The Telegraph has reportedly uncovered China’s secret plans for handling the scenario of a collapse of North Korea’s regime under Kim Jong Un. The document suggests that China is worried about the short- and long-term overall stability of the Un regime.
Chinese contingency plans structured through China’s People’s Liberation Army were leaked to Japanese media. It consisted of many insightful revelations of China’s mindset towards North Korea and the West as a whole.
China shares an 879-mile border with North Korea. Should Kim Jong Un’s regime collapse, the report calls for extra coverage over the border to prevent spillover into China.
The remaining senior leaders of North Korea’s military apparatus should be protected, the report states. This is due to the opinion that they are a prime target of another “military power”, which the Telegraph suggests is code language for United States. However, this does not mean that the North Korean leaders can automatically be trusted in Chinese territory. Therefore, the report suggests detaining the remaining leaders in China in order to interrogate them further. The North Korean leadership must be vetted in order to protect China’s national interests.
The report concludes that should mass regime change occur, many refugees remaining from the ensuing chaos will try to flee into China. It is believed that the route to China to the north is preferred over neighboring country South Korea.
“This only underlines that all the countries with a stake in the stability of north-east Asia need to be talking to each other,” Jun Okumura, an area scholar, told The Telegraph. He continued, “What we have learned from the collapse of other dictatorships – the Soviet Union, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya – is that the more totalitarian the regime, the harder and faster they fall. This is why we need contingency plans, and I am sure that the US and South Korea have extensive plans in place, but the release of Chinese measures is new.”
Last week on April 28, 2014, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released a 16-page report titled, “The North Korean Threat to the United States.” The abstract of the report stated:
DIA assesses with moderate confidence the North [Korea] currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles. This conclusion is highly credible and not really new. North Korea was assessed to have nuclear weapons long before the actual (or at least detected) first test of these weapons in 2006. Building a nuclear weapon small enough to be carried by the relatively large payloads of North Korea’s ballistic missiles is not a very difficult task today. In light of what is now known about the proliferation of a nuclear missile warhead from China to Pakistan and from Pakistan to North Korea, the North Korea defector reports about nuclear weapons development and the North Korean nuclear tests, the DIA conclusion may be an understatement. The North Korean nuclear stockpile may be significantly greater than what is usually assessed. This is of concern because the North Korean regime is the most brutal Stalinist dictatorship in the world. Moreover, while North Korea has long made occasional nuclear attack threats against the U.S. in the past, the scope, magnitude, and frequency of these threats vastly increased in 2013. Current U.S. policy, which downgrades the importance of nuclear deterrence and cuts missile defense, is not well suited to handle this threat.
Read the full story in The Telegraph.
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