Driving a Wedge between China and South Korea: North Korea's Rangoon Bombing Revisited

This study investigates the motives behind North Korea's "Rangoon bombing." On October 9, 1983, North Korea orchestrated a terrorist attack targeting South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan and his entourage in Myanmar, thereby heightening tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Simultaneously, it launched a peace offensive by proposing trilateral talks with South Korea and the United States. The underlying motivations for North Korea's seemingly paradoxical external policy have puzzled scholars. This study seeks to reevaluate North Korea's Rangoon bombing from the perspective of a "wedge strategy." It contends that in the early 1980s, amidst strengthening security cooperation between Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo, Pyongyang sought to secure its strategic space by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split. However, as China progressively improved its relations with the United States and the Soviet Union, North Korea's strategic space began to diminish. In this context, as Beijing attempted to stabilize the Korean Peninsula by hosting an inter -Korean dialogue with Washington in attendance while increasingly expanding its contact with Seoul, Pyongyang resorted to the Rangoon bombing to disrupt the tripartite talks and drive a wedge in Sino-South Korean relations. Through an analysis of Pyongyang's foreign policy behavior, this study asserts that a small -power ally can employ a wedge strategy by fostering regional tensions.