Biting the hand that feeds their fish to someone else

North Korea versus China... Who to root for? Or rather, who to root against?

This week we've had that rarest of situations where the Democratic People's Republic of the Kim Dynasty (DPRK) seems to be biting the proverbial hand that feeds them, the People's Republic of Crony Capitalists (PRC).

It seems that the North Koreans have taken over a Chinese fishing vessel and are holding the twenty-nine-member crew ransom until Beijing hands 1.2 million yuan (US$190K) over to Pyongyang. Much of the Western media are depicting this as a case of piracy, casting the Norks as the new Somalis. From the Associated Press:

A North Korean boat hijacked three boats with 29 Chinese fishermen on board and demanded 1.2 million yuan ($190,000) for their release, Chinese media reported Thursday.

It was unclear if a territorial dispute or piracy was behind the incident involving boats from the two communist-led nations. China is the North’s biggest diplomatic ally and source of economic assistance.

The fishing boats were hijacked in a Chinese section of the Yellow Sea on May 8 and moved to North Korean waters, the Beijing News reported. The paper said the North Korean boat was manned by armed men in blue hats and uniforms but didn’t otherwise identify them.

Border police in northeastern China’s coastal Liaoning province told the state newspaper they were in contact with the North Korean captors but declined to comment further.

One might think the AP is itself trying to show how tough it can be when reporting on North Korea, given the scrutiny it's been getting from those critical of the effusive reports from its freshly minted Pyongyang bureau, but a similar pro-Beijing perspective can be found at the Washington Post, AFP, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Guardian, etc. Although they're stating that the news is "according to Chinese reports," they're using terms like kidnapped at sea, ransom, and captors.

But just a doggone minute there. Those of us who pay closer attention to China because it's a quick boat ride away may have a different perspective on things, enough that we know it's unwise to accept Beijing's reports prima facie, even if the other party is Pyongyang, whose utterings should never be accepted prima facie.

See, those of us in the ROK know all about the Chinese fish pirates. We're used to reading about Chinese vessels illegally fishing in South Korea's Exclusive Economic Zone in the Yellow Sea or East China Sea and then attacking or even murdering ROK Coast Guard personnel who try to stop them.

To put it bluntly: If this is what Chinese fishing vessels do to the South Koreans in ROK waters or its EEZ, while Beijing fully denies it, why should we believe the Chinese fishermen are innocents when the North Koreans detain their boat? Angered by Pyongyang's plans for missile and nuke tests, and knowing full well how the rest of the world sees North Korea, it would be perfectly natural for Chinese officials to depict those poor Chinese fishermen as victims rather than thieves. The rest of the world is certainly lapping it up.

But think about something. North Korea may love brinkmanship, but in recent years it also follows a pattern when it detains foreign nationals. I'm probably going to get flak for saying this, but back when everyone assumed CurrentTV journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling were innocent travelers who had been kidnapped from the Chinese border region, I asserted the likelihood that the two Stupogants had actually entered North Korean territory. And I was right. Laura Ling claims that they were nonetheless captured after running back to Chinese territory, but it is highly doubtful that they would have been pursued and captured at all had they not entered North Korea illegally. And all along, the North Korean media was being truthful that the team had violated DPRK borders.

I'm still waiting to see what Pyongyang's Korea Central News Agency says about the Chinese fishing boats. Given the track record of the Chinese fish pirates and the not-so-inscrutible way one can discern fact from fiction in North Korean news media, I will be more inclined to believe that the Chinese had gone into North Korean waters or its EEZ if the North Korean media says they did.

My conclusion also stems in part from the realization that North Korea would have to have cojones the size of beach balls to capture and detain a Chinese fishing boat and then demand restitution unless they had cause.

Nevertheless, one also has to wonder about the Pyongyang regime's end game. As the title here suggests, Beijing is the hand that feeds Pyongyang (to a degree). Maybe this is just a way to let China know that it can never really control North Korea. Despite frequent claims of socialistic brotherhood, the North Koreans aren't particularly fond of the Chinese, regarding them in much the same way as those who made the 19th-century American cartoon below.

Those of us in South Korea are used to the Pyongyang regime b¡tch-slapping its ROK sponsors, so the Norks sticking it to the Chinese really isn't that unsurprising: North Korea's long-term strategy of pitting one economic/military/political power against another has involved begging for alms with one hand and then sucker-punching the benefactor with the other. During the Cold War, when Kim Ilsung was Moscow's and Beijing's headache, it was Russia-versus-China. Now it's a triangulation of Seoul, Beijing, and Washington (and occasionally a rectangulation or that includes Tokyo and/or Moscow).

