ABSTRACT
Korea, like Palestine, has long been a focus of great power politics. Inevitably, as one or another power trampled over Korea, Koreans came to feel that their independence had to be hard fought and would involve striking deals with their great power neighbors. China began to open contacts with South Korea in a meaningful way in the 1980s. Esoteric political communications were soon followed by indirect trade and, by the mid-1980s, China was doing more trade with South Korea than with North Korea. The collapse of Communist support for North Korea was part of a trend that the United States was seeing elsewhere around the world, from Europe to Latin America and Africa. China and North Korea could be pleased that, by holding out for a time, they obtained the complete withdrawal of all American nuclear weapons deployed in South Korea.
