China's deep-seated fear of instability along its northeastern border will prevent it from reining in its erratic ally North Korea after Pyongyang's deadly attack on a South Korean island, analysts said.

World powers led by the United States have categorically condemned Tuesday's artillery bombardment of South Korea's Yeonpyeong island, leaving China isolated as it merely expressed "concern".

The fact that Tuesday's attack even happened may show that the West has overestimated Beijing's influence over its reclusive neighbour, analysts said.

They added that demands by US President Barack Obama and Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan for China to maximise its leverage over Pyongyang appeared unrealistic.

"The Chinese are in a dilemma in terms of how to respond to this," said Brian Bridges, head of the political science department at Hong Kong's Lingnan University.

"Publicly, it's likely that they will continue not to blame North Korea openly, but behind the scenes, I'm sure they're involved with a lot of very frantic diplomatic activity, trying to get through to Pyongyang and to try and urge them not to do anything more in this dispute," he said.

And while China, which provides the North with desperately-needed financial support, carries some influence over Pyongyang, it also fears that using its economic leverage to pressure North Korea could cause its collapse.

"This is the problem that China continually faces," he said.

Robert Shaw, associate researcher at California's James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies, said China's main priority was to maintain stability in the region.

"I cannot envisage the Chinese government sanctioning this type of military activity on the part of North Korea", he told AFP. "That would not be in line with China's objectives in the region, which are very simply stability."

China, which has also been locked in territorial and other disputes with Japan, is anxious to maintain the status quo along its northeastern border.

On the one hand it can ill afford an influx of North Korean refugees, while it is similarly keen to avoid seeing US troops posted along the border in the event that the North implodes and the Korean peninsula is reunified.

Beijing's lukewarm reaction to Tuesday's bombardment, in which two marines and two civilians died, echoed its response when the North was blamed for torpedoing a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors.

China then refrained from criticising Pyongyang and said it wanted to conduct its own inquiry into the sinking, the results of which have yet to be released.

"I am sure the South Korean government was disappointed" by China's reaction to Tuesday's bombardment, said Bridges.

Beijing's tepid response also likely fell short of Washington's expectations and the United States would be expected to raise the question with Hu Jintao when the Chinese president visits in January.

"China's boilerplate calls for 'dialogue' and a return to the stalled (and now quite empty) six party (nuclear) talks will ring hollow in Seoul and Washington," said the Eurasia Group, a collection of US-based political consultants.

"Beijing is likely to (privately) tell North Korea to de-escalate. But China's track record of restraining North Korea is very poor indeed", they wrote in a paper on Wednesday.

In the past four years, North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests, walked out of the Chinese-hosted six nation talks on scrapping its nuclear programme, sunk a South Korean warship and now bombarded a South Korean island.

"There is a tendency, particularly in the US and the West, to overestimate China's direct influence over North Korea," said Shaw.

earlier related report
South Korea in a bind over its wayward neighbour
Seoul (AFP) Nov 24, 2010 - North Korea's deadly rain of shells has enraged South Koreans but also driven home their chilling dilemma -- how to deal with an unpredictable nuclear-armed neighbour while avoiding all-out war.

Compounding Seoul's strategic nightmare is uncertainty over the motivations of the hardline state and on whether China, the country with the most influence on North Korea, is willing to restrain its communist neighbour.

Tuesday's attack from the North follows the sinking of a South Korean warship this year that has been blamed on the isolated regime, and Pyongyang's surprise unveiling this month of a sophisticated nuclear facility.

South Korea's Premier Kim Hwang-Sik condemned as a "reckless act of savagery" the bombardment of the Yellow Sea island that killed two marines, wounded 18 people and reduced 19 houses to charred ruins.

Major newspapers labelled the first such attack since the 1950-53 Korean conflict a "war crime" and called for revenge, with the Dong-A Ilbo daily fuming that "a club is the only medicine for a mad dog".

But South Korean politicians, generals and citizens also know how much is at stake, having lived with the threat of full-scale war on the peninsula for decades.

The two Koreas have never signed a peace treaty, and just across the heavily fortified border, the North has hundreds of missiles targeted on Seoul, believed to include chemical and biological weapons.

"Because North Korea has less to lose, they are more apt to take steps that could lead to war," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

"South Korea, although they have various means of responding, will be very careful and considerate in their response so as not to create an escalatory spiral in which North Korea has what's called 'escalation dominance'."

Professor Yang Moo-Jin of Seoul's University of North Korean Studies agreed that "despite the strong soundbites, what South Korea can do about this is quite limited."

"At best, it may irritate the North into further provocative acts to find an excuse to mount retaliatory attacks, but even that's a remote possibility," Yang said.

"The South may flex its military muscle by staging joint military exercises with the United States on a greater scale than usual," he said, shortly before the US and South Korea announced a four-day naval exercise starting Sunday.

Yang said that if South Korea, backed by the United States, sought to punish or condemn the North at the UN Security Council, veto-wielding members China and Russia would probably not support them.

"If China or Russia join any international condemnation against the North, Pyongyang would respond by carrying out a third nuclear test, test-firing an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and disclosing nuclear devices that might have been miniaturised enough to be loaded on top of missiles," he said.

Northeast Asia security expert Robert Dujarric agreed that "South Korean options are indeed limited", pointing to the response after an expert panel found North Korea torpedoed South Korean warship the Cheonan in March.

"My guess is that in the end Seoul and Washington will decide to prioritise avoiding escalation, though they will have to find a way to warn the North to avoid further provocations," said Dujarric, director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University in Tokyo.

"It's hard to operationalise this sort of policy, but what we have seen in recent years, including with the Cheonan, is that the South and US will indeed let the North get away with its provocations."

Many observers said the North Korean attack was aimed at boosting the standing of heir apparent Kim Jong-Un, the youngest son of leader Kim Jong-Il.

"It is a way of seeking US attention and demonstrating that the next North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Un, knows how to provoke, how to fight and how to be as unpredictable as his father," said Rory Medcalf, international security programme director of think-tank the Lowy Institute.

"The key here is China's role. China is the only power with real capacity to harm the regime in Pyongyang," he said.

However, the latest inter-Korean flare-up comes at a time when China has been engaged in a bitter territorial row with Japan, and has quarrelled with the United States over currencies, trade and human rights.

"Beijing knows that it needs a cooling-off period in its relations with Asia and with Washington after all that strife," said Medcalf.

"China's response will be a grand test of whether it puts the region's interests ahead of its own relations with its dangerous little brother in Pyongyang."