[칼럼] South Korea Can Stand Up to China
- 빅터 차 (美 CSIS 한국석좌)
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung is pulling out all the stops to improve ties with Beijing. During a four-day state visit to China in early January, he snapped a selfie with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on a new Xiaomi smartphone that his hosts had given him, told an audience that he sought to “upgrade” Chinese-South Korean relations, and signed more than a dozen agreements on topics as varied as trade, climate, and transportation. This followed the two leaders’ long conversation on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in South Korea in early November, where Lee regally welcomed Xi with an honor guard and a welcome banquet to mark the Chinese leader’s first state visit in years.
For Lee, cozying up to Xi can stabilize the relationship with South Korea’s largest trade partner and open new channels of influence over rival North Korea, which depends on China economically. Xi, for his part, seems amenable to Lee’s overtures: after frosty relations with Yoon Suk-yeol, the former South Korean president, warmer ties with Lee can boost Beijing’s position in its strategic competition with Washington by helping pull South Korea away from Japan and the United States. But the bonhomie is unlikely to last.
In mid-November, just two weeks after laying out the red carpet for Xi at APEC,Lee and U.S. President Donald Trump reached an unprecedented deal to cooperate on nuclear-powered submarines. Although many details are still unclear, the agreement will allow Seoul to fulfill a long-standing goal of upgrading its fleet, either by providing U.S. technology and fuel for South Korean nuclear submarines or by encouraging South Korea to develop its own. Seoul would use these submarines to track North Korean vessels—but also those of China, a reality that will incense Beijing.
So far, this bombshell announcement has not provoked a reaction from Beijing. It’s possible that the Chinese leader was unprepared for the surprise move or that Xi’s spat with Japan over Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments about the importance of Taiwan’s security to Tokyo has made Lee a useful friend at this moment. But Beijing will not forget about the nuclear submarine deal. China, in response to other geopolitical slights, has sanctioned at one point or another almost every Korean product, ranging from music to cosmetics to television shows to kimchi. Xi did not seem convinced by Lee’s explanation that Seoul needed the new military capability to counter the expanding North Korean nuclear threat. Instead, during Lee’s visit to Beijing, Xi warned the South Korean president to make the “correct strategic choice,” a cryptic threat that Lee brushed aside to minimize any appearance of discord as he tries to repair ties.
When Beijing eventually turns up the economic heat on Seoul, South Korea cannot stand up to China alone. Instead, Japan, the United States, and other regional partners should work with South Korea to fend off Beijing’s severe economic coercion. Together, past and future targets of China’s economic bullying can amass enough economic leverage to fight back against such pressure tactics and liberate their foreign policy decision-making from under Beijing’s thumb.
HISTORY REPEATS
South Korea is no stranger to Chinese coercion. In 2016–17, Seoul allowed the United States to place a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery in Seongju, South Korea, to defend against North Korean ballistic missiles. Beijing opposed this move because it claimed that THAAD’s radar systems could penetrate deep into Chinese territory; it responded by imposing massive sanctions against South Korea’s entertainment, cosmetics, and tourism industries. A targeted pressure campaign against Lotte, the South Korean conglomerate that originally owned the land where the THAAD system was placed, forced the company to eventually shutter its 112 grocery stores in China. The total amount of lost revenue in South Korea’s economy amounted to over $15 billion.
Then in October 2021, China suddenly stopped exporting urea, an organic compound used to reduce diesel emissions and as a fertilizer, ostensibly to stabilize domestic prices and supply. Because South Korea relies almost entirely on China for its supply of urea, Beijing’s action caused panic buying and disrupted logistics and supply chains in South Korea. China resumed exporting a limited supply of the compound after a few months. But Beijing has repeatedly paused or slowed urea exports since, including from late 2023 to early 2024, delivering a clear warning to Seoul that China could paralyze the South Korean economy if it wanted to.
Soon after Lee and Trump announced in August 2025 that South Korean companies Hanwha Ocean and HD Hyundai would build ships in the United States, China again resorted to economic coercion to express its displeasure. It sanctioned five U.S. subsidiaries of Hanwha Ocean, which sent stock prices falling, upset South Korea’s shipbuilding industry, and signaled the geostrategic risk of more South Korean defense industrial cooperation with the United States.
