Academic literature on the topic 'Pyongyang Declaration'

Almost exactly a half-century following the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korea president Kim Dae-jung made a historic visit to Pyongyang for the first-ever summit meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas in June of 2000. A decade following the collapse of communism in the rest of the world, Kim's journey would inevitably be judged in history as a potential starting point for the end of inter-Korean confrontation. Three days following direct, broad-ranging discussions with his counterpart, Kim Jong Il, Kim Dae-jung confidently returned to Seoul with an inter-Korean summit declaration promising enhanced efforts at reconciliation and inter-Korean exchange. Upon his return to Seoul, Kim Dae-jung declared that there would be “no more war” on the Korean Peninsula. The next task was to institutionalize an array of exchanges and inter-Korean interactions designed eventually to lead to national reconciliation.

The main purpose of my considerations will be to present the most important determinants and relationships that characterize China-North Korea relations during the presidency of Xi Jinping. Based on the available literature on the subject, I would like to try to answer the question whether the relations of the two entities should be considered as rough friendship or long-term partnership. In addition, I intend to state whether mutual ties should be expected in the future.At the beginning I will describe the relations between China and North Korea during the Cold War, when both countries fought in the Korean conflict against the United States and the United Nations. In addition, it would be appropriate to look at the relations of both entities from 1955 to the fall of the USSR, when the North Korean dictator, Kim Il-sung, as part of his doctrine of independence (Juche) balanced in foreign policy between China and the Soviet Union. Post-Cold War times and Beijing’s relationship with Pyongyang will also be of interest to me until 2013, when the North Korean nuclear program became an increasingly contentious issue. In the rest of the work, it will be important to describe the relationship of both countries since Xi Jinping took power in China and Kim Jong Un in North Korea. At that time, despite official declarations of cooperation, relations between the two countries remained cool. It was only the direct negotiations between North Korea and the United States since 2018 that increased its importance in Chinese policy, as evidenced by the visit of the to Pyongyang discussed in the text in June 2019. In the article I intend to raise economic contacts between both entities.In summary, I am trying to answer the question of how relations between China and North Korea will develop in the future. I intend to assess whether the growing role of the DPRK in an international configuration it can contribute to wider, strategic ties with Beijing.

North Korea twice conducted ballistic missile tests close to Japan in 1998 and 2006. While Japan responded with non-coercive condemnations to demonstrate its disapproval in 1998, it imposed unilateral economic sanctions in 2006, marking the first instance in post-World War II of applying a substantial coercion to punish a neighbouring state. The research asks why Japanese policy toward the North shifted for a seemingly identical type of provocation. The dissertation seeks contextual explanations by using inductive process-tracing, a type of ‘middle approach’ between historical narratives and parsimonious theories. It is applied to highlight the underlying mechanism through which public discursive changes concerning national security and North Korea during this eight-year period influenced the subsequent policy shift in 2006. The dissertation concludes that the unilateral sanctions were not necessarily a calculated strategic response to punish the missile launch (or North Korean nuclear programs) per se, but were a direct consequence of a deeper shift in societal discourse taking place beforehand. During the eight-year period, there had been other visible provocations and shocks originating from the North, especially the sensational revelation in 2002 of past North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens. These highly-publicized incidents facilitated the Japanese public to be increasingly conscious about Japan’s security weaknesses and re-evaluate its historical relations with its neighbour, leading to a hardened domestic environment in which the new idea of pressuring the North became a feasible option even before 2006. These North Korean provocations and the resulting societal security discourse, along with concurrent structural changes in the Japanese government and mass media which made them both highly susceptible to discursive currents among citizens, mutually interacted to produce the policy result when the opportunity arose. The research, however, also challenges the popular view that the sanctions are the first example of the wholesale transformation of Japan’s post-war ‘pacifist’ security principles. It argues that the confined means (economic) by which the sanctions were imposed reflects the highly nuanced discourse, which endorses Japan’s legitimate right to specifically punish the North for the harms done, but that the societal momentum is not equally supportive of the more controversial areas concerning military usage and the current constitution.