Maybe I'm being a little to hawkish. A lot of what you say makes sense. Even so, what I hear from the locals, including the president of our university, who is a vice-minister in the Ministry of Labor, China has been propping up NK because they don't want a US puppet so near their border. It would cost them heaps to seal that border, which is right now about as porous as the US-Mexico border, as well as to install military bases sufficient to keep it thoroughly strategically defended. China's recent rebuffs of NK seem to have been motivated by the threat of economic (trade) repercussions should they be seen as supporting NK's nuclear agenda. They don't want their buffer zone to disappear; they just want NK to shape up instead of continuing to provoke, thus threatening the status quo.Ian wrote:Not sure if I agree with that one. The US would love to see a unified Korea with its government in Seoul (it just can't reunify any other way; Pyongyang's days of power are limited). The expansion of capitalism is always in its global interests. And being able to redeploy/draw down nearly 40,000 troops from Korea to elsewhere would make the US military very happy.FBM wrote: Anyway, both the US and China have too much to lose from a reunification of any kind.
As for China, I doubt they'll see a unified, western-oriented Korea as a strategic threat. For too long now, the North has been the charity case that China would rather not have. I think they'd prefer to increase economic ties with the peninsula than see a continuation of the status quo tensions.
The US has an interest in maintaining the status quo, too, it seems. If there is a peaceful reunification with a Southern-style democracy, Korea will no longer need US military presence, as it will have no enemies, and the US would be in danger of losing a strategic foothold in NE Asia. Right now, Korea is paying a lot of money annually for the US military presence, rather than take the economic impact of boosting its own military sufficiently to deter Northern aggression. Believe me, with all the bad press over the behavior of US soldiers, Korean citizens wouldn't shed a tear at seeing them leave. Korea would benefit economically and in terms of social unity. Korean domestic politics is strongly divided over the pro- and anti-US military presence issue.
South Koreans want reunification, but they're afraid of the economic burden it would have. They want reunification, but not right now. (I keep asking them 'If not now, when?', seeing as how this sentiment tends to propagate itself) They imagine some point in the not-too-distant future when they will have a strong enough economy to handle the inevitable in-pouring of refugees from the North. That said, should the North collapse internally, they'd welcome the news, generally speaking.
So, the only real beneficiaries of a Northern collapse/reunification would be the North Korean people themselves, but their voices are kept largely quiet by their own regime. I think the South would eventually recover from whatever economic blows a sudden reunification would bring, but most Southerners aren't interested in looking at the long-term.
