By Sunny Lee
BEIJING — North Korea didn’t even keep its closest ally in the loop about its most important development in over a decade: the death of Kim Jong-il, shedding light on one of the most intensely speculated elements surrounding the leader’s demise.
China did not know of Kim’s death in advance of North Korea’s official announcement, two sources from two different countries who are familiar with the matter, independently told The Korea Times.
China asked South Korea to vet the North’s announcement on Kim’s death, one of the sources said.
Whether Beijing was informed by Pyongyang of the death has been a matter of intense speculation because analysts saw it as a bellwether for China-North Korea relations under the latter’s new leader, Kim Jong-un. It was also seen as reflecting how the North feels about its major benefactor.
Kim Jong-il died of heart attack on a train on the morning of Dec. 17, according to the North’s state media. But it kept mum about the matter and made it public two days later on Dec. 19. Many pundits speculated that at least China knew about it before the official announcement.
Seoul came under fire for “intelligence failure” on its most important issue. The chiefs of South Korea’s spy agency and defense ministry both admitted that they were completely unaware of Kim Jong-il’s death until Pyongyang made an announcement two days later.
The foreign ministry here told a press briefing that China also did not know of the death in advance of North Korea’s official announcement.
“We heard several times that China did not find out (about Kim’s death) beforehand,” the ministry’s spokesman Cho Byung-jae said at that time, without going into details. That did not calm the rampant speculation.
The local JoongAng Ilbo quoted an unidentified source in Beijing as saying the Chinese ambassador to North Korea had obtained intelligence of Kim’s death and reported it to Beijing on the day Kim died.
Japan’s Asahi newspaper said North Korea did inform China of Kim Jong-il’s death. But it noted that the timing of doing so was on the 18th — one day prior to the official announcement.
Now the sources’ view disowns both reports.
What in fact transpired in the aftermath of Kim Jong-il’s death was an intense jockeying among the diplomatic communities for a fact-finding mission surrounding it. This included “comparing notes” among them too. And they found out that they all were on the same page. Beijing was not an exception, according to the sources.
That reveals the extreme level of secrecy North Korea attached to Kim’s death. “Even the North Korean Embassy in Beijing was not informed about it,” said one of the two sources.
China is seen as holding the most leverage over North Korea. Therefore, the strategy adopted by Seoul and Washington has often been to influence Pyongyang through Beijing.
But the episode highlights the fact that North Korea, even though it is highly dependent on China for its economic survival, still prefers to keep some information to itself, even from its closest and powerful neighbor.
That doesn’t make the role of China any less significant. Victor Cha, a former White House chief for Asian affairs, recently said in a column, “China is the only country that has eyes inside of North Korea.”
Yet Chinese experts on the North have long complained that while the two ideological allies are keeping in touch with each other, Pyongyang often doesn’t tell Beijing what is happening inside the country, posing a challenge to China’s diplomacy toward the reclusive country.
The diplomatic communities expect North Korea’s dependence on China will inevitably deepen as its new untested young leader Kim Jong-un needs an outside source to bolster his legitimacy and economic aid to feed the people so as to sculpt his image as a capable leader.
One of the two pillars of North Korea’s national goals this year is to become a “prosperous nation.”
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