China seems not to have appreciated how fortunate it was that Trump’s China policy has focused overwhelmingly on North Korea, rather than on its unfair trade and investment policies and its aggressive military expansion in the Asia-Pacific. For China’s interests, this has meant free rein on most other issues of concern—an extraordinary opportunity that it has squandered by not responding more effectively to what Trump wanted on this single front. Now, Trump is ratcheting up the pressure on China on multiple fronts at once…
On this score, what should China have done, and would that have made a difference? Let’s simply take the case of the sanctions the U.S. has just imposed on two Chinese entities for pro-North Korean money laundering. We must assume China was informed about the specific U.S. concerns related to these institutions and given information to support those concerns. So informed, China should have stepped up and gone after those companies itself.
The two entities are small, so China would not have lost face by cracking down on them. Most important, going after them would not have brought into play China’s most fundamental strategic concern regarding North Korea: that tightening the screws enough to freeze its nuclear program and bring it to the bargaining table would jeopardize the survival of what Beijing views as a buffer state.
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