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August 18, 2010

North Korean Fighter Pilot Dies in Possible Defection Attempt

A fighter plane from North Korea has crashed in China, killing its pilot. The pilot may have been trying to flee North Korea. Yonhap has a photograph of the aircraft, which has a delta wing characteristic of a Soviet MiG-21 or an early-model ChiCom F-7. [Yonhap photo] China may seem an unlikely destination for a defector who must have known that he’d be repatriated and killed if caught, but Yonhap, quoting South Korean government sources, claims that the pilot was...
Categories China & Korea/NK Military
July 28, 2010

Plan B Watch: A Shot Across China’s Bow?

Hey, did the State Department threaten the Bank of China and the Bank of Shanghai? Or to put the question more bluntly, did someone just grow a pair? A diplomatic source here said the U.S. will blacklist more North Korean entities and individuals in the coming weeks so that international financial institutions would cut off ties with them. Any foreign banks refusing to sever business ties with the North Korean entities and individuals in question will have U.S. financial institutions...
Categories China/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law
July 28, 2010

Why There Is a Cold War in Asia

When someone escapes from North Korea and makes contact with South Koreans, and when China then repatriates that person to North Korea, the North Korean authorities typically execute that person, or send him to die in a prison camp. China has known this for years. That’s why the Chinese government is an accessory to murder when it does things like this: China has repatriated an 81-year-old former South Korean prisoner of war who had fled North Korea decades after being...
Categories China/China & Korea/Korean War/Refugees
July 21, 2010

Will a North Korean Attack Win the Yellow Sea for China?

Is the Yellow Sea a Chinese lake? Under ordinary circumstances, I’d understand China’s complaints about a U.S. naval exercise in an inland sea near its shores. It’s not as if I’d want Chinese ships in the Gulf of Mexico, either, but these are not ordinary circumstances. This time, North Korea has sunk a South Korean warship, and China has both shielded North Korea from any consequences for that attack and continued to provide necessary financial support to the regime that...
Categories China/China & Korea
July 12, 2010

China’s North Korean Puppet Is Getting Away With Murder … Again (Updated, Bumped)

[Update 12 Jul 2010: I’ve located the full text of the Presidential Statement, and contrary to reports I linked below, it does use the word “attack.” It takes note of “the findings of the Joint Civilian-Military Investigation Group led by the ROK with the participation of five nations, which concluded that the DPRK was responsible for sinking the Cheonan” before noting North Korea’s denial. But because the statement is completely toothless, none of this was terribly upsetting to the North...
Categories "United" Nations/Cheonan Incident/China & Korea
June 30, 2010

China, Korea, and the Persistence of Mendacity

It’s nice to see Koreans calling China on its P.R. blunders with greater frequency these days: In its feature on the 60th anniversary of the start of the 1950-53 Korean War, the International Herald Leader, a newsweekly of the Xinhua News Agency, said the North Korean army launched the war by crossing the 38th parallel and seizing South Korean capital Seoul in three days. The article immediately drew attention, with some placing significance on China’s first admission of military aggression...
Categories China & Korea/Korean War
June 30, 2010

President Obama talks to our enemies, and it does not end well

President Obama, speaking at the G-8 summit recently, sounded very much like his predecessor, saying that “shying away from ugly facts on North Korea’s behavior is, in his words, “a bad habit we need to break.” I don’t know if the similarity should gratify or worry me more, or whether those two sentiments are really mutually exclusive. The problem for President Obama is that China, Kim Jong Il’s financial backer and sponsor, is shielding North Korea from even the slightest...
Categories China/China & Korea/Diplomacy
June 30, 2010

North Korea’s Money Men in China

It’s a few days old, but this Daily NK piece is a fascinating insight into how North Korea’s state trading companies put revenue in Kim Jong Il’s coffers, how they’re adapting to the politics of succession: Ri, who is in his mid-40s and living in Dalian, says he enjoys extravagance which he could never have imagined in North Korea. “The Cheonan incident and other issues are complicated,” he explains, “I now believe here (China) is my hometown and where I...
Categories China & Korea/Kim Jong Un/NK Economics
June 28, 2010

You Say That Like It’s a Bad Thing: “China Hand” Fears Treasury Sanctions

I’m apparently not the only one who cocked an eyebrow at the refusal of a State Department spokesman recently to rule out applying new sanctions to be directed at North Korea to third-country entities. The United States Wednesday did not preclude the possibility of freezing North Korean assets in foreign banks to effectively cut off resources for the North’s development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. “I’m not going to predict any particular step that we’re contemplating, but these...
Categories China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Fiskings/Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 9, 2010

At Last, China Regrets June 4th Shootings!

