Lips and Teeth: China’s Buffer Thinking Toward North Korea

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chinese officials characterize the bilateral relations between China and North Korea as ‘lips and teeth’ at times and most China scholars would also agree that North Korea is China’s buffer state. Despite the popularity of accepting this ‘buffering relationship’ between the two countries, few scholarly works explain this relationship in depth. What does ‘China regards North Korea as a buffer state’ mean? When and under what conditions did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders begin to view North Korea as a buffer state? Most importantly, how did such a buffer view shape China’s behavior when North Korea’s existence was endangered? The purpose of this article is to shed more lights on this unique geopolitical relationship forged in blood. It argues the CCP leaders’ first view on the Korean Peninsula was nationality minority. It was the Korean War that fundamentally changed the way the leaders perceived the value of the peninsula, from a non-geopolitical to a geopolitical one—North Korea is a buffer state keeping a hostile force away from the Sino-North Korean border. Evidently, China’s buffer thinking toward North Korea was one key factor contributing Chinese military and diplomatic protection over North Korea during the first North Korean nuclear crisis.