Africa's Big Brother Lives in Beijing - By John Reed | Foreign Policy

Africa's Big Brother Lives in Beijing - By John Reed | Foreign Policy

DIPLOMAT: How China Makes North Korean Policy

How China Makes North Korean Policy

By  Zachary Keck

July 30, 2013

Some Monday China links: Japan’s The Asahi Shimbun is beginning another one of its in-depth investigations of the Chinese Communist Party, this one examining Zhongnanhai, the CCP’s central headquarters in Beijing.

The first part of this series provides a rare in-depth look at the CCP’s internal decision-making towards North Korea. The report notes that until now bilateral ties have been maintained by the CCP and the Workers’ Party of Korea, as well as their militaries. According to the newspaper, a decision by the Central Leading Group for Foreign Affairs of the Communist Party led to the establishment of a strategic dialogue, signifying that the two governments will now handle bilateral relations. (Vice President Li Yuanchao traveled to North Korea this weekend in his government capacity as well.)

In summing up the implications of this, one researcher at a government think tank told Asahi, “That signifies that the China-North Korea relationship is no longer the special one of the past. North Korea will be treated just like any other foreign nation.”

China Daily has a long piece examining the challenging construction feats involved in building a 1,776-km-long high-speed railway linking the capitals of Gansu and Xinjiang provinces. The “high-speed Silk Road,” as the article calls it, is expected to be operational by the end of 2014.

Chinese officials’ mistresses are causing the Party a lot of headaches as they seek to act as “whistleblowers” when relationships turn sour, according to the Washington Post.

Xinhua reports that China’s National Audit Office (NAO) will conduct a nationwide review of government debt.

Reuters looks at how Samsung is still beating Apple in China.

Jim O’Neill, who coined the BRIC bloc, doesn’t believe that China is in for a hard landing. In the op-ed he writes “I am more confident that the decade ambition of 7.5pc [economic growth] is likely to be achieved.” He also argues, “If China grows by 7.5pt for the decade (it's currently closer to 8.5pc so far this decade), it will be an economy of around $16 trillion or more by 2020, allowing its average citizen to enjoy wealth of around $12-13,000.”

China Real Time reviews a new study that finds that the U.S. is the top real estate market for mainland Chinese purchasing property overseas and, within the U.S., New York is the top destination. The study also finds that in contrast to prior years, it’s no longer just wealthy Chinese who are looking at overseas property. Increasingly, middle class citizens are too.

Diplomat: The Struggle to Combat North Korea's Tuberculosis Crisis

North Korea’s Six Trillion Dollar Question
Is China’s Patience With North Korea Wearing Thin?
N. Korea Crisis: A View From Tokyo
Let North Korea Save Face
Lee’s North Korea Gambit

National Review: Photos of the Korean War

See National Review: Korean War Photos under pages for a photo essay published in National Review Online. Great images, but too large to post as an entry here.

Korea 60 Year Later: National Review

Korea 60 Years Later          
       
Korea provides an important model of complicated, indecisive modern warfare.

By William C. Latham Jr.

 

At 10 o’clock sharp on the evening of July 27, 1953, the shooting stopped in Korea. The cease-fire ended three years of bloody and inconclusive fighting between Communist and United Nations forces that killed an estimated total of 1.2 million people. Technically, a state of war still exists on the Korean peninsula, and the North Koreans have repeatedly renounced the 1953 agreement. Still, the last six decades of tentative peace have proven beneficial for South Korea and for the world.

For Americans, the cease-fire inspired few celebrations, either at the time or in the years that followed. At best, Americans viewed the war’s outcome as a tie. Many critics depicted it as a humiliating American defeat — at least, until the U-2 incident, the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, and the Iranian hostage crisis forced us to recalibrate that particular term.

Today, few Americans outside academia know much about the war itself. This ignorance is disappointing but understandable in a nation that has grown increasingly isolated from the military professionals who guarantee its security. Neither military nor diplomatic history garners much space in secondary and collegiate history courses, and the conflicts that receive attention are generally limited to the American Revolution, the Civil War, the two World Wars, and maybe Vietnam. Military history attracts more attention in Hollywood than in the classroom, but, again, the Civil War and the Second World War dominate the box office and our imagination. These conflicts lend themselves to the popular imagination because of their relative simplicity and their decisive outcomes.

 

Recent military history, however, suggests that modern warfare is rarely simple or decisive. In that sense, Korea provides an important model of complicated, indecisive warfare. Sixty years later, the Korean War still matters.

 

That conflict radically altered the nature of the Cold War. North Korea’s invasion across the 38th Parallel on June 25, 1950 — sponsored, planned, and approved by the Soviet Union — exposed the threat of Communist aggression in a manner that provoked global outrage and compelled the Truman administration to commit military forces, reinstitute the draft, and launch a massive re-armament plan that locked the United States and its taxpayers into a massive, expensive, and dangerous arms race with the Soviet Union. The conflict also forced the United States into long-term security commitments to defend South Korea and Taiwan, while bolstering the newly established North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a check on further Soviet expansion.

