China's North Korea stance: laggard or leader?

The Christian Science Monitor ^ | September 11, 2017 | Peter Ford, Michael Holtz

[Jagermonster]

PUTTING IT IN PERSPECTIVE - Beijing's caution risks undermining its growing reputation as a global player. But seeming weakness is a price it appears willing to pay now, in the interests of a long-term leadership goal: to take over America's old mantle as the dominant power in Asia.

PARIS AND BEIJING—Is China’s courage failing?

Exasperated and embarrassed by North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests, Beijing is nonetheless shrinking from using all the influence it has to stop them. China reportedly refused to back US proposals for an oil embargo against Pyongyang, for example, forcing Washington to soften the UN Security Council resolution debated on Monday.

US President Trump has publicly chastened Beijing on Twitter for its hesitancy, and China’s caution risks undermining its growing reputation as a decisive player on the world stage. But that apparent weakness is a price that its rulers seem willing to pay now, in return for longer-term leadership dividends.

Stronger sanctions could throttle Kim Jong-un’s regime. And though the young dictator is a humiliating thorn in China’s side, Beijing still sees North Korea as more of an asset than a liability for its overriding purpose: to take America’s old mantle as the unchallenged power in Asia.

“If you are a major global power you are expected to step up at a time of crisis,” says David Shambaugh, an expert in Chinese politics at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “China is not doing that.”

Instead, China is setting its own rules, and charting its own path to a bigger global role. Chinese President Xi Jinping is not vacillating, Prof. Shambaugh adds.

[Jagermonster]

Excerpted per rules.

[Rurudyne]

The ChiComs play Go. We in the West largely play Chess. There is a fundamental disconnect then because our leaders don’t seem to understand that they are thinking about the pieces on the board rather than the board itself, as the ChiComs (and others) do,

Territory is territory is territory just like location is location is location.

When I wrote my fanfic novel Transformers Genesis I described a game called Cyberball whose goal was to take and defend territory on the play field from which you could move on the other team’s goal. Each team was divided into players that were permitted to do different things, either to defend territory, take territory, or carry the ball. To capture territory or to score meant suffering attrition of your team’s players, too much success too quick and you might loose too many players to sustain yourself on the field. This was, as a part of the society I was describing, to simulate the actual trade offs on real battlefields and encourage ways of thinking that looked to achieve goals without needlessly sacrificing either people or assets ... I think Sun’tzu would have approved of such a game.

I imagine that the point of the fictional game, much like Go, would be lost on many Western leaders.