Path for Seoul's Sunshine Policy

The Kaesong Industrial Complex is the current embodiment of Seoul's sunshine policy towards the North. While Kaesong, strategically located north of the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas, is symbolically important, the massive scale that is envisaged in the coming years is unlikely to be realized in North Korea. Pyongyang's concerns about political contamination will, in practice, limit the growth of inter-Korean economic development projects. Seoul's vision of closer integration between the two Koreas, however, can be realized in northeastern China.

While the North Korean nuclear crisis drags on with placebo-like six-party talks meetings that are once again in limbo, a promising way for Seoul to implement integration with the North has emerged during a different set of gatherings in Beijing. While the focus of the recent Chinese National People's Congress' (NPC) 11th Five-Year Development Program was the reduction of the growing gap on the mainland between those benefiting immensely from China's economic growth and those increasingly left behind, an unintended potential beneficiary is South Korea and its sunshine policy.

Contributing to the creation of prosperity and jobs in the Chinese rust belt provinces along the Sino-North Korean border constitutes a unique opportunity for the South Korean government to enable its sunshine policy to flourish. (The Roh Moo-hyun administration refers to the sunshine policy as the "Peace and Prosperity Policy.") By building factories and infrastructure projects in the area along the Sino-North Korean border with the participation of South Korean private sector firms, Seoul would be assisting the development of a regional engine of growth that would surpass Kaesong.

South Korean factories in joint ventures with Chinese firms could bring about the construction of massive industrial zones that would straddle the border. For political considerations, rather than 100 percent-owned and operated by South Korean factories and construction companies, strategic investments by South Korean small and medium enterprises (SMEs) into Chinese firms would create a way to side-step North Korean concerns about political contamination from South Korea.

The Kaesong project would continue given its symbolic significance, but the major tangible change and benefits would be realized through industrial areas along the Sino-North Korean border. A win-win situation would be created for these core parties in the region. As the tide rises, so too will all the boats. For the sunshine policy to emerge to be more than a trickle, Seoul should seek to play a major role in fostering the creation of such a tide in China's northeastern region. Being left out of that phenomenon would ensure that Seoul's economic engagement of the North would be dwarfed in relation to China's rising commerce with its neighbor. Indeed, a South Korean policy based solely on Kaesong would eventually make this complex little more than a model village of inter-Korean integration dreams for South Korean tourists.

The last time Seoul developed and implemented a creative and highly effective policy to deal with North Korea was in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Nordpolitik. Dangling trade incentives, Seoul successfully established diplomatic relations with North Korea’s core allies—China, the former Soviet Union, and Soviet bloc countries. Nordpolitik garnered Seoul greater political capital in the inter-Korean dynamic as it sought detente with Pyongyang. By focusing more on significantly developing the northeastern Chinese provinces, a strategically enlarged sunshine policy would thrive and facilitate greater engagement of Pyongyang as North Korean provinces would be drawn further into this localized economic development frenzy.

While the North Korean nuclear issue increasingly becomes a chronic part of the security landscape in the region, more economic development activity will continue to be rapidly fostered by Beijing. Trade with North Korean provinces will figure more into national as well as provincial initiatives in China. As this trend accelerates, the South Korean government has a strategic choice to make—to focus largely on Kaesong-type initiatives based on grand dreams or to implement a novel, bold policy in northeastern China that would integrate South Korea into a swelling economic phenomenon. To continue following only the former route would be to miss a strategic opportunity as the real road to North Korea is, and increasingly will be, through China.

John S. Park is the project leader of the North Korea Analysis Group at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. His research examines the negotiating strategies of the six-party talks countries.