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geoschmo said:
As distastful as it sounds, I think we've reached the point where the only military option, if we think the non-military options are gone, is to basically give China a permission slip to annex North Korea. North Korea survives at their pleasure as it is now. I can't imagine the people of North Korea could be any worse off as an official part of China than they are now.
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There are couple of other options available that just might force China to stop supporting NK without turning it into the Chosen Autonomous Province of the PRC that just might kill the once-communist, now-fascist regime:
We threaten China with the prospect of a fully-nuclearized, politically-able, militarily self-sufficient Japan and Taiwan if the NK problem isn't dealt with swiftly,
We let the Kim family have safe exile in China in exchange that he turn over everything to the SK authorities,
We (any and every sensible nation) threaten to boycott the 2008 olympics, citing the NK threat and human rights abuses and China's tacit support, which just might cause the chinese to drastically cut support in order to save face,
We put restrictions on chinese trade, that is to say, incoming chinese goods and outgoing investments to china, citing some vague political reason or whatnot but giving subtle hints as to link it with the situation on the Korean peninsula,
Make the chinese turn a blind eye to the North Korean refugees that want to go south by giving the chinese authorities incentives to let them freely go to other countries such as Vietnam or Mongolia (but not to embassies) and thereby bleed NK dry,
or the US makes a trade: Taiwan for North Korea; The US rescinds all military agreements made with Taiwan in exchange for China's guaranteed non-involvement with North Korea.
All these options are unattractive, and none of them are foolproof; in each and every one, China could always bargain for more, call the US' bluff, or just simply dishonor the agreement, but these are the options that doesn't involve the potential death of 10s of millions of people and the wrecking of the world's major and budding economies.
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Of course this assumes that China would be interested in taking such action. My gut tells me they might if they had assurances from the international community there would be no repercussions.
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Not just might, the chinese certainly would: They have a million Korean-Chinese that speak both Mandarin and Korean ready to be used as political commisars or whatnot at their disposal, and the chinese have been active in their historical reevaluation (read: revisionism) in portraying that Goguryo, an ancient kingdom that straddled Lower Manchuria and Northern Korea (that probably never was Chinese or Korean as we know them today) as a chinese tributary that was founded by chinese and was populated by ancient chinese.