The author deigns to give China respectability as an agent for peaceful change on the Korean peninsula.  Completely ludicrous.  On the contrary, China is moving toward North Korea in a manner that reinforces both countries' strident, aggressive and antagonistically nationalistic outlook on the world.  Xi Jinping has tightened Chinese domestic freedoms and employed increasingly authoritarian police actions on his own population. Chinese propaganda is fiercely jingoistic, exceptionally aggressive and anti-western.  Militarism is in the ascendancy with the visible and enormously intimidating presence of the PLA everywhere including in Hong Kong.  Clearly North Korea, as a vassal of, and proxy state for China, is doing Beijing's bidding on the world stage.  China has no intention of abandoning North Korea or changing its direction. They are allies.  There will be no peaceful cooperation with the world to "unify" the Korean peninsula as the author suggests unless it is on Communist terms.