Gordon G. Chang's Blog, page 18
January 22, 2014
Hanoi's Symbolic Pushback against Chinese Expansionism

For the first time, Hanoi has formally marked the deaths of 74 South Vietnamese sailors killed in an attempt to dislodge Chinese forces occupying several of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. The Vietnamese government, many believe, is trying to stay ahead of public sentiment. On Sunday, the 40th anniversary of the sea battle, activists in Vietnam’s capital shouted anti-China slogans and laid flowers at the statue of Ly Thai To, a nationalist figure. Police allowed the unauthorized event to go on for about a half hour before dispersing the crowd.
Hanoi maintains that China is “illegally” occupying the islands, which sit about 200 nautical miles off Vietnam’s coast. Beijing, for its part, claims about 80 percent of the South China Sea with nine dashes on its official maps. Introduced in the 1940s, the dashes, nicknamed the Cow’s Tongue for the shape they form, indicate that Beijing believes those waters are internal. All other countries, including the US, disagree.
China’s expansive claim is inconsistent with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which Beijing has ratified, and optimists long maintained that the Chinese would not enforce such a broad interpretation of the nine dashes. Now, it’s clear they are holding onto their maximalist position. As of the first of this month, regulations issued by the authorities in China’s Hainan Province require “foreigners and foreign fishing vessels entering sea areas administered by Hainan and engaged in fishery production or fishery resource surveys” to receive approval “from the relevant State Council department in charge.” In short, Beijing purports to exercise sovereignty over most of the South China Sea.
China’s claims have been backed up by methodical and aggressive seizures of disputed territories. Over the course of decades, Beijing has grabbed specks in the South China Sea—not just Drummond and Duncan Islands, the objects of the 1974 clash with South Vietnam, but also Johnson South Reef in the Spratlys in 1988. Most recently, the Chinese took Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines, in 2012. Emboldened by that success, they are now pressuring Manila on Second Thomas Shoal and other territory.
And we have been warned. China’s navy, according to a Chinese media report from this month, intends to seize what Beijing calls Zhongye. The island, one of the Spratlys, is better known as Pagasa because it is in fact inhabited and controlled by the Philippines. The navy says the battle “will be restricted within the South China Sea,” as if that body of water is China’s to use as it pleases.
It is unlikely that China will actually invade Pagasa, part of the Philippines, but belligerent sentiments are often expressed in Chinese military circles these days. It seems not a month passes when one of China’s officers does not publicly call on Beijing to invade some maritime neighbor, as General Liu Yazhou, the political commissar at the People’s Liberation Army National Defense University, did in a recent interview.
As China pushes beyond its recognized boundaries, countries on its periphery are resisting—and remembering. For years, Hanoi sought to suppress nationalist sentiment, embarrassed that the communist government, having been dependent on Beijing’s massive aid at the time, did not oppose China’s moves in 1974.
Now, Hanoi cannot prevent its citizens from speaking out. “After a long time, the deaths of my husband and others seemed to fall into oblivion, but I’m very glad that they have been mentioned,” said Huynh Thi Sinh, widow of the captain of a Vietnamese vessel fighting the Chinese during the 1974 incident, to online publication VietNamNet. “Maybe in his world he’s feeling satisfied. His sacrifice is very meaningful. I’m proud.”
Her husband died fighting the Chinese, and she is not about to remain silent if her government cedes territory to them. As time passes, the battles of decades ago in Asia become more vivid.
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January 16, 2014
Why Is China Blaming America for Its Flawed Dam Project?

The Upstream Ayeyawady Confluence Basin Hydropower Co. (ACHC) issued its first social responsibility report in late December on the Myitsone dam, which it is building in northern Burma. Activists immediately—and accurately—called the report “propaganda.”
In 2009, ACHC, a Sino-Burmese consortium controlled by a Chinese state-owned entity, began work on Myitsone, located at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River. It will be the first dam on that vital waterway and a part of a seven-dam cascade, a $20 billion undertaking.
Myitsone has been called Beijing’s attempt to export the Three Gorges Dam, and it is even more unpopular in Burma than that massive project is in China. The Burmese version has been called “a showcase” for the country’s former military government, which signed the deal with China without public consultation. Therefore, those who disliked the junta—an overwhelming majority in the country—came out against the dam. And to make matters worse for Myitsone’s Beijing backers, the project became a symbol of Chinese exploitation of Burma, which the junta renamed Myanmar. It does not help that, in a power-starved nation, 90 percent of the dam’s electricity will be exported to southern China.
