CHINESE INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS: TYING CHINA MORE TIGHTLY TO NORTH KOREA…OR TO KOREA?

6/8/13

Yesterday’s (i.e., Friday 6/8/13’s, page A8) Wall Street Journal featured an article by Jeremy Page entitled “China Builds Up Its Links to North Korea.”  The article discussed Chinese construction of an extensive infrastructure network, including roads, railroads, an immense power cable, and a high speed railroad line, linking northeastern China with North Korea.  The article reports that the infrastructure program indicates a continuing desire of China to not only sustain North Korea but also to integrate North Korea even more deeply into the Chinese economy.   This massive undertaking contradicts China’s stated claims that it is cooperating with the  U.S. strategy of isolating and pressuring North Korea.   Such activity indicates, according to the article, that China not only believes that the Kim dynasty will remain in power in Korea but also that it is taking steps to insure North Korea’s vitality, or at least continued existence, as a buffer against what it considers U.S. encroachment in northeast Asia.

A thought occurred to yours truly as I read this piece, however…

Could the Chinese be taking these steps to integrate not the NORTH Korean economy with that of China but, rather, to integrate the KOREAN economy with that of China?  Perhaps the Chinese, being long range thinkers and having a firmer grasp on reality than most of the people who inhabit our government, are giving up Kim Jong Eun and the entire concept of Communist North Korea for dead and are anticipating a reunification of the peninsula with Seoul, rather than Pyongyang, in charge.   The Chinese are tying their economy into that of North Korea with hopes of being firmly wrapped up with the new Korean government.

Remember German unification.  After a very troubling decade, roughly coinciding with the calendar ‘90s, the Germans eventually integrated the former East Germany into the larger German economy, resulting in the second German economic miracle.   A reunification of the Korean peninsula would be at least equally troublesome at its start, but, eventually, one has to bet that the very resourceful, and very rich, South Koreans would integrate the former north into a vibrant Korea, creating a kind of Asian Deutschland, an economic juggernaut that, while not quite on par with Germany, would be a formidable force on the regional and world economic stages.   The Chinese would do well to be closely tied to the new Korea, just as countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary have done well being closely tied to Germany.

Further, the Chinese always think politically as well as economically.   It would certainly be in China’s interest to be firmly tied to a unified Korea in order to counterbalance the influence the United States would have on the new power on the peninsula.

Anybody who thinks about the Korean situation at all carefully cannot believe that the North is sustainable.  North Korea in its present form is finished; its fall is assured and the only question is time.  And the Chinese have shown a remarkable ability to think in terms of longer periods of time than does the West.

“R-E-S-P-E-C-T, FIND OUT WHAT IT MEANS TO (KIM JONG EUN)”

4/3/13

I mentioned in my earlier post today (SOUTH KOREA:  “MR. PRESIDENT, WE CANNOT ALLOW A MINE SHAFT GAP!”) that the current bout of saber rattling by North Korea should be providing plenty of grist for the Mighty Quinn mill for some time to come and, sure enough, even today the story is bearing more fruit.

The Wall Street Journal put it succinctly in the continuation of page A8 of today’s (4/3/13’s) front page story when it reported

North Korea has repeatedly asked the U.S. and other major countries to recognize it as a nuclear-weapons state and negotiate with it as an equal partner.

As I stated in my post of a few days ago (KIM JONG EUN:  “I’M SMART, NOT LIKE EVERYBODY SAYS, LIKE DUMB.  I’M SMART AND I WANT RESPECT!”, 4/1/13), this craving for undeserved respect is the essence of this, and every, North Korean bout of bluster and bravado.  North Korea wants respect, and its new young leader needs respect not only from “the U.S. and other major countries” but also internally, especially from the military.   Hence the empty threats to nuke Seoul, Hawaii, Washington, and other places Mr. Kim can perhaps find on a map.  Being treated as “an equal partner” is impossible, given the military, economic, and geopolitical realities, but respect can indeed be achieved.

