WI and AHC: China and North Korea at war each other.

Sumeragi

Banned
It's not ASB that China could intervene in DPRK. I saw on a Chinese military forum a few years ago a suggestion that if Kim was going to do something really crazy like start another war, then China would, if it was able to, try and assassinate Kim and his cronies and install a puppet regime. China wants the DPRK as a buffer between it and Japan and RoK, ideally China will want it to follow it's path of embracing capitalism while keeping tight political control. It is not in China's interests for the DPRK to implode nor to keep causing regular crises in the region, what China wants more than anything is stability and if it judges that the current regime will destroy that then I suspect it will act.

Intervention I can get, but assassination? Just what kind of crackpot forum were you at :eek:
 
Intervention I can get, but assassination? Just what kind of crackpot forum were you at :eek:

Sino Defence Forum which is actually very sane and authoritative. ;)

As I said "if they could," I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese have people on the inside in the DPRK leadership who could be used in such a scenario, as was said above China would be reluctant to march into the DPRK and run it overtly, therefore if the possibility and the motivation to decapitate the snake and set up a pliant regime they'd take it.

The Chinese have little real love for Kim, juche theory is full of ideas of Korean racial superiority and regards the Chinese as inferior. The reason China props up the DPRK is because the alternative is millions of starving refugees crossing the Yalu and then an American ally on it's south bank. As soon as Beijing calculates that Kim is more a liability to them then they will plug the plug on him.
 
The Chinese have little real love for Kim, juche theory is full of ideas of Korean racial superiority and regards the Chinese as inferior. The reason China props up the DPRK is because the alternative is millions of starving refugees crossing the Yalu and then an American ally on it's south bank. As soon as Beijing calculates that Kim is more a liability to them then they will plug the plug on him.

Agreed. I seriously wonder how willing the South Koreans would be to take the reigns too, I mean lets face, who wants to be the one to bother with the huge money sink that would be re-educating and de-Kim-Jong-Illifying the North Korean population.

On another note, how long does everyone think the North Koreans have left before the country collapses? I reckon ten fifteen years max.
 

Sumeragi

Banned
Agreed. I seriously wonder how willing the South Koreans would be to take the reigns too, I mean lets face, who wants to be the one to bother with the huge money sink that would be re-educating and de-Kim-Jong-Illifying the North Korean population.
To be paid with exporting North Korean natural resources, using cheap labor, and expanding the labor market by sending up all those unemployed youth in administrative jobs.

It's really a win-win situation, as long as radical Juche doesn't perk up.


On another note, how long does everyone think the North Koreans have left before the country collapses? I reckon ten fifteen years max.
Shouldn't such discussions be done over at the Future History forums?
 
To be paid with exporting North Korean natural resources, using cheap labor, and expanding the labor market by sending up all those unemployed youth in administrative jobs.

Yup. Goldman Sachs estimates a unified Korea could do very very well for itself in the long run, even if the initial costs will be huge.

It's really a win-win situation, as long as radical Juche doesn't perk up.

This probably will happen, considering the way that a lot of South Koreans treat North Korean refugees now, it won't be surprising to see bad things happening if the north is flooded with chaebol carpetbaggers. Then, when the 60 years of bad habits and work-shirking caused by the side effects of quotas and ideological incentives possessed by the cheap labor force cause problems, the chaebols might start just bringing in Thai and Filipino workers with a more developed capitalist work ethic in to get at those resources instead. And then we will see Juche, and 우리 민족제일주의 (a.k.a. Korean ultra-ethnic-nationalism) rise up again...

Shouldn't such discussions be done over at the Future History forums?

Probably. I'm going to take some time to think and address the OP more seriously.
 
I can't see Koreans bringing in migrant workers to that extent unless Japan does as well. Unlikely to say the least.
 
To be paid with exporting North Korean natural resources, using cheap labor, and expanding the labor market by sending up all those unemployed youth in administrative jobs.

It's really a win-win situation, as long as radical Juche doesn't perk up.

On the other hand, the later the POD of this sort of thing gets, the less enthusiastic S Koreans get for reunification. Esp. if this happened anytime more than a few years after German reunification. I hear from a lot of Koreans that they don't wanna reunify because it would be too damn expensive.