ACHC’s report painted the dam as good for Burma, but that’s not how the Burmese see it. The dam is located in Kachin State, and the Kachins, the ethnic minority in the area, have been uniformly against it, not just the tens of thousands of them who have been or will be forced to move to avoid the rising waters. The dam will flood historical and cultural sites, including what is considered to be the country’s birthplace. The area that will be lost has been called one of the world’s “top biodiversity hotspots and a global conservation priority.” Downstream rice farmers expect that Myitsone will rob the river of crucial sediments. The dam is about 60 miles from a major fault line, and a dam failure would flood Myitkyina, the largest city in Kachin State. Says Ah Nan of Burma Rivers Network, an environmental group, “People across the country have already clearly spoken, and said that the Myitsone dam is unacceptable.”
It would be hard to design a project less popular than Myitsone, and so it should be no surprise that on September 30, 2011, President Thein Sein, deferring to “the aspiration and wishes of the people,” issued a statement in Parliament suspending work on the dam.
Burmese across the country were relieved at news of the suspension, but official China was angry. Within days Beijing found someone to blame: the United States. People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship publication, started the attack by implying that the US and other Western nations pressured the Burmese government to stop work on Myitsone. Barely a month after the suspension, Yun Sun, now at the Stimson Center in Washington, observed that “China has viewed anti-China sentiment bubbling in Myanmar as a conspiracy stirred up by the West and pro-Western nongovernmental organizations to undercut China’s national interests.”
Unfortunately, the Chinese government has not changed its views since then. “Following its opening up, Myanmar has become a main battleground for the world’s major powers, and the Myitsone project has become a bargaining chip in the resulting geopolitical struggle,” stated People’s Daily last September. “Some analyses point out that Western countries, like the United States and Japan, will first have to ruin the Sino-Myanmar relationship in order to expand their influence in Myanmar and demonizing the Myitsone project is an opening.” And what is Washington’s crime in the eyes of People’s Daily? Providing support to nongovernmental organizations concerned about Burmese society.
The Chinese, says Kelley Currie of Project 2049 Institute, “still haven’t really figured out that they are operating in a new context” in Burma. They see the US lurking in the shadows and believe it is determined to undermine their plans. “The Chinese,” she points out, “are still holding on to this idea that we’re stirring up trouble and causing problems for them and if they can just get to the right people and throw money at the problem they can fix it.”
The perceptions of Beijing officials show how much they misperceive what is happening just next door to them. There has indeed been a change in context, and they have failed to take into account “local sensitivities” in Burma and have instead fixated on the United States as if Washington was the cause of their misery. Beijing’s views show how out of touch authoritarian systems can be.
Of course, China’s Myitsone problems, despite the determined efforts of People’s Daily to redirect blame, are not America’s doing. What is important for us, however, is that Beijing’s first instinct was to hold the United States responsible for its own failings in Burma. That certainly affects us and is a warning sign that we may never have good relations with China as long as the Communist Party rules.
In short, the Myitsone fiasco suggests that China’s problem is not just water; it is also its authoritarianism.
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January 8, 2014
China’s Water Crisis Made Worse by Policy Failures

On Friday, the National Development and Reform Commission announced that China will, by the end of 2015, put in place a three-tier pricing structure for water. Heavy users will pay more under the new system, which will cover all cities but not all towns. The Wall Street Journal called it “the first stab at actual resource-sector reform” after November’s Third Plenum.
Technically, it’s the first announcement of a future stab because it remains to be seen whether significantly higher charges, which will surely be unpopular, will in fact be imposed. If there were political will, the NDRC would likely have put the new and urgently needed price restructuring system in place much sooner.
In any event, if the new pricing structure were to be implemented tomorrow, it would not be a moment too soon. The People’s Republic, with 19 percent of the world’s population but only 7 percent of its freshwater, is a country that often defines itself by the scarcity of this resource. As Wang Shucheng, a former water minister, tells us, “To fight for every drop of water or die: that is the challenge facing China.” Where “blue gold” is so precious, it is anomalous that Chinese water charges are less than a fourth of the global average.
