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Adam Cathcart recently pulled together a thorough dossier on early Chinese reactions to the death of Kim Jong Il (our highlights here). He and colleague Charles Kraus have now produced a second dossier based on a small cache of four newly-declassified CIA documents and a memorandum of a conversation between Kim Il Sung and Eric Hoeneker from the Cold War International History Project. Entitled China's "Measure of Reserve" to Succession: Sino-North Korean Relations 1983-5, the dossier not only offers up insightful commentary but uses simple technology that is transforming historical studies; authors can now not only cite documents but provide direct links to them as Cathcart and Kraus do here. A recurrent theme, though, is that the documents should not be taken at face value; the CIA analysis itself is a major part of the story as agency analysts fretted about Soviet intentions in Northeast Asia.
The dossier begins with a CIA assessment of Kim Jong Il’s first official trip to China in 1983 and the dilemmas it posed for the Chinese. Not wild about the dynastic succession they nonetheless wanted to size up Kim Jong Il. For his part, Kim Jr. sought status and foreign policy credentials through endorsement by Beijing. Sound familiar?
The Soviet Union was initially even more reluctant to embrace KJI, but relations subsequently warmed and CIA analysts picked up Pyongyang’s tilt away from Beijing toward Moscow. The reasons for these shifts involved both the larger strategic triangle between the US, China and the Soviet Union and relations surrounding the peninsula. The US-China rapprochement appeared to make Pyongyang nervous. One possible explanation: China’s experimentation with reform and opening posed both an ideological challenge and a practical one given Kim Il Sung’s reticence to follow suit. We now realize that the Soviet Union was stagnating badly, both economically and politically. But its forward response to the Reagan administration in the Asia-Pacific may have been comforting.
But Pyongyang’s concern also centered on growing economic ties between China and South Korea. Ironically, it was Gorbachev rather than the Chinese leadership who moved first to normalize relations with the South. But China was not far behind, and the dossier provides more evidence on how fraught the “lips and teeth” relationship has been.
