Abstract: China-North Korea relationship is an important factor that affects peace and stability of Northeast Asia and world, There are many important significances in studying of the relationship. Especially today, North Korea wants to acquire nuclear weapons, how to prevent it to promote regional peace in the use of this relationship is even more important. As the author of this paper, I believe that review the history of China-North Korea relationship will help us get a clear understanding of this issue, so this paper will review China-North Korea relations in the past 60 years with a brief history firstly. After that, I will express my own views on the current situation of China-North Korea relationship. I will also point out which benefits North Korea and China get from the relationship. At the same time, I will focus on the drawbacks to the relationship. Finally, I will speculate future development of China-Korean relations by a brief analysis.
Key Words: relationship, nuclear, peace, development
Introduction to China-North Korea Relationship
China and North Korea have been allies for more than half a century. Beijing is a key provider of food and fuel to Kim Jung-Il's regime, and it is heavily invested in preventing a destabilizing regime collapse that would send North Korean refuges flooding across its northeastern border. But as Kim tests ballistic missiles and develops his nation's nuclear weapons capacity, China may be rethinking its support.[①]
Many professors think that, China’s influence on North Korea is more than it is willing to admit but far less than outsiders tend to believe. Although it shares the international community’s denuclearisation goal, it has its own concept of how to achieve it. It will not tolerate erratic and dangerous behavior if it poses a risk of conflict but neither will it endorse or implement policies that it believes will create instability or threaten its influence in both Pyongyang and Seoul. The advantages afforded by China’s close relationship with the North can only be harnessed if better assessments of its priorities and limitations are integrated into international strategies. Waiting for China to compel North Korean compliance will only give Pyongyang more time to develop its nuclear arsenal.[②]
However, I don’t think so. I think we should review the relationship between China and North Korea ,  it will help us get a new view.
History of China-North Korea Relationship
The China-North Korea relationship remains the most enduring, uninterrupted bilateral friendship for both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). This brother-in-arms relationship was solidified early during the Korean War. Sharing a common border and ideology, both China and North Korea confront the frustration of divided nations.[③]
From Beijing’s perspective, the logic of the relationship between the PRC and DPRK is tied intimately to the two states’ more than half century of history of battlefield cooperation and military alliance, shared socialist divided nation ideology, the geopolitical balance of power both in Northeast Asia and on the Korean Peninsula, and ambivalent overlapping views of the United States.
  The brother-in-arms relationship the Korean Communists and the Chinese Communists was solidified early during the 1930s, Kim Il Sung, who later became the leader of Communist North Korea, waged an anti-Japanese guerrilla struggle in Manchuria. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a group of Korean Communists (including Pak Il Yu, who would later become North Korea’s vice prime minister and a head of the “Yan’an faction” within the Korean Workers’ Party [KWP]) traveled to Yan’an, the “Red Capital” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to join China’s “War of Resistance” against Japan. During the Chinese civil war between the CCP and the Nationalists in the late 1940s, while Communist
North Korea served as a strategic supporting base for the CCP in Manchuria, around 100,000 ethnic Korean residents in China joined the Chinese Communist forces. The 156th, 164th and 166th divisions, three of the best combat units of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), were mainly composed of ethnic Korean soldiers.
But the brother-in-arms relationship between China and North Korea was solidified early during the Korean War. Beijing’s decision to enter the war in late 1950 was not taken lightly. While China’s paramount leader Mao Zedong clearly was predisposed to intervene on the Korean Peninsula, many leaders had serious reservations, and others strongly opposed intervention. The consensus of several careful scholarly accounts is that “a high-level policy” debate took place in Beijing. Mao’s forceful personality won out, and the first units of the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) crossed the Yalu River on the night of October 19, 1950. China paid a tremendous cost as the result of this decision in terms of casualties and war-related expenses. By one official Chinese estimate, the CPV’s “combat losses were more than 360,000 (including 130,000 wounded) and noncombat losses were more than 380,000.” Moreover, while the hot phase of the Korean War lasted 3 years, Chinese forces remained on the peninsula for an additional 5 years (until 1958), many assisting in national reconstruction projects.[④]
This de facto alliance was formalized in July 1961 when Beijing and Pyongyang signed a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance. This agreement committed one country to come to the aid of the other if attacked.
Yet Kim, a Korean nationalist in soul and increasingly a dictator in practice, neither tolerated the continuous existence of any remaining pro-foreign faction within his Party nor felt comfortable with having to live under the shadow of a morally superior China. All of this formed one of the most important conditions under which Kim introduced in 1955 the “Juche” ideology, emphasizing that the Korean revolution must be carried out in an indigenous Korean way and must achieve “self reliance” in all spheres. It was against these backdrops that a serious crisis erupted between Pyongyang and Beijing in late 1956.
In the early 1960s, Pyongyang further gained leverage in its dealings with Beijing when a great polemic debate concerning the nature of true communism emerged and intensified between China and the Soviet Union. In appearance, the North Koreans maintained neutrality toward Beijing and Moscow, but in reality they were more sympathetic to Beijing (this was largely due to Kim’s resentment of Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign and criticism of Stalin’s personality cult).When the CCP was increasingly isolated in the international communist movement with the deepening of the Sino-Soviet split, sympathetic support from Pyongyang became more and more important to Beijing. In a 1964 conversation with Choi Yong Kun, North Korea’s second in command, Mao even asked him to comment on whether or not the Soviet Union would attack the PRC from the north, trying to win firmer support from Pyongyang. During this period, although Beijing’s influence upon Pyongyang was further reduced, Chinese–North Korean relations—now based upon a foundation that was quite different from that of the early and mid-1950s—were very close. The situation, however, changed in the mid-1960s.On the one hand, after Khrushchev’s downfall in October 1964, the new Soviet leadership started providing more material support to the DPRK; on the other, the eruption of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in 1966 sunk China’s Party, state and society into great chaos, causing the PRC’s external relations in general—and its relations with the DPRK in particular—to be severely derailed. Consequently, Chinese–North Korean relations reached low ebb from 1967-1969, when the Cultural Revolution was experiencing its most hectic stage. The Red Guards in China widely made Kim Il Sung a target of criticism, proclaiming that North Korea, like the Soviet Union, had degenerated into a “revisionist country.” And the Beijing leadership, which was by itself in constant disorder, did little to stop these activities. At some points it even seemed that the PRC-DPRK alliance was going to be undermined.[⑤]
When both Beijing and Pyongyang strongly felt the negative impact caused by the deterioration of their relationship, they started to take action to improve relations. In January 1968, when a serious crisis erupted between the DPRK and the United States after the U.S. intelligence vessel Pueblo and its crew were captured by the North Koreans, the PRC government issued a statement on January 29, 1968 to provide “firm support” to the DPRK. Then a dramatic turn in Chinese–North Korean relations occurred on September 30, 1969, the eve of the 20th anniversary of the PRC’s establishment. Although Beijing had decided in principle that no foreign delegation would be invited to attend the celebrations for the anniversary, at 3:20 p.m. on September 30, “for the purpose of improving Chinese-Korean relations,” Beijing issued an invitation for a top North Korean leader to visit Beijing. At 6:25 p.m., Pyongyang replied that Choi Yong Kun would travel to China, and Choi arrived in Beijing at 11:30 that evening. The next day, Mao met with him atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, telling him that “the relations between our two countries are special and our aims are identical, so we should improve our relations.”[⑥]
As it turned out, the discrepancy demonstrated in the 1975 Deng-Kim meeting was with a meaning much deeper and broader than the issues under discussion. It indicated that Beijing, after [...]

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