China has less leverage over North Korea than you think

Beijing wants Pyongyang to adopt Chinese-style economic reforms, as this would enable North Korea to wean itself off of Chinese support and become more stable. The United States and the rest of the international community would probably find this acceptable, too. So why doesn’t it happen?

Two reasons. First, North Korea is historically wary of Chinese influence, dating back to the inception of the country after World War II. According to Andrew Scobell, a China expert at the RAND Corporation, founding leader Kim Il Sung (Kim Jong Un’s grandfather) actually purged ethnic Korean Communists who studied in China, fearful that they constituted a potential fifth column. And when global Communism cratered following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, North Korea increasingly embraced juche, or self-dependence, as a national ideology. As Scobell notes, “North Korea just isn’t comfortable with China’s dominant role in its economy.”

Secondly, the Kim regime fears that implementing reforms might reduce its grip on political power, even though this hasn’t happened (yet) in China. Pyongyang has experimented with small-scale reforms in the past, but has always stopped well short of abandoning its command-style economic system. Why? Scobell says that “they’re afraid of reforming the regime out of existence.”