The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [9]
In the North, Kim II Sung systematically purged his political opponents, creating a highly centralized system that accorded him unlimited power and generated a formidable cult of personality. As the great communist divide between the Soviet Union and China emerged in the mid-1950s, Kim, though profoundly disturbed by it, learned to play off his communist sponsors against each other to his own advantage. In July 1961 he went to Moscow and persuaded Nikita Khrushchev, who was seeking to recruit him as an ally against China, to sign a treaty of "friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance," pledging to come to Pyongyang's aid in case of a new war on the divided peninsula. This done, Kim proceeded to Beijing, where he presented Chinese leaders with his Moscow treaty and asked them to match it, which they did by signing their own nearly identical accord.
While both North and South Korea gave lip service to eventual reunification, there was little but hostility between them in the 1950s and 1960s. In the most notable incident, in January 1968, a thirty-oneman North Korean commando team attempted to assassinate the South Korean president. The team penetrated to within a thousand yards of the Blue House, the South Korean equivalent of the White House, before being repulsed by police and security forces. The prospects for any sort of reconciliation on the divided peninsula appeared slim indeed.
THE ORIGINS OF NEGOTIATION
On July 9, 1971, Henry Kissinger landed secretly in Beijing on a Pakistani airliner to begin the historic Sino-American rapprochement that openly split the communist world and changed global politics. At the time, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, a familiar figure to Chinese elders and a frequent unannounced visitor, was also secretly in Beijing. But while Kissinger and the president he served, Richard Nixon, were thrilled by the prospect of a geopolitical shift of great importance, Kim found the maneuvering of the great powers distinctly unsettling.
So far as can be determined, Korea did not figure in Nixon's desire to end the two decades of hostility with China, which had begun with Chinese intervention in the Korean War. However, among the factors uppermost in Nixon's triangular diplomacy with Moscow and Beijing was its potentially alarming effect on North Vietnam, another Asian client of the two giants of international communism. By simultaneously improving ties with both of Hanoi's sponsors, Nixon hoped to demonstrate that North Vietnam was expendable and vulnerable in a larger game being played by major powers. Though probably unintended, the same sets of pressures were felt by North Korea and, to Washington's eventual dismay, by South Korea as well. As a result both Korean regimes felt more insecure than ever before. Both, for the first time, decided to try to take the settlement of their conflict into their own hands.
From Kim II Sung's vantage point China's sudden shift toward amicable relations with the United States represented a betrayal of the common struggle against U.S. imperialism, leaving him in an exposed position against the American military power, still entrenched on the other side of the DMZ. The astute Chinese were sensitive to his problem. In his initial talk with Kissinger, Premier Chou Enlai went out of his way to urge that all U.S. troops be withdrawn from South Korea, although Chou may have done this more for Kim's reassurance than for any expectation of results. Immediately after Kissinger's departure, the leaders in Beijing dispatched two highranking officials to Pyongyang to give Kim a full report on the discussions with the Americans.
Later in the year, the Chinese approved new economic aid and signed the first agreement