Category Archives: China

Arts, China, Japan, North Korea, Society, South Korea, United Nations, United States

Are we inching towards nuclear war?

NORTH KOREA

NK2

Intro: North Korea’s continued use of missiles threatens a new global flashpoint which could suck in South Korea, China, Japan and the United States.

AT 8.30 in the morning, rush hour is in full swing in the South Korean capital of Seoul, home to some 25 million people.

Those commuters crammed into the underground system are the lucky ones – initially, at least. When the missile hits, they are protected from the blinding light of the 20-kiloton detonation.

But above ground, in the area centred on the Yeouido financial district, all is destruction. Buildings up to a mile from Ground Zero have been vaporised or reduced to rubble. Some 70,000 people are dead, killed by the heat and the blast wave. Many more will succumb to radiation burns and radioactive fall-out over coming days.

The nuclear nightmare that has long bedevilled South Korea – America’s key ally in the region and one of the world’s most dynamic economies – has become a reality.

North Korea, most rogue of rogue nations, has struck. The nuclear explosion, similar in size to that which levelled Hiroshima, signalled the start of a blitzkrieg-style ground invasion intended to swiftly overwhelm its richer, more advanced neighbour.

A second atomic warhead, inbound on a crude Rodong rocket, has been successfully intercepted by America’s THAAD (Thermal High-Altitude Area Defence) anti-ballistic missile system. But Seoul’s torment is only beginning as hundreds of North Korean heavy guns rain down shells on the capital, many containing Sarin nerve gas.

The city, bunched up against the North-South border, is hopelessly vulnerable to a mass sneak attack of the kind now taking place, as hundreds of thousands of North Korean troops, and thousands of tanks, pour out of innumerable underground bunkers built within miles of the Demilitarised Zone between the two countries.

The rest of the world watches as the horror is relayed via 24-hour rolling news and social media. And waits for the next move …

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COULD such a scenario ever come to pass? Will Kim Jong-un, latest incarnation of the cult dynasty that has ruled the Communist northern half of Korea since 1948, exchange bluff for action and, one day, deploy his small but lethal nuclear arsenal?

That terrifying possibility moved a step nearer this month when, without warning, Kim Jong-un ordered a salvo of missiles to be fired towards his other nervous neighbour, Japan.

The latest in a series of escalating acts of provocation by the North Korean dictator this year saw three (non-nuclear) missiles land in Japanese waters. North Korea media, which released photographs of the launch ‘supervised’ by a delighted Kim Jong-un, said the missiles had been aimed at American bases in Japan.

International condemnation was swift and wide-ranging, with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, describing the launch as a ‘new level’ of threat. The U.S. appears to be losing patience.

In the last few days, the U.S. has ratchetted-up the pressure further with the deployment to Korean waters of the super-carrier USS Carl Vinson. The 100,000-ton Nimitz-class carrier, with 40-plus F-18 fighters on board, and a powerful escort of cruisers and destroyers, is the ultimate ‘big stick’ expression of American military power – and a provocation to paranoid minds in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

Sources in South Korea are claiming the heightened military presence – which includes moving in ‘Grey Eagle’ attack drones – is part of a U.S. plan to ‘decapitate’ the North Korean leadership and by demolishing key military facilities.

Ostensibly, Vinson is there to take part in the annual U.S.-South Korean joint military exercises – codenamed ‘Foal Eagle’ and ‘Key Resolve’ – involving 300,000 South Korean personnel and 20,000 Americans.

This act of allied solidarity was met, as usual, with blood-curdling threats from Pyongyang. It warned of ‘merciless ultra-precision strikes from ground, air, sea and underwater’ in retaliation.

As the Vinson berthed in the South Korean port of Busan, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, on a tour of the region, warned that the ‘diplomatic and other efforts of the past 20 years to bring North Korea to a point of denuclearisation have failed’.

The United States, said Tillerson, had provided $1.35 billion in assistance to Pyongyang to encourage it to abandon its nuclear programme, but to no effect. A ‘new approach’ was required – but what that might be, he has refused to say.

President Donald Trump has stated that ‘every option was on the table’ when it comes to North Korean aggression. While the phrase was meant to reassure, many Japanese and South Koreans worry that the Americans are contemplating pre-emptive strikes on North Korean military sites – which would indeed place them in the crosshairs of retaliatory attacks.

In unusually graphic language, China, North Korea’s reluctant patron, has warned that the communist state and the U.S. are like ‘two-accelerating trains’ speeding towards a head-on crash. The rhetoric may not be misplaced.

If World War III is to break out anywhere, then it would probably be in this febrile region. North Korea is intent on developing nuclear-tipped missiles that can hit the United States. Large areas of Japan and all of South Korea are already in range. Its nuclear arsenal numbers some 20 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs.