China’s bullying is likely to be even more aggressive in response to the nuclear submarine deal between Washington and Seoul because the agreement will extend South Korea’s undersea warfare capabilities beyond the Korean peninsula, which would make it possible to use them to support U.S. military operations against China. Beijing could target South Korean companies operating in China, as it did in response to THAAD in 2016–17. Or it might sanction rare earth minerals, which both South Korea and the United States rely on for advanced manufacturing in critical sectors including semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, and shipbuilding. Beijing will likely pursue sanctions quietly—delaying export licenses, for example, or stopping Chinese tour groups from going to South Korea—to protect its reputation in case they don’t work. But even these efforts might inflict enough economic pain on South Korea to complicate Seoul’s nuclear submarine cooperation with the United States. In response to the THAAD sanctions, the South Korean government agreed not to pursue further missile defense cooperation trilaterally with Japan and the United States. Seoul also hesitated to criticize China’s 2013-2015 militarization of the South China Sea out of fear that it would once again find itself in Beijing’s crosshairs.
UNDER PRESSURE
Given the size of bilateral trade between the two countries, South Korea, like many other countries, cannot simply decouple from China. In 2025, trade between China and South Korea totaled more than $300 billion. But Seoul also cannot allow itself to live forever in the shadow of Beijing’s economic coercion, which gives China an effective lever to influence South Korea’s foreign policy choices. In 2019, for example, when the first Trump administration asked the South Korean government to stop Huawei from entering its 5G market, Seoul was paralyzed because it worried Beijing would retaliate with economic punishment similar to what it unleashed in the conflict over THAAD.
South Korea has traditionally seen good relations with China as strategically vital to its economic well-being, a key source of stability on the Korean peninsula (given Beijing’s influence over North Korea), and a security counterweight to its alliance with the United States. But it may be time to wholly rethink this strategic view because China is showing itself to be an increasingly unreliable partner.
Most notably, Beijing has done little to stem North Korean nuclearization. Instead, it has allowed North Korea’s nuclear weapons program to grow, refuses to comply with UN Security Council nonproliferation or human rights sanctions, and has not tried to stop North Korea’s cooperation with Russia in the Ukraine war. The image of Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un standing together on the rostrum viewing China’s September 2025 Victory Day parade conveys a clear message that China’s loyalties lie with this axis of autocracies and not with South Korea.
Economic complementarity between China and South Korea has also transformed into economic competition. In the 1990s, South Korea exported high-tech products such as chips and displays to China, which assembled them into final products for export. China now competes with South Korea to produce these intermediate goods and controls supply chain materials such as rare-earths on which South Korea depends. China has been aggressively undercutting prices to squeeze South Korean companies out of industries as varied as car tires and steel, and cases of industrial espionage between the two countries are increasingly common.
Moreover, China has been quietly militarizing the Yellow Sea, which it can use to pressure South Korea. Beijing’s unilateral construction of an observation platform and two aquaculture stations, and its deployment of buoys for fishing in the provisional measures zone—an overlapping maritime area between the two countries’ exclusive economic zones—violates a standing bilateral agreement between Beijing and Seoul to jointly manage the area. South Korean vessels have sought to monitor Chinese expansion in the zone, but Chinese coast guard ships have intercepted South Korean attempts to do so 27 times since 2020. Leaders in Seoul can also look to what China has done in the South China Sea, where it built purportedly civilian installations such as airstrips and weather stations that can be used for military purposes, for an indication of what Beijing might do off South Korea’s coasts. Lee raised this issue with Xi during their recent talks, but China conceded nothing.
MORE LEVERAGE THAN MEETS THE EYE
Individually, no country in the region has the political or economic heft to stand up to China. But collectively, they have enough leverage. South Korea’s best option is to work with the United States, Japan, Australia, and other G-7 countries to organize a collective economic deterrence pact to stop China’s economic aggression. The pact would need to deem coercion against one to be coercion against all, and for which there would be automatic retaliation, similar to the collective security agreement of Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty.
