Timothy Mo
by Timothy Mo
The “crisis” on the 38th Parallel has little to do with the two Koreas: It’s about oil and gas for China, the prelude to an energy grab that will safeguard the expansion of the Chinese economy for decades to come. Six months ago Taiwanese and Japanese coastguard cutters were drenching each other in spray from water cannon, in footage. The present pantomime, with hisses greeting North Korea as the villain, is not a replacement of the fountain show but its encore.
The Senkaku islands, if you’re Japanese — Diaoyu if you’re Chinese — halfway between both countries, and the fossil resources that underlie them, are the issue of contention, not the integrity of the Korean border. In the twilight of oil, long-term energy security is at the top of all great powers’ agendas, but it has a highly personal dimension for those in power in China.
About $200 for a barrel of oil and 15 percent unemployment will lose a presidential election in America. In China, it could lose you your life, or all its luxurious trappings. Continued growth and rising standards of living — with the oil to guarantee it — are vital to protect family positions of the unpopular hereditary elite who run the country.
To have their subjects acquiesce to their rule, the princelings need to keep the economy booming and the good times rolling, not just for China’s nouveau riche but for the emergent middle-classes and the migrant factory workers from the sticks.
It was possible to shoot university students and residents of the capital in 1989. Unrest in the provinces to which laid-off workers would have to return would be a serious matter.
The notion of North Korea having autonomy in its external dealings and, as a prodigal son, going further than China would want is ridiculous. The reprimands and tut-tuttings from China go further — they are a preposterous farce. North Korea is China’s attack dog. The leash is the weapons, food and fuel that go over the border. China has had absolute control over the North since the day its troops turned the tide of war by launching infantry attacks against UN forces in November 1950.
China has the capacity to install whoever it wishes in Pyongyang. The attack dog of the North has very large fangs in the shape of its million-plus army, but in the end both know who is master. The North is not even a client regime of Beijing, but a special autonomous region, with nuclear weapons and concentration camps.
If mobilisations and sabre-rattling are taking place within a tea cup, the storm is brewing not in a dainty Chinese thimble cup but a hefty mug. North Korea has done terrible things, largely forgotten. Kim Jong-un is going to have a hard time living down to them.
The bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987 palled next to the bomb attack in 1983 on the South Korean cabinet in Myanmar. Three South Korean ministers died, including the foreign minister, who rejoiced in the name Lee Bum Suk. He knew humour was anathema to the pretensions of dictators.
The problem is not with the leadership in the North — ultimately rational, prioritising self-preservation and aggrandisement — but with the minions in a military that is factionalised. Brainwashing is a word that dates from the Korean war.
The population of the North is docile and stupefied with terror. The crew of a North Korean submarine that ran aground in Southern waters in 1996 executed 11 of its own members for incompetence (read, fear for themselves and their families) before making a run for the demilitarised zone, but two survived. It is possible for someone so lobotomised by the cult of personality to push a button never meant to be pushed.
North Korea has some kind of agenda independent of China. Ratcheting up a situation such as today’s consolidates the hold over the army of Kim Jong-un. Like the frog that puffed itself up, it also makes him look larger on the world stage. The desire for a personal telephone call from Barack Obama would be puerile if the potential fallout — literal and figurative — were not so deadly.
The grandson of Kim Il-sung also finds himself facing, in the new South Korean leader, the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the cold warrior and assassinated military dictator of the South between 1961 and 1979. (The head of his secret service did him in.) Family business is being settled, with Kim Jong-un desiring to show himself as intransigent as his father and grandfather. Kim believes that a certain amount of obstreperousness will, as in the past, ease sanctions and bring a resumption of aid.
The majority of South Koreans are relatively blase. Not so in Japan, where the public is edgy. They have had three nuclear disasters — two in war, one in peacetime. They did not fight in the Korean war, but Japanese civilians were abducted from their streets and homes by North Koreans and held in Korea for decades. Kim is a bogeyman in Japan.
Yet he needs to be careful he does not get a chopstick through the heart. To perceive Japan as something of a diplomatic and military soft touch would be a catastrophic error. The Japanese self-defence force and, in particular, the navy and coastguard — whose ratings, in full anti-flash gear, did not hesitate to sink a North Korean spyship with gunfire in 2001 — constitute a formidable obstacle. Japan has amassed plutonium to make as many bombs as China. The Japanese public abhors nuclear weapons, and, under the constitution, banned from Japanese shores. If Japan does not possess an arsenal of hydrogen bombs, they can be put together rapidly.
Barring misadventure — always possible when delinquent children play with firecrackers — a shooting war is out of the question. Basically, what we have now is heated bargaining in an Asian mall selling pirated goods.
Japan wants as large a share of the Diaoyu oil as possible; China wants to concede as little as possible. In the end, Japan will be prepared to play second fiddle to China, as it has done to the US for half a century, while the Americans will be bought off with lucrative contracts for service companies such as Halliburton.
As for the deposits in the South China Sea, America has a poor record of loyalty to its defeated allies. The Philippines, Taiwan and Malaysia can expect to be sold out if China takes the fields by brute force.
The so-called pivot to the Pacific cannot work: This is China’s backyard. It’s as forlorn as it would be for a Chinese armada to steam to the Gulf of Mexico to secure its oil wells or land in the Cayman islands.
