The ambivalent Chinese foreign policy and the North Korea's nuclear program

Abstract

The present essay aims to analyze the China-North Korea relationship and also how the nuclear issue has contributed to shape the way chinese foreign policy is implemented in the region throughout the years. This relationship, which had its beginning marked by the Korean War, can be seen through a series of conventional thoughts that for a long time served as an explanation to the ambivalent way China has been behaving towards North Korea. Nevertheless, after more than one decade of North-Korean Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) tests, the way how the international security issues have developed made these thoughts no longer sufficient to explain the behavior of a China that now occupies a place of a great global power, and has also a lot more responsibility to the international community given the threat Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has become.

Keywords

• china. coreia do norte. questão nuclear.