Caution unprecedented Beijing to Pyongyang if nuclear test

China does not "hesitate" to reduce its aid to North Korea if Pyongyang conducts a nuclear test, warned on Friday 25 January, an official Chinese press, in a rare warning regarding its unpredictable neighbor and ally.

"If North Korea engages in further nuclear tests, China will not hesitate to help reduce" the regime of Kim Jong-un, the Global Times wrote in an editorial, noting that Beijing is facing a "dilemma "over the situation in the Korean peninsula. "It seems that North Korea does not appreciate the efforts of China. It criticizes China without naming it explicitly," says the editorial in the English, after the shock announcement by Pyongyang of its intention to conduct a nuclear test "high level", in response to sanctions expanded the United Nations (UN) decided Tuesday.

The newspaper cites a statement referring to North Korea "these large countries (...) who give without hesitation to the most basic principles under the influence of arbitrary American", a clear reference to China, voted sanctions against its ally at the UN.

This controversy between Beijing and Pyongyang muffled by the press is largely unprecedented.Accompanied by the threat of a reduction of its aid, it also reflects the weariness and a form of impotence on the part of China to influence its ally and its nuclear ambitions, analysts are. "So let North Korea to his" anger ", the newspaper said, who" China must reduce their expectations about the effects of strategies to the peninsula, "because" it is further away from the goal of (sa) denuclearization "and" there is no way for us to find a diplomatic balance "between Pyongyang, Seoul, Tokyo and Washington.

"So let the United States, Japan and South Korea bitching about China," adds the newspaper in the wake, which warned that if Washington, Seoul and Tokyo are committed to the "extreme sanctions" against Pyongyang , China will oppose it "resolutely" because "we need to preserve all our national interest instead of that of any of the parties."

Read: North Korea after the announcement of a nuclear test, Washington extends its blacklist

Bloodless, North Korea, which has plagued a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of deaths in the mid-1990s, survives economically through support Chinese and international food aid. Beijing "hopes a peninsula stable", but "it will not be the end of the world if troubles arise there," and it "must be the foundation of our position," adds the newspaper.

The Global Times, the English and Chinese are the same editorial, everyday is a group of People's Daily, the central organ of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which represents generally very nationalistic views on foreign and resolutely reformist of affairs. Its editorial tone freer than the official comments reflect a point of view allowed by all or part of the Chinese leadership.

Thursday, in a statement much more soothing, the spokesman of Chinese diplomacy, Hong Lei, expressed the wish that "all parties remain calm, remain measured in their words and actions." A new North Korean nuclear test would be the third after those of 2006 and 2009 that met already at the time of sanctions passed by the UN in response to rocket attacks.