The problem is that getting respect the right way, by developing one’s economy, engaging the world, and giving one’s citizens a decent chance at a better life, the way that South Korea has done it, is difficult, expensive, and risky.  It takes time, patience, and investment.  Achieving respect in this manner also might lead to one’s citizens making outrageous demands for, among other things, a say in the way things are run.   People have a funny tendency to demand input into their own lives, and into their communities, when they have something at stake.  

Kim Jong Eun and the people who pull his strings cannot take the risks, or do the hard and expensive work, necessary to earn respect in an enduring way.   Developing a bomb and threatening to use it is far cheaper, easier, and less fraught with peril, from the regime’s standpoint, than undergoing the type of economic miracle that has been achieved by South Korea.  In fact, miracle is the wrong noun to describe what has happened in South Korea.  The South Koreans and, yes, their formerly authoritarian regimes under Syngman Rhee and, to a greater extent, Park Chung Hee, took the types of risks, and engaged in the type of hard work, that the North Koreans are too timid to undertake.   They are to be congratulated.   The North Koreans, and their pudgy ruler, are to be ridiculed.   Only they don’t appear to know it.

With that having been written, I think I’ll go out and buy a Kia or a Hyundai.

SOUTH KOREA: “MR. PRESIDENT, WE CANNOT ALLOW A MINE SHAFT GAP!”

4/3/13

My thoughts on North Korea’s saber rattling were neatly encapsulated in my post of a few days ago entitled KIM JONG EUN:  “I’M SMART, NOT LIKE EVERYBODY SAYS, LIKE DUMB.  I’M SMART AND I WANT RESPECT!”.   The situation keeps developing, however, and this story promises to provide nearly as much grist as the Redflex speed camera scandal in Chicago politics; see only my latest post on that treasure trove, 3/26/13’s REDFLEX’S EXCELLENT CHICAGO ADVENTURE:  EDDY BURKE ENTER(ED) THE FRAY.

Now we learn that South Korea wants to renegotiate a 1972 treaty under which the United States provides the South with nuclear fuel and technology for its electricity generating and research reactors.   The South would like to increase its own skills in enriching uranium and reprocessing the spent fuel.   The South Korean government, through a spokesman, insists

“This government has no intention at all of pursuing nuclear capabilities in terms of weapon.”

So in the wake of North Korea’s restarting one of its reactors and threatening to obliterate Seoul and, now, Washington, D.C., it suddenly becomes urgent for South Korea to enrich uranium to generate electricity.   I know we are dealing with international relations here and we have to speak diplomatically, but just how naïve are we supposed to pretend to be?   This is the nuclear equivalent of the growing enthusiasm for hemp products among people who just happen to enjoy smoking pot.

Leaving aside the hypocrisy that masquerades as diplomacy, one has to ask one’s self just how much more dangerous the world would become were South Korea to produce its own nuclear weapons.   Yours truly, for one, would rest much easier knowing that Kim Jong Eun would be losing sleep pondering the possible retaliatory actions of a nuclear armed South next time he wants to rattle the nuclear rattle to get a little attention.   A nuked up South Korea might even permit us to bring out tripwire troop presence home from the Korean peninsula.

There is no logical reason why responsible countries, like South Korea, should not have nuclear weapons should they choose to acquire them.   Some might argue that allowing responsible countries to have nuclear weapons would eventually lead to irresponsible countries having nuclear weapons.  But having such horrific weapons tends to sober up countries quite quickly; one’s neighbors’ having such weapons has an even more immediate and permanent sobering effect.   Note that it was the presence of nuclear weapons have kept the peace, or at least have kept things from getting completely out of hand, since the dawn of the nuclear age, despite many countries we once regarded as crazy having their hands on these awesome (In this case, that adjective is used properly, but I digress.) weapons.

A better question is where the United States and other nuclear powers get off deciding who should have nukes and who shouldn’t, who is sufficiently responsible and who isn’t.  Why should the South Koreans, or anybody else, have to come to us and beg to acquire the means to defend themselves?    Why is it any of our business?  As the sisters used to say back at St. Walter School in my youth, and usually to an often obnoxiously precocious yours truly, “Who died and left you boss?”