 

WHAT is not clear is if North Korea has the ability to marry these A-bombs to its missiles to create workable devices. But even the most cautious of analysts warns it is only a matter of time.

Kim Jong-un, irrational and unpredictable at the best of times, appears increasingly trigger-happy, revelling in his ability to make Western powers squirm. In February, North Korea launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile, superior to anything that had gone before.

Just days later came the brazen murder, by a hit squad using powerful VX nerve toxin of Kim Jong-un’s estranged half-brother, Kim Jong-nam. The manner of the killing, at Kuala Lumper airport in Malaysia, was intended to strike terror into the hearts of exiled opponents of the Kim regime. Interpol have now issued warrants for the arrest of four North Koreans in connection with the murder.

It is, however, the test-firing of four ballistic missiles towards Japan on March 5 (a fifth is thought to have failed) that most concerns the West.

The missiles themselves are not the most worrying feature. Unlike the one launched on February 12, these were not propelled by solid-fuel motors which allow for quick launches. Nor did they have intercontinental range.

Judging by the distance (600 miles) and height (160 miles) reached by the missiles, they were probably what experts call ‘extended-range’ Scuds, acquired in the Nineties after the fall of the Soviet Union.

What truly alarmed was the simultaneous, multiple-firing, which suggests advanced operational skill; the impact area of three of the missiles within 200 miles of Japan; and, the threats that followed.

North Korea’s UN ambassador claimed that the situation on the Korean Peninsula was ‘inching to the brink of a nuclear war’.

China’s intervention, calling on the U.S. and South Korea to halt military exercises in exchange for North Korea suspending tests seems, not surprisingly, to have fallen on deaf ears, as evidenced by the arrival of the USS Carl Vinson this week.

For the time being, the U.S. military response is defensive, bringing forward the long-planned installation of its anti-ballistic missile system, known as THAAD, on South Korean soil. The system, while not perfect, is designed to knock out Scud-type missiles.

China has called the installation of THAAD a provocative military escalation, a claim echoed too by Russia. Both nations fear that the system’s radar would allow the Americans to peer deep into their territory and monitor their missile tests.

China views every U.S. military development in its hemisphere as an attempt to thwart its ambitions for regional dominance. But America needs Chinese help in reigning in Pyongyang.

The best outcome for all in the region would be for China to use its leverage as North Korea’s biggest trading partner and main source of arms, food and energy to persuade Kim Jong-un to halt his nuclear ambitions.

China has, in fact, recently put pressure on its troublesome semi-ally, announcing last month that it was stopping imports of North Korean coal, a third of the poverty-stricken nation’s exports. However, Beijing has always been cautious about actions that could cause the collapse of the North Korean system, and with it a flood of refugees.

Before leaving office, Barack Obama warned Donald Trump that North Korea was the gravest security risk he would face as president. Every day that has passed since the inauguration confirms this assessment.

Perhaps the best hope for those living in the shadow of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions lies within Kim Jong-um himself. He loves the good things in life, yachts, cars, the best tobacco, even as his own people go hungry.

War with South Korea means instant war with the United States, and whatever mayhem North Korea can cause during its brief nuclear rampage, it cannot hope to prevail against the world’s only superpower.

In signing the order to attack South Korea, Kim would be signing his own death warrant. We must all hope Kim Jong-um is still sane enough to understand that.

Appendage:

USS Carl Vinson

The super-carrier, USS Carl Vinson, has been deployed to the Korean Peninsula following continued provocative actions by North Korea. Pyongyang’s insists that it is nearing the completion of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching America.

 

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Asia, China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, United Nations, United States

The U.S. says the use of pre-emptive force against North Korea is an option

NORTH KOREA

DMZ

The Korean Peninsula continues to remain in a technical state of war. Soldiers patrol the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), a Cold War vestige created in 1953.

Intro: U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has outlined a tougher strategy to confront North Korea’s nuclear threat after visiting the world’s most heavily armed border near the tense buffer zone between rivals North and South Korea.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said it may be necessary to take pre-emptive military action against North Korea if the threat from their weapons program reaches a level “that we believe requires action.”

Tillerson outlined a tougher strategy to confront North Korea’s nuclear threat after visiting the world’s most heavily armed border near the tense buffer zone between the rivals Koreas. He also closed the door on talks with Pyongyang unless it denuclearises and gives up its weapons of mass destruction.

Asked about the possibility of using military force, Tillerson insists: “all of the options are on the table.”

He said the U.S. does not want a military conflict, “but obviously if North Korea takes actions that threatens South Korean forces or our own forces that would be met with (an) appropriate response. If they elevate the threat of their weapons program to a level that we believe requires action that option is on the table.”

