Adam Cathcart and Christopher Green

Political relations between China and North Korea frequently make headlines – for the latest example, see the exchange of letters by Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un in late March, just ahead of a North Korean ballistic missile test. In this interview, two of the volume’s editors, Adam Cathcart of the University of Leeds and Christopher Green of Leiden University, discuss their thoughts on North Korea and China’s approaches to the border region, and the impact on ordinary people. Christopher Green: This question identifies the essential dilemma of North Korea’s leaders: How to maintain authoritarian control over society whilst simultaneously developing the economy to a degree that allows for maintaining the regime’s power. Green: One result of this natural cyclicality in North Korea’s policy toward China – and to a lesser extent vice versa – is that it causes quality of life to rise and fall markedly in the country’s border communities. Adam Cathcart: On the Belt and Road, Christopher Green and I published a paper in 2017 which showed “genuine discord between Xi’s rhetorical strategy and the responses of North Korea to the BRI framework.” But to say that this discord has resulted in actual sparks or overt disagreements between the two states would be an exaggeration – in general the Chinese Communist Party seems fine with North Korea not really playing the BRI game, and as in so many other economic initiatives, the energy has flowed to South Korea instead.