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December 8, 2014

N. Korea: We didn’t hack Sony, but we’re glad someone did

As suspicions grow that North Korea was indeed responsible for the Sony hack, North Korea offers that oddly unconvincing denial. If the North Koreans really did do it, some commenters think the U.S. will have to respond: Aitel says the hacks are potentially “a ‘near red-line moment’” because they represent the kind of incident that would almost require a US policy response assuming a rival state was behind it. As Aitel says, “This is the first demonstration of what the military would call...
Categories Books & Films/Censorship/China & Korea
December 8, 2014

Dennis Halpin on the suppression of protests in Hong Kong

Writing in The Weekly Standard, Halpin explains why the crackdown in Hong Kong not only portends worse things to come for China’s aggression against democracy within it borders, but also beyond them: A major Beijing propaganda theme in attempting to deny the democratic aspirations of the people of Hong Kong is that outside agitators, chiefly from the United Kingdom and the United States, are behind the wave of unrest. China’s government mouthpiece, the Global Times, editorialized earlier this fall that...
Categories China
December 2, 2014

Sony Pictures should go after North Korean hackers’ Chinese enablers

Since the weekend, several of you have e-mailed me about “suspicions” – and really, I don’t think they went further than that – that and leaked unreleased movies to file sharers to punish it for “The Interview.” Those rumors were covered by many outlets, but frankly, the open-source evidence for North Korea’s complicity was little more than speculation, at least until I read this today: Hackers who knocked Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer systems offline last week used tools very similar...
Categories Books & Films/Censorship/China & Korea
November 20, 2014

China’s bridge to nowhere?

The AP’s Pyongyang Bureau Chief reports that as China completes a $350 million bridge across the Yalu River from Dandong to Sinuiju, and weeks after its announced opening date, the North Korean side is largely an unfinished abutment. Now, it is beginning to look like Beijing has built a bridge to nowhere. An Associated Press Television News crew in September saw nothing but a dirt ramp at the North Korean end of the bridge, surrounded by open fields. No immigration or customs...
Categories Capitalism/China & Korea
November 19, 2014

NIS: China oil-cutoff story was bogus

China is secretly providing North Korea with oil, with shipments over the border either intentionally omitted from its export statistics or broadly identified as aid, according to South Korean intelligence officials. Customs data released by Beijing indicates that no crude oil went over the border to North Korea in the first nine months of the year, although analysts in Seoul say that such a drastic halt in imports would have played havoc with the North’s industrial capability and its military...
Categories China & Korea
November 1, 2014

China arrests 11 more N. Korean refugees

Eleven North Korean defectors were arrested by Chinese police while seeking to cross the border with Myanmar, a source said Friday. Local police rounded up the defectors — 10 adults and a seven-year-old child — at around 3-4 a.m. on the day, shortly before they were to head towards the border in the southern region of Yunnan Province, according to the source. They were immediately put in custody in a police station there, added the source. A South Korean foreign...
Categories China & Korea/Refugees
October 29, 2014

Kirby presses China to support ICC referral of North Korea

Western diplomats say China, North Korea’s principal protector on the UN Security Council, will likely use its veto power there to knock down any attempt to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court (ICC). But Michael Kirby, a former Australian judge who led the independent UN inquiry into alleged human rights abuses in North Korea, told reporters at UN headquarters that it was by no means certain if Beijing would block an ICC referral. “I don’t think a veto...
Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Human Rights
October 22, 2014

30% fewer N. Korean companies exhibiting at trade fair in Dandong

Yonhap attributes this to chillier relations between China and North Korea. That may be, and it may also be that the network of North Korean vendors uprooted by Jang Song Thaek’s purge hasn’t fully recovered. A third possible explanation is that China may prefer to avoid repeating the embarrassment of another revelation by the U.N. Panel of Experts that it was allowing North Korean companies involved in proliferation to exhibit openly at another trade fair last year. The knowledge that...
Categories China & Korea
October 13, 2014

Chinese behave badly in South Korea, and it doesn’t end well for them (updated).

