China's N Korea policy is making latter more formidable

NORTH Korea's provocative launch of a rocket on Sunday, triggering off another emergency session of the United Nations (UN) Security Council, came barely a month after Pyongyang conducted its fourth nuclear test. The rocket launch added urgency to the Security Council's latest efforts to put in place additional economic sanctions after the January nuclear test.

The launch is also likely to further strain the China-US relationship. While China says that its goal is the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, it doesn't want to risk putting too much pressure on North Korea that it will bring instability to the region and possibly cause the collapse of the Pyongyang regime.

Even before the rocket launch, the US had been telling China that its North Korea policy was not working. When North Korea announced on Jan 6 that it had once again conducted a nuclear test, this time of a hydrogen bomb, China and the US both denounced the action and urged North Korea to honour its intern…