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S. Korea Suspends Food Aid to North
Push for Renewal of Nuclear Talks Brings Meeting to Bitter End
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 14, 2006; A18
TOKYO, July 14 — South Korea on Thursday suspended humanitarian aid to North Korea until it agrees to return to international nuclear disarmament talks. The action infuriated visiting North Korean officials, who immediately cut off high-level talks in South Korea and stormed back home.
The decision to postpone consideration of a North Korean request for 500,000 tons of rice marked the South’s first punitive action against its impoverished communist neighbor since July 4, when the North test-fired seven missiles, including a long-range Taepodong-2. The move came as the administration of South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun confronted sharp public criticism at home for what many there viewed as a weak response to the tests.
South Korea also reiterated its deep opposition to a push by Japan and the United States to impose broader sanctions on North Korea through a draft resolution at the U.N. Security Council. Seoul has vowed to maintain its “sunshine policy” of engagement, which has fostered the warmest ties between the Stalinist North and the capitalist South since the Korean War ended in stalemate more than half a century ago.
But the decision to follow through with a previous threat to suspend food aid if North Korea tested missiles — a threat many experts doubted the Seoul government would stick to — displayed a new willingness by the South to use its significant economic clout to apply pressure on the North.
The North Koreans — whose economic assistance from the South is topped only by aid from China — appeared jolted by the decision. Pyongyang’s delegation departed abruptly on Thursday afternoon from talks in the South Korean city of Pusan that were originally scheduled to end Friday. South Korea’s Yonhap news service reported that the North Korean officials left after circulating a statement calling the rupture the result of “reckless” attempts by South Korea to raise “irrelevant issues.” Those issues, South Korean officials said, were the recent missile tests and the North’s refusal to return to six-party talks on its nuclear program.
The North bitterly condemned the decision to suspend food aid, saying, “The South side will pay a price before the nation for causing the collapse of the ministerial talks and bringing a collapse of North-South relations.”
South Korean officials, who in recent years have rolled out the red carpet for their visiting North Korean kin, this time offered them a simple meal and hospitality without the customary sightseeing excursions and photo opportunities. When the North’s representatives understood they would not be returning with promises of more food aid, they simply left.
For the United States and Japan, which are both pushing for a strong draft resolution at the United Nations that would ban international trade in North Korean missile and other military technology, the South Korean action was a rare diplomatic bright spot.
Christopher R. Hill, Washington’s top envoy on North Korea, left Beijing for Washington on Thursday after it became apparent that Chinese efforts to persuade the Pyongyang government to return to the six-party talks had failed. Before leaving, Hill said there was no indication that the North Koreans had decided to end their boycott of the talks, which have been stalled since last November.
Japan, which has been deeply rattled by the missile tests, has pushed for a tough resolution that would impose sanctions on the North. But Japan’s Kyodo news service quoted several government officials early Friday as saying the Tokyo government might be willing to offer a compromise resolution taking into account a Chinese and Russian proposal to censure North Korea with only voluntary punitive actions.
“The Chinese are as baffled as we are,” Hill told reporters in Beijing. “China has done so much for that country, and that country seems intent on taking all of China’s generosity and then giving nothing back.”
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China to Block Vote Condemning N. Korea
Competing Text on Missile Tests Offered
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 13, 2006; A20
UNITED NATIONS, July 12 — China and Russia presented the U.N. Security Council Wednesday with a draft resolution that “strongly deplores” North Korea’s July 4 missile tests. But it endorses only voluntary measures aimed at restraining Pyongyang’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs.
The move threatens to head off a U.S.-backed effort to impose mandatory sanctions on North Korea, and places the United States, Japan and their European allies in the difficult position of having to offer concessions to secure Beijing’s and Moscow’s support or face a certain veto of their tougher sanctions resolution.
China’s U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, confirmed Wednesday that he is prepared to veto a legally binding, U.S.-backed resolution that would condemn the missile tests, demand North Korea cease launching missiles, and ban trade in nuclear or missile technology with North Korea.
Wang expressed concern that the resolution drafted by Japan and co-sponsored by the United States, Britain, France, Greece and the Slovak Republic might ultimately serve as a pretext for military action against North Korea.
“The political position of my government is clear: that we have political difficulties with that draft,” Wang told reporters outside the council after presenting his competing resolution. “If that draft is put to a vote without any modifications, the instructions from me is to veto it.”
The diplomatic moves come as North Korea showed no signs of yielding to Chinese pressure to recommit itself to a 1999 moratorium on missile tests and resume six-nation talks aimed at ridding the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons.
There is general agreement in the 15-nation council that North Korea’s launch of seven missiles, including a failed test of a Taepodong-2 missile with the capability to reach parts of Alaska and Hawaii, was a reckless act of belligerence against its neighbors, primarily Japan. But the Security Council remains divided over a response.
Despite China’s veto threat, U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton said the Chinese and Russian initiative was “a significant step” forward. For weeks, Moscow and Beijing refused to consider passage of any resolution, preferring to criticize Pyongyang’s action with a weaker, nonbinding council statement. “Now we can talk about a resolution, which is the appropriate measure through which the Security Council should act,” Bolton said.
Bolton insisted that China and Russia make further compromises or face a vote on the U.S.-backed sanctions resolution, raising the prospect of China’s sixth veto in history. “We’re prepared to push ahead for a vote. We’ve deferred it on the basis of the high-level Chinese mission in Pyongyang,” Bolton said. “But if the resolution comes to a vote and China votes no, then that will be a decision they will have to make.”
Japan’s U.N. ambassador, Kenzo Oshima, the chief sponsor of that resolution, said the Chinese and Russian draft does not go far enough. “A quick glance at the text shows that there are very serious gaps on very important issues,” he said. “So we will study the text, but I believe it is going to be very difficult for us to accept that as it is.”
The effort to forge a unified response to North Korea’s tests has been complicated by the lingering resentment over the U.S. decision to go to war against Iraq without explicit Security Council resolution. Chinese and Russian diplomats have repeatedly noted that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has influenced their decisions not to support tough resolutions on Iran and North Korea.
The Chinese and Russian resolution calls on Pyongyang to observe a 1998 moratorium on ballistic missile tests and to resume six-nation talks aimed at eliminating North Korea’s nuclear program. It also calls on U.N. members to neither purchase from nor sell technology to North Korea and to “exercise vigilance” in halting the transfer of missile technology to Pyongyang.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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Major Powers Will Return Iran Issue to U.N. Council
E.U. Talks Spur Russia, China to Join Statement
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 13, 2006; A14
PARIS, July 12 — Diplomats from the United States, Russia, China and Europe announced Wednesday that they would return to the U.N. Security Council for possible punitive action against Iran, expressing “profound disappointment” over the Tehran government’s refusal to stop its uranium enrichment program or respond to incentives offered by global powers.
“The Iranians have given no indication at all that they are ready to engage seriously on the substance of our proposals,” French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said in a statement read at the end of a meeting with his counterparts from the United States, European Union, China, Russia and Germany. “We have no choice but to return to the United Nations Security Council and take forward the process that was suspended two months ago.”
The United States and the five other major powers have offered Iran assistance in building civilian nuclear reactors as well as economic and trade incentives in return for Iran giving up its uranium enrichment program. Iranian officials have given conflicting signals about whether they would accept a plan and have repeatedly said they needed more time to consider the proposals since they were presented to Tehran on June 6.
The unanimous decision to go back to the Security Council followed a report from E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who told the foreign ministers that his meeting Tuesday with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, “gave him nothing to work with,” according to a Western diplomat who attended the meeting. He said Solana complained that he had made no progress in persuading the Iranians to begin negotiations, despite three meetings in the last five weeks.
Russia and China, which have been reluctant to join the U.S. and European nations in pressuring Iran with threats and tough talk, agreed to the statement issued Wednesday because of growing concerns over Iran’s refusal to engage in discussions, the diplomat said.
The United States and other Western nations say Iran is advancing its uranium enrichment program in an effort to produce a nuclear weapon; Iranian authorities say the program is intended only for civilian energy production.
John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Wednesday that informal discussions about a resolution ordering Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program were already beginning and that he hoped the Security Council would take action next week.
But U.S. and European officials monitoring the Paris meeting said tensions among the world leaders could likely resurface during Security Council debates over how much more time to give Iran to respond, as well as over the potential next stage of the debate — the severity of any measures that could be used to punish Iran if it continues enriching uranium.
If Iran does not stop its program, U.S. and European countries have threatened to push for economic and trade restrictions, in addition to limiting travel by Iranian officials. The measures now under consideration do not include military action.
The Wednesday statement by the foreign ministers, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, also said that should Iran halt its uranium enrichment efforts and “enter into negotiations, we would be ready to hold back from further action in the U.N. Security Council.”
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeated Wednesday that Iran would not negotiate its right to a nuclear program. “We are for negotiations, we are for dialogue,” he said at a public rally. “But of course we will not negotiate our undeniable rights with anyone.”
Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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Russia and China Resist Korea Penalty
President Bush called the leaders of Russia and China today to seek a unified response to North Korea’s test-firing of missiles, but both countries continued to dismiss the possibility of imposing the sanctions the United States wants.
North Korea also threatened to launch still more missiles while warning of “stronger physical actions” if sanctions are imposed on it.
In Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin today called for steps that would allow for “reaching a compromise” with North Korea, Reuters reported.
During an Internet question-and-answer session that was broadcast on Russian state television, Mr. Putin said he was “disappointed” that North Korea had conducted the test-firings involving seven missiles launched on Wednesday. But he also said that Pyongyang was “right” when it said it had the legal right to do so.
The Chinese government again dismissed the idea of sanctions today, saying that China and North Korea remained “friendly neighbors,” and it called for diplomacy as the best way to alleviate the tensions.
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, voiced “serious concerns” about the North Korean missile tests. But when asked if China would cut back on aid to its neighbor because of the tests, Ms. Jiang said, “At present we are not taking this aspect into consideration.”