But he said that by taking other steps, including sanctions, the U.S. is hopeful that North Korea could be persuaded to take a different course before it reaches that point.

Past U.S. administrations have considered military force because of North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them, but rarely has that option been expressed so explicitly.

North Korea has accelerated its weapons development, violating multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions and appearing undeterred by tough international sanctions. The North conducted two nuclear test explosions and 24 ballistic missile tests last year. Experts say it could have a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the U.S. within a few years. Pyongyang insists it has the capability in delivering such a long-range ballistic missile.

Tillerson met with his South Korean counterpart Yun Byung-se and its acting president, Hwang Kyo-ahn on the second leg of a three-nation trip which began in Japan and will end in China. State Department officials have described it as a “listening tour” as the administration seeks a coherent North Korea policy, well-coordinated with its Asian partners.

Prior to that meeting, Tillerson touched down by helicopter at Camp Bonifas, a U.S.-led U.N. base about 400 meters (438 yards) from the Demilitarised Zone, a Cold War vestige created after the Korean War ended in 1953. He then moved to the truce village of Panmunjom inside the DMZ, a cluster of blue huts where the Korean War armistice was signed.

Tillerson is the latest in a parade of senior U.S. officials to have their photos taken at the border. But it’s the first trip by the new Trump administration’s senior diplomat.

The DMZ, which is both a tourist trap and a potential flashpoint, is guarded on both sides with land mines, razor wire fence, tank traps and hundreds of thousands of combat-ready troops. More than a million mines are believed to be buried inside the DMZ. Land mine explosions in 2015 that Seoul blamed on Pyongyang maimed two South Korean soldiers and led the rivals to threaten each other with attacks.

Hordes of tourists visit both sides, despite the lingering animosity. The Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty, which means the Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war.

President Donald Trump is seeking to examine all options — including military ones — for halting the North’s weapons programs before Pyongyang becomes capable of threatening the U.S. mainland.

Tillerson declared an end to the policy “strategic patience”, a doctrine of the Obama administration, which held off negotiating with Pyongyang while tightening of sanctions but failed to prevent North Korea’s weapons development. Tillerson said the U.S was exploring “a new range of diplomatic, security and economic measures.”

Central to the U.S. review is China and its role in any bid to persuade Pyongyang to change course. China remains the North’s most powerful ally. Tillerson is now expected to meet with top Chinese officials including President Xi Jinping in Beijing.

While the U.S. and its allies in Seoul and Tokyo implore Beijing to press its economic leverage over North Korea, the Chinese have emphasised their desire to relaunch diplomatic talks.

Tillerson, however, said that “20 years of talks with North Korea have brought us to where we are today.”

“It’s important that the leadership of North Korea realise that their current pathway of nuclear weapons and escalating threats will not lead to their objective of security and economic development. That pathway can only be achieved by denuclearising, giving up their weapons of mass destruction, and only then will we be prepared to engage with them in talks,” he said.

Six-nation aid-for-disarmament talks with North Korea, which were hosted by China, have in fact been stalled since 2009. The Obama administration refused to resume them unless the North re-committed to the goal of denuclearisation, something that North Korea has shown little interest in doing.

Tillerson urged China and other countries to fully implement U.N. sanctions on North Korea.

He also accused China of economic retaliation against South Korea over the U.S. deployment of a missile defence system. He called that reaction “inappropriate and troubling” and said China should focus on the North Korean threat that makes the deployment necessary. China sees the system as a threat to its own security.

Last week, North Korea launched four missiles into seas off Japan, in an apparent reaction to major annual military drills the U.S. is currently conducting with South Korea. Pyongyang claims the drills are a rehearsal for invasion.

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Arts, Books, China, Communism, History

Book Review: No Wall Too High

REVIEW

No Wall Too High

No Wall Too High: One Man’s Extraordinary Escape from Mao’s Infamous Labour Camps

Synopsis: Life in Mao’s labour camps was so brutal, its inmates longed for death. One captive broke free – to tell his heart-stopping story.

HIS arms lashed lightly behind his back, squeezed between two soldiers and prodded mercilessly with rifle butts, he was paraded through the streets and into the square where more than 10,000 hate-filled faces were screaming abuse and obscenities at him.

Xu Hongci was experiencing the sharpest edge of the terrible witch-hunts that masqueraded as justice in the China of mad revolutionary Chairman Mao.

He was hauled up onto a table, his slumping head grabbed by the hair and forced upwards to face the baying mob. Quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book echoed from loudspeakers as he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary, an imperialist, and a criminal. He was sentenced to . . .

Xu fully expected the next word to be ‘death’, and he welcomed the prospect. He had been a prisoner for 12 years, serving the hardest time imaginable in the laogai, China’s chain of brutal slave-labour camps for those considered enemies of the state.

