Gordon G. Chang's Blog, page 27

Confrontation in the South China Sea

A tense standoff between China and the Philippines continued this week, as Beijing demanded that Manila withdraw a coast guard vessel from the waters around Scarborough Shoal, which both countries claim.

China maintains that the entire South China Sea is an internal Chinese lake and asserts sovereignty over all the islands, islets, and rock outcroppings in that massive waterway through which one third of the world’s trade passes. Scarborough, which Beijing calls Huangyan Island and Manila has renamed Panatag Shoal, is about 125 nautical miles off the Philippine coast but at least three times as far from the nearest Chinese shore.

The standoff began on April 8th, when a Philippine plane spotted eight Chinese fishing boats in the vicinity of the shoal. Since then, both China and the Philippines have sent ships to the scene. Manila has tried to “de-escalate the situation” by replacing a warship with a coast guard vessel, which is now facing off against two Chinese maritime surveillance craft.

The two sides have promised to settle the dispute diplomatically, but no negotiated settlement is in sight. This week Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario asked Beijing to submit the matter to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, a judicial body established by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Beijing ignored Manila’s request.

Philippine President Benigno Aquino has said his country will not risk war with China over Scarborough Shoal, but the only way he can do that is to surrender his country’s claims of sovereignty. The rhetoric this month from the Chinese capital has been nothing if not threatening. “The biggest miscalculation of the Philippines is that it has misestimated the strength and willpower of China to defend its territorial integrity,” wrote General Luo Yuan in the semi-official Global Times. Luo also warned that Beijing was giving Manila its “last chance” to come to agreement with China.  

Filipinos, Beijing should know, are not easily intimidated. And they have good reason not to be afraid of their large and belligerent neighbor across the sea. On Monday, the US and the Philippines, long-term treaty partners, began a 12-day joint military exercise in the archipelago nation.

Beijing, of course, is unhappy about the exercises. “The major trend of the times in this region is peace and development,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin. “Military exercise does not represent the major call of the times.”

Unfortunately, the exercises are absolutely necessary. China, by fishing close to the shores of other nations, has precipitated a series of international incidents in the region, some of them deadly. The current standoff with the Philippines will, in all probability, be settled peacefully, but the potential for one of these confrontations to escalate to armed conflict is growing.

In recent months, the Obama administration has committed additional naval and other military forces in the region to both reassure China’s nervous neighbors, as well as deter the threat of Chinese expansionism. Yet despite these American efforts, Beijing continues to test international will by dispatching its vessels to contested waters within very close reach of other countries in the region. China has neither halted its provocations nor toned down its demands for its expansive territorial claims.

The drift of events in the South China Sea, therefore, could hardly be more ominous.

Chinese Dissident, Fang Lizhi, Dies

Fang Lizhi, a Chinese hero, died on Friday in Tucson, Arizona. He was 76.

In an era of turbulence in China, Fang, a physicist, articulated a vision of a democratic and free nation. His open letter in early 1989 called on Deng Xiaoping, then the country's supremo, to free political prisoners. His public stance helped inspire protests in 1989 in Beijing and about 370 other cities across China.

The Beijing Spring terrified Deng and other Communist Party leaders, and after months of internal dissension, they authorized the mass killing of Chinese citizens in their capital. The death toll is not known to this day, but it could number in the thousands.

Fang and his wife took refuge in the American Embassy on June 5, 1989, just hours after the massacre. They remained there for more than a year. "I am an astrophysicist, and yet I cannot see the sky," he said during the tense standoff between Washington and Beijing over his fate. Fang and his wife were allowed to leave China for Britain after Henry Kissinger and others worked out a settlement.

They eventually settled in Tucson, where he taught at the University of Arizona. Fang continued to speak out about human rights until his death.

His strong voice is missed now in a China that is, in many ways, less stable than in 1989. As the country enters a historic leadership transition, its economy is faltering, the Communist Party is splintering, the authority of the central government is eroding, the military is breaking free of civilian control.

And the Chinese people, from one end of their country to the other, are taking to the streets, often in violent protest. If there is any hope for a peaceful transition to an open political system in China, it is that its people embrace Fang's theme of justice and fairness. Yet the voices that can guide China have been either imprisoned or, like Fang, sent into exile. As a result, frustration, desperation, and anger are at the moment fueling social unrest in China.

American policymakers, as Fang famously noted, hold China to a lower human rights standard than the one they applied to the Soviet Union. That is a mistake. As many have noted, a regime that plays so hard at home cannot possibly be a reliable partner for other nations.

