If Ever so Briefly, China Picks a Public Fight with North Korea
Not that it matters much to the Chinese government, but North Korea’s seizure of those 28 or 29 fishermen has pissed off a lot of Chinese netizens. No, the Chinese government isn’t about to bow to the demands of Weibo commenters, but the other side of this cause-and-effect relationship is interesting. This outrage, as temporary as it’s sure to be, has to be a consequence of a deliberate decision by the Chinese government to make a public issue of this incident. China’s attitude here really isn’t all that different from what you’d expect had the arresting authorities been South Korean — this really seems to be a reflection of China’s insistence on the filial piety of its vassal states. China’s beef isn’t that North Korea is brutal, it’s that North Korea is rebellious.
The reports are both consistent and plausible that the North Korean sailors looted the Chinese boats and the possessions of their crew members, and that they mistreated their captives. No surprise there, but then, we’d be able to put that in its proper context if we really knew whose waters the Chinese were fishing in at the time, or whether the North Korean sailors were acting under orders or were engaging in piracy. On balance, it seems more likely that the Chinese were the ones who crossed the line, and that the North Korean sailors took the sort of liberties that undisciplined forces tend to take when in positions of power.
A helpful report, thank you.
But the facts that the captors
(a) erased the memory of the GPS devices before returning the boat and
(b) kept the boat on an island instead of bringing it to a harbor
point to piracy in Chinese waters. That it took so long for the NK authorities to return the fishermen suggests either a complete breakdown of discipline or overconfidence in China’s support.
With the Chinese asserting themselves near the Philippines in their gigantic South Sea, it was always out of the question that the Norks would be permitted to sustain their Somalian activities nearby. Whether the quick-to-be-brutal NK pirates were civilian, renegade military, or state sponsored still all goes to show that these types harbour little love for their allies and, perhaps less so, how deep and wide casual brutality has been engendered in the people. Another socio-cultural reason for the South to be chary of unification.
Gray Hat, who says the GPS devices were erased? The Chinese? The Chinese fishermen? The former has a reason to say it happened if their side is in the wrong, and the latter has a reason to actually have done it if they were in the wrong.
And why keep them on an island? North Korea puts the “hermit” in “hermetically sealed.” That’s why.
Kushibo, our word “hermit” comes from the Greek word for “desert” (where hermits lived), while “hermetically” comes from Hermes, the Greek name for Mercury. The god’s name is believed to have come from the word for ‘a boundary marker’, which perhaps does make him pertinent to this story!
As for the GPS erasure claims, the Chosun Ilbo piece linked by Mr. Stanton says,
“The GPS navigational records of another Chinese fishing boat that was seized but managed to return after paying a ransom apparently played a key role in getting the North Koreans to release the other boats. According to the records, the boat had been fishing west of the maritime border between China and North Korea…”
You are right to note the possibility that someone is lying, but the boat seems to have been seized fairly quickly, the crew rapidly sequestered, and all equipment was in the hands of the captors for several days. If the captors actually were responding in an official manner to a territorial intrusion, the GPS records would have been copied and — at least after the Chinese accused them of erasing them — made public. I call it piracy, and a rather crude and brutish job of it at that.
Thank you. Now do the etymology of “tongue in cheek.” 😉
Anyway, the “report” is still coming from the Chinese side, and the Chosun Ilbo is so willing to take whatever side is against the North Korean side on any issue that it often puts its own credibility on the line. As I wrote here, there’s valid reason to suspect that the Chinese are full of shiitake mushrooms on this one, given their track record of fish piracy in South Korean waters.
A purely pedantic point, a vessel that acts to seize another while it is acting under apparent license by a nation (be it military or private) is not a pirate. The actions of the DPRK vessel were “legal” under the laws pertaining to piracy. Basically, a pirate vessel is one that is not licensed by any recognized country. We might, in the vernacular, call the activities here “piratical” but as a matter of normal international law, they were acts of aggression rather than acts of piracy.
Perhaps they were conducted by Ermit the Frog