Virtually with his bare hands, he’d built dams, dug mines, quarried mountains, worked in paddy fields for 19 hours a day, all on starvation rations of gruel and husks. He’d been shackled in irons, whipped, beaten and humiliated.

To be pinned to the ground and finished off with a bullet in the back of the neck – as he had seen done to countless others – would be a release.

Instead, the voice on the loudspeaker pronounced “20 years’ imprisonment”.

Xu’s extraordinary tale of endurance – handwritten by him 20 years ago, and published for the first time in the West – is a rarity. Historians numbered the butchered and starved-to-death casualties of Mao’s 30-year regime at 60 million, outstripping Hitler (30 million) and Stalin (40 million) as the worst murderer in history.

 

BUT while there have been notable victim’s accounts of Nazi and Soviet atrocities, there has largely been silence from those who suffered at first hand the worst of Red China’s astounding inhumanity to its own people.

And that’s what makes Xu’s moving account a must-read. His is a story that must not be buried, but confronted.

The irony for Xu, born in Shanghai in 1933, is that he was a fervent Communist and a revolutionary, who as a teenager worshipped Mao. As a student activist, he rose up through the party ranks.

Then he made the mistake of taking Mao at his word. In 1957, as the Communist world fretted over developments in the Soviet Union, the Great Leader invited constructive criticism of his regime. “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” he declared.

At the college where he was studying medicine, Xu offered his ideas to make the Communist party more democratic and less dictatorial, only for Mao to spring his trap.

Xu had outed himself. He was denounced as a “Rightist” and disgraced, along with millions of others who had dared speak their mind. Even his girlfriend turned against him.

He was exiled to a remote labour camp for “re-education”. With Orwellian irony, this hell on earth went by the name of the Eternal Happiness Farm. He was worked to within an inch of his life. Twice he escaped, but surveillance was so tight in Mao’s police state that he was caught and hauled back.

That he survived at all is probably down to the fact his medical training gave him a valued position in what passed for hospitals in the prison farms and penal labour colonies.

Not that life on the outside of Mao’s gulag was much better. The Great Leader ordered a Great Leap Forward and pretty well overnight millions of peasants were forced off the land to work in factories. With no rice to sustain them, those millions starved to death.

Through all this, Xu bided his time in captivity, hoping for release. And it seemed near – until another of Mao’s initiatives, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, unleashed a further round of bloody persecution.

With his record of dissent and refusal to kowtow, Xu was an obvious target, hence his humiliating appearance in front of the howling mob and his new sentence to another 20 years.

This time he would be properly behind bars, in a seemingly impregnable high-security prison surrounded by a high wall and an electric fence, with guards and their dogs on constant patrol, a communist Colditz.

But just as the inmates of the German prison were determined to find a way out, so Xu began to plan his escape – the thrilling climax of this book and as gripping as any World War II prisoner-of-war epic.

Over the next three years, he made his preparations. In the prison factory, which made agricultural tools, he secretly carved wooden blocks for the stamps he would need on the travel documents he was forging.

He explored the prison for weak spots, a point out of sight of the spotlights and the sentries in their towers where he could climb the wall.

He hoarded parcels of food. He plotted his route once outside. He made and hid the components of a ladder. He also prepared a phial of poison from nicotine in cigarettes.

If his attempt failed, he would put an end to his misery.

In August 1972, he got his chance. Blackouts were common, but on this day the electricity went out at 10am and, the convicts were told, would not come back on until the next morning.

After roll-call that night, he hid in the prison yard, then climbed up and over the wall, into the factory, out through a window, with a final heave across the dead electric fence. His luck held. He had six hours until his absence would be discovered.

Xu headed up into the mountains, keeping on the move for 40 hours before daring to rest. He took trains when he could – those travel documents passed muster – before ending up in the Gobi Desert. Thirty days after escaping, he crossed the border into Mongolia.

As far as anyone knows, he is the only person to escape from Mao’s deadly labour camps and live to tell the tale. After Mao’s death, Xu returned to Shanghai in 1984, two years after his case was reviewed and his convictions quashed, anxious to see his mother again.

He brought his wife, whom he’d married in Mongolia, and their three children. He worked as a management instructor for a petrochemical company until his retirement in 1993, when he began to write this extraordinary and powerful memoir. He died in 2008, aged 75.

He left a warning. Mao’s problem he says was that, steeped in the mentality of ancient China, he was unable to listen to dissenting opinions. It’s a thought that today’s rulers in Beijing, with their authoritarian approach to human rights, would do well to keep in mind.

–     No Wall Too High by Xu Hongci is published by Rider for £20

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