Yup. Goldman Sachs estimates a unified Korea could do very very well for itself in the long run, even if the initial costs will be huge.

Agreed here. I think they mentioned that if Korea were to unify sometime in the next decade or so, there's a good chance that the country could become a larger economic power than even Japan. That also has very interesting implications for power projection, currently SK is working on four Dokdo helicopter carriers, and thinking about getting themselves some VTOL aircraft, which would make those 4 in effect light aircraft carriers. The big wild card in any NK scenario, Cold War or post Cold War, seems to be China tho.

This probably will happen, considering the way that a lot of South Koreans treat North Korean refugees now, it won't be surprising to see bad things happening if the north is flooded with chaebol carpetbaggers. Then, when the 60 years of bad habits and work-shirking caused by the side effects of quotas and ideological incentives possessed by the cheap labor force cause problems, the chaebols might start just bringing in Thai and Filipino workers with a more developed capitalist work ethic in to get at those resources instead. And then we will see Juche, and 우리 민족제일주의 (a.k.a. Korean ultra-ethnic-nationalism) rise up again...

Oh god, I know I mentioned this before, but there's gonna be a huge problem with reunification culturally the later it happens. Korea's constantly been getting more and more multicultural since about the late 90s, to say nothing of all the Koreans abroad and the adoptees. Any point past 1990 or so, that's gonna be a huge issue that the ROK government is gonna have a hell of a time trying to answer and figure out a solution to.

On the chaebols, that could be bad just the chaebols themselves, but regardless, its basically impossible for anybody to be more corrupt or more screwed up than NK is right now. The other interesting thing for them is attempting to reforets and rebuild the natural environment, one thing I'm virtually certain of is that the North has been deforested, particularly since the famine started hitting and people chopped down all the forests to make room for their own personal plots of land. On the other hand, some of the chaebols have land in Madagascar and other African countries, and the really realy ironic part is that for some of those plots of farmland, its not considered importing food (wiki neocolonialism, there's a little segment on it there), so depending on how well cultivation of those areas go as well, that could also help the situation a bit while people try and rebuild the farmlands in NK.


I'm going to take some time to think and address the OP more seriously.

On that note, getting China and NK at war, given how absolutely insane the whole Kim Dynasty has been, if say the Cultural Revolution goes even more out of control, and say, China starts to have problems holding on, wonder what the Kims might wanna try and do with say, the parts of Manchuria that used to be part of Goguryeo? There's still a lot of ethnic Koreans there even to this day, so under the guise of "protecting" fellow Koreans, again, with the whole ridiculous ethnonationalism in NK, its not implausible for NK to try and pick off a piece of China if it becomes THAT weak. Not super super plausible, but history rarely is.

I can't see Koreans bringing in migrant workers to that extent unless Japan does as well. Unlikely to say the least.
Actually this is already happening. There's a lot of migrant workers in Korea from Pakistan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and I think some former Soviet republics in the Caucasus, not to mention all the Chinese Koreans here too (out of all the Chinese nationals here, I think they're like 2/3 of them). In fact, there's so many people here as migrant workers that Korea now may have as many as a quarter million illegal immigrants in the country, which relative to the number of foreigners in the country and Korea itself, is a rather decent number.
 
If the Chinese went into Vietnam in 1979, can it do the same in the border areas with the DPRK? Who will win?

1 billion (or so) Chinese.
Not 1 billion underfed North Koreans.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the Chinese win. The Vietnamese were armed to the teeth and had years of experience in warfare against a larger opponent.
 

Sumeragi

Banned
This probably will happen, considering the way that a lot of South Koreans treat North Korean refugees now, it won't be surprising to see bad things happening if the north is flooded with chaebol carpetbaggers. Then, when the 60 years of bad habits and work-shirking caused by the side effects of quotas and ideological incentives possessed by the cheap labor force cause problems, the chaebols might start just bringing in Thai and Filipino workers with a more developed capitalist work ethic in to get at those resources instead. And then we will see Juche, and 우리 민족제일주의 (a.k.a. Korean ultra-ethnic-nationalism) rise up again...
To keep this short, the Kaesong Industrial Region seem to indicate otherwise.

