14 Responses to North Korea in the News

1. Pelagius
   August 3rd, 2006 at 10:11 am

   Found some more articles on Tallae - linked here

2. James J. Na
   August 3rd, 2006 at 11:26 am

   You gotta hand it to IHT… “North Korea pushes ‘Army First’ polic” is news?

3. cody
   August 13th, 2006 at 6:50 pm

   Good post. I have believed this for a while, but would not have been able to express it as well. I think it is probably because I’ve been in Korea too long and end up just sounding angry.

4. Mi-Hwa
   August 13th, 2006 at 11:37 pm

   Some of the men who buy aphrodisiacs are apparently morons.

5. China Law Blog
   September 1st, 2006 at 1:00 am

   I would not for a moment dispute that China’s foreign policy is essentially ammoral, driven strictly by oil, money and power, but at the same time, I think you are assuming too much by stating China is simply biding its time with respect to confronting the U.S. What evidence do you have of this and what do you mean by confronting?

6. Jana
   September 2nd, 2006 at 5:29 am

   Chinese communist regime has objectives that suit all other terrorists on the planet. To eliminate democracy; to maintain and dominate power at all costs. Have no respect for human life or the environment and to get rid of USA and other democratic Governments. Chinese communist regime supports all other despotic rulers and regimes in the world.
   This is a battle between good and evil

7. Sonagi
   September 2nd, 2006 at 9:53 am

   The most likely cause of future conflicts is the intensifying competition for dwindling non-renewable energy resources. The US consumes far more per capita than China, whos people have a much lower standard of living than we do. One cannot fault the Chinese government for being aggressive in seeking reliable oil resources to support a growing economy that sustains 1.2 billion people who simply want better lives for themselves and their children.

8. Jana
   September 3rd, 2006 at 1:55 am

   Songai, I wish it were as simple as that so that we can then move on to using /discovering renewable sources of energy.

   Its not about oil sources now its about ruling the world with their evil intent. I take it that you have heard of the independent investigative report on Forced organ harvesting in China. This report has been released around the world and Governments including Australia are demanding that an independent investigation is done in China ASAP. The full report can be viewed at http://investigation.go.saveinter.net/
   including all the relevant news articles and a response from the Chinese communist regime to the report which is very revealing.

   When you have a brutal regime who suppresses all their people by way of indoctrination, media and education control as well inciting violent campaigns at specific groups of people periodically every 7-10 years this has the effect of numbing and controlling people thru fear for the most basic right of survival.

   They have also eliminated religion and culture from a society that was rich in both up until 57 years ago when the communist party gained power. The 300 million middle class people have lost their souls (by fear) and traded silence on human rights, and politics for mobile phones cars rich apartments and money etc. In turn the greedier and more corrupt you are and the immoral you behave you are rewarded for by the CCP.

   As a result you have 1/3 of the Chinese population obedient immoral corrupt and soulless with no concern for the sanctity of any human life or nature.

   The other 2/3 of the Chinese some 800 million peasants they couldn’t care less about.. 87,000 group uprisings last year from the peasants not the middle class people, they slaughter them, every week they mow them down like the 1989 Tiananmen square massacre. They have no food no water no health care they have to pay for education so no one is educated. They have nothing left to live for as they watch the fat cats drive by in their limousines with their whores dressed in diamonds and high fashion.

   You are rewarded the more immoral and evil that you are. Goodness is eliminated.

   Tibetan Monks, Christians, Falun Gong, who practice higher principles of goodness based on universal principles are labelled political and executed after months/years of torture to extract promises that they will practice no more and that they acknowledge that the CCP is their God.

   So do still think that oil resources are the problem?? Read your history books read the communist manifesto read any good opinion piece article from someone who knows and has no financial ties with the Chinese communist regime.

   The world is waking up the good people of the world are waking up and want to help get rid of the communist regime in China. China will flourish with out the CCP and th world will be a better place for all of humanity.