 

For the Soviets, the war provided an opportunity to bleed United Nations forces and embarrass Washington politically, but it strengthened anti-Communist sentiment in the West and eventually led to an irreparable break between Moscow and Beijing. The outcome also committed Moscow to supporting a dysfunctional and increasingly embarrassing North Korean client state.

 

The war had an even more dramatic impact on Korea’s immediate neighbors. Communist China’s bold military intervention in the fall of 1950 prevented the establishment of a unified, pro-Western Korea on its northeastern border, bolstered domestic support for Mao’s fledgling government in Beijing, and firmly established the People’s Republic of China as a major regional power.

To Japan, the war proved both a political and an economic godsend. Ignoring a number of unresolved issues, including outstanding claims against the Japanese for war reparations, the U.S. accelerated the finalization of a peace treaty with Tokyo in order to create an anti-Communist bulwark in northeast Asia. Meanwhile, the war turned the Japanese islands into an American arsenal, and billions of dollars of American military spending jump-started the Japanese economic recovery.

 

But the war’s most significant impact, of course, was on the Korean peninsula itself. During the fighting, heavy artillery and air attacks devastated the countryside, flattened nearly every Korean city, and made refugees of millions. In the six decades since then, the constant threat of another war has turned both Koreas into armed camps. North Korea under the Kim regime has become an increasingly isolated pariah state that starves its own citizens and provokes international confrontations in order to attract attention and stifle internal dissent. South of the demilitarized zone, six decades of U.S. military and financial support have given the Republic of Korea sufficient breathing room to transform itself from a police state into a modern democratic society and a global economic powerhouse.

 

None of these outcomes were anticipated by the leaders who waged the war. That said, what should we learn from our experience in Korea?

 

First, geopolitical rivals can and will misinterpret each other’s intentions. In the months prior to the North Korean invasion, the Truman administration sent all the wrong signals to our friends and our enemies. Critics later blamed Secretary of State Dean Acheson for excluding Korea from his famous “defensive perimeter” speech in January of 1950, but the 1949 withdrawal of U.S. combat troops sent a far more important signal that U.S. forces would not fight to defend South Korea. The Soviets, meanwhile, assumed that a North Korean invasion would unify the peninsula under Communist rule before the Western powers could react. Instead, the war provoked widespread condemnation while fracturing Moscow’s control over the Communist bloc.

 

Second, the international community can occasionally join together as a force for good. In Korea, the Truman administration managed to forge an international military coalition that fought bravely and successfully to defeat Communist aggression. Since then, the United Nations has amassed a decidedly mixed record of success in addressing the world’s problems, and policymakers in Washington will always be tempted to favor unilateral action. Nevertheless, as we saw more recently in Operation Desert Storm and the international effort to help victims of the 2004 tsunami, international coalitions can muster widespread moral and political support, factors increasingly important in the age of CNN.

 

Finally, conflicts are generally much easier to start than they are to finish. In Korea, most of the dramatic battles took place during the war’s first twelve months, as both sides launched major offensive campaigns that fell short of victory because of the logistical challenges of fighting a modern conflict in mountainous terrain. When delegates met in July of 1951 to discuss an armistice, both sides assumed the negotiations would be quick. Instead, the talks lasted over two years, while the fighting lapsed into a bloody stalemate amidst the barren ridges of Korea. Washington tried a variety of sticks and carrots to force a compromise, but in the end, it took Stalin’s death to provide a face-saving avenue for the Chinese to reach an agreement. Had Stalin’s guards been less terrified of him, and had he not had his physicians thrown in prison, the war might have lasted another five years.

As we mark the 60th anniversary of the cease-fire, let’s remember the 36,000 Americans who died in the conflict, and the nearly 8,000 Americans still listed as missing. Let’s praise the success of our staunch allies in South Korea, and let’s hope for a brighter future for the starving masses of North Korea. Finally, let’s recall the unpredictable nature of modern warfare, and let’s celebrate and preserve the uneasy peace that began 60 years ago in Korea.

 

— William C. Latham Jr. is a course director at the United States Army Logistics University at Fort Lee, Va. His Cold Days in Hell: American POWs in Korea was recently published by Texas A&M University Press.

60th Anniversary of cease-fire KOREA

LINK

See this link for timeline of Korean war on this, the anniversary of the cease-fire that brought the initial three years of the conflict to end.

The Wild Card - By Kirk Spitzer | Foreign Policy

The Wild Card - By Kirk Spitzer | Foreign Policy

TOKYO — Japanese voters are almost certain to give Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) an overwhelming victory in upper house elections on July 21. The election so far has focused largely on economic recovery -- and for once there's hope on the horizon. Abe's aggressive program of monetary easing and government spending has begun to jolt the economy out of nearly two decades of deflation and stagnation. The prime minister, who's been operating with only the lower house of the Diet backing him, is looking to regain a majority in the upper house to help push through his "third arrow" of structural reforms.

