The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [131]
10
CHINA SHIFTS ITS GROUND
n mid-June 1991 a Chinese civil airliner bringing Foreign Minister Qian Qichen and his official party from Beijing floated down slowly over a flat green landscape toward a landing on the outskirts of Pyongyang. Making its gradual approach to the capital's airport, the plane passed over a seemingly deserted country, with ribbons of roadways nearly empty of traffic and hardly any people visible in the neatly divided plots of farmland or around big apartment houses and other buildings. Seated in the tourist section of the plane, behind the foreign minister's first-class compartment, I peered down for the first time at the territory of North Korea and wrote in my journal that it looked to be a strange land "left deserted by some invisible plague."
Then as the plane roared down the runway, hundreds of people came into view: a colorful crowd lined up in well-ordered rows on the tarmac, enthusiastically waving pink plastic boughs. As we taxied up and the motors were turned off, we could hear martial music from a khaki-clad military band. From the roof of the terminal building, a giant portrait of Kim Il Sung looked down on the scene.
Waiting near the foot of the steps to welcome the high-ranking Chinese guest and his party was North Korean deputy premier and foreign minister Kim Yong Nam, the man who was also instrumental in my own invitation to visit. It was pure coincidence that I arrived on the same plane and was in Pyongyang at the same time as the Chinese foreign minister. Although secretive North Koreans had told me nothing of the discussions between the two neighbors, I realized later that I had witnessed the launching of an episode of diplomatic theater that had led to a major readjustment of the relations between Beijing and Pyongyang.
From its short-lived conquest of ancient Choson before the time of Christ until the twentieth century, China had been the foreign nation with the greatest importance in the Korean world. For more than a thousand years, until Korea's invention of its hangul alphabet in the fifteenth century, Chinese characters formed the basis of the Korean written language, and they remained important in classical writing into the modern era. Korea adopted not only Buddhism from China but also Confucianism, which remains at the heart of many Korean relationships, public and private. Throughout most of its history, Korea paid tribute to its giant neighbor at the court of the Middle Kingdom. Koreans called China daeguk, "big state" or "elder state."
China's intimate alliance with North Korea dates back to the Chinese communist sponsorship of Kim Il Sung's rebel bands against the Japanese in World War II. In the Korean War, China saved North Korea from defeat by sending its "volunteer" troops across the Yalu River, at the cost of 900,000 of its own soldiers killed or wounded.
Even more than the Soviet Union, China maintained a warm official friendship with the North Korean state through most of its existence, marred only by the revolutionary tumult of the Cultural Revolution. For decades both sides professed that China and North Korea were as closely linked as "lips and teeth." In 1970, shortly before Beijing's opening to Washington and Tokyo, Premier Chou Enlai declared that "China and Korea are neighbors linked by mountains and rivers.... This friendship cemented in blood was forged and has grown in the course of the protracted struggle against our common enemies, U.S. and Japanese imperialism.... Common interests and common problems of security have bound and united our two peoples together." Even after the 1971-72 shift in Beijing's foreign policy, Chinese leaders were careful to maintain close ties with North Korea, which was seen as an important ideological client and ally on China's border. On the North Korean side, Kim Il Sung in 1982 called the DPRK-China friendship "an invincible force that no one can ever break.... It will last as long as the mountains