BEIJING -- China said Thursday that it will stick by its "freeze-for-freeze" proposal to de-escalate tensions in the Korean Peninsula, contradicting a suggestion by President Donald Trump that it had turned against the plan.
The proposal calls for North Korea to freeze its missile and nuclear tests in return for the United States and South Korea suspending their annual joint military exercises. On Wednesday, Trump suggested Chinese President Xi Jinping had acknowledged to him that the plan was a nonstarter.
The apparent Chinese contradiction of Trump's statement, coming two days after the president's return from his East Asia trip, highlights the lack of coherent policy put forward by the United States to actually usher North Korea along the path of denuclearization.
James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Trump administration deserved credit for raising the profile and urgency of the issue, and for pushing China to impose stricter sanctions than in the past.
But he said there was a lack of unity and clarity coming from the U.S. administration itself, over what actions from North Korea might open the door to negotiations, what an acceptable path was to de-escalation, and even whether its ultimate goal was still regime change.
"One question is what would the preconditions be for the U.S. to sit down with North Korea to negotiate," he said. "We've had at least three different answers to that question in the past week or two."
Yanmei Xie, an expert on China and North Korea at Gavekal Dragonomics, said China's announcement Wednesday that it is sending a special envoy to Pyongyang to brief the North Korean leadership appears to give credence to Trump's assertion that he had persuaded Xi to use his influence to press Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons.
On Wednesday, Trump said at a briefing: "President Xi recognizes that a nuclear North Korea is a grave threat to China, and we agreed that we would not accept a so-called freeze-for-freeze agreement like those that have consistently failed in the past."
But a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry said Beijing insisted that dialogue was the only solution and that its proposal was still on the table.
"Suspension-for-suspension is the most realistic, viable and reasonable solution in the current situation," Geng Shuang said at a routine news conference. "I stress that it's only the first step, not the end."
The plan has been rejected by Washington for a number of reasons, experts said, partly because it would undermine South Korea's defenses at a time when the threat is higher than ever and potentially spook a key ally. A similar idea was tried in the early 1990s and failed, and it implies some kind of moral equivalence between the actions of the United States and those of North Korea.
The proposal also lets China off the hook and plays into its attempts to portray the issue as solely a problem between headstrong governments in Washington and Pyongyang. Experts say the risks of backtracking are also asymmetrical. The United States might cancel its annual military exercises, but if North Korea reneged on its side of the deal in subsequent weeks or months, those exercises would be very hard to reschedule.
China is the main economic backer of the North Korean regime, accounting for most of its official foreign trade. It says it is strictly implementing sanctions agreed to by the United Nations Security Council, but experts say it is unwilling to go further, refusing to take action that might destabilize or take down the regime, or simply turn a nuclear-armed Pyongyang into an enemy of Beijing.
In Tokyo, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government said Thursday that it was not aware of any agreement made by China to back away from the freeze-for-freeze proposal.
However, the Japanese government has been discussing a "maximum pressure" approach with the governments of South Korea and China, said Yoshihide Suga, the chief Cabinet secretary.
Later Thursday, the U.S. appeared to notch a victory in its efforts concerning North Korea, after the State Department announced that Sudan would cut all military and trade ties to North Korea.
State Department spokesman Heather Nauert said Sudan is taking the step because of the "critical threat" posed by the North's nuclear program. She said the U.S. welcomes the decision.
The announcement came after a visit to Khartoum by Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan. That visit came as the U.S. and Sudan, encouraged by Israel and Saudi Arabia, moved to improve ties after decades of hostility.
Information for this article was contributed by Liu Yang, Amber Ziye Wang and Yuki Oda of The Washington Post and by Josh Lederman and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.
A Section on 11/17/2017