The United Nations Security Council prepared to meet for a second day today to discuss the missile issue, with China and Russia opposing a resolution drafted by Japan and backed by the United States that called for sanctions against North Korea.
The United States ambassador to the United Nations, John R. Bolton, said before the meeting today that countries that have “leverage” with North Korea “bear the responsibility to use that.”
But the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, today played down the idea of a rift over how to respond.
He also warned against expecting a rapid agreement on how to proceed. “This is not like a sitcom, it doesn’t wrap up in 30 minutes and come to a neat, happy conclusion,” he told reporters, according to The Associated Press. R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said today that he expected that China would feel the need to take strong action to rebuke its ally in Pyongyang.
“What’s meaningful here is what governments say privately, as well as in public,” Mr. Burns told CNN. “The Chinese have given us every indication that they will stand with us.”
Mr. Burns also suggested that it might be possible to find ways to punish Pyongyang without a Security Council vote. “Countries have to take individual action as well as collective action,” Mr. Burns said.
China did announce today that it would send its chief negotiator with North Korea, Deputy Foreign Minister Wu Dawei, to Pyongyang for talks July 10-15. Mr. Wu is scheduled to meet on Friday in Beijing with an American assistant secretary of state, Christopher Hill, who represented the United States at the stalled six-nation talks on North Korea’s nuclear programs.
“Practice tells us dialogue and consultation are effective ways to solve problems,” Ms. Yu said, reconfirming China’s long-standing policy.
North Korea issued a statement today saying that Washington’s rejection of direct talks and financial pressure made it more determined to increase its missile capabilities, and insisting that it had a legal right to test missiles. The statement also responded to American claims that the test of the largest missile, the Taepodong 2, was a failure because the flight lasted only 42 second.
“Our successful missile tests were part of a regular military exercise conducted by our military to boost our self-defense,” a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman told the North’s official news agency, KCNA.
“Our military will continue with missile launch drills in the future as part of efforts to strengthen self-defense deterrent,” the spokesman said. “If anyone intends to dispute or add pressure about this, we will have to take stronger physical actions in other forms.”
He did not elaborate. But Han Song Ryol, deputy chief of North Korea’s mission to the United Nations in New York, also told the Japanese broadcaster TBS that the North would take “all-out countermeasures if sanctions are exercised.”
The Communist regime is given to making dramatic statements to increase its leverage in negotiations. But it also has a history of provocative actions, like the missile tests on Wednesday.
Analysts said North Korea may try to launch another Taepodong 2 intercontinental missile, which is theoretically capable of hitting Alaska. “There is a possibility that North Korea will fire additional missiles, based on our intelligence and assessments of the traffic of equipment and personnel in and out of launch sites,” Defense Minister Yoon Kwang Ung of South Korea told a parliamentary hearing.
Experts say it takes days, if not weeks, to transport, mount and fuel a Taepodong 2 for a test launching. Officials both in Seoul and in Tokyo reported no immediate signs of another Taepodong test. But they said North Korea may fire more short- and medium-range missiles.
Major South Korean newspapers reported today that North Korea has three or four more intermediate-range missiles on launch pads. The mass-circulation daily Chosun Ilbo said the North had barred fishermen from sailing into some areas off the coast until July 11, a possible sign that it may fire more missiles.
Even if the Taepodong 2 launch was a failure, the successful tests of other models will strengthen the market value of North Korean missiles among its clients in the Middle East, experts and officials have said.
Both Japan and South Korea fall well within range of North Korean missiles. But their reactions varied widely.
Tokyo responded swiftly by barring North Korean officials from entering Japan, and banned one of its trading vessels from Japanese ports for six months.
South Korea only indicated that it would take some sanctions, such as a reduction in food aid. But like China, it stressed that diplomacy, not pressure, was the best way to solve the crisis.
The South Korean unification minister, Lee Jong Seok, told the National Assembly today that cabinet-level meetings between the two Koreas, scheduled for next week, should go ahead, and that Seoul would press ahead with inter-Korean economic joint ventures.
John O’Neil reported from New York for this article, and Choe Sang-Hungfrom Seoul.
Are the Bush and Koizumi administrations seeking a not so covert policy of political/military containment while at the same time economic engagement? The author is pretty left wing, as you can see by the middle of the article when he starts putting down the U.S. military and refering to America as an “empire”, I do not agree with all his politics, but I think what he poses is worth examining further.
The real ‘China threat’
Mon, 21 Mar 2005 00:11:56 -0800
Summary: Has anyone thought that perhaps China is already the other super power? Growing remarkably fast, and seeking out those resources previously dominated by the US (ie Venezuelan oil) it will be interesting to see whether or not Japan, being a staunch US supporter, will re-arm itself in light of the dynamic enviroment it now finds itself in.
[Posted By alpinestar]
By Chalmers Johnson
Republished from Asia Times
What’s happening on the other side of the world.
I recall 40 years ago, when I was a new professor working in the field of Chinese and Japanese international relations, that Edwin O Reischauer once commented, “The great payoff from our victory of 1945 was a permanently disarmed Japan.” Born in Japan and a Japanese historian at Harvard, Reischauer served as US ambassador to Tokyo in the administrations of presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Strange to say, since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and particularly under the administration of George W Bush, the United States has been doing everything in its power to encourage and even accelerate Japanese rearmament.
Such a development promotes hostility between China and Japan, the two superpowers of East Asia, sabotages possible peaceful solutions in those two problem areas, Taiwan and North Korea, left over from the Chinese and Korean civil wars, and lays the foundation for a possible future Sino-American conflict that the United States would almost surely lose. It is unclear whether the ideologues and war lovers of Washington understand what they are unleashing – a possible confrontation between the world’s fastest-growing industrial economy, China, and the world’s second-most-productive, albeit declining, economy, Japan; a confrontation that the United States would have caused and in which it might well be consumed.
Let me make clear that in East Asia we are not talking about a little regime-change war of the sort that Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney advocate. After all, the most salient characteristic of international relations during the last century was the inability of the rich, established powers – Great Britain and the United States – to adjust peacefully to the emergence of new centers of power in Germany, Japan and Russia. The result was two exceedingly bloody World Wars, a 45-year-long Cold War between Russia and the “West”, and innumerable wars of national liberation (such as the quarter-century-long one in Vietnam) against the arrogance and racism of European, US and Japanese imperialism and colonialism.
The major question for the 21st century is whether this fateful inability to adjust to changes in the global power structure can be overcome. Thus far the signs are negative. Can the United States and Japan, today’s versions of rich, established powers, adjust to the re-emergence of China – the world’s oldest continuously extant civilization – this time as a modern superpower? Or is China’s ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war, when the pretensions of European civilization in its US and Japanese projections are finally put to rest? That is what is at stake.
Alice in Wonderland policies
China, Japan and the United States are the three most productive economies on Earth, but China is the fastest-growing (at an average rate of 9.5% per annum for more than two decades), whereas both the US and Japan are saddled with huge and mounting debts and, in the case of Japan, stagnant growth rates. China is today the world’s sixth-largest economy (the US and Japan being first and second) and America’s third-largest trading partner after Canada and Mexico. According to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) statisticians in their Factbook 2003, China is actually already the second-largest economy on Earth measured on a purchasing-power-parity basis – that is, in terms of what China actually produces rather than prices and exchange rates. The CIA calculates the United States’ gross domestic product (GDP) – the total value of all goods and services produced within a country – for 2003 as US$10.4 trillion and China’s as $5.7 trillion. This gives China’s 1.3 billion people a per capita GDP of $4,385.
Between 1992 and 2003, Japan was China’s largest trading partner, but in 2004 Japan fell to third place, behind the European Union and the United States. China’s trade volume for 2004 was $1.2 trillion, third in the world after the US and Germany, and well ahead of Japan’s $1.07 trillion. China’s trade with the US grew some 34% in 2004 and has turned the California cities of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland into the three busiest seaports in the United States.
The truly significant trade development of 2004 was the EU’s emergence as China’s biggest economic partner, suggesting the possibility of a Sino-European cooperative bloc confronting a less vital Japanese-American one. As the Financial Times observed, “Three years after its entry into the World Trade Organization [in 2001], China’s influence in global commerce is no longer merely significant. It is crucial.” For example, most Dell computers sold in the US are made in China, as are the digital-video-disc players of Japan’s Funai Electric Co. Funai annually exports some 10 million DVD players and television sets from China to the United States, where they are sold primarily in Wal-Mart stores. China’s trade with Europe in 2004 was worth $177.2 billion, with the United States $169.6 billion, and with Japan $167.8 billion.
China’s growing economic weight in the world is widely recognized and applauded, but it is China’s growth rates and their effect on the future global balance of power that the US and Japan, rightly or wrongly, fear. The CIA’s National Intelligence Council forecasts that China’s GDP will equal Britain’s in 2005, Germany’s in 2009, Japan’s in 2017, and the United States’ in 2042. But Shahid Javed Burki, former vice president of the World Bank’s China Department and a former finance minister of Pakistan, predicts that by 2025 China will probably have a GDP of $25 trillion in terms of purchasing power parity and will have become the world’s largest economy, followed by the United States at $20 trillion and India at about $13 trillion – and Burki’s analysis is based on a conservative prediction of a 6% Chinese growth rate sustained over the next two decades. He foresees Japan’s inevitable decline because its population will begin to shrink drastically after about 2010. Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs reports that the number of men in Japan already declined by 0.01% in 2004; and some demographers, it notes, anticipate that by the end of the century the country’s population could shrink by nearly two-thirds, from 127.7 million today to 45 million, the same population it had in 1910.
