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Xi’s tone took a more conciliatory approach than that of a speech he made in July, when he vowed to “smash” any attempts at Taiwan independence. China claims the island of some 24 million people as part of its own sovereign territory, and has previously threatened to take control by force if Taiwan formally declares independence. However Taiwan, which has its own elected government and constitution, has maintained that it will defend its democracy and independence. President Xi has previously spoken of the “inevitability” of Taiwan’s return and has said that the issue cannot be passed from generation to generation...

Here we are, Wednesday. You may remember the call earlier to celebrate Chicken Day the same as we celebrate Caturday and Dogerday – although to be honest every day looks like Caterday and Dogerday around here. Anyway, some people suggested Wednesday would be good for chickens while others insisted it would have to be Thursday as Hump Day already belongs to camels. Well, let’s not be so hasty. First of all Thursday already has a job - Throwbacks. So this is my Solomon decision: I hereby declare Wednesday to be Cluck’n-Hump day. So let’s all do our bit to live...

For several years, I was vice president of the US-China Strategic Review Commission, and we spent a lot of time with the top experts. We all generally agreed that China would grow larger and more powerful, but the central question was whether this would be a peaceful transformation or a violent one. Very few of these people (almost all men) thought China could get through the transition without some sort of violent convulsion, as we see today. Chinese unification has long been a challenge to the chiefs of their dynasties, and today there are three big areas that seek...

North Korea’s Phony Peace Ploy By Nicholas Eberstadt Mr. Eberstadt is a founding director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. April 25, 2018 WASHINGTON — When the government of South Korea announced last week that it would begin work on a formal peace treaty with North Korea, to be discussed at a summit meeting on April 27, its so-called Sunshine Policy of engagement gave way to P.T. Barnum-style, a-sucker-born-every-minute diplomacy. Fighting in the Korean War ended in 1953 with just an armistice, and South Korean officials are calling for a “permanent peace.” But it is not merely...

North Korea calls for unification of Korean Peninsula By Ryan Gaydos | Fox News North Korea on Thursday called for “all Koreans at home and abroad” to take steps toward unification without the help of any other countries. The message urged all Koreans to “promote contact, travel, cooperation between North and South Korea,” while assuring that Pyongyang would get over any hurdles in its way toward reunifying the peninsula, Reuters reported, citing North Korean state media. North Korea also said military exercises with “outside forces” hindered the development of relations between North and South Korea. Pyongyang also called on Seoul...

TAIPEI, Taiwan - Tsai Ing-wen was elected Taiwan’spresident on Saturday, becoming the first woman to win the office. Voters gave her Democratic Progressive Party, which is skeptical of closer ties with China, control of Taiwan’s legislature for the first time, giving her broad authority to enact her policies in office. "The results today tell me the people want to see a government that is willing to listen to people, that is more transparent and accountable and a government that is more capable of leading us past our current challenges and taking care of those in need,” she said in a...

In unification scenario, stabilization of NK military imperative [Understanding Unification] Daily NK | 2015-11-05 13:34 As South Korean President Park Geun Hye asserted, is unification really a bonanza? If there is sufficient state power that can manage what is to come before and after unification as well as uphold the economy despite North Korea’s impoverished economic conditions, then unification is an opportunity. However, bringing together the two Koreas--each cut off from the other for more than half a century--is no simple task. Being hopeful about unification is necessary, but understanding the positive and negative aspects that will come with it...

A new approach to the unification of general theory of relativity and quantum theory Present-day physics cannot describe what happened in the Big Bang. Quantum theory and the theory of relativity fail in this almost infinitely dense and hot primal state of the universe. Only an all-encompassing theory of quantum gravity which unifies these two fundamental pillars of physics could provide an insight into how the universe began. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Golm/Potsdam and the Perimeter Institute in Canada have made an important discovery along this route. According to their theory,...

Why Phased Reunification Is Impossible [Andrei Lankov Column] By Andrei Lankov, Professor, Kookmin University [2012-05-25 11:20 ] At some point, the North Korean people are going to see South Korea as the absolute benchmark for its standard of living, given that it is a country inhabited by fellow Koreans and which it may eventually unify with under one flag. If North Korea does not begin to see the same standard of living as is enjoyed in the South, people will quickly begin to regard themselves as poor. Accordingly, if the regime cannot deliver progress which suggests a quick upswing toward...

There's an old Indian story about six blind men who go to visit an elephant. One touches its leg and decides that elephants must be like trees. A second examines its trunk and declares they are like snakes. A third feels its side and concludes they are like walls. You can imagine the rest. Everyone is right yet they are all wrong and it all ends in an argument. Only a major leap of the imagination, inspired by a lot more careful feeling around, could reveal the true nature of the animal that combines so many different characteristics. Six blind...

