UPDATE: North Korea is China's useful idiot

GlobalPost's article, Beijing's big gamble: Can it control North Korea?, quoted Andrew Horvat, a China specialist at the Stanford Japan Center at Doshisha University in Kyoto: "South Korea is a foothold of U.S. power and military bases . . . [China] would rather have a failing state than a really successful state adjacent to a [Chinese] region with lots of ethnic Koreans. That doesn’t mean that China isn’t worried about collapse; it just doesn’t want collapse to lead to reunification. It doesn’t care if North Korea remains a weak and corrupt regime, even one that is dabbling in nuclear weapons."

CNN's article, Defectors from North near 20,000, confirms this. North Korean defectors reaching South Korea are allowed to stay and work. However, North Korean defectors reaching China are forcibly returned, with those people facing punishment or even a firing squad. The number of North Koreans in China is unknown, because they go underground to avoid deportation.

In other words, North Korea is just a buffer zone between China and the Western world, just like the Soviet Union used Poland and the Baltic Countries as a buffer zone between it and future aggression, whether by latter-day Nazis or the West. China prefers to keep North Korea poor and militaristic indefinitely. North Koreans are mere pawns in a Chinese imperial intrigue.