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Comment by verroq | Hacker News Reader

Has North Korea become "too big to fail"?

Well, that, and that and too strategically important to China to fail. However frustrated the DPRK makes them, they still don't want an American-allied Korea on their border.

Serious question: why? What do they envisage happening in that scenario? Korea invading them seems unlikely, they trade with the US all the time, and there have recently been massive American forces on their border in Afghanistan with noone batting an eyelid.

Manchuria is close to Beijing and is a relative easy area in China for armies to travel through. It's not mountainous or particularly forested/swampy.

Japan invaded through Manchuria in WW2 so it makes sense for China to have as big a buffer zone as possible in that area.

The border between china and afghanistan is very mountainous and very far away from Beijing.

But China is a strategic nuclear power - the idea that a unified Korea would risk violating their territorial integrity is far-fetched, they are far more likely to be attacked by the North out of desperation!

China tends to think extremely long term, both in then past and future.

For example: one of the most criticized of China behavior, that is the occupation of many parts of mongolian and related lands, is a way to prevent another Khan starting another Yuan dynasty.

Similarly China had many wars with Korea, and don't trust them (neither do the Japanese, thus why they don't move a finger to get rid of North Korea either, nevermind blatant racism in Japan, like the fact that nonasians can expect to get citizenship after about 20 years trying, while many second and third generation Koreans still aren't allowed to be citizens)

China wants a blue-water navy, and they want to keep US military bases far enough away that a pre-emptive strike is difficult. Their Pacific coast is blocked off by opposed states: South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are protected by the United States, and while the Philippines has slipped into a more complicated situation recently, they're still quite hostile to China. It's stated Chinese military doctrine to work towards securing this "first island chain," and disable US military bases and aircraft carrier groups in the area. This prevents the United States from exerting control through potential pre-emptive strike capability, and in the long run ensures them an easy path to the Pacific.

Although I'll note that as of WWII that strategy was pants for Imperial Japan. We peeled off their 3 or so defensive island chains, and nowadays we're a lot more mobile, we have all sorts of things than can all but completely ignore such like ballistic missiles, stealth planes and stealthy nuclear subs, etc. Maybe we couldn't stop them from taking Taiwan, especially if they're willing to pound it into rubble† with the ... more than a thousand IRBMs they've got pointed at it, but we could make that very expensive.

†Which would then crater a lot of everyone's economies as foundry chips, computers and their components get super scarce to unavailable for a long time....

During WW2, the US's industrial output (and particularly ship tonnage production) was about 10 times that of Japan.

China's industrial output is actually above the US's now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...

And you don't think the Japanese didn't know that? (On the other hand, anyone pointing that out would have been assassinated, so...). And note we were likely to be committed to the European theater as well.

A lot of this comes down to quality, which by and large neither the Japanese had at the time, e.g. an ability to built reliable airplane engines significantly more powerful than the one the Zero started out with, and as for the PRC, the latest tidbit in this area is their embarrassment that for all the billions of ball point pens they manufacture each year, they have to import the ball bearings, since they can't produce them in the quality required, at least not at the volumes required.

(On the other hand, their Long Lance torpedoes were an unpleasant surprise, and their torpedoes actually worked, or at least they quickly fixed whatever problems theirs' had (I've read in passing that all the naval power's torpedoes had problems at the beginning of the war, unfortunately the US Navy bureaucracy's total inability to believe field reports resulted in very bad results for more than a year). Then again, you didn't really need such fast and long range torpedoes, and they weren't decisive.)

And quality matters a lot in warfare. Just our nuclear attack subs alone could make an invasion of Taiwan ultimately impractical, unless they somehow figure out how to find them (and even espionage isn't going to be enough to target weapons).

Sure, but I'm just pointing out that saying some strategy didn't work for Japan in the Pacific nearly a hundred years ago has little bearing on what that would mean for China, given the differences in technology, industrial strength, and military strategy.

For one thing, the de facto state of the world right now is that the US controls all the oceans. Being able to secure island chains and put area denial weapons on them would increase China's capabilities and also reduce the US ability to project power easily. That doesn't mean they wouldn't be swept aside in a real war, but they would impose a real cost on the US to get rid of, and that's the entire point.

that and 10+ million N. Korean refugees crossing the border...

More like "failed too much to be allowed to fail completely"

NK is such a failed state that we keep on propping up its failed regime because no one knows what to do with its 25M citizens

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