 Good afternoon, and welcome to CSIS. This is an event hosted by the CSIS Korea Chair. My name is Victor Cha, and it's a pleasure to have these guests with us on the stage today to talk about the China and North Korea issues. They will go basically in the order that you see them. I will introduce them to you each. First, we have Tom Christensen. Tom is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, and he is director of the China and the World Program at Princeton. As many of you know from 2006 to 2008, he served as the deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs with responsibility for relations with China, Taiwan, and Mongolia. President Christensen has served on the board of directors and the executive committee of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and he is co-editor of the International History and Politics series at Princeton. Tom is also a very good and old friend from grad school days, and we served in the government together. Following Tom will be Dr. Shin, who is currently a visiting fellow at the East-West Center in Washington, D.C., only two blocks away from us here. He is also an associate professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University, otherwise known as the Georgetown of Korea. Previously he was an assistant research professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies and a research fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. His publications include the book North Korea Nuclear Crisis and Peace on the Korean Peninsula, and he has published quite widely in journal articles, both on Asia and on international relations. The following, Dr. Shin, is not reserved, but that is John Park, I think as many of you in this room know, John Park is director at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He runs the Korea Working Group and has had some very interesting trips in the past week or so, and he's been kind enough to join us on the stage to offer some insights about his travels and recent meetings with folks from Asia. And then my role, I will sort of bat clean up and really offer just some brief comments as a discussant on what's been said and on the topic that we're all gathered here for today, which is China's role on the Korean Peninsula after the Cheonan Incident. So we'll begin with Tom Christensen, who will offer us about 15 minutes of remarks followed by each of the panelists, and then we'll open it up for general discussion. Thank you very much, Victor. I just wanted to say at the outset that it's always a pleasure to see Victor, and it's a great honor to serve on a panel. I'm a big fan of public intellectual activity, and I really can't think of a better example of a public intellectual than my old friend and classmate, Victor Chow, who's done so much for the country and done so much for academia, keeping it realistic, keeping it focused on real problems. I have to do a couple of disclaimers up front. First, I have to say that everything I say today is really just my views as a private citizen. I don't want to pretend to be a government official. I just give my own views, although sometimes I will say things that sound like I agree with the government view, because I do agree with the government view on some of the issues I will raise. And the second disclaimer is not being a government official. There may be things going on that I'm not aware of, so there may be more going on behind the scenes than I could possibly be aware of, and that means that maybe some of the things that I'm speaking about from publicly available information is not the complete story, and I just want to recognize that up front as well. But I'll do the best that I can under those circumstances. And the first thing I'll say that will sound like a government official, and I mean it, and that is to our Korean friends in the audience, I send my condolences for the loss of life for the sunken ship, and I think it's important that this isn't just an incident, it's not a political affair that 46 sailors lost their lives, and it was a very brutal attack, and I think we should recognize it as such and not treat it as just some kind of political incident that occurred. And what I want to emphasize in my talk is the difficult position that the DPRK has placed China in as it seeks to pursue its overall foreign policy strategy around the world and in the region. So it creates a series of dilemmas. Ultimately those dilemmas will be solved by Chinese people, not by Americans and not by Koreans, but I think that the United States and South Korea have a role to play in helping the Chinese come to the correct conclusions about what they should do in response to DPRK activity. So DPRK activity, whether it be the nuclear issue or the sinking of the ROK naval ship, and China's inability or unwillingness to take stronger and more effective measures to change that behavior by the DPRK has in my view served to undercut a lot of China's foreign policy strategies in East Asia. So there's a very high cost for China in what the DPRK is doing, and there's a very high cost for China when China is either unwilling or unable to take more effective measures to change DPRK behavior. And as you know, since 2005 China has been urged to join the United States and the other great powers to help solve problems around the globe. And U.S.-China relations have moved well beyond the bilateral issues that are traditional in the U.S.-China relationship to include tackling problems in third areas of the world and having China play a leadership role in that process. And that's really started in 2005 and has continued into the Obama administration and has expanded to new issues like climate change. And I think this is a very important thing for China's prestige on the international stage and it fits China's goal of being a respected great power on the international stage. One of those problems in third areas of the world is the North Korean nuclear problem. And I think China had behaved extremely well on the North Korean nuclear problem, especially if you take a viewpoint that says what were the baseline expectations of Chinese behavior, say, 10 or 15 years ago on such an issue if it were to arise among knowledgeable people who understand China's foreign policy? And I think many of them would be very surprised at how forthcoming China was in the Six-Party Talks process, how forthcoming China was in writing UN Security Council resolutions with teeth. And particularly in the period 2000 and six to 2007, how hard China was willing to push North Korea to try to change its behavior. So China got kudos for that. And there was some progress. There was the Disablement Program. There was the Taking Down of the Tower. And China got kudos for that. And that was, in my view, that fit China's overall strategy of being a responsible great power around the world. And I tried to outline in an article, I can't go through all the details, in July 2009 in Washington Quarterly, the various areas where I saw China behaving in a constructive manner in a way that experts wouldn't have predicted 10 or 15 years ago in that period from 2005 to 2009 from North Korea to the Gulf of Aden. And this was a good thing for China's foreign policy. It was something that China's foreign policy experts and officials were aware of and I think correctly celebrated. But these efforts need to be effective. And the problem with the North Korea account is that there's been no progress in recent years and some real setbacks in the North Korean nuclear progress. There's been progress for North Korean nuclear development, which is a setback for everybody else, since the Disablement of 2007 and 2008. So right there, North Korea is undercutting China's prestige in this global effort to be an effective, responsible, great power. And this runs against China's strategy. If we look at regional strategy, China's willingness and actual proactive measures to maintain solid economic relations with North Korea at a time in which the South Koreans are raising very strict sanctions under the leadership of President Lee. And I'll say it as an aside, President Lee is a very impressive leader in my opinion and has really raised very good policies throughout the periods that I'm going to talk about. And I think on the North Korean nuclear issue he's been very strong and I think he has been very solid under this current set of problems. So President Lee has raised sanctions against the North and offered conditional economic support and interaction with the North if the North takes the proper actions on denuclearization. And under those circumstances when China has growing economic relations with North Korea, there are many in South Korea who see this in a negative light as either strategic on China's part, as cynical, as exploitative, and even, and I heard this in the fall of 2009 when I was in Seoul, colonial, imperial on the part of China, that China is moving into a vacuum in North Korea created by the appropriate policies of Seoul towards an intransigent North Korean regime. This is not consistent with China's goals in the region. The regional goals stated in the most simple terms of trying to reassure China's neighbors as China's influence rises so that the neighbors don't see the rise of China's influence and power as somehow a security threat or an economic threat to their long term well being. And China had actually made a lot of progress on this score in the period up till the late part of this decade, this past decade. And a lot of that progress in a place like Korea and to somewhat of a lesser degree in a place like Japan has been undercut by China's policies recently toward North Korea before the Cheonan incident and especially after the China.