Around Asia

North Korea’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, in a statement carried Thursday by the official Korean Central News Agency, accused Seoul of a “sinister intention.”

Why the harsh rhetoric? On Tuesday, South Korea announced that Pyongyang had canceled talks scheduled to begin on the following day in Seoul.

By now we should know: it’s not possible for the regime of Kim Jong Un, the North’s insecure new leader, to maintain good relations with the South.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that, beginning next month, the US and China will hold regular talks on cyber matters. The high-level discussions, labeled the first diplomatic initiative on the subject with China, will be part of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the framework of annual meetings between Washington and Beijing.

The ultimate goal is to arrive at understandings with the Chinese. As a “senior American official involved in the negotiations” told the paper, “We need to get some norms and rules.”

Actually, we have long passed that stage. What we need to do at this point is stop Chinese cyber intrusions, cyber attacks, and cyber espionage, all part of what many suspect to be the most extensive cyber campaign conducted by one country against another

On Friday, the London-based advocacy group Free Tibet announced a boycott of InterContinental Hotels Group, the world’s largest hotel operator and owner of the Holiday Inn, Candlewood Suites, and Crowne Plaza brands. So, if you’re planning a stay at one of these hotels, Free Tibet urges that you go elsewhere.

The chain, which refers to itself as IHG, plans to open the InterContinental Resort Lhasa Paradise, a 2,000-room complex, next year. The boycott is based on Free Tibet’s demand that IHG withdraw “from Tibet because the hotel’s presence will be a PR coup for the Chinese government and will exacerbate oppression and economic marginalization of Tibetans.”

This week, Michael Sheridan of the Sunday Times revealed that China’s Communist Party is internally circulating an anti-Western screed, “Minutes of the 2013 National Conference of Propaganda Chiefs: Briefing on the Ideological Situation at the Present Time.” Among other things, the document tells officials they must “completely understand the harm of viewpoints and theories propagated by the West.” Moreover, officials are exhorted to “use battlefield tactics” to defeat China’s own liberals. The party must “stand up” to Western nations.

On Monday, the South China Morning Post reported that China’s State Bureau for Letters and Calls, an office under the State Council, was ordered to stop compiling its list of “illegal petitioners” from the provinces.

The edict, issued after the National People’s Congress meeting in March, probably reflects an attempt by the country’s new leadership to begin a reform of the much-maligned petitioning system. At this late date, however, there is little that anyone in the Chinese capital can do to change it, at least for the better.

Since imperial days, Chinese with grievances have gone to local offices and even their capital to petition for relief. In recent times, thousands of petitioners each day camp outside the Beijing office of the Letters and Calls bureau, and some of them have been there for years. The spectacle, according to the Post’s editor Wang Xiangwei, “has become a major embarrassment for the leadership.”

South Korean President Park Geun-hye meets President Obama on Tuesday in Washington. 

The South Koreans created a slogan for the summit, “Bound by trust, forward together,” the first time they have adopted an English-language motto for an event of this sort. During her visit, Park may talk about “the most successful alliance in history”—the mutual defense pact turns 60 this year—but there is not as much trust between South Korea and the US as there needs to be.

This summit was supposed to mark the signing of a “next-generation civilian nuclear accord” between Washington and Seoul, a replacement for the so-called “123 Agreement” first inked in 1956 and last amended in 1974. The existing deal—named after Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act of 1954—prohibits South Korea from completing the nuclear fuel cycle by enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium.

On Friday, the Guardian reported that Beijing had “punished” David Cameron by telling him he would not be permitted to meet senior leaders during a China trip originally scheduled for last month. The London newspaper noted that Downing Street then cancelled the visit. With Cameron’s visit cancelled, French President François Hollande became the first European leader to visit China after the Communist Party’s Fifth Generation team of Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang took over. 

Why were the Chinese upset with the British prime minister? The paper chalked up the snub to his meeting with the Dalai Lama last May at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. 

On Monday, China’s Foreign Ministry denied that Chinese soldiers had intruded onto Indian-controlled territory in Ladakh, in the Himalayas. “Our troops are patrolling on the Chinese side of the Line of Actual Control and have never trespassed the line,” said spokeswoman Hua Chunying, referring to the de facto border between China and India in that area.

