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Will Xi Jinping give up the Sino-North Korean alliance?: The enhancement of status quo of Kim Jong-un’s parallel development policy

ABSTRACT Since North Korea’s third nuclear test and the purge of Jang Sung-taek in 2013, there have been strong debates on the future of the Sino-North Korean alliance, on whether it will be maintained or terminated. The definite answer will be obtained in 2021, when the Sino-North Korean alliance treaty is due to be renewed. Based on the structure of great power relations and the history surrounding the Korean peninsula, Xi Jinping is not expected to give up the Sino-North Korean alliance from a strategic point of view. The structure of Sino-North Korean relations can be defined as ‘the Strained Alliance’, in which the tension is in constant existence in the midst of cooperation or ‘the Alliance despite Antagonism or the Adversarial Alliance’. The Chinese policy towards North Korea during the Cold War retained strategic characteristics to adjust great power relations, while North Korean policy towards China searched for security assurance and economic cooperation, taking advantage of balanced power relations among great powers. Both countries, in the frame of great power relations, are obliged to maintain an adversarial alliance based on the compromise between North Korea’s system maintenance and China’s enhancement of its status quo. Xi’s global policy and Sino-American relations aim to form a new type of great power relations. This is in the process of realization through the stabilization policy involving the maintenance of Kim Jong-un’s leadership system in the Korean peninsula, including the Sino-North Korean alliance.