Using the market to achieve conservation—the big idea behind the NDRC’s announcement—is certainly the right approach, but this move is decades late, coming after every other policy proved ineffective, unworkable, or inadequate.
Before this, Chinese leaders tried to solve their water problems by announcing—and failing to meet—water-efficiency targets. Then they decided to transport the commodity from the middle regions of the country, where it is plentiful, to the north, where it is not, with the South-to-North Water Diversion Project.
The first phase of the project’s eastern channel—one of three planned waterways—officially opened December 10th, and it now carries Yangtze River water to Dezhou in Shandong Province. The central channel will start delivering water this year from a Yangtze tributary in Hubei Province to Beijing, Tianjin, and nearby cities. The western channel is still in the planning stages and, if built, will take water from the frail Himalayan plateau.
As the New York Times reported, there was only “subdued resignation” at the eastern channel’s official opening last month, and that is unusual for construction-crazy Chinese officials. Yet the reason for their lack of enthusiasm is obvious. “It’s not a moment for celebration,” said Ma Jun, often described as China’s most famous environmental activist. “There should be a sobering review of how we cornered ourselves so that we had to undertake a project with so much social and environmental impact.”
The project, from all accounts, is already causing irreversible damage to the Yangtze, it will spread pollution by transporting goopy water from one part of the country to another, and it will displace hundreds of thousands of the poorest Chinese. And the cost has been exceedingly high. Estimates have now risen to $79.4 billion, and the most challenging part—the western channel—has not even gotten off the drawing board. The South-to-North project could end up, apart from the International Space Station, the most expensive civil engineering undertaking in history.
And if all this were not bad enough, the gargantuan project has actually made China’s water problems worse. As Ma explains, “To some extent, the north has subjected water resources to unsustainable exploitation because they’ve known that one day they’d get this water.”
If China’s technocratic leaders were so skilled, as many seem to think, they would have implemented the pricing solution two decades ago. What they have in done in the interim is despoil their environment and spend tens of billions, having apparently made matters much worse.
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December 30, 2013
Bickering US Asian Allies Complicate Regional Security

On December 26th, Shinzo Abe paid his respects to Japan’s war dead at the Yasukuni shrine.
The US expressed disappointment at the visit, the first by a sitting Japanese prime minister since 2006. Others expressed disgust. No reaction was stronger than the one from Seoul. Washington’s two main allies in the region, Japan and South Korea, can’t get along, and that animosity undermines America’s ability to defend them.
Abe said his visit to the Shinto shrine was personal, and meant “to convey my resolve that people never again suffer the horrors of war,” but few in Asia accepted the explanation. Fourteen “Class A” war criminals, including wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, are enshrined at Yasukuni, and visits there are deeply resented throughout East Asia, even in countries maintaining good relations with Tokyo.
So it should have come as no surprise that the response from Seoul was immediate and sharp. South Korea’s minister of culture read a statement expressing “rage,” but the important reaction came from the Defense Ministry, which cancelled plans to strengthen military ties between South Korea and Japan, calling Abe “untrustworthy.” In perhaps the most petty announcement by any Asian government this year, the ministry also declared it was returning 10,000 rounds of ammunition that the Japanese had provided South Korean peacekeepers in South Sudan.
There is no doubt that Abe knew the shrine visit would inflame passions in South Korea, which Japan colonized and absorbed into its empire at the beginning of the 20th century. By making the pilgrimage, he reinforced the firmly held notion that the Japanese remained unrepentant. And at a time when his country is threatened by China and needs all the allies it can find, the move was diplomacy of the worst sort.
At the same time, the South Koreans are also guilty of grossly counterproductive behavior. Abe probably figured that, after years of attempts, there was no placating Seoul. Last year in June, the government of President Lee Myung-bak went so far as to refuse to ink a General Security of Military Information Agreement with Japan. The rebuke could not have been more stinging, with Seoul backing out less than an hour before the scheduled signing. Lee’s government feared domestic criticism for doing something that was clearly in South Korea’s national interest.
Lee’s successor, President Park Geun-hye, has hardly been more responsible. Maybe she feels she cannot look weak on Japan because her father, the president who created the “South Korean miracle,” had actually been an officer in the Japanese army during the Second World War. Yet however she may personally feel, first and foremost she has a responsibility to protect her nation.