Fang showed his government—and ours—that there was a better path.

"One day, China will be proud to once have had Fang Lizhi," said Wang Dan, one of the student leaders in 1989. And we too should be proud that he chose to live in America.

Why North Korea's Hidden Gulag Matters

"The term 'political prisoner' does not exist in the DPRK's vocabulary," declared Ri Tcheul, the North Korean representative to the UN Human Rights Council, on December 7, 2009. "The so-called political prisoners' camps do not exist."

Because of the bold denial, the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea next week will release an update of "The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps," first issued in 2003. Since then, the committee has gathered additional substantiation—from defectors and satellite imagery—of the horrific crimes that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea perpetrates on its own people.

As the new report shows, the North Korean gulag, a "network of prison camps, penitentiaries, police detention facilities and mobile forced labor brigades," does indeed exist. And inside that network are scores of thousands of prisoners. They are held, brutalized, starved, and tortured for "crimes that are not really crimes"—the wrong thinking, the wrong knowledge, the wrong associations, the wrong class background. 

Take Shin Dong-hyuk, imprisoned in Camp 14 in South Pyong-an Province from the moment he was born in 1982, the result of a coupling of two model prisoners (inmates, except for a select few mated by the prison staff, are forbidden to have sexual relations). Shin thinks his parents were permitted to mate to ease a labor shortage that was the result of prisoner deaths from accidents and malnutrition.

His father's family was rounded up in 1965, in a pre-dawn raid, because two of his uncles had defected to South Korea. In Camp 14, Shin saw little of his family: his father worked in another part of the camp and he was taken from his mother at age 12. He was forced to watch the execution of his mother, by hanging, and his brother, by firing squad.

Shin escaped in early 2005. During the attempt, a fellow prisoner was electrocuted on a fence encircling the camp; Shin then wriggled through it. He worked for a year and a half on a Chinese farm before eventually escaping to South Korea's consulate in Shenyang. Shin was fortunate he was not caught in China. Beijing, in violation of its international obligations, routinely repatriates North Korean defectors, who are then imprisoned in the gulag.

And why do we care about Shin's story? Many make the reasonable-sounding argument that we should be much more concerned about North Korea's missiles and other weapons—chemical, biological, nuclear, and conventional. The assumption is that we stand a better chance of coming to terms with Pyongyang to limit its threat if we ignore the horrific treatment of its people, that it would be impossible to reach an agreement if we were to raise sensitive human rights matters.  

The Obama administration initially adopted this approach for China. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for instance, famously said in February 2009 that Washington believed there were more important matters to discuss with Beijing than its rights record. The soft approach did not moderate China's behavior—on the contrary, Chinese leaders seemed emboldened by Washington dialing down on the issue. As a result, administration policymakers are now changing their minds as they realize that the nature of China's government is relevant to its external relations.

The same is true for North Korea, even more so. The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea will hold a public event in Washington, DC, on April 10th to release its updated report on the gulag. Keep these human rights issues in mind when Pyongyang tests its most advanced ballistic missile later this month. 

US, China 'Coordinating' on N Korea Policy

On Monday, President Obama met with Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, in Seoul. According to Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, the two leaders agreed to "coordinate" their response to North Korea's "potential provocation."

And what provocation would that be? In the middle of this month, Pyongyang stated it would launch an "earth observation satellite" sometime between April 12th and 16th. Nobody, however, believes that story. The launch, apparently intended to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, will be a test of a ballistic missile, and as such will constitute a violation of Security Council resolutions and the deal, announced on February 29th, between the US and the North.

Should we be working with Beijing to stop the launch? The operating assumption of the Obama administration is that the Chinese have the ability to influence the Kim family regime, and from most indications this assessment is correct. The Chinese know they have influence and can use it at any moment, observes Chung Jae Ho, a Beijing watcher at Seoul National University.

American policymakers have also assumed that the Chinese want to stop the North's nuclear weapons program. This belief underpinned the Bush administration's promotion of the six-party talks and its urging of China to assume the leading role in the crucial negotiations. Yet after almost nine years of discussions—the six nations first convened in August 2003 in Beijing—it is evident the Chinese do not share Washington's objectives. After all, more often than not Beijing's negotiators have sided with the North Koreans in this now long-running drama.

American policymakers, however, have yet to come to terms with the notion that China may actually be taking the Kim family's side. "My suggestion to China is, is that how they communicate their concerns to North Korea should probably reflect the fact that the approach they've taken over the last several decades hasn't led to a fundamental shift in North Korea's behavior," Obama artfully noted on Sunday, essentially raising the issue of Beijing's allegiance.