By contrast, China’s population is likely to stabilize at approximately 1.4 billion people and is heavily weighted toward males. (According to Howard French of the New York Times, in one large southern city the government-imposed one-child-per-family policy and the availability of sonograms have resulted in a ratio of 129 boys born for every 100 girls; 147 boys for every 100 girls for couples seeking second or third children. The 2000 census for the country as a whole put the reported sex ratio at birth at about 117 boys to 100 girls.) Chinese domestic economic growth is expected to continue for decades, reflecting the pent-up demand of its huge population, relatively low levels of personal debt, and a dynamic underground economy not recorded in official statistics. Most important, China’s external debt is relatively small and easily covered by its reserves; whereas both the US and Japan are approximately $7 trillion in the red, which is worse for Japan, with less than half the US population and economic clout.
Ironically, part of Japan’s debt is a product of its efforts to help prop up America’s global imperial stance. For example, in the period since the end of the Cold War, Japan has subsidized America’s military bases in Japan to the staggering tune of approximately $70 billion. Refusing to pay for its profligate consumption patterns and military expenditures through taxes on its own citizens, the United States is financing these outlays by going into debt to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and India. This situation has become increasingly unstable as the US requires capital imports of at least $2 billion per day to pay for its governmental expenditures. Any decision by East Asian central banks to move significant parts of their foreign-exchange reserves out of the US dollar and into the euro or other currencies to protect themselves from dollar depreciation would produce the mother of all financial crises.
Japan still possesses the world’s largest foreign-exchange reserves, which at the end of January stood at around $841 billion. But China sits on a $609.9 billion pile of dollars (as of the end of 2004), earned from its trade surpluses with the US. Meanwhile, the US government and Japanese followers of George W Bush insult China in every way they can, particularly over the status of China’s breakaway province, the island of Taiwan. The distinguished economic analyst William Greider recently noted, “Any profligate debtor who insults his banker is unwise, to put it mildly … American leadership has … become increasingly delusional – I mean that literally – and blind to the adverse balance of power accumulating against it.”
The Bush administration is unwisely threatening China by urging Japan to rearm and by promising Taiwan that, should China use force to prevent a Taiwanese declaration of independence, the US will go to war on its behalf. It is hard to imagine more shortsighted, irresponsible policies, but in light of the Bush administration’s Alice in Wonderland war in Iraq, the acute anti-Americanism it has generated globally, and the politicization of America’s intelligence services, it seems possible that the US and Japan might actually precipitate a war with China over Taiwan.
Japan rearms
Since the end of World War II, and particularly since gaining its independence in 1952, Japan has subscribed to a pacifist foreign policy. It has resolutely refused to maintain offensive military forces or to become part of America’s global military system. Japan did not, for example, participate in the 1991 war against Iraq, nor has it joined collective security agreements in which it would have to match the military contributions of its partners. Since the signing in 1952 of the Japan-United States Security Treaty, the country has officially been defended from so-called external threats by US forces located on some 91 bases on the Japanese mainland and the island of Okinawa. The US 7th Fleet even has its home port at the old Japanese naval base of Yokosuka. Japan not only subsidizes these bases but subscribes to the public fiction that the US forces are present only for its defense. In fact, Japan has no control over how and where the US employs its land, sea and air forces based on Japanese territory, and the Japanese and US governments have until quite recently finessed the issue simply by never discussing it.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the United States has repeatedly pressured Japan to revise Article 9 of its constitution (renouncing the use of force except as a matter of self-defense) and become what US officials call a “normal nation”. For example, last August 13, then secretary of state Colin Powell stated baldly in Tokyo that if Japan ever hoped to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council it would first have to get rid of its pacifist constitution. Japan’s claim to a Security Council seat is based on the fact that, although its share of global GDP is only 14%, it pays 20% of the total UN budget. Powell’s remark was blatant interference in Japan’s internal affairs, but it merely echoed many messages delivered by former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, the leader of a reactionary clique in Washington that has worked for years to remilitarize Japan and so enlarge a major new market for US arms. Its members include Torkel Patterson, Robin Sakoda, David Asher and James Kelly at the State Department; Michael Green on the National Security Council’s staff; and numerous uniformed military officers at the Pentagon and at the headquarters of the Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
America’s intention is to turn Japan into what Washington neo-conservatives like to call the “Britain of the Far East” – and then use it as a proxy in checkmating North Korea and balancing China. On October 11, 2000, Michael Green, then a member of Armitage Associates, wrote, “We see the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain as a model for the [US-Japan] alliance.” Japan has so far not resisted this US pressure since it complements a renewed nationalism among Japanese voters and a fear that a burgeoning capitalist China threatens Japan’s established position as the leading economic power in East Asia. Japanese officials also claim that the country feels threatened by North Korea’s developing nuclear and missile programs, although they know that the North Korean standoff could be resolved virtually overnight – if the Bush administration would cease trying to overthrow the Pyongyang regime and instead deliver on US trade promises (in return for North Korea’s agreement to give up its nuclear-weapons program). Instead, on February 25, the State Department announced that “the US will refuse North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s demand for a guarantee of ‘no hostile intent’ to get Pyongyang back into negotiations over its nuclear-weapons programs”. And on March 7, Bush nominated John Bolton to be US ambassador to the United Nations even though North Korea has refused to negotiate with him because of his insulting remarks about the country.
Japan’s remilitarization worries a segment of the Japanese public and is opposed throughout East Asia by all the nations Japan victimized during World War II, including China, both Koreas, and even Australia. As a result, the Japanese government has launched a stealth program of incremental rearmament. Since 1992, it has enacted 21 major pieces of security-related legislation, nine in 2004 alone. These began with the International Peace Cooperation Law of 1992, which for the first time authorized Japan to send troops to participate in UN peacekeeping operations.
Remilitarization has since taken many forms, including expanding military budgets, legitimizing and legalizing the sending of military forces abroad, a commitment to join the US missile defense (“Star Wars”) program – something the Canadians refused to do in February – and a growing acceptance of military solutions to international problems. This gradual process was greatly accelerated in 2001 by the simultaneous coming to power of President George W Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Koizumi made his first visit to the United States in July of that year and, in May 2003, received the ultimate imprimatur, an invitation to Bush’s “ranch” in Crawford, Texas. Shortly thereafter, Koizumi agreed to send a contingent of 550 troops to Iraq for a year, extended their stay for another year in 2004 and, on October 14, personally endorsed Bush’s re-election.
A new nuclear giant in the making?
Koizumi has appointed to his cabinets over the years hardline anti-Chinese, pro-Taiwanese politicians. Phil Deans, director of the Contemporary China Institute in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, observes, “There has been a remarkable growth of pro-Taiwan sentiment in Japan. There is not one pro-China figure in the Koizumi cabinet.” Members of the latest Koizumi cabinet include Defense Agency chief Yoshinori Ono and Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura, both ardent militarists; Machimura is a member of the right-wing faction of former prime minister Yoshiro Mori, which supports an independent Taiwan and maintains extensive covert ties with Taiwanese leaders and businessmen.
Taiwan, it should be remembered, was a Japanese colony from 1895-1945. Unlike the harsh Japanese military rule over Korea from 1910-45, it experienced relatively benign governance by a civilian Japanese administration. The island, while bombed by the Allies, was not a battleground during World War II, although it was harshly occupied by the Chinese Nationalists (Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang) immediately after the war. Today, as a result, many Taiwanese speak Japanese and have a favorable view of Japan. Taiwan is virtually the only place in East Asia where Japanese are fully welcomed and liked.
Bush and Koizumi have developed elaborate plans for military cooperation between their two countries. Crucial to such plans is the scrapping of the Japanese constitution of 1947. If nothing gets in the way, Koizumi’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) intends to introduce a new constitution on the occasion of the party’s 50th anniversary this coming November. This has been deemed appropriate because the LDP’s founding charter of 1955 set as a basic party goal the “establishment of Japan’s own constitution” – a reference to the fact that General Douglas MacArthur’s post-World War II occupation headquarters actually drafted the current constitution. The original LDP policy statement also called for “the eventual removal of US troops from Japanese territory”, which may be one of the hidden purposes behind Japan’s urge to rearm.
A major goal of the Americans is to gain Japan’s active participation in their massively expensive missile defense program. The Bush administration is seeking, among other things, an end to Japan’s ban on the export of military technology, since it wants Japanese engineers to help solve some of the technical problems of its so-far-failing Star Wars system. The United States has also been actively negotiating with Japan to relocate the US Army’s 1st Corps from Fort Lewis, Washington, to Camp Zama, southwest of Tokyo in the densely populated prefecture of Kanagawa, whose capital is Yokohama. These US forces in Japan would then be placed under the command of a four-star general, who would be on a par with regional commanders such as Centcom commander John Abizaid, who lords it over Iraq and South Asia. The new command would be in charge of all US Army “force projection” operations beyond East Asia and would inevitably implicate Japan in the daily military operations of the American empire. Garrisoning even a small headquarters, much less the whole 1st Corps made up of an estimated 40,000 soldiers, in such a sophisticated and centrally located prefecture as Kanagawa is also guaranteed to generate intense public opposition as well as rapes, fights, car accidents and other incidents similar to the ones that occur daily in Okinawa.
Meanwhile, Japan intends to upgrade its Defense Agency (Boeicho) into a ministry and possibly develop its own nuclear-weapons capability. Goading the Japanese government to assert itself militarily may well cause the country to go nuclear in order to “deter” China and North Korea, while freeing Japan from its dependency on the US “nuclear umbrella”. Military analyst Richard Tanter notes that Japan already has “the undoubted capacity to satisfy all three core requirements for a usable nuclear weapon: a military nuclear device, a sufficiently accurate targeting system, and at least one adequate delivery system”. Japan’s combination of fully functioning fission and breeder reactors plus nuclear-fuel reprocessing facilities gives it the ability to build advanced thermonuclear weapons; its H-II and H-IIA rockets, in-flight refueling capacity for fighter bombers, and military-grade surveillance satellites assure that it could deliver its weapons accurately to regional targets. What it currently lacks are the platforms (such as submarines) for a secure retaliatory force in order to dissuade a nuclear adversary from launching a preemptive first strike.