China has claims on South Korean–controlled territory and is using aggressive tactics to try to enforce them. Beijing, for instance, recently declared an air-defense identification zone, which includes sovereign South Korean airspace. It has routinely sent its fishermen to plunder South Korea’s waters, once killing a South Korean coastguardsman, and has supported North Korea when it has attacked the South. Even a cursory look at a map reveals that South Korea is not defensible without Japanese assistance.
So it does not matter whether South Korea or Japan is more at fault in their increasingly nasty spat. They both have a common adversary that covets their territories. Both of them look to Washington for defense but reject American advice to cooperate with each other.
It is essential that the Japanese and South Koreans work together, for China’s challenge to the peace and security of the region is unmistakable. In East Asia, centuries-old antagonisms threaten the future, and the need for America to engage in “alliance management” is long overdue.
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December 24, 2013
China’s Credit Crunch—and Prospects for a Crash
John-Paul Smith, who predicted the 1998 Russian stock market collapse, sees China’s equity markets tanking soon. “There is potential for a debt trap in industrial companies which can trigger an economy-wide financial crisis as early as next year,” said Smith, now a strategist at Deutsche Bank, in an interview this month. China today, Smith says, resembles Russia before its markets flopped 15 years ago.
China analysts, when they think about debt, focus on out-of-control municipalities and their notorious local government financing vehicles, but, as Smith reminds us, it could be Chinese corporate debt that will be responsible for the world’s next great equity crash.
China’s corporates have clearly taken on far too much debt. At the end of last year, their obligations were 113 percent of gross domestic product, according to the Royal Bank of Scotland. JPMorgan, on the other hand, thinks the figure was 124 percent, and BBVA, the Spanish bank, estimates almost 130 percent.
All these figures, in reality, are far too low because they are based on official GDP statistics, which grossly overstate China’s output. After making adjustments to nominal GDP for inflation—this change by itself takes more than a trillion dollars off the 2012 results—and eliminating obvious fibbing, the corporate debt-to-GDP ratio becomes astonishingly high, perhaps approaching 155 percent. As Tom Holland of the South China Morning Post tells us, “China Inc.’s balance sheet is flashing danger signals.”
As a result of their heavy debt loads, many companies are either not making payments or paying with cash substitutes, like bankers’ acceptances. Some have even failed. The most recent high-flier to fall is Liansheng Resources Group, a coal-mining company that is the largest private business in inland Shanxi Province.
Liansheng crashed fast. Its troubles are notable because its founder, Xing Libin, gained notoriety early last year for spending 70 million renminbi ($11 million) to celebrate his daughter’s wedding and the 10th anniversary of his company with an extravaganza on the resort island of Hainan. The young tycoon—he’s 46—chartered three jets to fly family and friends to the islands, hired pop stars to sing at the event, and arranged six Ferraris for the wedding procession. He even had a horse-drawn carriage with a foreigner at the reins—a rare show of opulence.
Now, Liansheng is in bankruptcy, and some, such as Quartz’s Gwynn Guilford, believe the company’s problems could bring down China’s shaky banking system. At the moment, Guilford, who wrote just four days ago, looks prescient. The country is going through another quarter-end credit squeeze, just as it did in June. Last week, interbank rates doubled, with some of them heading to historic highs and one rate actually setting an all-time record. There were rumors of default in the interbank market as banks apparently missed payments. Experts disagree as to the seriousness of ongoing disruptions in the market, but they cannot be a good sign.
In fact, the markets don’t like what is—and has—been going on. Unless there is an unprecedented upswing in the next few trading days, 2013 will be the third down year after the boom of 2009. The closely watched Shanghai Composite Index is now off 36.2 percent from the end of that bull year.
Some foreign analysts, however, are predicting a “massive multiyear bull run.” The theory is that the Communist Party will in fact embark on the reform program announced last month after its Third Plenum. Yet as Smith points out, “The proof will be in the implementation.” So far, he remains unconvinced.
Xi Jinping has been ruling China for slightly more than a year, and up to now he has presided over a period of backsliding. Beijing today, for instance, has doubled down on its exhausted state-investment growth model and waged campaign after campaign against foreign business. It’s not clear that Xi can drop his Maoist-Marxist rhetoric, overcome entrenched interests, and get behind fundamental restructuring.