2012/01/24 14:32 KST Sudden unification could cause 3.65 mln N. Koreans to enter S. Korea: report SEOUL, Jan. 24 (Yonhap) -- Sudden unification between South and North Korea could cause a flood of refugees across the land border that could rock the local labor market, a business organization said Tuesday. A report by the Korea Employers Federation (KEF) predicted that if the North Korean regime collapsed suddenly, up to 3.65 million people from the communist country may cross over into capitalist South Korea. "Even under a conservative estimate, up to 1.61 million North Koreans may move to South Korea, mainly...

China supports the "independent and peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula" and cannot afford to give the North Korean regime the impression it has a blank cheque to act any way it wants, Chinese officials based in Europe said today. The officials, who asked not to be identified, spoke after the Guardian revealed that senior figures in Beijing, exasperated with North Korea behaving like a "spoiled child", had told their South Korean counterparts that China was leaning towards acceptance of reunification under Seoul's control. China's moves to distance itself from the North Korean regime were revealed in the latest tranche...

(Probably Part I of II) From previous posts, such as this one, you can tell I am somewhat sympathetic towards Lee Myung Bak. He seems to be the wrong president at the wrong time, but anyways I just read this article and every single time I read something like this, the political situation in Korea boggles the mind (But on a side note, I'd also argue that South Korea is one of just two East Asian countries with democratic institutions - Taiwan being the other one. And Japan, well, we'll see). That is, how on earth can people care so...

MEXICO CITY, April 30, 2008 – As Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stands up to insurgents threatening Iraq, it’s serving to unify his once-splintered government, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters here last night. Gates pointed to Maliki’s Iraqi-led crackdown against Shiite militias, primarily Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia, known as the Mahdi Army, or Jaysh al-Mahdi. While conceding that operations in and around the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City have seen more U.S. and Iraqi casualties, Gates said part of it is because coalition and Iraqi forces are operating in new areas. Another part is because of mixed...

Catholic and Orthodox churches seek unity September 18, 2006 3:54 PM BELGRADE, Serbia-Top Roman Catholic and Orthodox dignitaries declared Monday that the time has come to close the ages-old rifts between the ancient branches of Christianity and bring East and West closer together. Representing the world's 1.1 billion Catholics and more than 250 million Christian Orthodox, sixty bishops, metropolitans and cardinals, 30 from each side, convened in the Serbian capital Belgrade for a renewed "theological" dialogue while acknowledging that much wider issues are involved. "East and West have been estranged from each other since the 11th century," said Orthodox Metropolitan...

N. Korean Long-range Missile Aims For U.S.-S. Korea Alliance American Enterprise Institute July 13, 2006 [Edited transcript from audio tapes] 9:00 Panel I: China & North KoreaPanelists: Randall Schriver, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Nicholas Eberstadt, AEIJacqueline Newmyer, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard UniversityModerator: Gary Schmitt, AEI [Start Panel I: China and North Korea] Nicholas Eberstadt: North Korea has a way of keeping itself in the news. Usually, when North Korea is in the news, it is not for very happy reasons, at least for those of us who are not...

Nationalistic 'Hanbando' Lacks Healthy Perspective By Kim Tae-jong Staff Reporter South Korean president (played by Ahn Sung-ki), left, holds hands with a North Korean leader as a gesture of the cooperation between the two nations in new movie “Hanbando.” The new movie ``Hanbando'' (the Korean Peninsula) begins with the hypothetical premise that Japan will emerge in the near future as the main opponent of the unification of North and South Korea. It also criticizes Japan's historical distortions of its rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Although the sensitive theme appeals to Korean audiences, who know the...

JERUSALEM - Israel's high court Sunday narrowly upheld a controversial law that restricts the right of Palestinians to live in Israel with their Arab Israeli spouses and children. The law, imposed in 2002 at the height of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, is believed to have kept hundreds, and possibly thousands, of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians from moving to Israel to live with their families. The law states that only Palestinian women over the age of 25 and men over 35 are eligible to join their families in Israel and eventually receive citizenship. A panel judges voted 6-5 against a petition to...

Paris backs Nicosia Turks urged to accept Cyprus; Karamanlis puts off Ankara trip Greece jumped at the chance yesterday to echo criticism by the French prime minister regarding Turkey's persistent refusal to recognize Cyprus as a condition for its accession to the European Union. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis's office announced that a scheduled landmark visit to Ankara by the Greek premier later this month had been indefinitely postponed. The trip will now probably take place after Oct. 3, when Turkey's EU accession talks are due to begin, the prime minister's office said. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's comments,...

July 13, 2005 Will the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) finally force you to get a doctor's prescription just to buy vitamin C, or E, or other dietary supplements you currently pick up "over the counter" in America? Powerful special interests are banking on it. Since 1995, Big Medicine has spent billions of dollars trying to get Washington to regulate your dietary supplements just as European governments do. So far, that effort has failed in America. But you may lose the battle for health freedom if CAFTA entangles the U.S. in Europe's infamous Codex Alimentarius (Codex). And if you...