Click on photo for full article.





IHT - ROCKET SITE - North Korea

North Korea Said to Stop Construction At Rocket Site

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — Satellite images show that North Korea has halted work at a complex believed to have been intended to allow it to launch bigger and longer-range rockets, a Washington-based research organization reported on Tuesday.       

The organization, the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and others have been using commercial satellite imagery to monitor the complex, the Tonghae Satellite Launching Ground, in northeastern North Korea. They have previously detected the building of a new launching pad, missile assembly building and launch control center that they believe are designed to launch larger rockets capable of flying longer distances and delivering heavier payloads than the North’s Unha-3 rocket, which successfully thrust a satellite into orbit in December.       

North Korea says it launches rockets for the peaceful purpose of sending scientific satellites into orbit. But Washington sees them as a cover for developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that could one day strike targets as far away as North America with nuclear warheads.

The institute first noticed that the work at Tonghae stopped at the end of 2012. In its latest update, posted on its Web site 38 North, it said on Tuesday that the construction had not resumed as of late May, although it was not clear what had caused the seven-month halt.

Even if North Korea resumes work, the lull means that the new projects might not be completed until 2017, a year longer than earlier estimates, it said.

 

“Initial speculation at the end of 2012 focused on the need for equipment and troops elsewhere to repair damage done by last summer’s typhoons and heavy rains,” it said. “That explanation now seems less plausible given the amount of time that has passed since last year’s rains.”

An alternative explanation is that the North has decided that testing conducted at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station, in northwestern North Korea, will be sufficient to support its development of larger rockets, the institute said, without citing any evidence to support its theory. North Korea conducted its December rocket launching from the Sohae station.

“Or the stoppage may reflect a decision either to slow or even halt development of larger rockets,” it said.

 

Such an analysis contradicts recent official pronouncements from Pyongyang. Despite international criticism and United Nations sanctions, North Korea has vowed to continue to build and launch more powerful rockets. Again using satellite imagery, 38 North said on July 10 that North Korea might have conducted engine tests for a more powerful rocket at the Sohae facility in late March or early April.

 

During military tensions that followed the North’s nuclear test in February and ensuing sanctions from the United Nations Security Council, North Korea claimed to have the ability to hit the continental United States with nuclear missiles. American intelligence agencies are divided over how close the North has come to attaining such an ability. Still, Washington announced plans to deploy more missile interceptors on the West Coast.

Erotic Republic - By Afshin Shahi | Foreign Policy

Erotic Republic - By Afshin Shahi | Foreign Policy

FP: Surfing the 38th Parallel - Korea's DMZ Playground


 





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Surfin' DMZ

Hanging 10 in the shadow of North Korea.

PHOTOS BY SHANNON ASTON | JULY 18, 2013

 

Surfing the 38th parallel is not like surfing in Malibu or Lower Trestles in California, or Snapper Rocks on Australia's Gold Coast. 38th Parallel beach -- one of the few available beaches on South Korea's east coast -- is a strip of sand about a third of a mile long, cut off on both sides by barbed wire-topped fences. Getting to the waves means carrying your board past the aging guard towers that dot the coastline. A person taking a nighttime stroll on the shore might find himself at the center of a spotlight, shining down from a sentry tower. It's all a far cry from the laid-back surf towns of California, Costa Rica, or Australia.

And yet more and more Koreans are finding that they like their surfing with a little bit of border tension on the side. Photographer and surfer Shannon Aston began documenting the growing surf scene at sahm parl hae pyeon, or 38th Parallel Beach, two years ago. What started as mainly expats seeking better waves than popular Korean surf areas like Busan and Jeju Island in the south had to offer is beginning to come into its own, Aston says. Today, there are shops, camps, and hotels geared toward the surfers that come from Seoul year-round, even during the bitterly cold winter months.

The strange location -- about 37 miles south of the DMZ -- is never far from the surface, Aston says. "You can see the guard towers above you," he says. "There's barbed wire, you see patrol frigates coming out of the water, at the river mouth you'll see tanks, jeeps." While the east coast of the Korean Peninsula is mainly peaceful -- with far fewer of the skirmishes that flare up from time to time in the waters off the west coast -- the occasional North Korean defector might still turn up on an east coast beach. Troops still patrol the sands daily.

But the surf scene keeps growing, undeterred. These are, after all, among the top waves South Korea has to offer, Aston says. They just happen to be found between two strips of barbed wire.

 

NR - Rich Lowry article on Wendy Davis, Abortion Extremist

Wendy Davis, abortion champion in the USA 

Malala's Forgotten Sisters - by Adriana Carranca | Foreign Policy

Malala's Forgotten Sisters - by Adriana Carranca | Foreign Policy

Aiding and Abetting - By Isaac Stone Fish | Foreign Policy

Aiding and Abetting - By Isaac Stone Fish | Foreign Policy
 

The Slow Boat from China - By Stephen S. Roach | Foreign Policy

The Slow Boat from China - By Stephen S. Roach | Foreign Policy