Why Beijing should lead on the North Korean crisis

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results."

The quotation is attributed to Albert Einstein but after a torrid few days on the Korean peninsula, it's one for Chinese leaders to ponder.

China is simply in the wrong place on North Korea. It is allowing Kim Jong-un's nuclear ambitions to undermine Chinese national interest.

There are complex reasons for this including history, habit and political culture. But among Chinese foreign policy experts and even on social media, unease is beginning to spread.

North Korea's nuclear programme has already driven South Korea to agree to the deployment of an American anti-missile system, locking Seoul deeper into a defensive triangle with Japan and the United States.

Relations between Beijing and Seoul are at their worst in a quarter of a century and many South Koreans have been alienated by unofficial Chinese sanctions against the whole spectrum of South Korean interests from supermarkets to boy bands.

This is good for North Korea but for no-one else. It is nonsensical for China to punish South Korea for trying to defend itself against a nuclear threat which even Beijing describes as real and urgent.

And if North Korea continues its drive for nuclear weapons, there may be a worse arms race to come. A nuclear-armed Japan would hardly be in China's national interest.

But despite this catalogue of warning signals and failures, China seems trapped in an unfinished history marked by binary choice: a nuclear-armed North Korea or a reunified Korea with American troops on China's border. Between these choices, it finds a nuclear-armed North Korea preferable.

But if it thinks hard enough, perhaps there is an alternative.

In fact, this is a moment of decision for China. President Xi has talked of an Asia led by Asians. Showing flexibility and resolve on fixing Korea in the interests of the region and the world would demonstrate a readiness to lead.

Almost everyone, even China's most suspicious neighbours, would be grateful. President Trump has already promised that American gratitude would take material form in a favourable trade deal.

So China could use the current crisis on the Korean peninsula to engage its neighbours and cement a key area of partnership with the US. Or it could duck the challenge and let the US lead. A choice put starkly in a tweet from President Trump: "I have great confidence that China will properly deal with North Korea. If they are unable to do so, the US, with its allies, will."

Of course, China's view on what constitutes "dealing with North Korea" does not coincide with Mr Trump's. But there will be no dealing with North Korea worth the name that does not require a fundamental shift in how Beijing sees the region and its relationships within it.

China is after all an ideologically insecure one-party state. A profound aversion to liberal internationalism has tied it to a rigid position on non-interference in the internal affairs of another state. A position which now constrains it in managing the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

What's more, in Beijing's worldview, the United States is its long-term rival in Asia and the US system of alliances is a barely concealed strategy of containment.

For decades, China's security planners have war-gamed scenarios of brinkmanship and conflict with the US as enemy in a zero-sum game. There are no established scenarios in which the US presents as a partner in managing a rogue state masquerading as a Chinese ally.