Northeast Asia

The young Kim needs a power base of his own. The military was not and can never be his power base, he has no link with the military and no revolutionary credentials of his own. The best he can do is maybe rely on the large party apparatus. The problem is that he wants to have his cake and eat it too, to grow the economy and grow the nuclear machine, but the problem is it’s really difficult to do both. They don’t have the resources, so he’s chasing after an impossible dream.

He hopes to use this meeting to finalize the consolidation of his authority and emphasize his ruling policy of byungjin. In the larger sense, [Kim] is rebuilding the institutions of governance that fell apart during the Great Famine of the 1990s under his father’s watch.

For the first time, China has begun to fully acknowledge that North Korean actions pose a direct threat to vital Chinese security interests, and that Beijing is no longer prepared to rationalize or ignore the threat.