You have to look at the PRC–DPRK relationship materially, not idealistically.
Under Chairman Mao, China sent hundreds of thousands of volunteers and stopped the imperialist destruction of DPRK. The DPRK exists today because of that intervention.
Since then, China has consistently acted as North Korea’s main economic and diplomatic backstop. It provides food, fuel, trade access, and blocks the worst attempts to strangle the DPRK through institutions like the United Nations Security Council. This is the real relationship: China prevents collapse, prevents regime change, and keeps a socialist buffer state alive on its border.
So why the condemnations and partial sanctions?
Because China operates inside a global system dominated by imperialism. It can’t act like a revolutionary state in 1950 anymore, it’s managing contradictions in a hostile world order. Publicly criticizing nuclear tests is damage control. It reassures surrounding states, reduces pressure on China itself, and limits excuses for more US missiles and troop deployments in East Asia. It’s diplomacy aimed outward, not a break with the DPRK.
From a dialectical standpoint, this is China balancing opposing forces: defending North Korea’s survival while avoiding direct confrontation with the imperialist bloc before conditions are ripe. China’s priorities are straightforward and material: no war on its border, no US-aligned Korea, no refugee catastrophe, and no regional destabilization that strengthens American military encirclement.
People get confused because they treat statements as policy. But Marxism teaches us to look at practice. In practice, China has never supported regime change, never cut off the DPRK, and never abandoned it economically. Condemnations are surface phenomena. The base reality is continued protection.
This isn’t betrayal. It’s socialist realpolitik under imperialist pressure.
China plays to the Western audience to maintain stability, buy time, and avoid escalation, while quietly ensuring the DPRK survives. That dual track is exactly what you’d expect from a state navigating uneven development and hostile global power relations.
You keep proving you don’t actually understand this subject. You misread, you overstate, you walk it back, and then pivot without addressing the core issue.
We already established you were wrong on literacy. You were comfortable declaring something “impossible” with zero methodological grounding.
Now you want to lean on Human Rights Watch and UN defector reports as if that settles it. HRW again is a privately funded New York NGO with no on-the-ground access in the DPRK. Its reporting relies overwhelmingly on defector testimony filtered through NGOs and institutions embedded in Western policy networks. It’s adversarial-source reporting shaped by a very specific geopolitical environment.
You might as well cite Radio Free Asia. Different logo, same alignment: institutions whose mandate or funding structure is tied to states openly hostile to the DPRK.
As for UN “reports,” most of them rely on the exact same defector pipelines. They are not independent mass surveys conducted inside the country. They are structured interviews with people who have already exited under specific political and economic incentives.
Let’s talk about those incentives.
Defectors to South Korea receive state resettlement packages, financial assistance, housing support, and integration programs. There is a media ecosystem in the South that rewards the most dramatic narratives with book deals, television appearances, NGO careers, and speaking circuits. South Korean intelligence agencies have historically screened and processed defectors. None of this automatically means “everyone is lying.” It does mean there are material incentives, institutional filters, and political framing at work.
When testimony is gathered outside the country, from a self-selecting group, processed through security services, NGOs, and Western institutions, and then presented as comprehensive evidence about 25 million people, that is not clean data. It is structurally biased evidence.
Meanwhile, anything produced inside the DPRK is dismissed out of hand as propaganda. So Western-aligned sources are presumed credible, socialist-state sources are presumed fraudulent. That asymmetry is doing all the heavy lifting in your argument.
“Hate the government, not the people” also sounds tidy until you realize the state in question survived total war, the destruction of nearly every major city, the killing of roughly 20% of its population, and decades of sanctions without collapsing internally. People lived in caves after U.S. bombing campaigns flattened urban infrastructure and flooded farmland by targeting dams.
Then came seventy years of sanctions, trade embargoes, financial isolation, technology bans, fuel restrictions, and constant military encirclement. This is long-term siege warfare in modern form.
You don’t get to wave that away as background context and then reduce everything to “the Kim family.”
If you strip out war, annihilation-level destruction, sanctions, isolation, and security compulsion and still insist governance style is the primary explanatory variable the only possible explanation is that you are supremely idiotic or are pushing western narratives on purpose.