And maybe China doesn't really have all that much control over North Korea to begin with. It can nudge the DPRK toward reform, it can promote socialism with Chinese characteristics, it can scold North Korea, it can huff and puff, but it's a mistaken calculus if you think that benefits of the PRC-DPRK relationship flow only one way. China wants to maintain its port presence in Rajin/Najin, and if it pisses off the Norks a bit too much, Beijing knows that Pyongyang can kick them out, like they've done or threatened to do to South Korean businesses and developers in Kŭmgangsan National Park or Kaesŏng Industrial Park.

So for now enjoy the show from the sidelines (and wonder just a bit if this is not part of a long-term strategy by Kim Jong-un or his handlers to move away from China and toward South Korea and/or its allies). In the meantime, I'm glad someone is standing up to the Chinese fish pirates. It looks like China is learning they messed with the wrong Korea.

...

Parallel universes

Despite all the inter-Korean tension that erupted with the sinking of the Ch'ŏnan, despite efforts by Washington to step up sanctions against Pyongyang (what Joshua Stanton of One Free Korea calls Plan B), and despite real concerns that the Lee administration would have to just get up and walk away from the infrastructure already in place in Kaesŏng, we have an odd report that Seoul is in talks to expand the Kaesŏng experiment with another industrial complex:

The governments of both North and South Korea are in talks to build a second industrial complex in Kaesong, the southern province of North Korea.

According to Lee Myung-bak, President of South Korea, a second industrial complex may be built by South Korea if the North implements changes. “The ball is currently in the camp of the North” Lee said in an interview with a Russian TV station.

Frankly, I think there's a good chance that this report has simply gotten it wrong, with the writer or the news agency for whom he/she works simply operating from a skewed translation (that happens a lot) or otherwise having their facts mixed up. After all, the report also says that "a free trade agreement is in place between the US and South Korea," which is not quite right, either.

Still, anything is possible. Seoul has been denying reports of secret high-level meetings between ROK and DPRK officials (including expected future regent Jang Songthaek, uncle of Kim Jong-un), but things denied are often things that have really happened, so who knows.

With a slight majority of the South Korean public skeptical of Seoul's take on the Ch'ŏnan sinking, it's plausible that some in the Lee administration may have felt there was no point in hardline sanctions against Pyongyang. Perhaps the release of the seven South Korean fishermen held for the past month was meant as a bit of quid pro quo for reconsideration of restrictions on Kaesŏng.

And if I'm right about my bold prediction that North Korea is planning to pursue Chinese-style economic reforms, then it would make sense not only that they would pursue an expansion of the Kaesong Industrial Complex, but that Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law Jang would be spearheading it or be otherwise involved.

If that were the case, it begs the question: How should Seoul proceed (or Washington or Tokyo, or Taipei for that matter)? If Pyongyang is genuinely and earnestly embarking on its own sunshiny project, should South Korea, the US, and Japan hold their noses and cooperate in the hope that these reforms will, à la China, dramatically change the lives of the average citizen for the better, even if it doesn't completely alter the totalitarian nature of the regime?

Ten North Koreans believed killed in bus accident near Kaesong Industrial Complex

So says Yonhap:

The collision took place Friday evening at an intersection in the Kaesong industrial park where about 120 South Korean firms employ 42,000 North Koreans to produce labor-intensive goods, a police official in the South Korean border city of Paju said.

Citing South Korean witnesses, the official said that a bus carrying commuters hit another on the side amid heavy rains but no South Koreans were aboard the buses.

"The case was reported by South Korean workers traveling to and from the Kaesong complex," the official said, declining to be identified. "The exact number of casualties and how the accident happened have not been ascertained."

Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo in Seoul said North Korean authorities quickly cordoned off the scene of the collision and were seen bringing casualties out of the buses.

"The authorities prevented others from approaching the scene, which made it difficult for our side to determine the number of casualties and the cause," she said in a press briefing.

Such secretive behavior in the face of a negative incident should give pause to anyone working in the Kaesŏng complex. With the site made off limits, how would the South Korean side even know if a ROK national were involved?

They're baaaack! (Or, the political experiment that would not die!)

It's a mainstay of horror films and television series: some staple within the fabric of the movie franchise or TV show that assures that — no matter what — the show will go on. Somehow, someway.

