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The Korean War and Sino-North Korean Friendship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Heonik Kwon
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The relationship between China and North Korea is a subject that attracts much discussion and speculation in today's policy circles and media. The history of Sino-North Korean friendship is typically traced to the time of the Korean War (1950-1953), although in North Korea it tends to go further back, to the colonial period. The texture of this international friendship has been changing recently. Some Chinese leaders state that China's friendship with North Korea is no longer a special one and that the two countries have, or should have, a “normal” interstate relationship—respecting mutual interests as well as certain international norms—rather than one that is historically determined and unchanging. In North Korea, by contrast, there has been renewed interest in reinventing its relationship with China as a historically constituted and durable friendship. This essay explores North Korea's recent efforts to present its relationship with China as a special, extraordinary, revolutionary friendship. It will focus on how the making of this special friendship draws upon a set of powerful ideas and metaphors of kinship and consanguinity. First, however, a few words on kinship and friendship concepts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 32 , August 2013 , e3
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2013

References

Notes

1 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 2006).

2 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 1927)

3 See Felix Berenskoetten, “Friends, there are no friends?: An intimate reframing of the international,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2007, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 647-676. Also Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

4 The refrain of this song goes: So comrades, come rally And the last fight let us face The Internationale unites the human race (C’est la lutte finale Groupons-nous et demain L’Internationale Sera le genre humain)

5 Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung, North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012).

6 Moon-Woong Lee, Bukhan jŏngch’imunhwaŭi hyŏngsŏnggwa gŭ t’ŭkjing The formation and characteristics of North Korean political culture (Seoul: Institute of National Unification,1979). See also Seong-Bo Kim, “Bukhanŭi juch’esasang, yuilchejewa yugyojŏk jŏnt’ongŭi sanghogwangye Confucian tradition, juch’e ideolosy ‘and personality cult in North Korea » Sahalikyŏngu Journal of the historical society of Korea 61 (2000): 234-52.

7 Haruki Wada, Kita Chōsen: Yūgekitai kokka no genzai North Korea's partisan state today (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1998).

8 See Zhihua Shen, Mao, Stalin and the Korean War: Trilateral Communist Relations in the 1950s (New York: Routledge, 2012), 127-130; Charles K. Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1992 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 20.

9 See Adam Cathcart and Christopher Green (eds.), The Tumen Triangle Documentation Project: Sourcing the Chinese-North Korean Border, Issue 1, Sino-NK, April 2013. Available online at this site.

10 See Uradyn Bulag, Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China's Mongolian Frontier (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).