The real drama is going to be an Israeli attack on Iran — 100 times more likely than the curtain rising in Korea. The implication is that the more conciliatory and moderate the West is over the shadow puppet-show and dress rehearsal playing out in the Orient, the more it can justify extreme measures against Iran. This is what we should be concerned about. The Guardian
by Timothy Mo
The “crisis” on the 38th Parallel has little to do with the two Koreas: It’s about oil and gas for China, the prelude to an energy grab that will safeguard the expansion of the Chinese economy for decades to come. Six months ago Taiwanese and Japanese coastguard cutters were drenching each other in spray from water cannon, in footage. The present pantomime, with hisses greeting North Korea as the villain, is not a replacement of the fountain show but its encore.
The Senkaku islands, if you’re Japanese — Diaoyu if you’re Chinese — halfway between both countries, and the fossil resources that underlie them, are the issue of contention, not the integrity of the Korean border. In the twilight of oil, long-term energy security is at the top of all great powers’ agendas, but it has a highly personal dimension for those in power in China.
About $200 for a barrel of oil and 15 percent unemployment will lose a presidential election in America. In China, it could lose you your life, or all its luxurious trappings. Continued growth and rising standards of living — with the oil to guarantee it — are vital to protect family positions of the unpopular hereditary elite who run the country.
To have their subjects acquiesce to their rule, the princelings need to keep the economy booming and the good times rolling, not just for China’s nouveau riche but for the emergent middle-classes and the migrant factory workers from the sticks.
It was possible to shoot university students and residents of the capital in 1989. Unrest in the provinces to which laid-off workers would have to return would be a serious matter.
The notion of North Korea having autonomy in its external dealings and, as a prodigal son, going further than China would want is ridiculous. The reprimands and tut-tuttings from China go further — they are a preposterous farce. North Korea is China’s attack dog. The leash is the weapons, food and fuel that go over the border. China has had absolute control over the North since the day its troops turned the tide of war by launching infantry attacks against UN forces in November 1950.
China has the capacity to install whoever it wishes in Pyongyang. The attack dog of the North has very large fangs in the shape of its million-plus army, but in the end both know who is master. The North is not even a client regime of Beijing, but a special autonomous region, with nuclear weapons and concentration camps.
If mobilisations and sabre-rattling are taking place within a tea cup, the storm is brewing not in a dainty Chinese thimble cup but a hefty mug. North Korea has done terrible things, largely forgotten. Kim Jong-un is going to have a hard time living down to them.
The bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987 palled next to the bomb attack in 1983 on the South Korean cabinet in Myanmar. Three South Korean ministers died, including the foreign minister, who rejoiced in the name Lee Bum Suk. He knew humour was anathema to the pretensions of dictators.
The problem is not with the leadership in the North — ultimately rational, prioritising self-preservation and aggrandisement — but with the minions in a military that is factionalised. Brainwashing is a word that dates from the Korean war.
The population of the North is docile and stupefied with terror. The crew of a North Korean submarine that ran aground in Southern waters in 1996 executed 11 of its own members for incompetence (read, fear for themselves and their families) before making a run for the demilitarised zone, but two survived. It is possible for someone so lobotomised by the cult of personality to push a button never meant to be pushed.
North Korea has some kind of agenda independent of China. Ratcheting up a situation such as today’s consolidates the hold over the army of Kim Jong-un. Like the frog that puffed itself up, it also makes him look larger on the world stage. The desire for a personal telephone call from Barack Obama would be puerile if the potential fallout — literal and figurative — were not so deadly.
The grandson of Kim Il-sung also finds himself facing, in the new South Korean leader, the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the cold warrior and assassinated military dictator of the South between 1961 and 1979. (The head of his secret service did him in.) Family business is being settled, with Kim Jong-un desiring to show himself as intransigent as his father and grandfather. Kim believes that a certain amount of obstreperousness will, as in the past, ease sanctions and bring a resumption of aid.
The majority of South Koreans are relatively blase. Not so in Japan, where the public is edgy. They have had three nuclear disasters — two in war, one in peacetime. They did not fight in the Korean war, but Japanese civilians were abducted from their streets and homes by North Koreans and held in Korea for decades. Kim is a bogeyman in Japan.
Yet he needs to be careful he does not get a chopstick through the heart. To perceive Japan as something of a diplomatic and military soft touch would be a catastrophic error. The Japanese self-defence force and, in particular, the navy and coastguard — whose ratings, in full anti-flash gear, did not hesitate to sink a North Korean spyship with gunfire in 2001 — constitute a formidable obstacle. Japan has amassed plutonium to make as many bombs as China. The Japanese public abhors nuclear weapons, and, under the constitution, banned from Japanese shores. If Japan does not possess an arsenal of hydrogen bombs, they can be put together rapidly.
Barring misadventure — always possible when delinquent children play with firecrackers — a shooting war is out of the question. Basically, what we have now is heated bargaining in an Asian mall selling pirated goods.
Japan wants as large a share of the Diaoyu oil as possible; China wants to concede as little as possible. In the end, Japan will be prepared to play second fiddle to China, as it has done to the US for half a century, while the Americans will be bought off with lucrative contracts for service companies such as Halliburton.
As for the deposits in the South China Sea, America has a poor record of loyalty to its defeated allies. The Philippines, Taiwan and Malaysia can expect to be sold out if China takes the fields by brute force.
The so-called pivot to the Pacific cannot work: This is China’s backyard. It’s as forlorn as it would be for a Chinese armada to steam to the Gulf of Mexico to secure its oil wells or land in the Cayman islands.
The real drama is going to be an Israeli attack on Iran — 100 times more likely than the curtain rising in Korea. The implication is that the more conciliatory and moderate the West is over the shadow puppet-show and dress rehearsal playing out in the Orient, the more it can justify extreme measures against Iran. This is what we should be concerned about. The Guardian
