President-elect Trump’s belief that China won’t help restrain North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is incorrect, according to the State Department.
“We would not agree with that assessment,” State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.
Trump criticized Chinese leaders on Monday after North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un declared that his regime is in “the last stage” of testing an intercontinental ballistic missile, following a flurry of nuclear weapons tests in 2016. “Research and development of cutting edge arms equipment is actively progressing and ICBM rocket test launch preparation is in its last stage,” Kim said on New Year’s Eve, according to Reuters.
Trump vowed that the North Koreans would fail and turned his ire to the Chinese. “China has been taking out massive amounts of money & wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won’t help with North Korea,” he tweeted. “Nice!”
But Kirby said China has committed to implementing economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council targeting the North Korean coal industry.
“Chinese officials have made clear that they intend to implement the resolution and we’re engaged [in] an ongoing dialogue with them to that end as well as our allies and our partners on how to best curtail the DPRK’s pursuit of nuclear ballistic missile and proliferation programs,” Kirby said.
Still, the State Department declined to say if China is refusing to use other tools at its disposal to pressure North Korea to scrap the weapons program. “I’ll leave my answer as is,” he said after discussing the sanctions.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry assented to the sanctions in late November, then promptly raised doubts about its commitment to implementing the punitive measures by saying the sanctions wouldn’t interfere with “normal trade.” The State Department replied by warning China not to poke holes in the sanctions regime.
“All UN member-states are expected to implement sanctions resolutions in good faith,” spokesman Mark Toner said in December. “Implementation with regard to sanctions is almost everything. You can have the toughest sanctions in the world; if they’re not implemented correctly, then they’re meaningless. So we continue to work and talk to China about how to effectively – more effectively – implement those sanctions.”
China has long been accused of softening the blow of economic sanctions directed at the North Koreans.
“The real reason why China keeps the North Korean state alive economically is because it whenever Pyongyang fires off another test, Washington comes running to Beijing to help it negotiate,” Gordon Chang, author of the 2001 book The Coming Collapse of China, said in December.
