KERFUFFLES between the Koreas tend to involve few surprises. The latest military spat between the democratic South and the despotic North ended on August 25th after 43 hours of talks concluded with an agreement to have more. The truce bound North Korea to hardly anything. The only commitment was for a resumption of cross-border reunions of families separated by the Korean war of 1950-53, in late September. (The last planned reunions, last year, went ahead, though the North scuppered others two years ago.) So far, so predictable. But, intriguingly, this time North Korea did not appear to demand new concessions, a staple of its old formula of threats in exchange for handouts.

Tensions had risen in early August, when a landmine maimed two South Korean soldiers. In response the South resumed loudspeaker broadcasts of propaganda blaring across the demilitarised zone. North Korea fired four artillery rounds over the border between the two countries. The South retaliated with 29. North Korea put its armed forces on a semi-war footing but then called for high-level talks. In these, atypically, it expressed “regret” for the two soldiers’ injuries.

Both sides claimed credit for the entente. Approval ratings for Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s president, jumped by 15 points to around 50%. North Korea does not allow filthy imperialist practices such as opinion polls, but Kim Jong Un, the North’s leader, declared that the country had cleared “the dark clouds of war that hung over the Korean nation” by proposing the talks “on its own initiative”.

That was a quiet message to China, says John Delury of Yonsei University in Seoul. Since Xi Jinping came to power three years ago, official communication between China and North Korea, its supposed ally, has slowed to a “trickle” as the relationship worsened over the North’s nuclear posturing and over Mr Kim’s mercurial petulance. China’s chief nuclear envoy, Wu Dawei, told the South that it would play a “constructive role” in cooling tempers. When its foreign ministry urged “restraint” on all sides, North Korea shot back through its state media that it had exercised self-restraint for decades and that such talk was unhelpful.