Pondering Pyongyang: Beijing's problem child

One of the biggest questions involving North Korea is China and its relationship with Pyongyang.  Following the North's testing of long range missiles and a nuclear device China finally agreed to sanctions being imposed on North Korea.  Those sanctions don't have a lot of teeth as they are not vigorously by Chinese authorities.  So, why agree to them and show lack of enforcement?   Literally fear of the vary out come if those sanctions were in forced to the letter as written.

Were China to sever its economic life line to Kim Jong-un's government how long would it before a real crisis ensued.   China fears a collapse of the North's government for these reasons:  Large numbers of refugees crossing into China,  a war that would end with the country reunified under a pro-western government and the sharing of a border with a U.S. ally.

"If you talk to officials at the border, there's no change," says Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, the North Asian head of the International Crisis Group.
 "And a lot of that trade is conducted by government trading companies especially on the North Korean side," adds the Los Angeles Times' Beijing Bureau Chief Barbara Demick. "There's a lot more China could do that it has chosen not to."

 And there's something else holding Beijing back -- the historic and symbolic relationship with Pyongyang that is hard to give up."The Chinese Communist Party thinks of North Korea as this small state that is in its own image," says Demick. "The structure of the North Korean government is very similar to the Chinese government and, in a way, it's the pure Communist state.