No matter how many times Freddy Krueger is buried, incinerated, electrocuted, top-killed, etc., he is always back on Elm Street in the next film. No matter how buildings Alice blows up or zombies she kills, the T-virus is always on the move. A new cell of terrorists always assured Jack Bauer would have gainful employment (and overtime pay) for at least another day, and a new crop of self-absorbed fame-seekers always guarantees another season of "Survivor."

And so it is with the Kaesŏng Industrial Complex just north of the DMZ, that political experiment borne of the Sunshine Policy. It just won't die, not even when frenemies Seoul and Pyongyang temporarily join forces to destroy it: the South by slowly starving it, and the North — fresh off another kill — by an avalanche of vitriolic propaganda and bad vibes.

Even as its obituary was being written about here at Monster Island and in other august halls of journalism, it is back.

So let's just call it the Jason Industrial Complex™.

Quoting the New York Times:

North Korea expressed its wish to keep an inter-Korean industrial complex in operation, South Korean officials said on Monday, while the South indicated that it could reconsider its decision to revive psychological warfare against the North.

The two movements combined showed that the two Koreas were carefully weighing the option of easing their confrontation, analysts said.

Tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula have deteriorated to their worst in years since a South Korean warship sank on March 26 in a blast blamed on a North Korean torpedo attack.

“Neither side can afford to keep building up tensions,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. “Both sides have been raising tensions the way you blow into your balloon, and now they need an excuse for each other to stop blowing so that the balloon won’t burst.”

Wait... What?! We killed the Jason Industrial Complex™ in the last film. In the wake of the report that the North was responsible for the sinking of the Chonan and the nearly four dozen deaths involved, President Lee cut off all trade — except for a reduced presence at Kaesong — but then North Korea swooped in with the coup de grâce and said, essentially, "If you're not going to kill it, we will!" and they were ready to send everyone home. Indeed, there were worries that the South Korean workers who had missed their bus back to Torasan might be held hostage.

But when it comes to North Korea, maybe there are no coups de grâce. For now, it looks like the Jason Industrial Complex™ will be back for a new sequel in the papers. Slice it, burn it, bury it, decapitate it, nuke it, feed it a steady diet of saturated fat, and it still comes back to life.

Now don't get me wrong, I think (as did South Korean leaders at the time) that Kaesŏng (that's what it was called before it morphed into Jaesong) was a noble effort to effect change in North Korea that was worth trying (after all, four decades of confrontation hadn't gotten us anywhere). It was meant as a little bit of a Trojan horse to infuse ideas of capitalism into the DPRK.

But Pyongyang had other Trojans in mind, and they prophylactically sealed off Kaesŏng-Jaesong as much as they could.

But eventually, like a once virtuous corporation in a what-could-possibly-go-wrong sorta horror film, Seoul had become invested in this unholy hybrid they had created in the lab. They would lose Sejongs and face if they aborted now, so they let it live. And soon it was sucking the blood supply away from good diplomatic policy, maiming it in the process. It gained a life of its own, becoming a radioactively hot potato, and about two or three sequels ago, Seoul could have killed it when it had the chance, but they were afraid of the fallout. And so it grew and grew, as did our dependence on its growth. And just when we thought that the two sides both finally had the will to terminate it once and for all, it's back. Back with a vengeance (I'm guessing). Will the two protagonists survive to the next reel?

[kushibo pauses, takes a deep breath]

Um... anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah: Kaesŏng a noble effort. (I've never bought the argument that Kaesŏng was propping up North Korea, since China has always been there with its wallet open to prevent a collapse.) The problem with Sunshine Policy, as I've stated before, is that it was all carrot and no stick. Even now, the Jason Industrial Complex™ is apparently being used by the conservative Lee Myungbak administration as a bargaining chip.

Now one could argue that Kaesong/Jason still has a purpose: not only as the aforementioned concession or enticement in future negotiations, but also as a conduit through which South Korean government and business can still keep their foot in the door in order to forestall a collapsed North Korea in the future from becoming China's Inner Cháoxiān Autonomous Region.

So Lee is basically giving us the classic, "This [evil character who keeps coming back] is worth more to us alive than dead." Or, if you prefer, "We'd better hold onto these [super lethal weapons that could easily wipe out a lot of people by accident] just in case."

I wouldn't expect anything less. Welcome to Monster Island (actually a peninsula).