CHINA/NORTH KOREA/TRADE DEALS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “What the Chinese call the Friendship Pipeline runs for 20 miles, crossing under the Yalu River and spanning the border between North Korea and China. For more than half a century, it has been both a symbol of the two nations’ alliance and a lifeline for the North’s economy.
Now, in response to North Korea’s latest and most powerful nuclear test, the Trump administration is expected to press China to impose an oil embargo on the North, cutting off the flow of petroleum through the pipeline and on tankers, too. The United States has called for similar measures before, and Beijing has almost always refused.
But no previous American administration has pressed the case as an implicit choice between cutting off the fuel and potential military action.
That puts President Xi Jinping of China in a particularly difficult position. With an important Communist Party leadership conference next month, he will not want to look weak in the face of American pressure. But a destabilizing war on the Korean Peninsula would be even less welcome…
Mr. Zhang said that if Mr. Trump agreed to a version of a strategy proposed by China to ease the crisis — a freeze of the North’s nuclear program in exchange for suspending joint United States-South Korean military exercises — then Mr. Xi might be more amenable to an oil cutoff.”
-Jane Perlez, “U.S. Desire for North Korea Oil Cutoff Puts China in a Tight Spot,” The New York Times online, Sept. 5, 2017