Yet even if he can accomplish all this, the issue is whether he can do so in time. Today’s credit crunch is a warning to the world that the issue in China is not so much the direction of change as much as its pace. Smith is correct to warn that the elements of a nationwide failure now exist.
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December 18, 2013
North Korea and China's Resurgent Militaries

Last Thursday’s surprise execution of Jang Song Thaek in North Korea may well suggest that a fundamental shift in the balance of power is taking place in Pyongyang. If so, it seems likely that the country’s military—at least for now—is winning in the rough game of Kim-style politics. A similar shift might also be taking shape in Beijing, where Chinese generals and admirals seem to be gaining influence in Communist Party circles. The rise of the two militaries is bound to profoundly affect an already troubled region.
Until last month Jang was widely considered the second most powerful official in North Korea. In the two years after the death of Kim Jong II, Jang used his considerable power to reward the ruling party, the Korean Workers’ Party, which had languished under Kim Jong Il, and to diminish the role and influence of the Korean People’s Army, which had prospered considerably under Kim Jong Il’s songun, or “military first,” policy. As a result, until a few years ago, the generals and admirals were the most powerful among the four elements that make up the regime: the Kim family circle, the military, the party, and the internal security apparatus. Jang purged generals and stripped them of their moneymaking ventures. For instance, he closed Taepung International Investment Group, the army’s conduit for investment abroad. Under Kim Jong Il, about 70 percent of the North’s foreign currency business was conducted by the flag officers. Jang reportedly transferred lucrative operations to the party, further strengthening his already considerable base of power.
Some believe military officers—especially Vice Marshal Choe Ryong Hae—were largely responsible for Jang’s stunning downfall. Whether or not this is true, it is evident, from photographs released by state media, that Kim Jong Un is now surrounded by generals wherever he goes. That, of course, is a sure sign the military is back in power. Jang, for all his faults, was a moderate who believed in pushing economic reform and good relations with China. Today, military officers are the ones whispering into Kim’s ear instead.
While the hard-liners appear to be gaining ground in Pyongyang, the People’s Liberation Army seems to be gaining clout across the border in China. Some attribute Beijing’s new aggressiveness to the ascension of Xi Jinping as general secretary of the party last November (he then became president in March). A more plausible explanation, however, is that flag officers are either making their own policies independently of him or essentially telling him what policies he will adopt.
Why more plausible? Xi Jinping, who sits atop a factionalized political system, has no faction of his own. People say he heads the “Princelings,” but that term merely describes sons and daughters of either former leaders or high officials. These offspring have views spanning the political spectrum and do not form a cohesive group.
Xi became China’s supreme leader because he appealed to all factions, in large part because he had no faction. He was, in short, the least unacceptable candidate. And because he still has no identifiable faction to call his own, he cannot afford to offend the generals and admirals, who look like they have been the driving force behind external policy for some time. Some political analysts, like the oft-quoted Willy Lam, even believe the military is now Xi Jinping’s faction. That’s not a bad base, as the army looks like the party’s most powerful component group, but Xi’s reliance on the flag officers means he is not in a strong position to tell them what to do.
The two armies, therefore, seem to be gaining political influence in their respective regimes. In the coming months, we will see if the civilian leaderships of the two people’s republics are indeed as weak as they now appear to be. If they are, two resurgent militaries, which have traditionally maintained close ties to each other, could further roil a volatile North Asia.
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December 5, 2013
Is Beijing Stacking the Deck in Hong Kong?

On Wednesday, Hong Kong’s chief secretary, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, released the city’s first consultative paper on electoral reform (pdf). At stake is who gets to choose the next leader—the “chief executive”—of the freest place in the People’s Republic of China.
In the last “election,” which took place last year, Beijing essentially picked the chief executive by informally making its preference known to a select group in Hong Kong—1,200 notables in a city of more than 7 million—that constituted the Election Committee, which formally made the choice. The process was deeply unpopular and will surely change in time for the next election.
The Basic Law (pdf), Hong Kong’s “mini-constitution,” provides in Article 45 that the chief executive will be elected and then formally “appointed by the Central People’s Government.” The law contemplates a “gradual and orderly process” toward “universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.”
