The most important thing is that China supports NK for ideological reasons. Sure, China would prefer a communist regime that isn't quite as well suited to parody, but it'll take whatever communist regime it gets for propaganda and ideological reasons.
But I'm convinced if at all, only very reluctantly so - certanly not so over an ideology whose championing stands to benefit not those of Deng Xiaoping's orthodoxy but of Maoist irredentism (Hua Guofeng may only be relevant as a historical footnote dominated by currents with consderably more inertia now, but Bo Xilai certainly seemed to have justified a thorough purging. At the very least I'm confident enough to estabish that faction-on-faction maneuvering in the far past has been justified on ideological differences of a similar magnitude - and that we looked at Bo's dramatics for shades of that precedent.)
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The most important thing is that China supports NK for ideological reasons. Sure, China would prefer a communist regime that isn't quite as well suited to parody, but it'll take whatever communist regime it gets for propaganda and ideological reasons.
China doesn't care about ideology. It cares about having a buffer state instead of US troops on its borders.
But I'm convinced if at all, only very reluctantly so - certanly not so over an ideology whose championing stands to benefit not those of Deng Xiaoping's orthodoxy but of Maoist irredentism (Hua Guofeng may only be relevant as a historical footnote dominated by currents with consderably more inertia now, but Bo Xilai certainly seemed to have justified a thorough purging. At the very least I'm confident enough to estabish that faction-on-faction maneuvering in the far past has been justified on ideological differences of a similar magnitude - and that we looked at Bo's dramatics for shades of that precedent.)