Last week, several news sources reported Congressional interest in more sanctions on North Korea. The source of that contemplated action was a United Nations report - that report was supposed to be confidential but, according to Foreign Policy, was posted on-line by the Ukraine government. FP promised to post the whole report, but I haven't seen it yet. None-the-less, FP quotes from the report describing a "whack-a-mole strategy" that does not prevent North Korea from suffering under sanctions, nor building nuclear weapons. We have mostly China to thank for that.
North Korea stops getting money or equipment from one Chinese company and the companies change to new ones. China votes for sanctions, then does not enforce them. In a country where censorship is an art form, there is no way China cannot know which companies are violating sanctions. They have to be condoning it. China has the most elaborate Internet monitoring in the world. They will not miss anything going on in their own country. Those sanctions violations go on because China condones them, probably even encouraging it. Anyone who has ever seen the schemes cooked up by ZTE and another unnamed Chinese company to circumvent Iranian sanctions, can be there is the same kind of things going on here. Iran and North Korea are not the only countries involved. Sudan, Cuba, and Syria are also included in their sanctions violations.
So, China votes for sanctions in the UN, then works around them at every opportunity. Does anyone wonder why we trust China to anything they say they will do?
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