And just to make sure the Chinese got the message, the administration drove home the point a day later. "China has expressed those concerns before and North Korea has continued on with its behavior," Rhodes said. "Therefore, China needs to look at whether it needs to be doing more above and beyond the types of messages and warnings it's been giving to the North Koreans."

Actually, China needs to do nothing. The Chinese are getting most of what they want from America's failure to stop the North's nuclear and missile programs. They are, among other things, making Washington feel beholden to them while supporting their ally in Pyongyang. 

It is the US that has to change the landscape. And the best way to do that is to drop the polite language and publicly make the Chinese choose between the North Koreans and the international community. For far too long American administrations have signaled that they were playing a weak hand, and the Chinese have taken advantage of that. Washington needs to show Beijing policymakers who really holds the high cards.

How does Obama do that? For one thing, the US Treasury could apply strict financial sanctions—like those imposed on North Korea in 2005 by the Bush administration—on any Chinese bank involved in North Korea's trade in nuclear weapons or missiles. 

That would qualify as the "strong response" that White House official Gary Samore promised last week. The Chinese will be livid, but if the day comes when North Korean missiles pose a direct and immediate threat to the American homeland, it will not do for the president to say he could have done more to prevent it but he didn't want to offend the Chinese.

North Korean Aid and American Interests

Should the US supply food to the world's worst regime, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? 

On February 29th, Washington announced it had reached an interim arrangement whereby, among other things, the DPRK, as North Korea calls itself, would honor a moratorium on tests of ballistic missiles and the US would provide 240,000 metric tons of food aid. 

On Friday, however, the North Koreans announced they would launch a satellite in the middle of next month. The State Department reaction was swift. "We do want to assist the North Korean people, particularly those who the regime has chosen to neglect," said spokesperson Victoria Nuland at the Friday press briefing. "That said, a launch of this kind, which would abrogate our agreement, would call into question the credibility of all the commitments that the DPRK has made to us, is making in general, including the commitments that we've had with regard to the nutritional assistance, which go to the questions of monitoring and ensuring that any food that we would provide would go to the needy folks and not to the regime elites."

Nuland's explanation illustrates what is wrong with Washington's policy toward North Korea. Her statement implies that America was on the verge of providing food without adequate monitoring to prevent diversion. In the past, the North has rerouted food aid to military storehouses, traded it for weapons, given it to the Pyongyang elite to keep its loyalty, and donated it to African nations. Tinned food from America was even found in a North Korean submarine that had run aground in South Korea.

Of course, the Kim family regime in Pyongyang is hardly to be trusted, but that does not mean the US should automatically back out of the commitment, in the so-called Leap Day deal, to provide food. Why? Feeding starving North Koreans, despite Pyongyang's antics, is in America's interest.

Food aid, if distributed with strict monitoring, can undermine the grip of the odious Kim family regime. The regime—now in its third generation with Kim Jong Un—has maintained power mainly by keeping the North Korean people sealed off from the rest of the world so that its propaganda would remain effective. 

Food aid, if properly monitored, can further erode regime controls on information. Foreign food monitors, present in the country to ensure no diversion of aid, give the North Korean people an opportunity to meet outsiders and thereby learn the truth about their own society and the outside world. Moreover, the presence of the monitors tests the limits of the state's ability. There are simply not enough local minders to watch over foreign workers, doctors, and monitors. In fact, there has been unsupervised contact between foreign food monitors and North Koreans. 

Perhaps the most subversive consequence of the foreign presence is that government officials accompanying foreigners have traveled inside their own country and seen, many for the first time, the failures of their own government.

Need proof that providing strictly monitored food aid is a good idea? North Korea, this month, rejected humanitarian aid from private South Korean groups because they insisted on monitoring its distribution.

So let's feed North Koreans, whether or not their government launches a missile next month, as long as we also send our monitors along with it.

 

Fighting for Tibet’s Political Prisoners

In person, Lhamo Tso looks frail. Yet she has set herself against the mightiest authoritarian state of our times by devoting her life to winning the release of her husband, Dhondup Wangchen.

Lhamo last saw him in 2006. That’s when he left home to make a documentary about what Tibetans thought of the 2008 Summer Olympics. He shot footage and was then detained, tortured in a “black jail,” convicted of “subversion” in a secret trial, and sentenced to six years. Friends took his film, smuggled it out of China, edited it, and finally released Leaving Fear Behind.