And obviously, I refer to the killings of three Chinese citizens and the wounding of a fourth by North Korean border guards: Foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang, briefing reporters in Beijing, said the shooting incident occurred in the early morning hours of June 4, around the northeastern town of Dandong, when the Chinese civilians crossed into North Korea to engage in illicit trading, common along the 880-mile border. South Korean and Japanese media reported that the Chinese were in a...
Categories China & Korea/Drugs & N Korea
June 7, 2010

China’s Support for Kim Jong Il Undermines the U.N., Nonproliferation, and Regional Peace

Some of us, of course, have never really believed that the United Nations could play much of a useful role in restraining North Korea anyway, other than helping us enlist the support of Old Europe, which is almost alone in paying any heed to the U.N. After all, the institution is led by Ban Ki-Moon, who rose from local obscurity to international obscurity by appeasing Kim Jong Il, and who, by all outward appearances, suffers from a genetic testosterone deficiency....
Categories "United" Nations/Cheonan Incident/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Sanctions
May 31, 2010

Robert Einhorn to Lead North Korea Sanctions Implementation Effort

The Joongang Ilbo is reporting that Clinton Administration alumnus and counter-proliferation expert Robert Einhorn is going to be put in charge of “streamlining the process by which it implements” international sanctions against North Korea, sanctions that are likely to be enhanced after an international investigation found that North Korea torpedoed and sank the South Korean warship Cheonan. “The U.S. administration was seeking more efficient management of implementation of sanctions, which had been divided between the State and the Treasury departments,”...
Categories Cheonan Incident/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law/Washington Views
May 18, 2010

“Decisive” Evidence Implicates North Korea in Cheonan Sinking

As news reports suggest that an international investigation will soon announce that North Korea torpedoed the Cheonan, South Korean military sources are leaking information that, if true, seems reasonably conclusive: “In a search using fishing trawlers, we recently discovered pieces of debris that are believed to have come from the propeller of the torpedo that attacked the Cheonan,” a high-ranking government source said Monday. “Analysis of the debris shows it may have originated from China or a former Eastern-bloc country...
Categories Cheonan Incident/China & Korea/Korean Politics/Useful Idiocy
May 11, 2010

Kaesong Death Watch

Alternate title: Of fools and their money. North Korea has led a delegation of Chinese investors on a tour of the Kaesong Industrial Complex. Would the North Koreans really confiscate Kaesong as they did Kumgang and hand it over to the Chinese? I sure as hell wish they would. Nothing would please me more than such an ineradicable deterrent to foreign investment, such a thorough repudiation of the Sunshine Policy, and the closure of Kaesong’s money pipe to Pyongyang. Alas,...
Categories China & Korea/NK Economics
May 5, 2010

Has the Teflon Finally Worn Off the Wok?

For well over a decade, the South Korean street and government have let China get away with murder — literally — of North Korean refugees, and South Korean POW’s and their families. Koreans quickly forgot their anger after hundreds of Chinese “students” rioted in downtown Seoul and beat and kicked Korean citizens (but, said the Chinese government that bused the mobs in, they really meant well). But for once, I’m gratified to see South Koreans sharing my sense of outrage...
Categories China & Korea/Kim Jong Il
May 4, 2010

Prediction: U.N. Resolutions, Cheonan Sinking Won’t Change China’s Support for Kim Jong Il

What will the Chinese ask Kim Jong Il during his visit? South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, was in China as well last week, meeting with Hu on Friday to solicit support if his country sought stronger U.N. sanctions in retaliation for the Cheonan attack. “China wants to hear North Korea’s explanation so it can determine its position,” said Yang Moo-jin, professor at the University of North Korean Studies. China has been taking a more active role recently in mediating North...
Categories China & Korea
May 3, 2010

Kim Jong Il in China, Says Yonhap

The dead of the Cheonan haven’t been in the ground for a week, but the man who probably ordered their deaths is still a welcome and honored guest in Beijing: “We have confirmed the arrival of a special train at (the Chinese border city) Dandong, and we believe it is highly likely that Chairman Kim is on board,” a South Korean government official told Yonhap. [L.A. Times] The last such report turned out to be a false alarm. Recall that...
Categories China & Korea/Kim Jong Il