In October, Leung Chun-ying, the current chief executive, said that Zhang Dejiang, the member of the Politburo Standing Committee holding the Hong Kong portfolio, was on board with reform. “Zhang explicitly said the central government sincerely hopes Hong Kong could achieve universal suffrage in the election of the chief executive in 2017 in accordance with the Basic Law and relevant interpretations and decisions of the NPC Standing Committee,” Leung assured Hong Kong’s increasingly restive population.
Hong Kong people up to now have focused on the promise of universal suffrage. Beijing’s apparent concession on the issue, therefore, should have ended years of controversy over the rules for the 2017 election.
In fact it has not. Albert Chen Hung Yee, perhaps the most prominent Basic Law expert in Hong Kong, has now publicly proposed elaborate nominating procedures that have ignited controversy. Chen suggested that a nominating committee, chosen by the city’s elite, be permitted to toss out candidates standing for election. “It’s not a bad thing if that happens, because Hong Kong people cannot force the central government to appoint someone it couldn’t trust or accept as chief executive,” he explained.
Chen also believes the number of candidates standing for election should be limited to five. The public would then go to the polls to rank the candidates who survived the screening process.
Moreover, he has proposed that Beijing have the right to reject the person receiving the most votes. Chen’s proposal, not surprisingly, has been roundly rejected by the city’s noisy liberals. “The central government can simply refuse to appoint the winner and pick the runner-up without even holding another round of elections,” said the Democratic Party’s vice chairman, Richard Tsoi Yiu-cheong, rejecting Chen’s plan. “That essentially means Beijing can do anything it wants.”
Chen, in response, has said Chinese officials should establish “clear standards” how they would exercise their power of rejection. “From the pan-democrats’ perspective, they are fighting for a ‘relatively perfect’ democratic system,” Chen explained to a local television station at the end of last month. “But I think it is impossible for democracy in Hong Kong to be completely the same as that of an independent country.”
Beijing should hope that democracy is possible in Hong Kong, for without it the city will remain “ungovernable,” as one activist there, a law school professor, explained to me last month. The current chief executive was deeply unpopular from the day he took office in July of last year, in large part because of the undemocratic manner of his selection. Moreover, these days official decisions—even minor ones and ones that are sound—are scrutinized and sharply criticized simply because an unrepresentative government made them. Activists flying the banner of “Occupy Central”—Central being the main business district of the city—have threatened mass civil disobedience next July if Beijing does not permit free elections.
Chen says he has not consulted Beijing in making his electoral proposals. Maybe he is telling the truth and maybe he is proposing what he thinks Chinese officials want. In any event, given the strong desire among Hong Kong people to pick their own leaders, any procedures that stand in the way of full democracy are bound to rouse an already discontented populace.
Photo Credit: VOA
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November 27, 2013
North Korea Detains 85-Year-Old American Veteran

On October 26th, two uniformed North Korean officers marched Merrill Newman off his plane just before it departed the regimented state for Beijing. The 85-year-old Korean War veteran has not been heard from since. Bob Hamrdla, who traveled with him on the 10-day trip, said his detention “has to be a terrible misunderstanding.” Newman’s wife, in a statement issued from her home in Palo Alto, California, used the same word.
Did the North Koreans really make a mistake? Perhaps they thought they were detaining the Merrill Newman who was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry during the Korean War—he lives in Beaverton, Oregon. But it’s unlikely the North Koreans blundered, at least in the broader sense. In all probability, Pyongyang grabbed an American after careful deliberation. From all we can tell, the North Koreans plan their provocations with great care.
It’s not clear what Kim Jong Un, the third generation of his family to rule the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, wants with the Merrill Newman it has in custody. He is the seventh American detained since 2009, and usually the North Koreans get something for their efforts. Former presidents Clinton and Carter won the release of detained Americans, both after high-profile visits to Pyongyang in 2010. The trips bolstered the North’s disgusting regime by showing to its subjects a contrite America coming to ask for Kim family forgiveness.
The Obama administration appropriately refused to reward the North for the seizure of American Kenneth Bae last November. The tour operator and Christian missionary was sentenced to 15 years hard labor this May for “hostile acts,” thought to be the snapping of photos of hungry children. For the diabetic Bae, that term was tantamount to a death sentence. The authorities, however, transferred him to a hospital, apparently preferring to keep him alive. So perhaps the taking of Newman, who has a heart condition, is an attempt to get Washington’s attention. If it is, the North is working on the theory that two hostages are better than one.
