North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks during a ceremony in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency in Pyongyang December 28, 2014.KCNA/Reuters
In the end, it took being denied a Seth Rogen movie to arouse U.S. anger about the risk of North Korea's unpredictable dictatorship. Nuclear bomb tests and missile launches, apparently, are a lot easier to handle. But deny the U.S. public their God-given right to a Hollywood blockbuster, and look out for some good old-fashioned American outrage.
Of course, the cyberattack on Sony, which revealed embarrassing (and racist) internal communications as well as Social Security numbers, was easier for ordinary people to comprehend than the largely victimless posturing of a rogue state in the Pacific. The Sony hack had celebrity and scandal, and escalated rapidly – like the plot of some unserious Hollywood movie about North Korea. By pulling the commercial release of The Interview, Mr. Rogen's film, Sony indulged hackers who the Federal Bureau of Investigation said are acting on behalf of North Korea, and allowed the incident to transcend specifics. The whole episode morphed into a universal lesson on the evolving nature of state-sponsored attacks and the threats to free speech in an era of digital warfare.
But most Americans have little at stake in this conflict, and have a cartoonish impression of the hermit kingdom anyway.
This is largely because of the involvement of celebrities such as Mr. Rogen, Dennis Rodman and the creators of South Park.
North Korea looks like a farce, but it is actually a tragedy.
Millions are starving. About one in three children is stunted because of malnutrition. Tens of thousands are locked away in labour camps – all while the South prospers. Some North Koreans manage to flee across the border to China, but many hundreds of thousands more would follow in the chaos that ensued after any radical destabilization, or outright collapse, of the regime.
And that is why China matters.
Beijing is North Korea's only ally, from the time Chinese troops trundled onto the Korean Peninsula in 1950 to the present day. China shares a border with the tottering dictatorship, along with South Korea, and provides most of North Korea's food and energy imports. It is the country's largest trading partner, and also does not want to endanger the economic development of its own northeastern provinces. For China, political and social stability in North Korea is paramount, and overrides everything else – including all concerns about the horror of daily life for North Koreans, as well as the regime's dogged and trumpeted pursuit of nuclear weapons.
All of this partly explains China's reluctance to push North Korea too hard, either on its pursuit of nuclear weapons, in the six-party talks, or on the recent cyberattack. Beijing condemned cyberattacks more broadly, but said there was no proof the hackers were tied to North Korea – which sounds familiar, because that is what China usually says when its own hackers target Western corporations and governments, including Canada's. China is also nervous, with the U.S. pivot to Asia, that Washington may want to actively destabilize the regime under the guise of denuclearization, or seek to contain China's rise by pursuing a united democratic front in Asia along with Japan and South Korea.
But resolve in Beijing may gradually be fraying. China's policy of trying to coax North Korea toward long-term stability via incremental economic reforms has largely failed. And when Kim Jong-il, or his son Kim Jong-un, defied the international community, they were also defying the wishes of Beijing. North Korea recently executed a top official who was its main link with China. And lately, a retired People's Liberation Army general, Wang Hongguang, has written some sternly worded opinion pieces in the state-owned Global Times criticizing the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as China calls it, for its intransigence. He said North Korea's military tests have occasionally endangered civilians flying in international airspace – one North Korean missile apparently flew just six minutes ahead of a state-owned China Southern aircraft, an airline that also flies out of Vancouver – and that the North's leaders had violated a military pact with China by refusing to consult with Beijing on its nuclear weapons.
"China has cleaned up the DPRK's mess too many times," he wrote. "But it doesn't have to do that in the future."
It is unlikely that hacking Sony will push China over the edge, but the United States could take advantage of the situation to engage China in a constructive dialogue about North Korea because China will play the lead in any solution.
Because even if North Korea's rickety, unjust political system weathered the transfer of power from one Kim to another, many ordinary North Koreans did not, and they continue to die needlessly.