April 19, 2025: China is upset over how neighboring North Korea has turned to Russia as an ally and now ignores traditional patron China. This is largely because Russia turned to North Korea for weapons, munitions and soldiers to use in the Ukraine War, and paid them so much for this that they cozied up to Russia. China waits for that war to end so it can enforce its traditional control over North Korea.

This is largely because the 1950-53 Korean War lies and deceptions linger longer because China and North Korea want it that way. Yet China and North Korea remain intertwined. For example, in 2005 China hosted delegates from China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, the United States and North Korea for talks over the situation in North Korea. China put forward a proposal to solve the dispute over North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile program. China proposed North Korea get needed economic aid, and give up its weapons. The dispute was now over how fast North Korea got the aid, and how strict the inspections would be of the dismantling of the weapons programs. China doesn't want a meltdown in North Korea, and a flood of starving refugees coming across the border. China also does not want South Korea to take over North Korea, putting a major democracy on their border. China was trying to get North Korea to reform its economy like China did, but the North Koreans are rather inept at this, and the North Korean economy is in far worse shape than China's ever was. The United States, South Korea and Japan refused because North Korea has made such promises many times and broken them all.

Meanwhile North Korea continues to be a threat more than 70 years after the Korean War ended. That happened in 1953 when an armistice was signed. While prisoners of war were exchanged, the soldiers remained facing each other along the four kilometers wide DeMilitarized Zone or DMZ that stretched from coast to coast. This was a ceasefire agreement, not an end to the war. All attempts at negotiating an end to the war in the last 72 years have failed. The three years of fighting caused 140,000 American casualties, including 33,651 dead. South Korean troops suffered 415,000 killed, while other nations fighting North Korea suffered 15,000 casualties. The communist forces suffered 1.5 million killed, most of them Chinese because North Korea would have lost without massive reinforcements from China. There were also several million civilian dead, mainly in North Korea.

After the war, North Korea experienced a period of economic growth as its industrial facilities were rebuilt with Russian aid. Between 1904 to 1945, Korea was a Japanese colony, and in the north Japan built mines, railroads and factories. The south, which always had more farmland and was turned into a largely agricultural area to help feed Japan. During the Korean war, industrial and transportation facilities were heavily damaged, and reconstruction was slower in the south.

In the 1970s, foreign investment in the south began to grow, and local entrepreneurs began to start, or expand their businesses. By the 1980s, North Korea's centrally planned economy was falling apart because so much money was diverted to military spending, and lack of marketing resulted in products that could only be sold to other communist nations. When the Soviet empire fell apart in 1991, the markets for most North Korean goods disappeared. Corruption and lack of investment in agriculture resulted in food shortages, as well as the collapse of most industrial enterprises, except those that made weapons. Food aid from the Soviet Union ceased and that led to widespread hunger in North Korea during the 1990s when several million civilians (more than 10 percent of its population) starved to death.

Post-1991 documents from the Russian archives showed that Stalin appointed Kim Il Sung as ruler of North Korea and in 1950 ordered him to invade South Korea and unite Korea. When that did not work, Russia ordered China to rescue the North Koreans. China complied and told Russia that the Chinese debt for assistance in the 1949 Chinese Communist Party victory during the 22 year long civil war was paid. China no longer sought advice or guidance from Russia.

In 2010, an article appeared in a Chinese magazine describing the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. What was unusual about the article, in a government approved publication, was the frank admission that North Korea had started it all, by invading South Korea. But once news of the article spread, and was posted on Internet sites, the Chinese government ordered the article withdrawn and denounced it as untrue. The unofficial reason was that China wished to avoid angering North Korea. This, despite the fact that Chinese participation in the war killed or wounded over a million Chinese soldiers. Even Chinese leader Mao Zedong lost a son in Korea.

Since 1950, it had been the official Chinese position that the war started with a South Korean invasion of the north, to which the north responded by moving into South Korea. For decades, all communist nations accepted this version, even though all evidence pointed towards the north invading first. Then, in the 1990s, the Russian government released telegrams sent before 1960, by Russian and North Korean leaders, making it clear that Russia wanted the invasion, and that North Korea duly carried it out.

Chinese troops entered North Korea in late 1950, to prevent American forces from occupying all of Korea, and that resulted in a two-year stalemate along the current inter-Korean border which is now the DMZ Demilitarized Zone. To justify the Chinese losses, and maintain good relations with North Korea, China continued to insist that South Korea had started the war, even after everyone agreed that Russian leader Josef Stalin and North Korea had been the instigators.

What this incident really tells North Korea is that China has admitted the truth about who started the war by authorizing the article's publication in the first place but is sorry for this accident and officially sticks by the earlier lie.