This Saturday will mark the fifth anniversary of the last time Lhamo spoke to her husband, whom Amnesty International calls a prisoner of conscience. She is now in New York for a press conference for State of Control, a forthcoming documentary calling for the release of Dhondup and other Tibetans. She speaks to anyone who will listen, determined to reunite her family.

At the moment, the world is not listening. There is great sympathy for the plight of her people and horror at the sight of desperate monks, nuns, and others burning themselves in recent months in protest, yet governments have not been moved to act. Presidents and prime ministers still view Tibet as part of the People’s Republic.

Beijing, however, betrays its insecurity by rejecting international criticism of its harsh rule in Tibet with shrill assertions of sovereignty. Why does Beijing raise an issue that other capitals take for granted? It is clear by now that almost no Tibetan wants to be part of China. And how do we know this? The People’s Republic can hold on to Tibet only through the massive presence of troops and armed security forces. Tibet is effectively under martial law, an occupied country as Tibetans believe.

The Tibetans no longer seem intimidated. In their ancestral home, there is a new sense of popular defiance of authority, something evident from the increasing public displays of banned images of the Dalai Lama—as well as incidents of unrest.

The calculus in Beijing must be that over time the use of force will subdue Tibetans. Yet increased disturbances in Tibetan areas—as well as those in Muslim and Mongolian lands—indicates that at this moment coercion is not working well. As the Tibetan activist known as “Tendor” has written, “When the oppressed become fearless, the oppressor becomes powerless.”

And then there is the lone voice of one woman. Lhamo Tso talks about injustice, how her husband was tortured, how he is not getting medical attention, of the hard labor he must perform. Most of all, she speaks for all the families of prisoners in her homeland. “There are so many in Tibet like me,” she says. “Parents waiting for children, children waiting for fathers. Mine always ask me, ‘Where is father, when will we see him?’ There are so many like me.”

Lhamo lives in India, where displaced Tibetans now congregate, waiting one day to go back north across the Himalayas. Their numbers may be small and they are scattered across the world, but like this young wife, the Tibetans will not give up. And Lhamo’s passion suggests she will outlast the People’s Republic, which is in only temporary possession of her husband and her homeland.

One day, Dhondup will be free.

 

Photo Credit: Sonam Zoksang

 

Fighting for Tibet's Political Prisoners

In person, Lhamo Tso looks frail. Yet she has set herself against the mightiest authoritarian state of our times by devoting her life to winning the release of her husband, Dhondup Wangchen.

Lhamo last saw him in 2006. That's when he left home to make a documentary about what Tibetans thought of the 2008 Summer Olympics. He shot footage and was then detained, tortured in a "black jail," convicted of "subversion" in a secret trial, and sentenced to six years. Friends took his film, smuggled it out of China, edited it, and finally released Leaving Fear Behind.

This Saturday will mark the fifth anniversary of the last time Lhamo spoke to her husband, whom Amnesty International calls a prisoner of conscience. She is now in New York for a press conference for State of Control, a forthcoming documentary calling for the release of Dhondup and other Tibetans. She speaks to anyone who will listen, determined to reunite her family.

At the moment, the world is not listening. There is great sympathy for the plight of her people and horror at the sight of desperate monks, nuns, and others burning themselves in recent months in protest, yet governments have not been moved to act. Presidents and prime ministers still view Tibet as part of the People's Republic.

Beijing, however, betrays its insecurity by rejecting international criticism of its harsh rule in Tibet with shrill assertions of sovereignty. Why does Beijing raise an issue that other capitals take for granted? It is clear by now that almost no Tibetan wants to be part of China. And how do we know this? The People's Republic can hold on to Tibet only through the massive presence of troops and armed security forces. Tibet is effectively under martial law, an occupied country as Tibetans believe.

The Tibetans no longer seem intimidated. In their ancestral home, there is a new sense of popular defiance of authority, something evident from the increasing public displays of banned images of the Dalai Lama—as well as incidents of unrest.

The calculus in Beijing must be that over time the use of force will subdue Tibetans. Yet increased disturbances in Tibetan areas—as well as those in Muslim and Mongolian lands—indicates that at this moment coercion is not working well. As the Tibetan activist known as "Tendor" has written, "When the oppressed become fearless, the oppressor becomes powerless."

