I know I’m not being as consistent as I should be - work has been busy and I’ve had a chronic little cold that’s been making sleep far more interesting than it should be. Enough complaining, though.

Have you ever had one of those moments where something seems so immediately obvious, so immediately clear, that you can’t believe nobody else has come up with it before? I’m there right now. I’m sure somebody else has thought of this. I’m sure somebody else has written about it. However, to my knowledge, I’m the first person I’ve run across that’s realized precisely why China doesn’t just let North Korea implode or push for it to unify with South Korea.

It’s not because of any refugee problem. China has a refugee problem with North Korea now.

It’s because of us. More specifically, it’s because of the United States.

Pretend you’re in charge of the Chinese military. Who are your threats? Who are your neighbors? To the north, you have Mongolia and Russia. To the west, you have all the former -Stans of the Soviet Union. To the south, you have India, Burma, Thailand, and the various countries in Indochina. To the east, you have Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. You also have, across the Pacific, the most powerful country on Earth, economically and militarily, and they’re getting increasingly nervous about you.

The good news is that most of your neighbors are weak. Mongolia will never be a threat to you, nor will Nepal or Bhutan. Vietnam is an annoyance due to their involvement in the Spratleys, but, if things get really interesting, you have more than enough military heft to deal with them. Burma is in your pocket right now, which is helpful. Thailand is a mess at the moment. Laos and Cambodia are too small to be interesting. India and Pakistan are doing a wonderful job of distracting each other at the moment, and, even if that changed, you have Tibet between your most populous regions and theirs. The other -Stans are interesting as far as their support (tacit or otherwise) of the Muslim uprisings in Western China, but they’re never going to be more than an annoyance to you. Russia is too busy imploding, both demographically and politically, to be too serious of a threat - they just don’t have the resources to take you on in any sort of a prolonged campaign unless they use their nukes, and it’s not like you don’t have a few of those lying around yourself. Besides, Siberia isn’t exactly an ideal staging ground for an invasion of a country of 1 billion people.

This brings us to Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. They’re not interesting by themselves - at least, not terribly so. Japan has already tried to invade you once, with catastrophic results. Its people aren’t going to put up with that again. Taiwan is technologically advanced but numerically few; they’re not going to hurt you, but it would hurt you to try to hurt them. South Korea is, as far as you’re concerned, in the same class as Taiwan - they’re not going to push you around, but they’re also not going to be easily pushed around, at least initially. What makes these three countries special, however, is not them unto themselves. It’s that big behemoth to the east that has been protecting them for over 60 years now.

The United States is a problem - a big one. They have the most technologically advanced military on the planet, and it’s backed by the most powerful economy on the planet. The closest they’ve come to military defeat in their entire national history has been the War of 1812, which nobody over there remembers, and the Vietnam War… and you know how well their military really did in Vietnam. The United States was spiritually tired - militarily and economically, they could’ve fought that war for as long as they wanted, and you know it. Worse yet, they learned their lessons well - you saw what they did to Iraq twice. You know that, in a head-to-head battle, your forces don’t have a prayer against the United States, at least in the short term - even if they left your communications infrastructure alone, which you know they won’t, they could run circles around you, striking targets with lethal speed and precision, permanently staying in your decision loop.

Unlike the rest of your neighbors, whom you could bully around a little with your military, the United States is not going to be intimidated by you, and, at least for the next 20 years or so, there isn’t a single thing you can do about it. So, what can you do? The answer is simple - keep that military as far away from you as humanly possible.

How can we do that?

First, some good news. There is no way in hell that Russia will let the United States use their soil for American military bases. That secures your north. The United States is also never going to set foot in Indochina again if they can even remotely help it - that takes care of the southeast. Putting troops in Pakistan or India is also out - not only is Tibet a bad location to invade through, even for the Americans, but the Americans are also not interested in destabilizing a nuclear standoff.

That leaves the -Stans, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan… and the United States has troops either in or around all of those places.

As far as locations go, the -Stans aren’t a huge problem for you - if the United States is going to invade you, you’d very much like it if they wandered through the desert for a while, giving you as much time as possible to defend your industrial base in the east. If you’re lucky, you can slow them down enough and make it painful enough where domestic pressure would send the Americans back home. Japan and Taiwan both have the Pacific Ocean between you and them - granted, the United States has the most powerful navy in the world, but launching an amphibious assault against you would be pretty difficult and expensive, logistically, even for them.

Korea, on the other hand…

Korea is a problem for you, strategically. Most of your industrial base is in North-East China. If the United States has a clear shot up the Korean peninsula to Manchuria, any hope you have of prolonged conventional military resistance is gone - most of your industrial base will be in American hands within a month. Thankfully, your predecessors realized this, as well, which is why they invaded Korea when the Americans started to get near the Yalu River and tilted the Korean War into a stalemate.

This is where North Korea comes into play, and why it is insanely vitally important for the strategic survival of the People’s Republic of China.

North Korea is a bulwark against complete American strategic domination over you. They have a leader that is more than happy to bankrupt that tiny country to stave off the Americans. Their entire government… heck, their entire reason for North Korea’s existence is predicated on the Americans being foreign devils that must be held back at all cost.

Now, let’s be realistic - militarily, they’re not stopping the Americans any further than you or any other foe of theirs would, at least in the long term (i.e. less than a year). However, North Korea can make a big mess of South Korea in a very short amount of time, which makes South Korea nervous enough to convince them that they should keep the Americans from building up too big of a force there. That’s enough.

Continuing this thought exercise, what do you want to see, or, more importantly, what do you not want to see?

You don’t want North Korea to open up - countries that open up tend to become pro-America awfully fast. You’ve already learned that at home and are having a hard enough time keeping a lid on that.

You don’t want Korea to reunite, a la Germany, unless North Korea finds a way to force the issue on its own terms, which isn’t happening. South Korea would overwhelm North Korea, politically and economically, in no time, which would give the United States complete and unfettered access to your most vulnerable border.

You don’t want the leadership in North Korea to become so suicidal that they genuinely scare their neighbors enough for South Korea to decide that a military solution, with all the pain and destruction that would entail, is preferable to the status quo. This means you would rather North Korea keep its nuclear status vague - at the very least, you’re going to make very certain that the leadership down there realizes that launching a nuclear missile against one of their neighbors would be an exercise in extremely poor judgment for all parties concerned.

You want North Korea to remain rabidly anti-American and remain perfectly willing to self-destruct in order to hold them off for you. If that means you deal with some refugees, fine - it beats dealing with an American force at your northeastern border. The good news is that the powers that be in North Korea are of the same mind as you. In order for them to stay in power, their only hope is to keep their populace in a state of perpetual fear and poverty. Isolation and rabid anti-Americanism plays quite nicely into that.

This is why North Korea is going to remain a thorn in the side of the United States for a long, long time. China can’t afford for North Korea to not be a thorn. It’s the one shield they have, strategically, against a much stronger, much more powerful foe, and they’re not going to let that go peacefully… even if it condemns 20 million people in the process.

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