China is dependent on South Korea in numerous critical sectors. For 48 goodsworth $8.57 billion, China relies on South Korea for more than 70 percent of its imported supply, and it does not have good substitutes. Take OLED (organic LED) panel displays, for example, which Chinese manufacturers need for smartphones, smart watches, tablets, televisions, vehicle dashboards, and infotainment systems. In 2024, China imported $2.11 billion worth of these panel displays from South Korea, equivalent to 94 percent of its imports. China is also increasingly dependent on South Korean marine propulsion engines for its shipbuilding industry, purchasing $781 million—70 percent of its imported supply—from South Korea in 2024.
Such dependence extends to South Korea’s allies and partners. According to 2024 trade data, China is more than 70 percent dependent on 595 items worth $37.05 billion from the G-7 plus South Korea and Australia, and more than 90 percent dependent on 248 items at a value of $17.49 billion from these countries. Many of these are critical imports that China needs to produce everything from lithium batteries and solar panels to petrochemicals and steel.
The purpose of a collective economic deterrence pact would not be to start a trade war with China. Instead, the goal is simply to stop China’s coercion. China suffers no cost for its threats or pressure campaigns on its neighbors because it assumes—correctly—that no single target would dare to retaliate. But the threat of real costs could make Beijing think twice. There is precedent for this working elsewhere: in response to China’s targeting of Lithuania, for instance, the European Union in December 2023 implemented what it calls the Anti-Coercion Instrument, which aims to protect EU countries from outside economic pressure by invoking retaliatory response measures. Since then, there have been no reports of similar acts of coercion by China against other EU member states.
STANDING TOGETHER
The United States, Japan, and South Korea will need to work together to counter China’s pressure. But so far, the countries have not done enough to support each other. At the G-7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, in 2023, leaders recognized the problem of Chinese economic coercion and committed to organizing against it, but they have taken no action since. When, in response to Takaichi’s comments about Japan’s commitment to Taiwan’s security in November 2025, Beijing curtailed critical mineral exports to Japan, banned Japanese seafood imports, and stopped Chinese tourism to Japan, neither Trump nor Lee spoke out in support of Takaichi or criticized Xi. And rather than using trade policy to counter China, Trump imposed onerous tariffs on both Japan and South Korea as part of his tariff spree in early 2025.
But the foundations are in place for a new era of heightened geoeconomic cooperation between Washington and its two most important Indo-Pacific allies. The recent U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-South Korean trade and investment agreements amount to a combined $900 billion of Japanese and South Korean investment in U.S. manufacturing capacity in ships, chips, energy, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies by January 2029. Together, Japan, South Korea, and the United States hold much of the economic leverage that the G-7 and regional partners can wield over China: there are 327 goods worth more than $23.19 billion that these three allies trade with China and on which Beijing is more than 70 percent dependent.
Rather than levying tariffs on its allies, the United States should use its presidency of the G-7 in 2027 to lead the effort to organize the collective economic deterrence pact to stop China’s economic bullying. Washington should publicly call out China for its coercive tactics, and Trump should voice U.S. opposition to China’s economic pressure campaigns directly to Xi when the U.S. president goes to Beijing in April. Doing so would deter China by signaling that Beijing faces costs if it continues to pressure Japan or targets U.S. companies (perennial targets of Chinese coercion), and it would preempt Chinese retaliation against South Korea for its nuclear-powered submarine agreement with the United States. Japan, South Korea, and the United States should also coordinate their commerce and intelligence agencies to more thoroughly map out China’s trade dependencies, which will help identify where this trilateral alliance—in concert with G-7 partners—has the best opportunity to push back against Beijing.
Such cooperation is not free, however. China is going to respond—and when it does, Beijing is likely to pull out every tool in its economic arsenal to target what it perceives to be the most vulnerable link in the trilateral group, South Korea. Only if all the targets of Chinese economic coercion—and South Korea, the United States, and Japan, in particular—are willing to work together will any country be able to end the escalating Chinese pressure campaigns that have so far gone unchecked.
[Foreign Affairs, 2026-01-26]
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/south-korea-can-stand-china