# Tracing ideas on North Korea I’m a lazy, tired, frustrated, wannabe novelist academic, and admittedly put as much effort into this Substack blog as deserved for a pastime mostly undertaken on bus and subway commutes. So, understandably I do not partake in a rigorous reference regime, and equally understandably, I’m sometimes called on this lackadaisical attitude. Most recently, some readers quite rightly wondered about the statement “To many in North Korea, the fear is that China could in fact prefer dealing with a unified Korean Peninsula under South Korean rather than North Korean rule, if the U.S. were to leave” in the piece “South Korea’s converging threats”. Challenge accepted. Tracing any idea and opinion on what goes on in North Korea is like dipping your hand into a bucket of lobsters. You might grab a tail, and start to salivate, but you’re equally likely to have one of the buggers claw down on you. So, that being said, let’s try the bucket. **First things, first: mea culpa** Snap! The claw of the lobster closed on my hand! The use of the the term “to many in North Korea...” is an exercise in the freedoms of brain-farts and blogging (see below). It implies access that doesn’t exist. Nobody should use the phrase “to many in North Korea...” and get away with it. I was pushing my luck. It’s as bad as “Kim Jong-un thinks...” or “Pyongyang’s greatest fear is...” Claiming privileged access to the thoughts, intentions, or fears of actors whose internal deliberations are largely inaccessible is the analyst’s biggest mistake—and I’d never do it in an academic paper or an analytical brief. Yet, taking liberties is what blogs are all about. There is value in the freedom to provoke, speculate, intuit, and follow a line of thought wherever it might lead, even when the evidence is thin and the conclusions uncertain. Such exercises are not substitutes for rigorous analysis, or academic reasoning, nor should they pretend to be. They do though, serve a purpose that more formal approaches struggles to accommodate: the exploration of possibilities, the questioning of established assumptions, and the pursuit of ideas that may initially appear implausible, even ridiculous. In my experience, decent research never begins with a formulated research question or a theoretical framework but rather begins with a hunch, a half-formed idea, a particularly persistent brain-fart—or indeed, someone challenging you to think deeper. Spinning crap (creativity), provoking, challenging, and speculating is where decent research comes from—and for me, that freedom of expression is the value that I get from writing this blog. So, while the expression took liberties, it did so in the right context. It’s kind of like a tone-deaf academic singing a ditty after a few pints—it don’t sound right to anyone else, but it’s sweet music to his reddened, drunken lugs. **China could in fact prefer dealing with a unified Korean Peninsula under South Korean rule** This call has some solid justification. The idea has some serious political vintage and deserves some space. The idea was that it would make the case for reconciliation with Pyongyang: if North Korea feared Chinese domination as much as it feared American hostility, then engagement with Seoul offered a means of reducing its dependence on Beijing. Reconciliation, in other words, was not simply a matter of goodwill but of shared strategic and ethno-nationalist interests. Over time, it became a pretty popular, oft-repeated trope. [Kim Dae-jung](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/08/30/south-korean-says-north-wants-us-troops-to-stay/3b6c0e41-b795-4410-a24c-7e98a4991b3f/) even shared a similar point following the first inter-Korean summit, suggesting that the North would welcome the continued U.S. presence on the peninsula after unification. The underlying argument was that Pyongyang feared Chinese domination, and that this anxiety provided a rationale for reconciliation. It really took off with [WikiLeaks](https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/249870). Leaked U.S. diplomatic reporting suggested that some Korean officials had heard that Chinese officials had come to regard North Korea as more of a liability than a strategic asset, and that Beijing might be willing to accept unification under South Korean leadership, provided the resulting state was not hostile to China. Now, diplomats say shite that sounds like it means one thing and it means a whole another thing, and from experience, sometimes just plain make shit up. So relying on diplomatic leaks is never solid, but it sure gave added credence to the argument: China might no longer regard North Korea’s survival as essential to its strategic interests. After WikiLeaks, the idea was repeated in a few media articles but didn’t gain solid credibility until it was taken up by some senior scholars. [Bonnie Glaser and Yun Sun](https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/landing/article.kci?arti_id=ART002025511) argued in 2015 that China’s growing economic and political influence, particularly its deepening relationship with South Korea, had given some Chinese analysts greater confidence that Beijing could protect its interests regardless