KIM JONG EUN: “I’M SMART, NOT LIKE EVERYBODY SAYS, LIKE DUMB. I’M SMART AND I WANT RESPECT!”

4/1/13

The bravado and the shenanigans of North Korean tinpot Kim Jong Eun provide yet another instance in which the conventional wisdom is probably correct.   

Mr. Kim is not bent on a nuclear war, or even a conventional war, with South Korea and the United States.   He does not have the capability for a nuclear attack and probably has neither the authority nor the motivation for a conventional attack on the South.  He knows, or his generals know, that a nuclear strike would be his, and North Korea’s, last act in this mortal coil.  He also knows that a conventional attack on the South would bring similar, though probably slower, results; while North Korea’s military dwarfs that of South Korea, the technological disparity between the two is immense and, more importantly, the U.S.’s 30,000 (or so) troop tripwire would be tripped with consequences that the North Koreans would not want to contemplate.   Even if Mr. Kim is as crazy as he would like us to believe, and even if his generals are unwilling or able to bring a measure of sobriety to his deliberations, both of which are highly unlikely, China, North Korean’s big brother and lifeline, would never go along with a conflict that would potentially engulf at least Northeast Asia in an unpredictable, yet in any case horrible, military conflict.

So why is Mr. Kim doing this?   Largely for the same reasons that his father, Kim Jong Il, and his grandfather, Kim Il-Sung, engaged in similar saber rattling, i.e., doing so brought favorable consequences for North Korea.   Such threats in the past inevitably brought the United States, the South Koreans, and even, in some instances, the Japanese and the Chinese, to the table to negotiate more food and energy aid for North Korea’s cruel excuse for an economy.   Extortion has long been a lucrative racket for organized crime, and North Korea has been described, most recently by Representative Peter King (R., NY), as “an organized crime family running a territory.”  The problem is that Kim Jong Eun is no Carlo Gambino, and neither his father nor his grandfather was a Tony Accardo.   And there was never a North Korean Meyer Lansky or Sidney Korshak, though China has long played a similar role for the North Korean family.   But I digress.

Perhaps a better organized crime analogy than that conjured up by Mr. King would be to the fictional Fredo Corleone, the imbecile middle Corleone brother who wanted nothing more than he wanted the respect that he thought was due him but that he deserved only in his own fantasies.   Mr. Kim’s father had a similar problem.   Both men, and especially the latter, have been portrayed as puerile putzes, and this doubtless hurts.   So, Kim Jong Il rattled the nuclear saber to get some respect and the apple has not fallen far from the tree.   Young Mr. Kim, especially because he is new on the scene, feels the need to impress not only the North Korean in the street and the “international community,” but also the North Korean military who don’t yet know what to make of this young popinjay.

So what we have in Kim Jong Eun’s bluster is both a new chapter in a continuing successful extortion racket and a cry for respect, a respect that he needs more than even his walking, talking caricature father and far more than his grandfather, who did manage to fight the world’s greatest military power to a draw.  The conventional wisdom is correct; we are not on the verge of a nuclear war in the northwest Pacific.

One potential problem though, with the above argument is that Mr. Eun is, after all, probably (It seems no one is quite sure.) not yet 30.  I, like many of you, knew everything when I was in my twenties.   So we are dealing with a very young man with the misplaced confidence of youth who seems to have inherited some peculiar genes; consequently, we can never be entirely sure that the young man is not completely crackers.   Therefore, the B-2 flyover and the F-22 deployment were probably a helpful and inexpensive reminder to this scion of the Kim dynasty of the inadvisability of playing these games with undue vigor and enthusiasm.   On the other hand, a quick admonition that any overly spirited adventure would threaten the supply of Johnny Walker Black and blond, blue-eyed Western women might be equally effective; such realizations always gave Mr. Kim’s father pause when he ramped up the extortion game too steeply.