By Ben Blanchard and Philip Wen
BEIJING (Reuters) - North Korea's latest nuclear test
is likely to pile more pressure on China to take tough action against
its neighbor, but Beijing already doubts economic sanctions will work
and says it is not its sole responsibility to rein in Pyongyang.
China has lambasted the West and its allies over
recent weeks for promoting the "China responsibility theory" for North
Korea, and been upset by Seoul and Washington's own military drills that
Beijing says have done nothing to cool tensions.
"The United States has to play its own role and
should not be blindly putting pressure on China to try and squeeze North
Korea," said Ruan Zongze, a former Chinese diplomat now with the China
Institute of International Studies, a think-tank affiliated with the
Foreign Ministry.
While the seriousness of Sunday's nuclear test means
China will likely support tough new action, including possibly cutting
off oil supplies, China will make clear others need to step up too, Ruan
added.
Over the past week, China's foreign ministry has
repeatedly hit back at calls from Western countries and Japan for China
for to do more to rein in North Korea, saying that pushing for dialogue
was an equally integral part of the U.N. resolutions, and that
escalating sanctions alone had been evidently ineffective.
"On the one hand, sanctions have continued to be put
in place via resolutions and on the other hand North Korea's nuclear and
missile launch process is still continuing," ministry spokeswoman Hua
Chunying said last week.
The Global Times, a state-run newspaper, also
attacked British and Australian leaders for calling on China to do more,
especially Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's suggestion that
China should cut off oil supplies to North Korea.
The tone in which China has pushed back has had some
Western diplomats raising questions over the extent to which Beijing
would be willing to stomach further sanctions, before it argues that
they could destabilize the Kim Jong Un regime.
China's big fear has always been that cutting North
Korea off completely could lead to its collapse, unleashing a wave of
refugees into China's rustbelt provinces in the northeast.
One Beijing-based Western diplomat, speaking late
last week before the nuclear test, said China had cooperated with the
United States on sanctions to a certain degree, in order not to give
Washington a pretext for a military strike.
"But they won't
go far enough to have an impact on North Korea's determination to become
a nuclear power," the diplomat said, speaking on condition of
anonymity.
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