of developments on the peninsula. The implication was that North Korea’s continued existence was no longer necessarily indispensable to Chinese security. Now, the _International Journal of Korean Unification Studies_ (IJKUS) may not be a top-notch academic journal, and publishing there may not earn you the academic cred you’re forever chasing like a hamster on a wheel, but it does get you read by Korean officials. Articles published there seem to pass through the Korean government like prunes through an ageing diplomat. Arguments put forward in its pages are taken on board or, arguably, are solicited for publication precisely because they already enjoy a degree of support within government and can help justify further steps in government policy. In the echo chamber of North Korea watching, this means that over time, the idea would inevitably appear across multiple spaces seemingly independently. A South Korean academic repeats it in a conference and later at a drunken night out; a diplomat raises it while sipping stale coffee at a university 1.5 track conference; a middling manager in a government department raises it in an off-the-record with a journalist; or a feckless blogger repeats it after talking to someone known for their insight. This is the nature of echo chambers.  Ideas only pass through echo chambers when they have a certain resonance, and the claim is buttressed by an irresistible combination of culturally specific and more than likely fallacious logic. China and Korea share a long history, and for much of that history, Beijing dealt with a unified Korea rather than a divided peninsula. There is a certain seductive simplicity to the idea that China would prefer dealing with one Korean government rather than two, particularly if that government were stable, economically prosperous, and no longer hosting American troops. Throw in the assumption that Beijing values order above all else, that Chinese leaders think in centuries rather than electoral cycles, and that a unified Korea would naturally gravitate towards China by virtue of geography, history, and culture, and the argument practically writes itself. None of this, of course, tells us what Beijing actually wants, but it makes for a hell convincing story. The idea ultimately stands its ground like a half-boiled leek, both ready to fall apart in your hand and to be stabbed into someone’s gullet. To stab someone in the gullet with a half-boiled leek may sound violent, but it simply means to wield something as though it were a fearsome weapon, when in reality it’s as threatening as a half-cooked vegetable. And so the idea has been used ever since. Ultimately, many ideas on North Korea are like this. There are mountains of assumptions we make regarding North Korea. Near every single one of them deserves to be challenged and when they are, often reveal as much about the term as the user. AND voila! An idea for research: tracing the mainstream ideas on North Korea through the echo chamber. Not a bad research topic—but you’d have to watch out for lobsters. **On brain-farts and blogging** So, in sum, was using that expression justified? Probably not. But whether it needs justification, that’s a riddle in itself. Anecdotes, hunches, and intuitions—essentially brain-farts—are given short shrift in academia, and that’s fair enough. We live in a scientific world that values empirical evidence, methodological rigor, replicability, and the systematic testing of hypotheses. But anecdotes, hunches, and intuitions, along with accumulated experience and practice, form an important component of tacit knowledge—and it is tacit knowledge, rather than the explicit knowledge of academia, that occupies the vast space of diplomatic practice. Here lies the value of blogging in my opinion. I can guarantee you, there’ll be more practitioners reading this and other pieces of fluff I write on Substack (even with my poor maladjusted algorithm) than will read any academic churn I put out. In my opinion, the style of free writing that comes with blogging even has value that may with time be more valued in academia. Academia currently faces a massive problem with the flood of AI articles. Increasingly, it’s hard to tell them apart from human created articles. There lies the crux—if academic output has become so predictable and machine-like in its striving for corporate key performance indicators, where’s the value? You may as well have machines churn it out. Read a lot of academic articles today and its like chewing cardboard. What happened to the writing of old? What happened to creativity, experience, and the human elements of empathy, emotion, and intuition? Blogging is one space that brings this element back. Even those blogs written by lazy, tired, frustrated, wannabe novelist academics. This has been a fun post—for me. Thanks to readers for the feedback and inspiration! *** Help a very thirsty academic - [Buy Me a Coffee](https://buymeacoffee.com/junotane)! ## Related articles - [[2026-10-20 South Korea's converging threats|South Korea's converging threats]] - [[2026-06-14 Washington think-tanks, Trump, and Korea|Washington think-tanks, Trump, and Korea]] - [[2026-06-21 Write a guest post!|Write a guest post!]]