The Taiwanese knot
Japan may talk a lot about the dangers of North Korea, but the real objective of its rearmament is China. This has become clear from the ways in which Japan has recently injected itself into the single most delicate and dangerous issue of East Asian international relations – the problem of Taiwan. Japan invaded China in 1931 and was its wartime tormentor thereafter as well as Taiwan’s colonial overlord. Even then, however, Taiwan was viewed as a part of China, as the United States has long recognized. What remains to be resolved are the terms and timing of Taiwan’s reintegration with the Chinese mainland. This process was deeply complicated by the fact that in 1987 Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, who had retreated to Taiwan in 1949 at the end of the Chinese civil war (and were protected there by the US 7th Fleet ever after), finally ended martial law on the island. Taiwan has since matured into a vibrant democracy and the Taiwanese are now starting to display their own mixed opinions about their future.
In 2000, the Taiwanese people ended a long monopoly of power by the Nationalists and gave the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), headed by President Chen Shui-bian, an electoral victory. A native Taiwanese (as distinct from the large contingent of mainlanders who came to Taiwan in the baggage train of Chiang’s defeated armies), Chen stands for an independent Taiwan, as does his party. By contrast, the Nationalists, together with a powerful mainlander splinter party, the People First Party headed by James Soong (Song Chuyu), hope to see an eventual peaceful unification of Taiwan with China. On March 7, the Bush administration complicated these delicate relations by nominating John Bolton to be the US ambassador to the United Nations. He is an avowed advocate of Taiwanese independence and was once a paid consultant to the Taiwanese government.
Last May, in a very close and contested election, Chen Shui-bian was re-elected, and on May 20, the notorious right-wing Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara attended his inauguration in Taipei. (Ishihara believes that Japan’s 1937 Rape of Nanking was “a lie made up by the Chinese”.) Though Chen won with only 50.1% of the vote, this was still a sizable increase over his 33.9% in 2000, when the opposition was divided. The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately appointed Koh Se-kai as its informal ambassador to Japan. Koh has lived in Japan for some 33 years and maintains extensive ties to senior political and academic figures there. China responded that it would “completely annihilate” any moves toward Taiwanese independence – even if it meant scuttling the 2008 Beijing Olympics and good relations with the United States.
Contrary to the machinations of American neo-cons and Japanese rightists, however, the Taiwanese people have revealed themselves to be open to negotiating with China over the timing and terms of reintegration. On August 23, the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan’s parliament) enacted changes in its voting rules to prevent Chen from amending the constitution to favor independence, as he had promised to do in his re-election campaign. This action drastically lowered the risk of conflict with China. Probably influencing the Legislative Yuan was the warning issued on August 22 by Singapore’s new prime minister, Lee Hsien-loong: “If Taiwan goes for independence, Singapore will not recognize it. In fact, no Asian country will recognize it. China will fight. Win or lose, Taiwan will be devastated.”
The next important development was parliamentary elections on December 11. President Chen called his campaign a referendum on his pro-independence policy and asked for a mandate to carry out his reforms. Instead he lost decisively. The opposition Nationalists and the People First Party won 114 seats in the 225-seat parliament, while Chen’s DPP and its allies took only 101. (Ten seats went to independents.) The Nationalist leader, Lien Chan, whose party won 79 seats to the DPP’s 89, said, “Today we saw extremely clearly that all the people want stability in this country.”
Chen’s failure to capture control of parliament also meant that a proposed purchase of $19.6 billion worth of arms from the United States was doomed. The deal included guided-missile destroyers, P-3 anti-submarine aircraft, diesel submarines, and advanced Patriot PAC-3 anti-missile systems. The Nationalists and James Soong’s supporters regard the price as too high and mostly a financial sop to the Bush administration, which has been pushing the sale since 2001. They also believe the weapons would not improve Taiwan’s security.
On December 27, mainland China issued its fifth Defense White Paper on the goals of the country’s national defense efforts. As one longtime observer, Robert Bedeski, noted, “At first glance, the Defense White Paper is a hardline statement on territorial sovereignty and emphasizes China’s determination not to tolerate any moves at secession, independence or separation. However, the next paragraph … indicates a willingness to reduce tensions in the Taiwan Strait: so long as the Taiwan authorities accept the one-China principle and stop their separatist activities aimed at ‘Taiwan independence’, cross-strait talks can be held at any time on officially ending the state of hostility between the two sides.”
It appears that this is also the way the Taiwanese read the message. On February 24, President Chen met for the first time since October 2000 with chairman James Soong of the People First Party. The two leaders, holding diametrically opposed views on relations with the mainland, nonetheless signed a joint statement outlining 10 points of consensus. They pledged to try to open full transport and commercial links across the Taiwan Strait, increase trade, and ease the ban on investments in China by many Taiwanese business sectors. The mainland reacted favorably at once. Astonishingly, this led Chen to say that he “would not rule out Taiwan’s eventual reunion with China, provided Taiwan’s 23 million people accepted it”.
If the United States and Japan left China and Taiwan to their own devices, it seems possible that they would work out a modus vivendi. Taiwan has already invested some $150 billion in the mainland, and the two economies are becoming more closely integrated every day. There also seems to be a growing recognition in Taiwan that it would be very difficult to live as an independent Chinese-speaking nation alongside a country with 1.3 billion people, 9.6 million square kilometers of territory, a rapidly growing $1.4 trillion economy, and aspirations to regional leadership in East Asia. Rather than declaring its independence, Taiwan might try to seek a status somewhat like that of French Canada – a kind of looser version of a Chinese Quebec under nominal central government control but maintaining separate institutions, laws and customs.
The mainland would be so relieved by this solution it would probably accept it, particularly if it could be achieved before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China fears that Taiwanese radicals want to declare independence a month or two before those Olympics, betting that China would not attack then because of its huge investment in the forthcoming Games. Most observers believe, however, that China would have no choice but to go to war because failure to do so would invite a domestic revolution against the Chinese Communist Party for violating the national integrity of China.
Sino-American, Sino-Japanese relations spiral downward
It has long been an article of neo-con faith that the US must do everything in its power to prevent the development of rival power centers, whether friendly or hostile. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this meant they turned their attention to China as one of the United States’ probable next enemies. In 2001, having come to power, the neo-conservatives shifted much of the US’s nuclear targeting from Russia to China. They also began regular high-level military talks with Taiwan over defense of the island, ordered a shift of US Army personnel and supplies to the Asia-Pacific region, and worked strenuously to promote the remilitarization of Japan.
On April 1, 2001, a US Navy EP-3E Aries II electronic spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter off the south China coast. The US aircraft was on a mission to provoke Chinese radar defenses and then record the transmissions and procedures the Chinese used in sending up interceptors. The Chinese jet went down and the pilot lost his life, while the US plane landed safely on Hainan Island and its crew of 24 spies was well treated by the Chinese authorities.
It soon became clear that China was not interested in a confrontation, since many of its most important investors have their headquarters in the United States. But it could not instantly return the crew of the spy plane without risking powerful domestic criticism for obsequiousness in the face of provocation. It therefore delayed for 11 days until it received a pro forma US apology for causing the death of a Chinese pilot on the edge of the country’s territorial airspace and for making an unauthorized landing at a Chinese military airfield. Meanwhile, the US media had labeled the crew as “hostages”, encouraged their relatives to tie yellow ribbons around neighborhood trees, hailed the president for doing “a first-rate job” to free them, and endlessly criticized China for its “state-controlled media”. They carefully avoided mentioning that the United States enforces around the country a 200-mile aircraft-intercept zone that stretches far beyond territorial waters.
On April 25, 2001, during an interview on national television, President Bush was asked whether he would ever use “the full force of the American military” against China for the sake of Taiwan. He responded, “Whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend herself.” This was US policy until September 11, 2001, when China enthusiastically joined the “war on terrorism” and Bush and his neo-cons became preoccupied with their “axis of evil” and making war on Iraq. The United States and China were also enjoying extremely close economic relations, which the big-business wing of the Republican Party did not want to jeopardize.
The Middle East thus trumped the neo-cons’ Asia policy. While the Americans were distracted, China went about its economic business for almost four years, emerging as a powerhouse of Asia and a potential organizing node for Asian economies. Rapidly industrializing China also developed a voracious appetite for petroleum and other raw materials, which brought it into direct competition with the world’s largest importers, the US and Japan.
By the summer of 2004, Bush strategists, distracted as they were by Iraq, again became alarmed over China’s growing power and its potential to challenge US hegemony in East Asia. The Republican Party platform unveiled at its convention in New York in August proclaimed that “America will help Taiwan defend itself”. During that summer, the US Navy also carried out exercises it dubbed “Operation Summer Pulse ‘04”, which involved the simultaneous deployment at sea of seven of the United States’ 12 carrier strike groups. A US carrier strike group includes an aircraft carrier (usually with nine or 10 squadrons of planes, a total of about 85 aircraft in all), a guided-missile cruiser, two guided-missile destroyers, an attack submarine, and a combination ammunition-oiler-supply ship. Deploying seven such armadas at the same time was unprecedented – and very expensive. Even though only three of the carrier strike groups were sent to the Pacific and no more than one was patrolling off Taiwan at a time, the Chinese became deeply alarmed that this marked the beginning of an attempted rerun of 19th-century gunboat diplomacy aimed at them.
This US show of force and Chen Shui-bian’s polemics preceding the December elections also seemed to over-stimulate the Taiwanese. On October 26 in Beijing, then secretary of state Colin Powell tried to calm things down by declaring to the press, “Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation, and that remains our policy, our firm policy … We want to see both sides not take unilateral action that would prejudice an eventual outcome, a reunification that all parties are seeking.”
