Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

There’s no mystery as to why the owners of North Korea are calling the Korean War armistice “null and void.”

They want to replace it with a peace treaty with the U.S. — a deal that would freeze out South Korea, which they consider a U.S. client, a flunky state that does not deserve the respect of any agreement that would make the South an equal partner.

They figure, if they nullify the armistice, eventually the U.S. and others will come begging for another piece of paper that will turn out to be the long-sought treaty.

There’s just one huge problem the North Koreans deliberately overlook, and it’s not about the need for the United Nations Command to recognize the North’s nullification of the deal.

The problem is that China is also a signatory to the agreement, and China is not saying anything about nullifying it. The Chinese, as far as anyone can tell, are trying to figure out how to get the North Koreans to cool it and stop making trouble on their doorstep.

No, the Chinese aren’t publicly holding the 1953 armistice over the heads of the North Koreans.

They’re not telling them, look, we have this agreement, and you can’t just nullify it without talking to us about it. You have to wonder, through, if the Chinese aren’t reminding the North Koreans privately that they had a lot to do with saving North Korea from oblivion in the Korean War and are now keeping the country on life support.

Shouldn’t the North Koreans have asked their Chinese friends if they too wanted to “nullify” the agreement? And are the North Koreans choosing to nullify it as it applies only to the U.S. while respecting the agreement as it applies to China? That’s not likely but the North’s histrionics come through as hysterical propaganda that’s great at capturing headlines but short on substance.

Compounding the vacuity of the North’s rhetoric is that Syngman Rhee, the president of South Korea from the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1948 until his ouster in the student revolution of April 1960, wanted no part of the truce. He saw it as a document that would only legitimize the division of the Korean Peninsula.

Yes, reluctantly, Rhee had to go along, but the South was never a participant in the talks even though the South had 600,000 men under arms, about the same as it has today.

The signatory of the agreement for the North, of course, was Kim Il-Sung. Gen. Mark Clark, as U.N. commander, signed for all the forces on the southern side while Peng Dehuai, commander of the Chinese People’s Volunteers, signed for China.

U.S. bombing by that time had flattened Pyongyang and most other North Korean cities and towns, but the Chinese had suffered far more casualties than either North or South Korea.

The war ground to a truce that no one liked after Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s premier and foreign minister, realized enough was enough and all sides had to halt where they were. That was not the denouement that either Kim or Rhee had fantasized.

North Korea in the decades since has grown ever more dependent on China – in humiliating contrast to the North’s incessant yakking about “juche,” or self-reliance.

In fact, the reason the North came to propounding juche as a state ideology was to declare its independence from China. The idea was that North Korea had to pull its own weight, had to show it could make it on its own.

That was well and good until the collapse of communism in the old Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites when the new Russia stopped shipping in oil and other supplies on long-term, low-interest credit and hugely skewed exchange rates. North Korea would really have gone into the oft-forecast collapse if China had also refused to ship in oil – just enough to keep the economy on life support.

After going to all that trouble, though, China can hardly countenance North Korean leaders scrapping the armistice without telling them about it.

North Korea can bluster about the U.S. and South Korea, but you don’t hear the North Koreans telling the Chinese, “We don’t like the truce you forced us to sign.” The Western media has gone along with the North on its rhetorical roller coaster, also forgetting that Peng, much later purged in the Great Cultural Revolution, had more to do with perpetuating the North Korean regime than did the North Koreans.

It’s about time North Korea — and the media — gave China full credit as the central force behind the truce on the communist side. That’s a fact that North Koreans would like to forget but have trouble ignoring.

Columnist Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, has been following the ups and downs of the armistice since 1972. He’s at kirkdon@yahoo.com.

  “juche”, China, Gen. Mark Clark, Kim Il-Sung, Mao Zedong, Peng Dehuai, Syngman Rhee, the forgotten signatory of the Korean War armistice, United Nations Command, Zhou Enlai