China’s concerns about the onset of a nuclear arms race in East Asia are beginning to override Beijing’s long-term worry of seeing a collapsed state on its border, according to analysts and diplomats. Despite Pyongyang’s nuclear brinkmanship of recent years China has been loath to push its long-term ally and neighbour too hard for fears it might precipitate a regime collapse and chaos that would provide reason for intervention by the US. But North Korea’s nuclear test in October has focused China’s fears on the chilling possibility of a full-scale nuclear arms race on the Korean peninsula and forced Beijing to engage in intense bilateral and multilateral negotiations to reverse its course.

“The threat of a nuclear arms race in East Asia is by no means minor to the threat posed to China’s interests by separatist forces in Taiwan,” Zhu Feng, a scholar on international

relations from Beijing University, wrote of the island that mainland China considers a part of its sovereign territory.

“A nuclear arms race would destabilise the regional geopolitical balance and render China’s current goal of building a ‘harmonious world’ very difficult if not impossible,” Zhu warned in the weekly Southern Weekend. Signs that China is hard pressed to strike a balance between maintaining stability in North Korea and preventing a wider nuclear crisis in the region emerged earlier this year when Pyongyang conducted a series of provocative missile launches in July. An internal debate among Chinese policy makers about how far their country should prop up the Stalinist regime of Kim Jong-il resulted in Beijing’s support of a tough UN Security Council resolution that condemned the missile tests.

The same scenario was repeated when North Korea conducted an underground test on Oct 9 and declared itself a nuclear power. Emerging from its decades-long position of neutrality at the UN, China voted in favour of imposing sanctions on Kim’s regime. In the past, Beijing had consistently impeded efforts to impose UN sanctions on North Korea despite evidence of breaches to the international law.

It’s the possibility of Japan, China’s wartime enemy, going nuclear that worries Chinese policy makers most.

Japanese foreign minister Taro Aso has created political waves by declaring that “it is important to have various discussions” on the development of atomic arsenal as “another way of thinking”.

During the premiership of Junichiro Koizumi, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) became increasingly vocal about the need to raise the country’s military profile in the region and re-assert Japan’s regional leadership role.

The issue of nuclear arms race is set to dominate talks between Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and his Japanese and South Korean counterparts when they hold their annual East Asian regional summit in the Philippines in mid-December.

Beijing is also trying to revive the stalled six-party disarmament talks that, along with China and North Korea, includes the US, South Korea, Japan and Russia. The talks began late 2003 but Pyongyang walked away from the negotiating table in 2005 to protest financial sanctions imposed by Washington. After intense diplomacy by Beijing, North Korea agreed in October to resume negotiations, but no date has been set yet. — IPS