Powell’s statement seemed unequivocal enough, but significant doubts persisted about whether he had much influence within the Bush administration or whether he could speak for Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Early in 2005, Porter Goss, the new director of the CIA, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Admiral Lowell Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, all told Congress that China’s military modernization was going ahead much faster than previously believed. They warned that the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review, the every-four-years formal assessment of US military policy, would take a much harsher view of the threat posed by China than the 2001 overview.
In this context, the Bush administration, perhaps influenced by the election of November 2 and the transition from Colin Powell’s to Condoleezza Rice’s State Department, played its most dangerous card. On February 19 in Washington, it signed a new military agreement with Japan. For the first time, Japan joined the US administration in identifying security in the Taiwan Strait as a “common strategic objective”. Nothing could have been more alarming to China’s leaders than the revelation that Japan had decisively ended six decades of official pacifism by claiming a right to intervene in the Taiwan Strait.
It is possible that, in the years to come, Taiwan itself may recede in importance to be replaced by even more direct Sino-Japanese confrontations. This would be an ominous development indeed, one that the United States would be responsible for having abetted but would certainly be unable to control. The kindling for a Sino-Japanese explosion has long been in place. After all, during World War II the Japanese killed approximately 23 million Chinese throughout East Asia – higher casualties than the staggering ones suffered by Russia at the hands of the Nazis – and yet Japan refuses to atone for or even acknowledge its historical war crimes. Quite the opposite, it continues to rewrite history, portraying itself as the liberator of Asia and a victim of European and US imperialism.
In – for the Chinese – a painful act of symbolism, after becoming Japanese prime minister in 2001, Junichiro Koizumi made his first official visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a practice that he has repeated every year since. Koizumi likes to say to foreigners that he is merely honoring Japan’s war dead. Yasukuni, however, is anything but a military cemetery or a war memorial. It was established in 1869 by Emperor Meiji as a Shinto shrine (though with its torii archways made of steel rather than the traditional red-painted wood) to commemorate the lives lost in campaigns to return direct imperial rule to Japan. During World War II, Japanese militarists took over the shrine and used it to promote patriotic and nationalistic sentiments. Today, Yasukuni is said to be dedicated to the spirits of approximately 2.4 million Japanese who have died in the country’s wars, both civil and foreign, since 1853.
In 1978, for reasons that have never been made clear, General Hideki Tojo and six other wartime leaders who had been hanged by the Allied Powers as war criminals were collectively enshrined at Yasukuni. The current chief priest of the shrine denies that they were war criminals, saying, “The winner passed judgment on the loser.” In a museum on the shrine’s grounds, there is a fully restored Mitsubishi Zero Type 52 fighter aircraft that a placard says made its combat debut in 1940 over Chongqing, then the wartime capital of the Republic of China. It was undoubtedly not an accident that, in Chongqing during the 2004 Asian Cup soccer finals, Chinese spectators booed the playing of the Japanese national anthem. Yasukuni’s leaders have always claimed close ties to the imperial household, but the late Emperor Hirohito last visited the shrine in 1975 and Emperor Akihito has never been there.
The Chinese regard Yasukuni visits by the Japanese prime minister as insulting, somewhat comparable perhaps to Britain’s Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi for a costume party. Nonetheless, Beijing has tried in recent years to appease Tokyo. Chinese President Hu Jintao rolled out the red carpet for Yohei Kono, Speaker of the Japanese Diet’s House of Representatives, when he visited China last September; he appointed Wang Yi, a senior moderate in the Chinese foreign service, as ambassador to Japan; and he proposed joint Sino-Japanese exploration of possible oil resources in the offshore seas that both sides claim. All such gestures were ignored by Koizumi, who insists that he intends to go on visiting Yasukuni.
Matters came to a head in November at two important summit meetings: an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering in Santiago, followed immediately by an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting with the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea that took place in Vientiane. In Santiago, Hu Jintao directly asked Koizumi to cease his Yasukuni visits for the sake of Sino-Japanese friendship. Seemingly as a reply, Koizumi went out of his way to insult Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Vientiane. He said to Premier Wen, “It’s about time for [China’s] graduation” as a recipient of Japanese foreign-aid payments, implying that Japan intended unilaterally to end its 25-year-old financial-aid program. The word “graduation” also conveyed the insulting implication that Japan saw itself as a teacher guiding China, the student.
Koizumi next gave a little speech about the history of Japanese efforts to normalize relations with China, to which Wen replied, “Do you know how many Chinese people died in the Sino-Japanese war?” Wen went on to suggest that China had always regarded Japan’s foreign aid, which he said China did not need, as payments in lieu of compensation for damage done by Japan in China during the war. He pointed out that China had never asked for reparations from Japan and that Japan’s payments amounted to about $30 billion over 25 years, a fraction of the $80 billion Germany has paid to the victims of Nazi atrocities even though Japan is the more populous and richer country.
On November 10, the Japanese navy discovered a Chinese nuclear submarine in Japanese territorial waters near Okinawa. Although the Chinese apologized and called the sub’s intrusion a “mistake”, Defense Agency director Ono gave it wide publicity, further inflaming Japanese public opinion against China. From that point on, relations between Beijing and Tokyo have gone steadily downhill, culminating in the Japanese-American announcement that Taiwan was of special military concern to both of them, which China denounced as an “abomination”.
Over time this downward spiral in relations will probably prove damaging to the interests of both the United States and Japan, but particularly to those of Japan. China is unlikely to retaliate directly but is even less likely to forget what has happened – and it has a great deal of leverage over Japan. After all, Japanese prosperity increasingly depends on its ties to China. The reverse is not true. Contrary to what one might expect, Japanese exports to China jumped 70% between 2001 and 2004, providing the main impetus for a sputtering Japanese economic recovery. Some 18,000 Japanese companies have operations in China. In 2003, Japan passed the United States as the top destination for Chinese students going abroad for a university education. Nearly 70,000 Chinese students now study at Japanese universities, compared with 65,000 at US academic institutions. These close and lucrative relations are at risk if the US and Japan pursue their militarization of the region.
A multipolar world
Tony Karon of Time magazine has observed, “All over the world, new bonds of trade and strategic cooperation are being forged around the US. China has not only begun to displace the US as the dominant player in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization (APEC), it is fast emerging as the major trading partner to some of Latin America’s largest economies … French foreign-policy think-tanks have long promoted the goal of ‘multipolarity’ in a post-Cold War world, ie, the preference for many different, competing power centers rather than the ‘unipolarity’ of the US as a single hyperpower. Multipolarity is no longer simply a strategic goal. It is an emerging reality.”
Evidence is easily found of multipolarity and China’s prominent role in promoting it. Just note China’s expanding relations with Iran, the European Union, Latin America and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Iran is the second-largest OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil producer after Saudi Arabia and has long had friendly relations with Japan, which is its leading trading partner. (Ninety-eight percent of Japan’s imports from Iran are oil.) On February 18, 2004, a consortium of Japanese companies and the Iranian government signed a memorandum of agreement to develop jointly Iran’s Azadegan oilfield, one of the world’s largest, in a project worth $2.8 billion. The US has opposed Japan’s support for Iran, causing Congressman Brad Sherman (Democrat, California) to charge that Bush had been bribed into accepting the Japanese-Iranian deal by Koizumi’s dispatch of 550 Japanese troops to Iraq, adding a veneer of international support for the US war there.
But the long-standing Iranian-Japanese alignment began to change in late 2004. On October 28, China’s oil major, the Sinopec Group, signed an agreement with Iran worth between $70 billion and $100 billion to develop the giant Yadavaran natural-gas field. China agreed to buy 250 million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Iran over 25 years. It is the largest deal Iran has signed with a foreign country since 1996 and will include several other benefits, including China’s assistance in building numerous ships to deliver the LNG to Chinese ports. Iran also committed itself to exporting 150,000 barrels of crude oil per day to China for 25 years at market prices.
Iran’s oil minister, Bijan Zanganeh, on a visit to Beijing noted that Iran is China’s biggest foreign oil supplier and said his country wants to be China’s long-term business partner. He told China Business Weekly that Tehran would like to replace Japan with China as the biggest customer for its oil and gas. The reason is obvious: US pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear-power development program and the Bush administration’s declared intention to take Iran to the UN Security Council for the imposition of sanctions (which a Chinese vote could veto). On November 6, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing paid a rare visit to Tehran. In meetings with Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, Li said that Beijing would indeed consider vetoing any US effort to sanction Iran at the Security Council. The US has also charged China with selling nuclear and missile technology to Iran.
China and Iran already did a record $4 billion worth of two-way business in 2003. Projects included China’s building of the first stage of Tehran’s Metro rail system and a contract to build a second link worth $836 million. China will be the top contender to build four other planned lines, including a 30-kilometer track to the airport. In February 2003, Chery Automobile Co, the eighth-largest auto maker in China, opened its first overseas production plant in Iran. Today, it manufactures 30,000 Chery cars annually in northeastern Iran. Beijing is also negotiating to construct a 386-kilometer pipeline from Iran to the northern Caspian Sea to connect with the long-distance Kazakhstan to Xinjiang pipeline that it began building last October. The Kazakh pipeline has a capacity to deliver 10 million tons of oil to China per year. Despite US bluster and belligerence, Iran is anything but isolated in today’s world.
The European Union is China’s largest trading partner and China is the EU’s second-largest trading partner (after the United States). Back in 1989, to protest the suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the EU imposed a ban on military sales to China. The only other countries so treated are true international pariahs such as Myanmar, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Even North Korea is not subject to a formal European arms embargo. Given that the Chinese leadership has changed several times since 1989 and as a gesture of goodwill, the EU has announced its intention to lift the embargo. Jacques Chirac, the French president, is one of the strongest proponents of the idea of replacing US hegemony with a “multipolar world”. On a visit to Beijing in October, he said that China and France share “a common vision of the world” and that lifting the embargo will “mark a significant milestone: a moment when Europe had to make a choice between the strategic interests of America and China – and chose China”.
