Excellent article today from Fairfax's man in Beijing, Hamish McDonald. Well, a fair amount of it's glib crap, actually, but his simple thesis about the difference of Chinese and American interests over the North Korea is striking. I'm a bit dubious about some of the stuff slung around these days about China as a new superpower, given its economic dependence on the US on a deuce of levels, but it's worth noting that the US imperium doesn't really abut China, with the exception of that one tiny sliver of Afghanistan which borders China. America has made inroads in Central Asia, but they haven't decisively routed the Russians there yet, and not until the US really gets Russia is that area going to become a US zone. Pakistan is of course rather in the US's pocket, but not much more than it is in China's – Pakistan is a zone of overlap between US and Chinese influence. Taiwan is the closest, effectively a US-occupied Chinese province, but one with a heavily militarised stretch of water separating it from China.
By contrast, what the fuck would happen if North Korea were assimilated into the West? A simple, non-mountainous, non-tundra border between an American neo-colony and the China proper? Would it be militarised? Or would trade flow freely? The latter course seems impossible, without China itself succumbing to the US politically far more decisively than it has heretofore, or Korea becoming a Chinese satellite (which would probably be more likely). The thing is that it won't come to this. There is already a militarised buffer zone in place: it's commonly called 'North Korea'. China is, as McDonald argues, going to prop that border up until it decides that there is no contradiction between its interests and America's, which is to say, until hell freezes over.