冷戰結束後中國的韓半島政策

Abstract

This article is to provide analyses on China’s policy basis toward the Korean peninsula and its following changes in China-DPRK and China-ROK relations after the post-Cold War era. As a result, China considers peace and stability in the Korean peninsula as the number one priority, and it seeks to play a role for ‘responsible great power’ in Northeast Asian region as well as in the international community by continuously expanding its influence in the peninsula thereafter. To this end, China in the post-Cold War era has sought to develop its relationships with the DPRK as well as the ROK in a balanced manner. China-DPRK relations are substantially transformed into strategic cooperative relations, maintaining friendly cooperative relations outwardly after going through the periods of alienation, restoration, consolidation, and laxity. In the meantime, China-ROK relations have developed into good neighborly relations, cooperative partnership, full-fledged cooperative partnership, strategic cooperative partnership by period since the establishment of formal diplomatic relationships between the two countries in the year 1992. China’s Korean peninsula policy through stabilizing and strengthening its influence in the peninsula has brought improvement in relations with the DPRK as well as the ROK simultaneously, and this trend is expected to continue in the future. Meantime, improving relations among China, North Korea, and South Korea may cause a problem for the three countries to act together as collective responsibility. In this case, China will try to solve the problem in the international community level rather than a bilateral relations level. It is highly likely in the future that China’s Korean peninsula policy and its following relationships with the DPRK and the ROK may be established in a phase of cooperation and conflict between China-US relations amid the interest of the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asian international relations.