In his trip to Western Europe in February, Bush repeatedly said, “There is deep concern in our country that a transfer of weapons would be a transfer of technology to China, which would change the balance of relations between China and Taiwan.” In early February, the House of Representatives voted 411-3 in favor of a resolution condemning the potential EU move. The Europeans and Chinese contend that the Bush administration has vastly overstated its case, that no weapons capable of changing the balance of power are involved, and that the EU is not aiming to win massive new defense contracts from China but to strengthen mutual economic relations in general. Immediately after Bush’s tour of Europe, the EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, arrived in Beijing for his first official visit. The purpose of his trip, he said, was to stress the need to create a new strategic partnership between China and Europe.
Washington has buttressed its hardline stance with the release of many new intelligence estimates depicting China as a formidable military threat. Whether this intelligence is politicized or not, it argues that China’s military modernization is aimed precisely at countering the US Navy’s carrier strike groups, which would assumedly be used in the Taiwan Strait in case of war. China is certainly building a large fleet of nuclear submarines and is an active participant in the EU’s Galileo Project to produce a satellite navigation system not controlled by the US military. The Defense Department worries that Beijing might adapt the Galileo technology to anti-satellite purposes. US military analysts are also impressed by China’s launch, on October 15, 2003, of a spacecraft containing a single astronaut who was successfully returned to Earth the following day. Only the former USSR and the United States had previously sent humans into outer space.
China already has 500-550 short-range ballistic missiles deployed opposite Taiwan and has 24 CSS-4 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with a range of 13,000 kilometers to deter a US missile attack on the Chinese mainland. According to Richard Fisher, a researcher at the US-based Center for Security Policy, “The forces that China is putting in place right now will probably be more than sufficient to deal with a single American aircraft-carrier battle group.” Arthur Lauder, a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, concurred. He said the Chinese military “is the only one being developed anywhere in the world today that is specifically configured to fight the United States of America”.
The US obviously cannot wish away this capability, but it has no evidence that China is doing anything more than countering the threats coming from the Bush administration. It seeks to avoid war with Taiwan and the US by deterring them from separating Taiwan from China. For this reason, China’s pro forma legislature, the National People’s Congress, passed a law this month making secession from China illegal and authorizing the use of force in case a territory tried to leave the country.
The Japanese government, of course, backs the US position that China constitutes a military threat to the entire region. Interestingly enough, however, the Australian government of Prime Minister John Howard, a loyal ally of the United States when it comes to Iraq, has decided to defy Bush on the issue of lifting the European arms embargo. Australia places a high premium on good relations with China and is hoping to negotiate a free-trade agreement between the two countries. Canberra has therefore decided to support the EU in lifting the 15-year-old embargo. Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder both say, “It will happen.”
The United States has long proclaimed that Latin America is part of its “sphere of influence”, and because of that most foreign countries have to tread carefully in doing business there. However, in the search for fuel and minerals for its booming economy, China is openly courting many Latin American countries regardless of what Washington thinks. On November 15, President Hu Jintao ended a five-day visit to Brazil during which he signed more than a dozen accords aimed at expanding Brazil’s sales to China and Chinese investment in Brazil. Under one agreement Brazil will export to China as much as $800 million annually in beef and poultry. In turn, China agreed with Brazil’s state-controlled oil company to finance a $1.3 billion gas pipeline between Rio de Janeiro and Bahia once technical studies are completed. China and Brazil also entered into a “strategic partnership” with the objective of raising the value of bilateral trade from $10 billion in 2004 to $20 billion by 2007. President Hu said this partnership symbolized “a new international political order that favored developing countries”.
In the weeks that followed, China signed important investment and trade agreements with Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile and Cuba. Of particular interest, in December, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela visited China and agreed to give it wide-ranging access to his country’s oil reserves. Venezuela is the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter and normally sells about 60% of its output to the United States, but under the new agreements China will be allowed to operate 15 mature oilfields in eastern Venezuela. China will invest about $350 million to extract oil and another $60 million in natural-gas wells.
China is also working to integrate East Asia’s smaller countries into some form of new economic and political community. Such an alignment, if it comes into being, will certainly erode US and Japanese influence in the area. In November, the 10 nations that make up ASEAN (Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam), met in the Laotian capital Vientiane, joined by the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea. The United States was not invited and the Japanese officials seemed uncomfortable being there. The purpose was to plan for an East Asian summit meeting to be held next November to begin creating an “East Asia Community”. Last December, the ASEAN countries and China also agreed to create a free-trade zone among themselves by 2010.
According to Edward Cody of the Washington Post, “Trade between China and the 10 ASEAN countries has increased about 20% a year since 1990, and the pace has picked up in the last several years.” This trade hit $78.2 billion in 2003 and was reported to be about $100 billion by the end of 2004. As senior Japanese political commentator Yoichi Funabashi observed, “The ratio of intra-regional trade [in East Asia] to worldwide trade was nearly 52% in 2002. Though this figure is lower than the 62% in the EU, it tops the 46% of NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. East Asia is thus becoming less dependent on the US in terms of trade.”
China is the primary moving force behind these efforts. According to Funabashi, China’s leadership plans to use the country’s explosive economic growth and its ever more powerful links to regional trading partners to marginalize the United States and isolate Japan in East Asia. He argues that the United States underestimated how deeply distrusted it had become in the region thanks to its narrow-minded and ideological response to the East Asian financial crisis of 1997, which it largely caused. On November 30, Michael Reiss, the director of policy planning in the State Department, said in Tokyo, “The US, as a power in the Western Pacific, has an interest in East Asia. We would be unhappy about any plans to exclude the US from the framework of dialogue and cooperation in this region.” But it is probably already too late for the Bush administration to do much more than delay the arrival of a China-dominated East Asian Community, particularly because of declining US economic and financial strength.
For Japan, the choices are more difficult still. Sino-Japanese enmity has had a long history in East Asia, always with disastrous outcomes. Before World War II, one of Japan’s most influential writers on Chinese affairs, Hotsumi Ozaki, prophetically warned that Japan, by refusing to adjust to the Chinese revolution and instead making war on it, would only radicalize the Chinese people and contribute to the coming to power of the Chinese Communist Party. He spent his life working on the question “Why should the success of the Chinese revolution be to Japan’s disadvantage?” In 1944, the Japanese government hanged Ozaki as a traitor, but his question remains as relevant today as it was in the late 1930s.
Why should China’s emergence as a rich, successful country be to the disadvantage of either Japan or the United States? History teaches us that the least intelligent response to this development would be to try to stop it through military force. As a Hong Kong wisecrack has it, China has just had a couple of bad centuries and now it’s back. The world needs to adjust peacefully to its legitimate claims – one of which is for other nations to stop militarizing the Taiwan problem – while checking unreasonable Chinese efforts to impose its will on the region. Unfortunately, the trend of events in East Asia suggests we may yet see a repetition of the last Sino-Japanese conflict, only this time the US is unlikely to be on the winning side.
(Source citations and other references for this article are available on the website of the Japan Policy Research Institute.)
Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute. The first two books in his Blowback Trilogy – Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic – are now available in paperback. The third volume is being written. This article appeared previously on Tomdispatch http://www.tomdispatch.com/ and is used here by permission.
…coming soon…
6 Missiles Fired by North Korea; Tests Protested
TOKYO, Wednesday, July 5 — North Korea test-fired at least six missiles over the Sea of Japan on Wednesday morning, including an intercontinental missile that apparently failed or was aborted 42 seconds after it was launched, White House and Pentagon officials said.
The small barrage of launchings, which took place over more than four hours, came in defiance of warnings from President Bush and the governments of Japan, South Korea and China. Of the launchings, which the United States and Japan condemned, intelligence officials focused most of their attention on the intercontinental missile, called the Taepodong 2, which American spy satellites have been watching on a remote launching pad for more than a month.
It is designed to be capable of reaching Alaska, and perhaps the West Coast of the United States, but American officials who tracked its launching said it fell into the Sea of Japan before its first stage burned out.
“The Taepodong obviously was a failure — that tells you something about capabilities,” Stephen Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters in a phone call on Tuesday evening in Washington. But other officials warned that even a failed launching was of some use to the North Koreans, because it will help them diagnose what went wrong with the liquid-fueled rocket.
In a statement issued late Tuesday night, the White House said the United States “remains committed to a peaceful diplomatic solution” and sought implementation of a joint statement on denuclearization issued after a meeting with North Korea in September. But it said “the North Korean regime’s actions and unwillingness to return to the talks appears to indicate that the North has not yet made the strategic decision to give up their nuclear programs.”
“Accordingly, we will continue to take all necessary measures to protect ourselves and our allies,” the White House said, offering no details.
The missiles have been the source of considerable diplomatic tension in recent weeks, because of North Korea’s declarations that it already possesses nuclear weapons. American intelligence agencies have told President Bush they believe the North has produced enough fuel for six or more weapons, but it is unclear whether they have actually used it to make nuclear devices.
However, the country is not believed to have developed a warhead small enough to fit atop one of its missiles, and it has never conducted a nuclear test, to the knowledge of American officials.
The other missiles that the North fired appeared to be a mix of short-range Scud-C missiles and intermediate-range Rodong missiles, of the kind that the North has sold to Iran, Pakistan and other nations. Those missiles also landed in the Sea of Japan.
None of the launchings were announced in advance. But the first came just minutes after the space shuttle Discovery lifted off in Florida — an event the North Koreans could monitor on television. Administration officials said they could only speculate as to whether the missile launching had been timed to coincide with the shuttle launching, or with Independence Day, but outside analysts had little doubt.
“It’s very in your face to do it on the Fourth of July,” said Ashton B. Carter, a Harvard professor who, with former defense secretary William J. Perry, had urged the Bush administration to destroy the Taepodong missile on the launching pad, advice the administration rejected.
“Hooray if it failed,” Mr. Carter said.
