I live in Beijing, and I can say this. While the West is worrying that China might take North Korea's side in the war, China is asking "if America strikes North Korea, will we be able to take over the country before they do?"
China is a... I don't really want to say "ally," but think of WW2. The U.S. and the USSR hated each other, but when their armies met, they didn't fight. They raced to see who could take over the biggest swath of Germany. If it comes to war over NoKo, that will be the same scenario.
And frankly, if China's leader was anyone other than Xi Jinpeng, I'd be fine with letting them have a chunk of it. The only problem is that Xi's rhetoric about how "Korea used to belong to China" is the perfect precursor to the CCP pulling one of their classic "re-write the history books" maneuvers and telling an entire generation of school children that their current rule of some chunk of North Korea has always been a fact, and that the rest of the peninsula is "a rightful part of China currently under Western capitalist Hegemony, awaiting 'liberation' by China," which is the line they took with Tibet before they rolled tanks in, and the line they are taking with Taiwan right now, and the line a few of their hyper-nationalists (by which I mean "most of the CCP and the coastal population) take with Mongolia and Vietnam. In short, letting China take over part of NK would set China up to make the R.O.K into the next Mongolia: a nation constantly under threat of being invaded by an opportunistic leader seeking to "restore China's ancient glory."
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