China to protect North Korea from sanctions

“We have assumed North Korea is not a rational actor.”

I'm not so sure the above statement is accurate. North Korea has been playing chicken with its' neighbors and the US for the past few decades and always ends up winning.

It's no surprise that China won't punish North Korea because Kim Jong Il is nothing but a Chinese patsy. Bloomberg

May 27 (Bloomberg) -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is likely to resist pressure to acknowledge that North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship when he flies to Seoul tomorrow to meet South Korean President Lee Myung Bak and Japan’s Yukio Hatoyama.

China hasn’t followed South Korea, Japan and the U.S. in blaming North Korea for the March 26 sinking of the Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors. Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun yesterday repeated a call for “restraint” by both sides and said China had no “firsthand information” on the sinking.

China wants to avoid a conflict on the Korean peninsula, and is concerned that taking South Korea’s side may provoke North Korea into further escalations and even lead to war, said Shen Dingli, vice dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Shanghai’s Fudan University.