While the test itself was a sign of North Korea’s defiance of the United States, for the administration, the outcome was as favorable as officials could have hoped for: the North’s capacity was called into question, and the North’s enigmatic leader, Kim Jong Il, has now put himself at odds with the two countries that have provided him aid, China and South Korea. “Our hope is that the Chinese are going to be furious,” said one senior American official, who declined to be identified.
Another official noted that only days ago, the Chinese indicated that they were trying to put together an “informal” meeting of the long-dormant six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program.
The North has boycotted the talks since September, citing American efforts to close down the banks it uses overseas.
But North Korea had apparently not responded to the Chinese invitation, and American officials said last week that the Chinese would not have made that gesture if they believed that they were about to be embarrassed by the country that they once considered a close ally.
The launching also makes it difficult for the South Koreans to continue their policy of providing aid and investment to the North, a program that has caused deep rifts with Washington. Administration officials said that Christopher R. Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the main negotiator with North Korea, would leave for Asia on Wednesday, and that they expected him to use the launchings to try to bring South Korea and China into the fold on imposing some kind of sanctions.
At the same time, the launching is likely to strengthen the hand of hard-liners in the Bush administration who have long argued that the six-party talks were bound to fail. They now have what one American diplomat called “a clear runway” to press for a gradually escalating series of sanctions, which some officials clearly hope will bring down Mr. Kim’s government.
But it is far from clear that China — which provides the North with its oil and much of its food — would go along with any move for sanctions.
The firing ended weeks of speculation about the intentions of Pyongyang, which had rolled out the Taepodong 2, its new long-range missile, in full view of American spy satellites, and came despite severe warnings from the United States and countries in this region that a test would entail further isolation and sanctions. The first missile was fired around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, according to the Japanese government.
American officials said they believe the Taepodong 2 was the third missile fired, with the U.S. Northern Command saying that it was launched at 5 a.m. on Wednesday.
American and Japanese officials immediately condemned the launchings. But American officials had never considered it a serious threat to the United States, especially because there was no evidence the missile was equipped with a warhead. Mr. Bush’s spokesman, Tony Snow, only went so far as to call the launching “provocative behavior.”
The Japanese government said it would take “severe actions” against the North, possibly including economic sanctions. Those could include shutting down the ferry service to North Korea and attempting to stem the flow of the transfer of cash to the North from Koreans in Japan, though officials acknowledge that would be difficult.
At the United Nations, John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador, was “urgently consulting” with other members of the Security Council to try to schedule a meeting of the panel, according to his spokesman, Richard A. Grenell. Later in the evening, it was announced that the Council would meet to take up the matter at 10 a.m. Wednesday at the request of Japan. Mr. Hadley acknowledged that “what we really don’t have a fix on is, you know, what’s the intention of all this, what is the purpose of all this? ” He noted it was a violation of North Korea’s previous pledges to hold to a moratorium on missile tests.
It was also unclear why North Korea fired short- and mid-range missiles, which it has tested successfully in the past and of which it is said to own several hundred.
“One theory is that they knew that there was a probability that things with the Taepodong 2 wouldn’t work, so it was good to fire off a few missiles that would actually work,” said a senior Bush administration official, who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak about this issue.
In 1998, the last time the North tested a missile outside its territory, Pyongyang fired the Taepodong 1, which flew over Japan before falling into the sea. That test set off a negative reaction in the region, especially in Japan, which responded by strengthening its military and its alliance with the United States.
Wednesday’s tests are likely to increase calls inside Japan to strengthen its missile defense efforts with the United States, and could increase support for hawkish candidates in the race to succeed Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who is scheduled to retire in September.
Shinzo Abe, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, who is the leading candidate to succeed Mr. Koizumi and who has gained popularity in recent years by being tough on North Korea and China, said the tests were “a serious problem from the standpoint of our national security, peace and stability of the international community and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
The tests are sure to anger China — which expended considerable diplomatic prestige in pressing the North not to go ahead with the launching and to rejoin the six-nation talks — and raise doubts anew about the real extent of Beijing’s influence on Pyongyang. The Chinese foreign ministry said it had no comment to make yet on the launching.
In South Korea, whose government publicly urged the North not to test-fire but privately played down the risk, opponents of the government’s engagement policy toward the North might gain support in presidential elections next year.
Intelligence from American satellite photographs indicated in mid-June that the North was proceeding with the test-firing of the Taepodong 2 at a launching pad on North Korea’s remote east coast. Satellite photographs showed that the North Koreans had taken steps to put fuel into the missile, but the missile sat there until Wednesday morning, leading to speculation that the North was simply staging the event in order to gain attention from the United States.
American officials had suggested that they might use missile defense to shoot down the Taepodong 2 in midair. Bad weather in this region was said to have delayed the launching, because poor visibility would prevent the North from tracking its missile.
But the North contradicted expert opinion by launching its long-range missile in predawn darkness today.
Norimitsu Onishi reported from Tokyo for this article, and David E. Sanger from Vermont. Reporting was contributed by Warren Hoge from the United Nations, and by David S. Cloud, Helene Cooper and Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington.
N.Korean just launched two test missles over Japan…more news as it becomes available!!
Here you go:
U.S. official: North Korea tests long-range missileFrom Elise Labott and Justine Redman North Korea also tested at least two smaller missiles, U.S. sources told CNN. Both missiles were launched from a site other than the one intelligence officials have watched for weeks ahead of the long-range missile test, a senior State Department official said. The United States, Japan and other countries have warned North Korea against a long-range missile test, saying such a move would be considered a provocation. Washington and North Korea’s Asian neighbors — South Korea, China, Russia and Japan — have been trying to persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program since 2002, but those talks have stalled in recent months. President Bush warned last week that the isolated Stalinist state would face even further isolation if it launched the Taepodong-2, which U.S. analysts fear is capable of reaching the western United States. (Full story) “The North Koreans have made agreements with us in the past, and we expect them to keep their agreements,” Bush said last month at the end of a European Union summit. “It should make people nervous when nontransparent regimes, that have announced that they’ve got nuclear warheads, fire missiles,” Bush said. “This is not the way you conduct business in the world. This is not the way that peaceful nations conduct their affairs.” The senior State Department official said the launches were timed to coincide with the launch of the space shuttle Discovery from Florida, calling it “a provocative act designed to get attention.” The North Koreans fired a Taepodong-1 missile over Japan in 1998, but declared a moratorium on future tests in 1999. Two senior State Department officials said Tuesday that fuel trucks had departed the site where the Taepodong-2 sat on a launch paid, indicating that a test may have been near. On Monday, Pyongyang’s state-run media carried a report accusing the United States of harassing North Korea and vowing to respond to any pre-emptive attack “with a relentless annihilating strike and a nuclear war with a mighty nuclear deterrent.” (Watch why North Korea is talking about annihilating the U.S. — 2:04) The White House has dismissed that threat as “hypothetical.” (Full story) Meanwhile, the Pentagontook steps to be ready for a possible military response to a North Korean missile launch. The U.S. Northern Command recently increased security measures at its Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a military official confirmed. In other planning measures instituted in the past several days, Northern Command, along with the Federal Aviation Administration, has put standby commercial flight restrictions into place over Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Fort Greely, Alaska, where the U.S. interceptor missiles are based. |
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| Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/07/04/korea.missile/index.html |
By Hans Greimel
Republished from Japan Times
Nation has territorial rows with all of its neighbours as nationalism heats up
The battle-ready Japan Coast Guard cutter Hateruma has just pulled into port after 10 days at sea protecting the nation’s territory from Chinese encroachment.
Its canvas-wrapped deck gun hasn’t been fired—it probably won’t—and the islets it is watching are obscure, guano-encrusted outcroppings.
China and Taiwan also claim ownership, and history, pent-up nationalism, fishing rights and oil and gas make even the smallest speck of land a potential flash point in the seas surrounding Japan.
“They’re uninhabited, except for a few goats,” Japan Coast Guard Director Takashi Nakagawa said of the islands, which Japan calls Senkaku and China refers to as Diaoyu. “But if you let your guard down for just a second, something’s bound to happen.”
Unique among industrialized nations, Japan is engulfed in territorial disputes with all of its near neighbors—Taiwan, China, South Korea, North Korea and Russia—and the quarrels are heating up as Asian economies expand and start looking for more energy and seafood.
Tensions could spike next month when South Korea plans a maritime survey of waters around another cluster of islets controlled by Seoul but claimed by Japan. Tokyo has warned its patrol boats will chase away “intruders.”
Called Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan, the islets lie in a no man’s land of overlapping exclusive economic zones claimed by both sides.
In April, Japan tried to mount its own survey, but backed down after South Korea sent in 20 gunboats. The first talks in six years to resolve the conflict ended June 13 with only an agreement to meet again in September.
“This is a problem that can never be given up or negotiated, no matter at what cost or sacrifice,” South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun vowed during the last standoff. Turning up the temperature, he likened Tokyo’s behavior to its 1910 colonial annexation of the Korean Peninsula.
Adding to the tensions is North Korea, which keeps the islands on its long list of belligerently worded grievances against Japan.
Of the disputed islands, Japan controls only the Senkakus, which lie halfway between Taiwan and Okinawa.
South Korea keeps a permanent security detachment on its controlled islets while Russia occupies four islands off Hokkaido.
Lying off the northeastern tip of Japan, the islands, which are inhabited, at the center of the row with Russia were seized by Soviet troops in the last days of World War II.
Meanwhile, China has started drilling for gas near contested waters in the East China Sea, which is heavily traveled by military and commercial ships and aircraft.
Japan looks highly unlikely to start shooting over the hot spots, but all players are wary of potential conflict.
“It’s a hypothetical thing. But people do imagine that something might happen,” said Akira Chiba, a Foreign Ministry spokesman. “We don’t plan to take them forcefully. It doesn’t mean we gave them up.”
Occasional flareups trigger wild protests in China, Taiwan and South Korea.