It looks like the South Koreans may have learned something from their northern cousins about how you deal with illegal fishing by the Chinese. For years, Chinese fishermen have entered South Korean waters illegally and violently resisted arrest by the South Korean Coast Guard. In 2011, a Chinese fishermen stabbed and killed a ROK coastie who was trying to board his vessel. This week, ten the Coast Guardsmen boarded a Chinese boat fishing illegally in Korean waters, and this happened: “At...
Categories China & Korea
October 13, 2014

More criticism of North Korea appears in the Chinese press

It will take more than this and this to convince me that China has tipped away from its support for North Korea, but a growing movement to take on North Korea’s crimes against humanity in the U.N., and a growing threat of secondary sanctions in our own Congress, have made North Korea a greater liability for China than ever before. In the same sense that North Korea has been forced to shift its tone on human rights and feign willingness to engage in sincere...
Categories China & Korea
October 6, 2014

Resign, Margaret Chan

Chan, the head of the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO), probably owes her job to her pedigree as a Communist Party quisling in Hong Kong‘s public health bureaucracy.* As Hong Kong’s Director of Health during the SARS outbreak, Chan’s public statements made her the object of widespread derision and ridicule. Later, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council commissioned a Select Committee to conduct an exhaustive study on the response of the government and its officials. The Select Committee’s Findings about Dr. Chan’s performance, which begin on...
Categories "United" Nations/China
October 5, 2014

Xi Jinping’s thuggery will mean China’s decline

In Hong Kong, the state has outsourced the more petty forms of its thuggery to gangsters. On the mainland, tactics like these are well-established and, so far, presumably effective. But in a literate, educated, civil society, they have caused an angry backlash and further energized the protest movement. For how long? Only time will tell whether the protest movement or the state has more persistence, but in the end, people who have lived in an advanced and vibrant civil society aren’t about to consign themselves...
Categories China
September 30, 2014

President Obama, speak up for Hong Kong

As we speak, an extraordinary, courageous, and dignified popular movement is rising in Hong Kong, and the state’s reaction to that movement is increasingly menacing. It may well be the case that confronting Xi Jinping publicly could dig him in, strengthen nationalist and xenophobic elements, and be counterproductive, but silence will be read as license. Right now, Xi is weighing the costs and benefits of suppressing the protests violently. The President could do much to deter such a course with...
Categories China
September 25, 2014

N. Korea seizes another Chinese fishing boat.

For once, I’m mostly in sympathy with North Korea’s position. Chinese fisherman are notorious for invading the territorial waters of their neighbors, the Chinese government may well have grander plans to invade them, and the North Korean people certainly need those fish more than the Chinese do. (Leave aside the question of whether the fish would otherwise be eaten by hungry North Koreans or exported by the regime for hard currency.) The North Koreans have impounded the ship, pending payment of...
Categories China & Korea
September 16, 2014

Because that worked out so well in 2008 …

The International Olympic Committee is seriously contemplating giving the Olympics to China again — the same Olympics that caused a wave of thuggery, censorship, bullying, and even rioting, and were a public relations fiasco for China. More relevant for purposes of this blog, it also led to a wave of round-ups of North Korean refugees. That means that the International Olympic Committee’s award of the Olympics to China will likely cost hundreds, if not thousands, of North Korean lives.
Categories China/Sports
September 11, 2014

Fifty a day, every Tuesday. Men. Women. Children.

“These days, China trucks about 50 North Korean defectors from its immigration detention center in Tumen to North Korea’s Namyang city just across the border every Tuesday,” an activist said, citing an unidentified Chinese official familiar with the matter. He did not elaborate on the official’s identity for fear of possible reprisal against her by the Chinese government. [Yonhap] Update: The title of this post was edited after publication, adding the words “every Tuesday.”
Categories China & Korea/Human Rights/Refugees