Germans, ordinary Germans, those who toed the line, would have lived like kings. All of them. It would not have been s small group, it would have been all of them.
This is the thing that gets me about Communism. It is run by intellectuals, most of whom have never known true poverty. I was reading, in fact, that Lenin lived on what amounted to an allowance from his mother–like a child–for some thirty years. These people don’t understand the people they spout rhetoric for. And they don’t care for them when they get power. Then they seemingly act surprised that the repressive regimes they implement “for the sake of the people” somehow create vast relative privilege for themselves.
The whole thing is lunacy, top to bottom. It is incomprehensible, outside of an emotional world inappropriate for any but the smallest, most immature child. It is the covetousness of a 4 year old, inflicted on the world.
To make a long story short, it seems obvious to me that, if they are smart, the Chinese will help us end the North Korean regime peacefully. That is in everyone’s interest, not least that of the tens of thousands, at a minimum, of North Koreans who will be killed in a futile war, the end of which is preordained. The only question is how much pain they can inflict on the rest of the world, in dying. Given that what hurts America hurts China–which I am going to go out on a limb and guess had an outstanding Christmas season–there can be no question what the intelligent course of action. And that course is not violating sanctions and providing oil to North Korea. Again, it is winter, and this is humanitarian aid, but everything gets much, much worse in the event of a war. And Trump fully intends war, if no other solution can be reached to the problem of a lunatic using every resource he has to build nuclear missiles he keeps telling us he intends to launch at us at his earliest opportunity.