While Americans are focused on a proposed meeting between Kim and President Donald Trump, it’s critical to also consider China’s unique perspectives, interests, and concerns regarding the peninsula, according to scholars and former U.S. officials. Speaking at a conference this week on China-North Korea relations, country experts looked back a thousand years at the historical roots of the two nations’ dynamics and peered ahead to how a reunified Korea might fit into the goals of China as a rising world power. They also addressed the role China might play in the event of war on the peninsula. The symposium was co-hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace and Georgetown University.

Chinese analysts are broadly convinced that Korean unification is inevitable and the country’s long-term policies should be seen in that light, said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center. The two Koreas’ strong national and ethnic identity forms an unbreakable link that no leader, north or south, can abandon, she said. China also sees the division of Korea through the prism of China’s goal of reunification with Taiwan, which it considers an “irreversible trend of history.”

That said, China’s policies are also shaped by uncertainties that include the timing, terms and conditions, and immediate impact of any changes to the status quo. At this point, Sun said, China sees North Korea’s provocations and nuclear program as harmful to its overarching desire for regional stability, increasing China’s willingness to take policy risks. Still, based on today’s realities, China believes reunification by absorption, as occurred with the divided Germany, would put a pro-U.S. Korea on its border, potentially threatening Chinese interests in a variety of ways, Sun said. China’s goal is a unified, stable and prosperous Korea that eschews any U.S. alliance.

Legitimate State

Chinese analysts say that to get there, North Korea must be accepted as a legitimate state and equal partner by Seoul and the international community, according to Sun.

“In Chinese logic, the path to denuclearization lies in how to remove North Korea’s deeply embedded sense of insecurity, and the most direct path is to have a peace mechanism that includes a U.S. security guarantee and diplomatic normalization,” Sun said.

Although China sees potential benefits in changing the peninsula’s status quo, the long history of strategic mistrust between China and South Korea and the United States makes it unlikely for now in South Korea’s view, said Heungkyu Kim, a political science professor at Ajou University in the Republic of Korea. The growing strategic rivalry with the United States, Xi’s foreign policy of expanding Chinese influence, and lingering lessons from the Korean War all affect Chinese thinking, he said. As USIP North Korea expert Frank Aum, who moderated the panel, noted, it’s commonly believed today that China prefers to have North Korea exist as a buffer state between itself and the U.S. presence in South Korea.

Still, China is afraid of North Korea’s instability and nuclear provocations, Kim said. Strategic cooperation between China and the United States will be essential to securely move toward a reunification that can produce economic benefits, and establish a more imposing unified Korean state to help check any remilitarized Japan.

The accumulated concerns, risks, and potential benefits foster policy considerations “far more confounding for Chinese strategic planners than perhaps we recognize,” said Michael Green, the director of Asian studies at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. In most respects, the status quo serves China’s current interests.

Defensive Standpoint

Green, who served on the National Security Council staff from 2001 to 2005, said that from a defensive standpoint, China’s principal issue is alignment with the U.S., not whether an American battalion moves to the Yalu River that separates the two countries. China’s grand strategy calls for securing its maritime flank, a source of weakness and invasion in the 19th Century. A U.S. ally on the continent complicates that strategy, he said. Ideology is also a serious concern, according to Green: Should South Korea, with its much larger economy, absorb the north—as most Chinese scholars concede is likely—China would have on its border an example of how a deeply Stalinist regime can transform to a democracy.

“We shouldn’t underestimate the effect,” he said.

On the other hand, a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War might begin turning back the clock to the 18th century before the West intervened in the region and Chinese dynasties dominated the Korean Peninsula, Green said.

In the meantime, with North Korea increasingly dependent on China, and South Korea trading more with China than with the United States and Japan combined, China has little incentive but to wait until a non-aligned Korea emerges, Green said.

Chinese Pressure

The implications for current U.S. and South Korean overtures are significant, Green concluded: China will put enough pressure on Pyongyang to participate in some diplomacy as it waits for the future to arrive. “The sweet spot for the Chinese in the foreseeable future would be to have North Korea stop taking provocative steps with ICBMs and its nuclear program and get the U.S.-Japan alliance to slow down missile defense and other weapons—and not to expect North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons in a verifiable way,” Green said.

Former U.S. ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert, calling the current sanctions regime “incredibly important” to getting North Korea to the negotiating table, said China is pleased to have helped promote talks. While many of North Korea’s current diplomatic steps may have a familiar ring from the past 25 years, China’s enhanced role and influence today may be having a greater impact on North Korean behavior, Lippert said. Yet the Chinese, too, are trying to figure out where North Korea goes from here, he added.

In the event of a military conflict, China would likely come to the North’s support if the United States abrogated the 1953 armistice agreement and initiated the hostilities, said retired Lieutenant General Jan-Marc Jouas, the former deputy commander of U.S. forces in Korea. Abraham Denmark, the director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former Pentagon official, said a key U.S. objective in a limited conflict scenario would be to “maintain escalation control” and avoid war with China. That could be done with open and careful lines of communication, he said.

Nuclear Security

China is likely to enter any extended conflict in North Korea to protect its own interests, not those of the regime, said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University and a U.S. Air Force Reserve officer. Its most critical interest is nuclear security, she said. Given China’s proximity to North Korea’s nuclear and missile sites, a Chinese intervention there would be the only Chinese intervention in the world that would benefit the United States, added Mastro.

China has 150,000 troops on the border that could quickly seize ground 100 kilometers into North Korea, where all the country’s nuclear sites and 2/3 of its missile facilities can be found, Mastro said, citing data from the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Arguing about what the United States would do with these facilities is a moot point, she said: Chinese forces will get there first and control them. The good news, she said, is that China may be open to international cooperation on areas where it is weak—nuclear proliferation and dismantling weapons.

“This type of help doesn’t come without costs, it comes with strategic tradeoffs,” she said. China envisions the peninsula’s future as one without U.S. forces or a U.S. alliance, she said. “If China controls large parts of North Korean territory and nuclear weapons, you better believe they’re going to leverage that to achieve some of those end goals that might not be to the benefit of the United States.”