On that note, getting China and NK at war, given how absolutely insane the whole Kim Dynasty has been, if say the Cultural Revolution goes even more out of control, and say, China starts to have problems holding on, wonder what the Kims might wanna try and do with say, the parts of Manchuria that used to be part of Goguryeo? There's still a lot of ethnic Koreans there even to this day, so under the guise of "protecting" fellow Koreans, again, with the whole ridiculous ethnonationalism in NK, its not implausible for NK to try and pick off a piece of China if it becomes THAT weak. Not super super plausible, but history rarely is.
My bet is that DPRK wouldn't make the first move, but will start marching if the Red Guards crosses the borders

1 billion (or so) Chinese.
Not 1 billion underfed North Koreans.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the Chinese win. The Vietnamese were armed to the teeth and had years of experience in warfare against a larger opponent.
Not by a long shot, supposing we take the Cultural Revolution as the timing of war. DPRK at the time was economically and militarily still a power (in fact, the most well-off East Asian country after Japan), and they would be able to easily defeat the rabbles that were the Red Guards and the chaotic PLA.
 
Not by a long shot, supposing we take the Cultural Revolution as the timing of war. DPRK at the time was economically and militarily still a power (in fact, the most well-off East Asian country after Japan), and they would be able to easily defeat the rabbles that were the Red Guards and the chaotic PLA.
It's hard to tell. The Red Guards were not even soldiers, most of them were just teenagers told by Mao to beat their teachers and not to go to school, and would be used in any sort of actual fighting except perhaps as diversionary forces. The PLA, on the other hand, though chaos-ridden, would still have a lot a lot of fighting spirit if, say, the war got started by accident and then the local Revolutionary Committee escalated it in a bid by some PLA officers to seem more "red" by extending the CR to Korea or something. It could become a fad of sorts for the army to get organized and make attacks on the DPRK, and given the mess the whole PRC was in it isn't a far-fetched possibility for the entire nation (or enough higher figures) to commit themselves to a full-on war. With the USSR they were forced out of practical considerations to restrain themselves but the DPRK is an easier target at least for some short time.

Now it is indeed possible that the first series of Chinese attacks would be haphazardly and easily beaten, perhaps with great losses for the PRC, but unlike in the the Sino-Vietnamese war, it could very well be the case that the more losses, the more eager the revolution-crazed young Chinese would be to see some "glory" in Korea. As the whole conflict snowballs you'd see more concerted PLA operations as the campaign gains greater political/propaganda importance - Mao could issue a single nasty statement about the DPRK being "revisionist" and in the context of this border conflict it would, for the PLA, translate into "Invade Korea". They may very well take grievous losses trying to do it, but they'd do it all the same and by sheer force of numbers they'd triumph. It would be like Vietnam in the sense that the DPRK would inflict high losses but still be forced to give territory.

However it is important to note that China would'nt actually be able to go so far as to actually conquer the DPRK since both the USSR and USA would be quite upset over the whole issue, especially the USSR. Even to have the conflict turn into a full-blown war is unlikely though not impossible, but it is certain, given how the Chinese acted around the Russians, that once the superpowers started complaining, that the PLA would be forced to withdraw or else face the consequences. The war would be over fairly soon.

Oh, and the result? China's opening up to the West might get butterflied, but it more likely will still happen if the US regards what happened as a fight between Communist nations and therefore insignificant in the bigger picture. Neither would Sino-Soviet relations be greatly affected, they would stay the same, i.e. bad. The true effects would be seen in North Korea, which would utterly despise the Chinese. For propaganda purposes the Chinese would also refuse to have anything to do with the DPRK. Come the collapse of the USSR and North Korea, with no one to provide it oil nor food, not even the Chinese, they will be screwed. If the RoK is smart they could easily blackmail the DPRK into allowing greater economic freedom for their citizens (IOTL Kim Jong Il cracked down on such practices created by the famine), which would lead to people losing faith in the government and thus an inevitable implosion thereof.

I can't really speculate with much certainty at all about what would happen in China, except the CR would still come to an end when Mao dies and something would change, though how close to OTL it ends up being is anyone's guess. It's interesting to imagine what were to happen if Lin Biao survived and Deng Xiaoping lost his life instead, for instance.
 
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