And then there is the lone voice of one woman. Lhamo Tso talks about injustice, how her husband was tortured, how he is not getting medical attention, of the hard labor he must perform. Most of all, she speaks for all the families of prisoners in her homeland. "There are so many in Tibet like me," she says. "Parents waiting for children, children waiting for fathers. Mine always ask me, 'Where is father, when will we see him?' There are so many like me."

Lhamo lives in India, where displaced Tibetans now congregate, waiting one day to go back north across the Himalayas. Their numbers may be small and they are scattered across the world, but like this young wife, the Tibetans will not give up. And Lhamo's passion suggests she will outlast the People's Republic, which is in only temporary possession of her husband and her homeland.

One day, Dhondup will be free.

 

Photo Credit: Sonam Zoksang

 

Reform in the Air in Beijing

At the moment, the Communist Party elite is gathered in Beijing for the annual meeting of the National People's Congress. China's Constitution makes the NPC, as it is known, the supreme organ of state power, but everyone views it as just the "rubber stamp" that it in fact is. This year, however, the massive gathering has taken on significance because it is considered the "warm-up" for the 18th Communist Party Congress. 

The Party Congress, to be held sometime this fall, will set China's direction for the next decade. At the event, the party will, among other things, select a new Central Committee, the body that presides over the organization between congresses.

And then things really get interesting. On the day after the Congress, the new Central Committee will convene the First Plenum to appoint a new leadership. Specifically, we will see a new Politburo, Central Military Commission, and Secretariat.  More important, the Central Committee will appoint a new Standing Committee of the Politburo and the next general secretary, the most powerful post in the People's Republic. 

At a minimum, seven of the nine members of the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee will change, as will seven of the 16 regular members of the Politburo. At least seven of the 12 members of the Central Military Commission will be new. More than 60 percent of the Central Committee's 370 members will retire and be replaced.

So it is no surprise that nearly 3,000 deputies at the NPC meeting are not paying attention as the outgoing leaders deliver their overly long and incredibly boring "work reports" at the Great Hall of the People. They are instead spending their time gossiping, conspiring, and angling for higher office. The politicking is intense, and despite predictions of a "smooth" transition, it is now clear that the transfer of power, from the so-called Fourth Generation leaders, led by Hu Jintao, to the Fifth, will be turbulent.

This time, the handover from one set of leaders to the next is provoking real debate among party luminaries because there is a sense that things must change in the country. So it is not only the wholesale turnover in party leadership that is consuming the assembled deputies. There is now talk of fundamental reform, political as well as economic.

There is always great hope, both inside and outside the People's Republic, when new leaders take over in Beijing, and now, with the need for change apparent, many are beginning to think that Xi Jinping, slated to replace Hu Jintao as general secretary, and Li Keqiang, tapped to take over from Premier Wen Jiabao, will actually move the country in the right direction. As Wang Xiangwei, the new editor of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, reports, "Already there is positive chatter that both Xi and Li are bona fide reformists, unlike Hu and Wen, who have continually spoken of reforms but failed to manage any significant breakthroughs during their 10-year reigns."

There are a dozen reasons why analysts think that Xi will sponsor change once he takes over after the First Plenum: his father was a reformer, members of Xi's Princeling faction are bolder than the technocrats, new Chinese leaders always try to clean house if they can. All this makes sense, but there are also a hundred reasons why Xi will act to protect the status quo: Xi is close to conservative generals, he will protect the business interests of fellow Princelings, he will need years to consolidate his political base among the hard-liners controlling Beijing.

In truth, we do not know what Xi really thinks or how he will exercise power, should he in fact take over the Communist Party this fall. Yet among the NPC deputies now in the Chinese capital, there is a sense of anticipation that his rule will see great change. And the desire for change is the one precondition for progress.

Is China's Economy Crumbling?

On Saturday, Bloomberg reported that a joint forecast by Xiamen University and the National University of Singapore predicts Chinese economic growth will slow to 8.6 percent this year, down from 2011's 9.2 percent announced last month by Beijing's National Bureau of Statistics. Growth will bottom out in the second quarter of this year at 8.4 percent, according to the Xiamen-Singapore study, which is in line with consensus views.

Everyone believes that China's growth is on the downswing. Government researchers told Reuters that next month Beijing will announce a growth target of 7.5 percent for the year. That's down from the long-held 8.0 percent goal. 

What's wrong with all these predictions? For one thing, they assume there will be growth this year. At the moment, the economy, according to other official year-to-year data, looks like it may be contracting.

Electricity consumption, the best indicator of Chinese economic activity, declined 7.5 percent last month. China's aggregate financing, perhaps the second best signal, collapsed, falling by almost half. New lending in January was the lowest in five years.