   The Chinese communist regime supports all rogue and anti human regime, it has deals with every despotic ruler in Africa that trades its resources for hard cash that goes into their pockets while millions of people starve .The CCp does not care even for its own peasants who are also dying of aids and every other disease on the planet.
   The Chinese communist regime has shut the door to heaven and opened the door to hell.
   Encourage people to read this report, talk about it, support a boycott of the Olympic Games.

9. Sonagi
   September 3rd, 2006 at 6:34 pm

   I hate the thugs in Beijing as much as the next guy, but that does not change the fact that 300 million Americans consume far more energy than 1.2 billion Chinese, a gross inequity.
   However brutal the Chinese regime is, that has no bearing on the fact that the US is an energy hog compared to the rest of the world. In early October, as people in the northern part of the US set their thermostats at 72 degrees, most Chinese in Beijing and other northern cities are still without heat; in order to ration precious energy resources, the government sets official start and stop dates (late October to late March for Beijing) and a maximum temperature of 61 degrees for heating in public buildings and residential complexes. Chinese schools equipped with heat typically turn it on only when the temperature dips below freezing. Meanwhile, my workplace has the air conditioner cranked so high I have to put on a sweater when the chill sets in mid-morning.

   US policy-makers have some nerve complaining about Chinese competition for oil resources. The US government has not made any serious attempt at a national energy conservation campaign since the 1970s, when the highway speed limit was lowered to 55 mph and people were urged to take cold showers and set their thermostats at 68 degrees.

10. Jana
    September 3rd, 2006 at 11:06 pm

    HI Songai,

    There are only 300 million people in China who are using the resources like the 300 million in USA.

    The other 800 million have nothing and cannot afford to eat never mind consume resources. They are dying because the communist regime has no more use for them. So your figures are not quite right. China contributed a small amount to the worlds resources last year yet used up a massive amount of the world resources. So the real problems will always lye with the ruling power in China. Until that is addressed the world will not be a safe place on any level by any means.

    I do agree with you that all democratic Governments should be putting in place all means available to stop global warming and find new ways of using renewable energy sources.

    A communist regime as powerful as this has no regard for human life or environmental issues and is clearly biding its time to destroy all democratic nations and the worlds environment. Do you know how bad the pollution is over there?

11. Sonagi
    September 4th, 2006 at 6:50 am

    I lived in China for four years, Jana. Having visited several provinces, I know firsthand about the air quality. Despite China’s poor environmental record, it is not the world’s biggest air polluter; that honor belongs to the US, which spits out 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2006/2006-04-18-02.asp ).

    The income distribution of Communist China is about the same as ours (http://faculty.tcu.edu/jlovett/econ_data/ click on Income Dist PDF and see the blue/red bar graph on the second page). Even if the Chinese were to overthrow their government and adopt a model like ours, that would not erase the gap between the rich and poor.

    The only way to raise the standard of living for the masses of Chinese is to achieve continuous economic growth, which requires ENERGY. That fact is why the US government is watching Chinese moves to acquire oil resources. China does have its own oil reserves; it is the 5th largest producer, two places behind the US(http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-05-02-bolivia-gas_x.htm ), yet China consumes only 1/3 of the amount of oil we burn every year, so no, 300 million Chinese do not consume the same amount of energy as 300 million Americans.(http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption ).

    Let’s imagine that there is a big revolution in 2007 and the CCP is overthrown and a new democratic government established. Will that reduce China’s need for energy? No, it won’t. A democratically elected government will face the same pressure to keep China’s economic engine humming. A democratic China would still be a competitor for dwindling energy resources.

12. James J. Na
    September 5th, 2006 at 8:07 am

    A couple of quick points. First of all, competition energy alone does not drive conflict. The EU and the U.S. (as is Japan) are all huge consumers of energy, but since the element of geopolitical rivalry is missing, the chance of military conflict is miniscule.