Other theories hold that Pyongyang wanted a “bargaining chip” to restart negotiations over its nuclear weapons program. In reality, however, the keeping of Newman could have been motivated by anything. We may never know what that is.
It ultimately does not matter why the North took Newman off the plane at the last minute. It is important, however, that he be freed, and it is even more important that Washington, while doing so, not provide incentives to the regime to snatch other Americans. At some point, we have to stop the detentions—essentially kidnappings—by ending all rewards for this state-sponsored crime. And we should raise the cost of abducting Americans. We can, for instance, restrict travel to the North, add the regime back to the State Department’s list of terrorism-sponsoring states, and tighten sanctions on its banks.
Many had hoped that Kim Jong Un would be a different leader than his father, Kim Jong Il. Analysts said that the son would choose a better path because he was young, because he was educated in the West, because the times were different. None of this, however, has made a difference. North Korea under Kim Jong Un is acting like the North Korea of not only his father but also that of Kim Il Sung, his grandfather and the regime’s founder. If anything, today’s regime could be worse than ever. How could the North Koreans take an innocent, elderly tourist and hold him in secret?
The Kim family has, in addition to detaining tourists and other visitors, abducted citizens from other countries, induced individuals to come to the North and not allowed them to leave, and not returned prisoners of war as promised. According to best estimates, the Kims may have snagged and retained as many as 180,000 individuals (pdf) since 1946, two years before the founding of the North Korean state.
Merrill Newman is only the last victim we know of. There may, for instance, still be American prisoners held in North Korea since the Korean conflict. As Mark Sauter, investigative historian and author, reports, the regime refuses to account for missing US servicemen, including those whose ID cards are displayed as war trophies in a Pyongyang museum (pdf).
At some point, we will have to make an unpleasant decision. We will either have to take steps to bring the end of the rule of the Kim family or accept its continued seizure and detention of Americans. That regime, after more than six decades, has proven itself to be unreformable.
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November 20, 2013
America the Generous

After Typhoon Haiyan swept through the Philippines this month, Beijing announced a contribution to Manila of $100,000. Derided almost everywhere for its stinginess, China then reconsidered. Beijing then said it would make a subsequent gift of $1.64 million and extended the offer of rescue and medical assistance teams.
The Obama administration, on the other hand, pledged $20 million in emergency aid to the ravaged island nation and immediately sent the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier, and its escort vessels, which are now delivering relief supplies to the victims of what may be history’s most powerful hurricane to make landfall.
Is America generous? The New York Times, in anarticle late last week titled “Asia Rivalries Play Role in Aid of the Philippines,” suggests that American humanitarian assistance to that Southeast Asian nation can be largely explained by a geopolitical struggle with China. “The outpouring of foreign assistance for the hundreds of thousands left homeless and hungry by Typhoon Haiyan is shaping up to be a monumental show of international largess—and a not-so-subtle dose of one-upmanship directed at the region’s fastest-rising power, China,” writes Andrew Jacobs. Jacobs then goes on to talk about “a showcase for the soft-power contest in Asia” and “American efforts to reassert its influence in the region.”
This narrative has cropped up a lot recently. “You don’t need to be a crotchety old cynic like me to know that the US aid pouring into the Philippines is not entirely motivated by altruism,” writes theTelegraph’s Rob Crilly, sounding as if he was working for the left-leaning Guardian instead.
This month marks the end of the second year of the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia, a renewed focus on the region viewed by many as a challenge to Beijing. There are obvious strategic implications of the American aid to Manila—China and the Philippines are in the middle of a multi-year spat over sovereignty of outcroppings in the South China Sea—and so analysts have drawn what looks like the obvious conclusion: President Obama is trying to score geopolitical points against Beijing.
Does American aid have geopolitical implications? Most certainly. Is Washington participating in rescue efforts to make Beijing look bad in a competition that spans East Asia? Undoubtedly not, if facts and history matter.
Critics miss two obvious points. First, pivot or no pivot, the centerpiece of this administration’s East Asia policy is the integration of China into the international system. The much-publicized pivot is merely intended to protect allies and friends in the region and to coax the Chinese to adopt less-belligerent policies. Washington, during this and the two previous administrations, has almost never missed an opportunity to work with China.