Bellwether car sales? They tumbled 23.8 percent. Property prices were off for the fifth-straight month, and foreign direct investment fell for the third month in a row. Exports and imports were both down. Especially depressing was the plunge in imports destined for China's consumers, a sure sign of a deteriorating economy. Industrial orders were contracting too, according to the closely watched HSBC Purchasing Managers' Index.

There were some indicators showing expansion, but on balance it appears the Chinese economy got smaller last month. There were four fewer work days in January this year, compared to a year earlier, due to the Lunar New Year holiday, but that does not begin to explain these numbers, which were much worse than expected. 

The slowdown makes Beijing vulnerable to pressure from the United States. Why? Because the fastest way for China to stimulate growth is to attract fresh funds from the outside, specifically export earnings and new investment.

First, let's look at exports. Last year, an astounding 190.5 percent of China's overall trade surplus related to sales to the American market, an increase from 149.2 percent in 2010, 115.7 percent in 2009, and 90.1 percent in 2008.

Think the 190.5 figure can't go higher? Perhaps it can. The number increased in 2011 because in the third and fourth quarters of the year orders from Europe to Chinese factories fell sharply. This year, European orders will be down throughout the full year, not just half it. That will be difficult for China, because the 27-nation European Union has in recent years been China's largest export market.

Moreover, the problems in Europe have had another effect. Last month, investment from Europe into China fell 42.5 percent while investment from America was up 29.0 percent. And while European investment will fall for at least the first half of this year, dollars from America will continue to flow into the Chinese economy, as a survey from the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, released this month, indicates.

And what do all these numbers mean? For one thing, China's economy is becoming even more dependent on the US, which could be a major factor the next time Washington wants something from Beijing—on trade, Syria, Iran, or anything else for that matter. Americans should realize that power appears to be shifting back to their side of the Pacific—rapidly.

 

Photo Credit: CHEN WEI SENG / Shutterstock.com

More Hollow Threats from North Korea?

On Monday, South Korea conducted two hours of live-fire exercises near its disputed boundary with North Korea in the West Sea, despite Pyongyang's promises of "merciless retaliatory strikes" and "total war" for infringing waters it considers its own.

The consensus is that these particular threats were "empty," as the Associated Press termed them, but it's far too early to say the matter is closed.  

Why? Because the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the North calls itself, apparently—and for good reason—believes that attacking South Korea and killing its citizens advances its national interests.  

First, Pyongyang has been trying for years to move its West Sea boundary with South Korea, known as the Northern Limit Line, farther south to give it control of additional islands and waters. The line was unilaterally drawn by the US-led United Nations Command after the Korean War, and Pyongyang has attacked this South Korean territory from time to time in failed attempts to force a border adjustment. In 2010, there were two startling provocations in these same waters: the sinking of the South Korean frigate Cheonan in March (46 killed) and the November shelling of Yeonpyeong Island (four killed, including two civilians). The area will likely be home to trouble again in the near future.

Second, the North needs food, and the Kim family has traditionally provoked incidents to blackmail the international community into coughing up food aid. The tactic may be murderous, but Western leaders have made it an effective approach by routinely caving to the North's extortion.

Third, Kim Jong Un may try to use an incident to undercut South Korea's conservative politicians—who take a harder line against Pyongyang than their "progressive" counterparts—as the country heads into parliamentary elections in April and a presidential election in December. Kim doesn't get to vote in the South, but it would be foolish to think he wouldn't use force to influence the outcome of elections there. After all, horrific provocations are a specialty of the Kim family: the two attacks of 2010 look like they had some effect in undermining hard-line President Lee Myung-bak, contributing to the ruling party's stunning loss of the Seoul mayoralty last October.

Fourth, Kim needs to solidify a somewhat precarious position as heir to his family's regime, now entering its third generation in power. There are signs of turmoil inside Pyongyang. The commerce minister recently died in a helicopter accident that looks like it was anything but, and the new leader's half brother, Kim Jong Nam, has, with a series of explosive comments, been evidently trying to destabilize the government from the safety of China. In the North's twisted logic, unprovoked attacks against the South could well be seen as a way to unify and rally regime elements as well as boost the legitimacy of the latest Kim family dictator.

North Korea can be relied upon to carry through on its threats. It picks the time and the targets well, and it acts for maximum benefit. So just because Pyongyang has not immediately reacted to the most recent South Korean artillery exercise does not mean the matter is forgotten. 

The North will strike the South. We just do not know when or where.