South Korean nationalists habitually burn the Japanese flag in street rallies. One patriot even covered his body in 200,000 bees this year to denounce Japanese “imperialism”—getting stung a reported 200 times in the process.
Protesters from Hong Kong and Taiwan have repeatedly tried to storm the Senkaku Islands to plant the Chinese flag and tear down a beacon installed there by Japanese rightists staking their claim to the islets.
It is the job of Japanese ships like the Hateruma to intercept them, and one Hong Kong protester died in 1996 after jumping into the ocean when his landing attempt was foiled.
When it comes to Russia, it’s Japan’s turn to protest.
Japanese roadsides within sight of the Russian-occupied isles are dotted with signs demanding return of the territory.
The Soviet Union expelled some 17,000 Japanese from the islands and the dispute still prevents Tokyo and Moscow from signing a peace treaty. Russia has expressed readiness to return two of the islands, but Japan insists on recovering all four.
“If you give up in one instance, other countries might think Japan would be willing to give up in other cases as well,” said Shigenori Okazaki, a political analyst in Tokyo.
At the heart of the dispute is resources.
Rich fishing grounds surround most of the disputed areas, as do potentially huge undersea reserves of natural gas and oil.
Korea Gas Corp. estimates the sea floor around what Japan calls Takeshima alone has enough deposits to meet South Korean natural gas demands for 30 years.
Nascent military rivalries have also emerged.
In 2004, a Chinese submarine infiltrated Japanese waters while returning from a mission near Guam. The foray underlined for Tokyo the importance of bolstering its claim to two nearby outcroppings it calls Okinotorishima.
Japan claims Okinotorishima is an island, but China says it’s just a reef, meaning it has fishing rights there as well as access to strategic shipping lanes between U.S. bases in Guam and the Asian mainland.
For now, China and Japan are talking about possible joint development of the East China Sea gas fields. But no breakthrough is in sight and the next round of talks hangs in limbo.
This was originally a post on futurepundit…I will post the original article and my comments below:
Mandarin is probably more efficient in the spoken form, but less so in the written. Its typical construction is s-v-o, however, mandarin has no effective future sense, no case change, no real past tense (but for the particle “le” at the end of the sentence and using constructs such as “wo zuotien qu shangdian le” (I yesterday go store). Mandarin also has no real plural, everything is counted with counting words, such as we have in English but they have far more (such as 2 flocks of geese, a heard of deer, etc)….in Mandarin an example would be “Wo kanguo san suen quaizi” ( I saw three chopstix, “suen” being the group word (I’m not 100% sure on the group word for chopsticks, been awhile) This language in the spoken form has few exceptions, is very streamline, and despite this Chinese people have been able to develop very complex abstract ideas in science and literature.
I once read that the older a language is and the more unified the country is culturally, the less grammar the language has…English not being an old language and is a hog-pog of two distinct languages, Latin (through the old Norman French) and German (through a distinct dialect that is closer to present day Dutch than High German and Old Norse)…the language is not efficient in grammar or spelling due to this.
I find Mandarin much easier to speak, than other languages I studied (such as Russian, French, and Spanish) due to the simple grammar constructions. Writing Chinese I found very hard, is is extremely detail oriented and memory intensive…the reason they still use characters is due to the fact that the writing system was the langu-franca of China proper for centuries. Until the Communists unified Modern China only the highly educated could speak the language of the “court” and this langauge varied depending on where the court was located. It was not always in Beijing. Due to China’s age and the fact that most people did not move around, regional dialects became so diversified that the difference between Shanghai Dialect, Cantonese, and Mandarin became greater than the difference between Portugese, Italian, and Spanish. If they had went to an alphabet, it would have been chaos, because everyone would have spelled words differently. The characters have no sound associated with them, therefore it does not matter how you say the character the meaning is the same.
I can give a good example of this.
Although Japanese (but for many loan words) is not grammatically similar to Chinese at all, the characters for the words sky and country are exactly the same as in Mandarin, however in Mandarin the characters are pronounced “tien” and guo, whereas in Japanese they are “Ten” and “koku” respectively. China in Mandarin is Zhongguo, in Japanese it is Chugoku, but written exactly the same in Chinese characters.
These characters unified China and made it possible to communicate between regions despite the dialect or language…even Vietnamese (who were part of China for over 1,000 years but have a strikingly different language) and Koreans once wrote in Chinese characer completely…so did the Japanese (however Japanese today only use 2,000 characters in unison with their two alphabet sytems).
Parts Of Brain Used For Math Differ For English, Chinese Speakers
Chinese and English speakers both use the inferior parietal cortex when doing math. But Chinese and English speakers use different additional brain regions for calculating.
“But native English speakers rely more on additional brain regions involved in the meaning of words, whereas native Chinese speakers rely more on additional brain regions involved in the visual appearance and physical manipulation of numbers,” says Eric Reiman of the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, US, one of the team.
Specifically, Chinese speakers had more activity in the visual and spatial brain centre called the visuo-premotor association network. Native English speakers showed more activity in the language network known as perisylvian cortices in the left half of the brain.
Reiman and his colleagues suggest that the Chinese language’s simple way of describing numbers may make native speakers less reliant on language processing when doing maths. For example, “eleven” is “ten one” in Chinese “twenty-one” is “two ten one”.
Note that the native Engilsih speakers used in the study probably were not ethnic Chinese. So this study does not control for genetic factors. I’d like to see this study repeated in an English speaking country with Chinese ethnics who were raised to speak English from birth. Also, a comparison with other groups and with more languages would provide more controls.
The difference “may mean that Chinese speakers perform problems in a different manner than do English speakers,” said lead author Yiyuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology in Dalian, China.
“In part that might represent the difference in language. It could be that the difference in language encourages different styles of computation and this may be enhanced by different methods of learning to deal with numbers,” Tang said in an interview via e-mail.
More use of some part of the brain to do computations might reduce the availability of that part of the brain for other uses. That, in turn, probably changes how the mind models the world.
This report is consistent with previous research which found differences in which parts of the mind process language. See Mandarin Language Uses More Of The Brain Than English.
I’d also like to brain scan comparisons done of people with different occupations (e.g. physicists, mathematicians, truck drivers, lawyers, reporters) for how they do mathematics. Do they differ between occupations as much as English and Chinese speakers differ?
East Asian Geopolitical Projection for next 20 years – DONE
July 15, 2006 in ASEAN, American Politics, East Asian Politics, Editor's Comment, Transnational Issues | Leave a comment
My musing…
N.Korea and S.Korea: North Korea will collapses within 10 years due to covert regime change by the US and Japan or the murder of Kim Jong Il by his own military after he fails to be able to bribe them effectively.
This will result in refugees flooding into a South Korea economically unable to provide for all of them and into China. The new united but poor Korea will have nuclear weapons and become increasingly nationalist and xenophobic, which will drastically destabilize its relationship with the United States and especially with Japan. Korean refugees in China will become a small, despite its redcurrant nationalism, Korea will slowly and continually slip under the Chinese sphere of influence as its economy becomes even more dependent on
China.
Japan: Under American pressure and public pressure over instability on the Korea Peninsula and fear of a powerful China, Japan will remilitarize which will aggravate its relations with both Koreas and China to a lesser extent. Part of this remilitarization will be a slow move to Japan going “nuclear” which will take place within 10 years of Japan changing its “peace constitution.” Nationalism at this time and anti-Asia neighbor sentiment will rise as a reaction to perceived unfairness by its Asian neighbors over WWII and rallying of the public by the right wing. This nationalism will create an unexpected strain between America and Japan who will remain close allies against China, but also have both having strong economic interest in China, as well as similar security interest in the region. The American military presence will be decrease in Japan as Japanese forces take a lead role. Despite the increase in nationalism, there will be a strong pro-China lobby forming, because historically Japan always seeks to make alliances and mimic the nations that it views as the strongest, many, at least from a regional perspective, begin to see China as a revived power in the region to seriously rival China.
China and Taiwan: Taiwan will not declare formal independence, instead it will form a type of federation (similar to that with between Hong Kong SAR and Mainland China, but with even more leeway given to Taiwan) for an indefinite period. This will avoid a war between Japan, America, and China over Taiwanese independence, where America and Japan will attempt to defend Taiwan militarily. China being capable of bombing Taiwan but not holding the island will be willing to avoid war unless Taiwan declares formal independence because a loss of Taiwan after a military conflict will cause the government to lose face, but also allowing Taiwan to formally succeed with no military response will be a worse loss of face, both likely resulting in internal pressure from home leading to serious uprisings that could topple the CCP, especially considering any military action will likely severely hurt China’s economy already aggravating the gap between rich and poor, rural and urban. This will be seen as victory for China by many right wing hawks in Japan and America.
Vietnam: Vietnam is included because it is culturally more an East Asian nation than a Southeast Asian due to its extensive historical contact with China. Vietnam will seek to balance China’s political and economic power in the region by establishing closer bilateral relations with the United States and becoming a more active promoter of ASEAN, as a negotiating device giving it more power in its relationship with China and the other East Asian nations. China will put more pressure on a United Korea to get military distance from America and even help promote Korean nationalism.
United States: Will lose all of its bases in the new united Korea and most of them in Japan although there will be a lose military alliance with the new militarized Japan, but over time Japan will slowly move back into China’s political orbit, but due to issues with Korea will remain some counterbalance with America out of fear. America will increasingly try to balance its economic issues with China and its fear of Chinese political power, not just in Asia, but increasingly its global political power, that often conflicts with U.S. interests.
ASEAN: China and Korea will join a new East Asian trade group born out of ASEAN, eventually, within 20 years time Japan will have no choice but to also join although hesitantly fearing Chinese domination. ASEAN itself will morph into an East-South East Asian trade group, much more diversified and less powerful than the EU, and dominated largely by China and Japan…which will form two balancing rival poles in the organization with small nations choosing sides. America will be excluded from this group causing some animosity and fear of Chinese power. Japan will (secretly) serve to help promote US economic interests.