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SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea appeared to have put what it said was a satellite into orbit on Wednesday, a boost for the country’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, in his struggle to be hailed at home as a worthy successor to his father and to be regarded as a serious rival by the United States and its allies in the region.
WASHINGTON — The United States and its Asian allies began an effort on Wednesday to impose additional sanctions on North Korea after its largely successful rocket launching, but this time Washington added a warning to China: Failure to rein in Kim Jong-un, the North’s new leader, will result in an even greater American military presence in the Pacific.
With the surprise launching on Wednesday morning of a rocket that flew beyond the Philippines and apparently put an object into orbit, North Korea showed that after a series of failures it was clearing key technical hurdles toward mastering the technology needed to build an intercontinental ballistic missile, analysts said.
The Chinese government, which sent a delegation to Pyongyang last month to warn against the missile test, said it “regrets” the launching, which put a 200-pound earth surveillance satellite into orbit.
The launching prompted the United States and its two main Asian allies, Japan and South Korea, to demand further United Nations sanctions on North Korea. But it was far from clear how far China, the North’s main ally, might be prepared to go in joining that push.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said that North Korea’s right to a peaceful space program was subject to “limitations” by United Nations Security Council resolutions. But he declined to say whether North Korea had failed to live up to those obligations, which include a prohibition on launchings like the one on Wednesday morning near the Chinese border.
China said that it “regrets” the launching, the first time it has used that word in the context of the North’s rocket program. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, also said that North Korea’s right to a peaceful space program was “subject to limitations by relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions,” somewhat tougher language than China has used on that subject in the past.
In fact, after a preliminary meeting of the Security Council members in New York, it was far from clear how far the Chinese are willing to go in further punishing an ally they once called as close as “lips and teeth.” Beijing’s biggest fear has always been destabilizing North Korea, and setting off a collapse that could put South Korean forces, and perhaps their American allies, on China’s border.
“North Korea, as a member of the United Nations, has the obligation to abide by relevant resolutions of the United Nations Security Council,” Mr. Hong said at a regular briefing in Beijing. But he declined to say whether North Korea had lived up to that obligation or whether China had received advance notice that the launching would happen Wednesday.
But the essence of the American strategy, as described Wednesday by administration officials, was to force the Chinese into an uncomfortable choice.
In North Korea, the apparent success gave Mr. Kim a propaganda boon. After state television announced the “important news” that the Unha-3 rocket had put the satellite Kwangmyongsong-3, or Shining Star-3, into orbit, government vehicles with loudspeakers rolled through the streets of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, blaring the news, according to the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency. The Associated Press, which has a bureau in Pyongyang, reported dancing in the streets.
“The kinds of things we would do to enhance the region’s security against a North Korean nuclear missile capability,” one senior administration official said in an interview, “are indistinguishable from the things the Chinese would view as a containment strategy” aimed at Beijing.
“Suddenly, the whole country is engulfed with happiness and the people endlessly inspired,” the state-run news agency K.C.N.A. reported, attributing the success to Mr. Kim’s late father, Kim Jong-il, whose main legacy of missile and nuclear programs his son has tried to bolster to solidify his own hereditary rule.
They would include increased patrols in waters the Chinese are trying to claim as part of their exclusive zone, along with military exercises with allies in the region. Many of those efforts are planned anyway as part of President Obama’s “rebalancing” strategy to ensure a continued American presence in Asia.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, said early Wednesday that it had detected the launching and tracked the rocket as its first stage appeared to fall into the Yellow Sea and the second stage into the Philippine Sea. “Initial indications are that the missile deployed an object that appeared to achieve orbit,” it said.
“It’s the right approach, but whether it works is another matter,” said Christopher Hill, who was the chief negotiator with North Korea during President George W. Bush’s second term, and went on to be ambassador to Iraq, on Wednesday. “The approach of thickening up the antimissile effort is something that would get China’s attention.”
All four previous efforts by North Korea to put a satellite into orbit failed, according to American officials, though the country insisted that two of them succeeded, in 1998 and then in 2009.
Mr. Kim, for his part, may have been trying to get the attention of China’s new leader, Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi has not met Mr. Kim, and many China experts say he is unlikely to spend much time or money winning the allegiance of the North Korean leader.
If the North indeed sent a satellite into orbit, it would give Mr. Kim bragging rights over the government of President Lee Myung-bak in South Korea, which has twice failed to do so. South Korea’s apparent failure to predict the timing of the North’s launching became a key campaign issues ahead of the South’s Dec. 19 presidential election, with the two main candidates arguing over who was better qualified to deal with the North’s threats.
Administration officials said that while the launching was successful, it was hardly a threat to the United States, despite a warning by Robert M. Gates in 2011, when he was secretary of defense, that the North would have a missile capable of reaching the United States by 2016.
For President Obama, the launching deepened the complexity of dealing with the new North Korean government, after four years in which promises of engagement, then threats of deeper sanctions, have done nothing to modify the country’s behavior. A statement from the White House by Tommy Vietor, the National Security Council spokesman, called the launch a “a highly provocative act that threatens regional security, directly violates United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1718 and 1874, contravenes North Korea’s international obligations, and undermines the global nonproliferation regime.”
“I am not disparaging this demonstration of 1950s Sputnik-quality technology,” the administration official said, referring to the Soviet satellite that prompted the space race during the cold war. He then went on to disparage it, noting that Mr. Kim “is in the family business, like his daddy before him, and it’s a form of extortion.”
The North Korean rocket was carrying a 220-pound satellite, perhaps one-tenth the weight of a typical nuclear warhead, said Baek Seung-joo, an expert on the North’s military at the state-financed Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul. Still, he said, by successfully launching a multistage rocket, “North Korea demonstrated some long-range capabilities.”
South Korean officials sounded similar themes, saying that the North’s effort was to extract a higher price — in aid, food and technology — for restraining future launchings or nuclear tests.
Although the launching was driven partly by domestic considerations, analysts said it carried far-reaching foreign relations implications, coming as leaders in Washington and Beijing — as well as those soon to be chosen in Tokyo and Seoul — try to form a new way of coping with North Korea after two decades of largely fruitless efforts to end its nuclear and missile ambitions.
Riki Ellison, chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a private group in Washington, called the North Korean satellite launching “a fundamental breakthrough” that showed the main elements of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Choe Sang-hun reported from Seoul, South Korea, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Beijing.
“This is a resounding achievement,” he said Wednesday in a statement. He called the remaining technical steps that North Korea must take in ICBM development “much easier” than the satellite launching.
Scientific experts who examined the flight said that North Korea appeared to have solved a number of problems that caused previous efforts to blow up, but they sounded less than impressed.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and William J. Broad from New York. Choe Sang-hun contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea.
