North Korea...suicidal, or attention whore?

[Anomalocaris]

He's emboldened because the Communist Party in China is deeply involved with the Communist Party of North Korea.

Why fear when you have China to step in and protect you when you're about to lose?

The Korean War taught us as much.

Several subtle points.

1. North Korean "communist" party, unlike the Chinese "communist" party, has actually formally renounced Marxism - Leninism and replaced it with a Kim derived ideology roughly translated as "National self-sufficiency". So North Korean communist party is not communist even in name.

2. Chinese "communist" party as we all know is really communist in name only, everyone perfunctarily sings the "Internationale" at opening of party functions right before diving into first agenda items concerning whether government policy in the following year should be more monetarist or Keynesian.

The involvement of Chinese communist party with Korean communist party seems restricted to portion of Chinese military industrial complex controlled by the so called princelings - sons and daughters of old communist revolutionaries who fought in the Chinese civil war before 1949 - they do feel sympathetic to North Korea because North Korea reminds them of the old revolutionary imperialist paradigm that glorified the alpha male leader like Mao, Leinin, Stalin, and whose lore justified the actions of their ancesters and propelled their families into power.

However North Korea is loathed by the generation of technocrats who grew up after the communist revolution in China - which is to say most of the upper echelons of the Chinese army and current communist party leadership. This is because these people grew up abhorring the personality cults surrounding Mao, and by extension, Kim, and think the dynastic succession within Kim family an barbarous throwback to fuedal monarchy which they despise. Also, these technocrats associate not just dynastic succession with feudal backwardness, but also poverty and femine. They pride themselves for having engineered China's recent explosive economical growth and relative properity. They think the Kim regime is unfit to govern for not having tried to emulate so obvious an example of success as China itself (and in the process also falling suitably completely under Chinese sway).

The dominant Chinese view of North Korea seem strictly transactional - North Korea keeps American influence away from Chinese borders, China keeps North Korea alive.

For North Korea, it knows China would not allow North Korea to vanish. But it must worry the Chinese intends to keep North Korea intact but supplant Kim with a Chinese puppet by squeezing North Korea so much economically that the population revolts and topples Kim. The Chinese probably won't succeed just because North Koreans are so indoctrinated and xenophobic. But what good does it do kim if Chinese fail to put their own man on Korean throne but does succeed in killing or deposing Kim?