China Briefing | The world’s dilemma: Why North Korea will become a nuclear power despite pressure

Over the past few days, a cartoon in a Japanese newspaper has gone viral on the internet on the mainland, depicting a fuming US President Donald Trump standing on one side of the American flag of red and white stripes and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on the other side. Trump barks, daring Kim to “cross the red line”, to which Kim replies: “Which one?” The cartoon succinctly captures the dangerous showdown not only between Washington and Pyongyang but also Pyongyang and the international community as a whole.

On Sunday, just a few weeks after Trump threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea, the rogue state said it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb, the country’s sixth nuclear test and the most powerful so far, creating a magnitude 6.3 tremor felt in China’s northeastern provinces.

US defence secretary Jim Mattis warned it could launch a “massive military response” to threats from North Korea while Trump called North Korea a great threat, warning the US was considering stopping all trade with any country doing business with it. But such escalating threats sound hollow without full support and cooperation from other powers like Russia and particularly China, North Korea’s major ally and supplier of economic aid. While both China and Russia have strongly condemned North Korea’s latest nuclear blast and share the goal of denuclearisation on the Korean Peninsula, their basic positions have not changed: that diplomacy and dialogue are still the keys to calming tensions.