How Stable Is the China-North Korea Alliance?

Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Galen Carpenter

“There is an indisputably crucial history of very close relations between Beijing and Pyongyang. In late 1950, PRC forces intervened in the war between communist North Korea and anti-communist South Korea (whose government was massively supported with military personnel and weaponry from the United States and other Western countries). The armistice that ended the fighting in 1953 left the Korean Peninsula split between two intensely hostile countries, with the United States and the PRC firmly backing their respective clients throughout the remainder of the Cold War. Despite that history, the current connection between the two communist states is decidedly more nuanced, ambiguous, and even contentious than the lips and teeth cliché would imply.” (06/18/26)

https://original.antiwar.com/ted_galen_carpenter/2026/06/17/how-stable-is-the-china-north-korea-alliance