Second, the US provides humanitarian assistance primarily because Americans believe that is the right thing to do. Although American assistance to the Philippines is substantial, it is so far a drop in the bucket compared to what Washington provided nations in the region for months after the December 2004 tsunami. In 2004 and 2005, the Bush administration essentially ignored East Asia—and to the extent it had a policy it was to work with China to make it a partner both in the War on Terror and the efforts to “denuclearize” North Korea. Therefore, the aid then was definitely not a tactic employed in a struggle, “soft power” or otherwise, with Beijing.
The point here is not that America is generous—it is, of course—but that democracies generally place great importance on helping humanity. Authoritarian regimes don’t share that ingrained sense of obligation, which is why Beijing’s first instinct was to give a gift that was just about as small as it could be.
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November 12, 2013
Are China's Dissidents Becoming Violent?

In the central Chinese city of Taiyuan last Wednesday, seven nearly simultaneous explosions killed one person and injured eight others, according to official reports.
“At the time of going to press, there was no indication that Wednesday’s serial blasts involved terrorism,” the Global Times, the Communist Party–run newspaper, wrote on the day after the incident. The suggestion of terrorism, however, was unmistakable, even then. Police had found fragments of circuit boards at the sites of the detonations, an indication that they were the result of homemade devices. Also, “finger-length long nails” and ball bearings littered the scenes, conclusive proof of an intention to harm passersby.
From the beginning, state media tried to downplay the events in Taiyuan. And there is no mystery why Beijing was so concerned. The first bomb was placed in a flowerbed almost directly in front of the Communist Party headquarters of Shanxi Province. The explosions, therefore, appear to have been directed against China’s one-party state.
On Friday, the authorities apprehended their suspect, Feng Zhijun. The Ministry of Public Security maintains that the 41-year-old confessed, saying he “wanted revenge on society.” Perhaps the authorities got their man, but the lightning-fast arrest looked suspiciously tidy.
For one thing, Feng was the perfect culprit from the government’s point of view. He had served time for theft, and as a common criminal he would be less likely to garner sympathy as recent bombers have. Moreover, he was a loner, thereby making it hard for others to question his involvement. “If the police want to find a scapegoat, a man known by few people might be the best candidate,” observed Li Maolin, a dissident in Shanxi. Feng was not known to have held a grievance against the state.
And it is not clear he had the skills necessary to pull off bombings, either. The scale and sophistication of the incident suggests it was the work of a conspiracy, not a single individual. In any event, Feng Zhijun’s “confession” ensures there will be no trial that will convince the Chinese public that he is culpable—and that he is the only one involved.
The Communist Party is now working hard to control the narrative about discontent in society. “There is no need to exaggerate the influence of the explosions,” the Global Times wrote in an editorial. “We should avoid creating illusions that the bomb-planters carried out an earth-shattering event.”
The Shanxi bombings didn’t shatter the earth, but they nonetheless rocked China. Why? Taken together, they were the second attack on a “government symbol” in less than two weeks (the first being the car incident in Tiananmen Square in late October in which five died and 38 were injured).
Moreover, the Shanxi incident continues a recent trend of bombings of government offices in China. For instance, in May of last year there was an explosion at a housing office in Yunnan Province. Four died, and 16 were injured. In May 2011, a government building in Fuzhou, in Jiangxi Province, was bombed. Three died, seven were wounded.
The bombings are just the most dramatic instances of turmoil in China. Beijing has stopped releasing statistics on the number of “mass incidents,” the euphemism for large demonstrations, but it appears they increased from tens of thousands a year last decade to as many as 280,000 of them in 2010. Yet the numbers are not the most important story. The most important story is the increasingly violent nature of protest. Today, China has not only protests and demonstrations but also riots and insurrections.
On November 1st, the Friday before the Shanxi blasts, 200 laid-off workers staged a demonstration on the very street where the detonations occurred. We should not be surprised by the symbolic progression from protest to violence in the center of China this month. The Communist Party rarely tolerates public expressions of discontent. It accommodates grievances only when it is forced to. Its first instinct is to coerce, not cajole, mediate, or compromise. Most of the time, it maintains only the appearance of order.
In the past, the party had been skilful in punishing peaceful protest, but this tactical success is looking more and more like a strategic disaster. Not just Shanxi is becoming violent.
Photo Credit: Julien Lozelli
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