    With China, the impetus is not just about securing access to energy (which exist in a global commodities market anyway), it is about an increase in geopolitical power. The PRC leaders want China to become the pre-eminent power in Asia.

    That is directly contrary to a long-term U.S. (and before that British) strategic aim of preventing the rise of a continental hegemon either in Europe or Asia.

    Secondly, if you want to gauge Chinese long-term strategic and ideological thinking, you look at what junior military officials publish and enunciate in public. What the senior leaders allow the junior leaders to publish or say in public says a lot about what the senior leaders think, without necessarily implicating the latter in diplomatic gaffes.

    And there has been an increasingly large number of articles and public statements from such junior officers about China assuming its “rightful” role in Asia as well as confronting “unilateral domination of the world by one power” (that’s a rather thinly veiled reference to the U.S.) in the future when China is stronger.

    Remember that when Japan set out to conquer Asia in the 30’s and the 40’s, it did so not with obviously naked aggressive declarations, but with that of “liberating fellow Asians from European domination.”

13. Jana
    September 5th, 2006 at 9:20 am

    Heres ana rticle you all might find interesting yes sadly true.

    History Repeating Itself
    Jasper Becker

    14 August 2006

    China’s support of nasty regimes —North Korea, Sudan—is part and parcel with its past

    Engagement with China was not supposed to work out this way. In a new report, Amnesty International has added its voice to the growing condemnation of China’s blanket support for unpleasant regimes like Burma, North Korea, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan and Iran.

    Amnesty draws particular attention to arms sales, but Beijing is using all means at its disposal—economic and diplomatic—to protect a host of governments responsible for the world’s worst violations of human rights.

    While the Bush administration insists it is trying to persuade Beijing to become a responsible “stakeholder” in the world community, like previous administrations it is finding this far from easy. In theory it ought to be to China’s advantage, and everyone else’s, that rogue regimes are reined in by sanctions and diplomatic pressure rather than overthrown by costly and disruptive wars like those fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia. Now a great beneficiary of the world trading system, China depends on a stable international environment to import raw materials and export the burgeoning output of its factories

    So why support the rogues? Beijing’s motivation in sheltering a string of client states is sometimes explained, or justified, by narrow self-interest. It supposedly wants to secure Sudan’s oil or capture Iran’s gas to offset energy shortfalls and find markets for exports. Yet its willingness to undermine Western sanctions against Burma, block UN resolutions against Sudan, and supply arms, is a symptom of a much deeper flaw in China’s relationship with the world.

    Chinese leaders simply don’t care about genocide in Darfur, mass starvation in North Korea or Burma’s persecution of minorities and democrats. How could they? They have hardly behaved any better themselves, at home or abroad.

    More than 35 years have passed since President Richard Nixon went to China, signaling a sea of change in the country’s external relations, yet although China’s economy has been transformed by the opening, the Communist Party of China (CCP) has not.

    The Party has yet to confront its own horrendous past or come clean about the enormous violations of human rights it committed during the relentless climb to power that began in 1921 and throughout its absolute dictatorship since 1949.

    The Party has shown no stomach for facing atrocities it committed at home, and Beijing has never had to apologize for occupying Tibet, attacking India, Burma and Vietnam, creating Pol Pot’s Cambodia, bankrolling Enver Hoxha’s Albania and fuelling devastating insurgencies across South-East Asia and Africa.

    It doesn’t feel the need to because it clings to a version of history which allows the Chinese to see themselves only as victims. At the same time, Beijing stirs up outrage at Japan’s alleged unwillingness to repent for the invasion of East Asia and for using textbooks that falsify history.

    The truth is that during its long Imperial past, China was a great colonial power, invading and occupying neighboring territories; it continued to do so under Chairman Mao. He sent tens of millions of people to colonize areas conquered by Qing dynasty armies and vowed to restore the empire at its greatest extent.

    At home the CCP murdered and starved to death millions as it fought its way to power, killed 30 million during the Great Leap Forward famine, and destroyed the lives of countless others in brutal political campaigns like that of the Cultural Revolution.