During the night of April 15th, a Chinese platoon-strength force advanced 10 kilometers south of the line and established a tented camp in the Daulat Beg Oldi sector of eastern Ladakh. An Indian unit responded two days later by setting up a temporary camp about 500 meters from the Chinese position.

“We’re prepared to reach out,” said Secretary of State John Kerry, referring to direct talks with North Korea. “But we need the appropriate moment, the appropriate circumstances.”

Is there anything “appropriate” about engaging in dialogue with the horrific regime of Kim Jong Un? Yes, but not in the way Kerry thought when he uttered those controversial words in Tokyo on Sunday. 

On Thursday, Pyongyang temporarily closed the last remaining cooperative venture between North and South Korea, an industrial park just north of the Demilitarized Zone that separates the two states. Is it time for Seoul to permanently withdraw from a project that has failed its ultimate objective?

North Korea stated on Thursday that what happens at the Kaesong Industrial Complex “entirely depends on the attitude of the South Korean authorities.” “Needless to say Kaesong industrial district will cease to exist should the Park Geun-hye regime continue pursuing confrontation,” said a spokesman for the North’s Bureau for Central Guidance to the Development of the Special Zone.

On Tuesday, North Korea’s General Department of Atomic Energy announced it was restarting the country’s reactor in Yongbyon, which produces plutonium. It also suggested the North’s uranium enrichment facility there would begin producing fissile material. Previously, Pyongyang said its Yongbyon uranium plant was for peaceful purposes only, specifically, creating low-enriched uranium for the generation of electricity.

In a poll released last month by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, 66 percent of South Koreans said they wanted their country to develop nuclear weapons to ward off attacks from North Korea. In fact, only 48 percent of the population last year believed America would use nukes to retaliate against a North Korean nuclear strike against them, down 7 percent from 2011.

The survey by the private think tank in Seoul is a clear vote of “no confidence” in the US, which has, by treaty, since 1953, pledged to defend the South, with nukes if necessary. If the South Koreans trusted Washington, they would not want to have their own arsenal of the world’s most destructive weapons. 

And if this many South Koreans suspect Washington’s resolve, it’s a safe bet that many policymakers in Beijing and Pyongyang doubt America as well. China and North Korea have increased their war-mongering rhetoric conspicuously of late, and both are behaving arrogantly, as if they think they can push the US out of Asia.

On Friday, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced the Obama administration’s decision to add 14 inceptors to the nation’s rudimentary missile defense system. The new ground-based missiles, scheduled to go into service in 2017, will be located at Alaska’s Fort Greely. Hagel’s announcement essentially reversed the administration’s 2010 decision to cap the number of anti-missile missiles in Alaska and California at 30.

The 30 currently deployed interceptors are positioned to defend against warheads launched from Asia, one country in particular. “The United States has missile defense systems in place to protect us from limited ICBM attacks,” Hagel said on Friday, “but North Korea in particular has recently made advances in its capabilities and has engaged in a series of irresponsible and reckless provocations.”

On early Sunday, a reported 3,000 police and security troops surrounded the Chinese village of Shangpu. They fired tear gas, severed communications, shut off the electricity, and removed wrecked vehicles. They cleared off roadblocks that residents had erected. Some 30 to 40 villagers were hurt in fierce fighting. “It’s an extremely serious situation,” one resident told AFP. “They injured many people.”

The incident began in February when villagers fought pitched battles with dozens of thugs sent by Li Baoyu to break up a protest against a seizure of 33 hectares of farmland. Li, the Communist Party chief of the village, had arranged for the land to be transferred to Wanfeng Investment, controlled by businessman Wu Guicun. Wu had planned to build factories making electrical cables.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that in January US and Yemeni forces seized ten sophisticated heat-seeking Chinese-made antiaircraft missiles on an Iranian dhow bound for a Shiite terror group, an Iranian proxy, in northwestern Yemen. These “extremely worrisome” shoulder-fired weapons are highly sought after by terror groups and represent a major threat to military and civilian aircraft alike.