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Xi does not love Kim, and he definitely doesn’t like what he has been doing with the nuclear and missile tests. Kim has even purged the senior people in the North Korean hierarchy who were closest to China, and Beijing still puts up with his behavior. Why? Because the survival of communist rule in North Korea is seen in Beijing as vital — not vital to China as a whole, but to the continuation of communist rule in China. That may sound weird, but look at it from the point of view of China’s current rulers.
What truly frightens the men in charge in China is seeing another communist regime go down. They were terrified by the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1989-1991, and they blame it on the weakness and willingness to compromise of the Soviet Communist Party.
For all their power and all their achievements, they see themselves as standing with their backs to a cliff. One step backward, one show of weakness, and they could be over the edge and in free-fall. Letting Kim fall, however much they dislike him, might unleash the whirlwind at home.
Conclusion? No matter what the various players say now, in the end North Korea will get to keep a modest nuclear deterrent force, but it will have to agree to keep it small enough that it could not possibly launch a successful first strike. Not that it could even remotely afford to build a force big enough to do that anyway.
Ridiculous assumption.
Fatboy is simply responding in kind, not under the chinese strings.
In reality, they would rather have a proxy state, achievable by desposing kim and replacing him with a chinese yes man.