    What is most worrying is how even its victims often accept the official version of history. Western newspapers, which recently covered the 40th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, interviewed many who acknowledged their individual guilt but still believed that the terror was merely an unfortunate excess.

    Mao’s Cultural Revolution was not an aberration. It was only an episode in an unrelenting campaign to erase the memory of a nation. From the 1920s onwards, Chinese Communists began destroying every artifact of the old society in order to implant an imagined history in which every aspect of China’s backwardness was the fault of foreign imperialists and capitalists. It is still the version taught in schools and universities.

    This Cultural Revolution still goes on today. This is why the current leadership, many of them former Red Guards like Hu Jintao, is determined to demolish China’s historical cities, tearing down the old and paving over the past. Any totalitarian state must monopolize the past to control the future, as George Orwell so famously made clear.

    In the great rush to modernize Beijing for the Olympics, it is razing the entire ancient capital. Plenty of museums are being built but these simply reinforce the Party’s distortion of Chinese history.

    The Party’s own history is also so much fantasy. From recent research, like the stunning 2005 biography, Mao: the Untold Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, we now know that Mao’s principle aim was securing his own power and, as a result, he never really fought the Japanese and indeed collaborated with them to undermine the Nationalists. In her new book about the Long March, author Sun Shuyan shows that much of accepted history was invented, such as the most famous heroic episode, the 1935 battle to cross the Luding Bridge by 22 Red Army soldiers facing an overwhelming force of Nationalist soldiers. There never was such a battle. A recent book edited by historian Yu Xiguang, Great Leap Forward, Bitter Days, includes the first official evidence of cannibalism during that awful period, with a photograph of a man condemned for eating his own child.

    The more we find out about China’s past, the worse it seems. Ten years ago, I wrote about the Xinyang “incident,” which took place in one corner of Henan province during the Great Leap Forward famine (1958-62). My sources claimed that over one million died from man-made starvation in a district with a population of eight to ten million.

    New research drawing on CPP archives reveal that in fact 2.4 million people perished, and perhaps a million more were beaten to death at the hands of local Party officials.

    This is the real reason that Mao launched the Cultural Revolution: to bury the memory of his misdeeds and destroy colleagues who knew the truth.

    The Party is still working hard at censoring everything published in the country. For example, earlier this year the Party fired the editors of the newspaper supplement Freezing Point which began running articles questioning official accounts of events like the Boxer rebellion. The government is also increasingly successful at persuading foreign publishers and media groups like Google to collaborate in its efforts in return for access to the massive China market.

    This is why people in China understand so little about their own past and care even less about what their government might be doing to perpetuate misery in far off places like Sudan. Until there is a real glasnost in China, we cannot expect to see China acting responsibly abroad.

    Jasper Becker is the author of The Chinese and Hungry Ghosts. His most recent book is Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Continuing Threat of North Korea.

14. Peter Wang
    September 23rd, 2006 at 2:24 pm

    The whole argument is about the Chinese persuit of the crude oil and its geopolitical ambition, etc.
    The Chinese per capital consumption of crude oil is actually only 10% of the Japanese - the least among developed nations. So far, the Chinese maintain 90% self-sufficiency - by coal - for its energy needs. SO ?????
    To imply the Chinese militay ambition is even more rediculous. Why? It is simple logic. Asuming China is trying to dominate Japan militarily - a subject that lots people like. Then, Beijing actually needs to do nothing - just let the economy run - 20 years or 30 or sooner or later - Chinese per capital GDP will be somewhat like Taiwanese - nobody suspects that - then China will be several times stronger than Japan - without one drop of blood or firing a single shot. Isn’t it sweet? Or are we going to think Beijing leaders are so stupid and can’t figure this out?
    Chinese are more rational than some Koreans give credit for. That’s why LG is very sucessful in China, some Koreans felt surprised, Chinese thought, in general, no big deal.

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