Posted on 10/08/2006 8:43:01 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
The Sunday Times October 08, 2006
China on alert over a nuclear neighbour
Michael Sheridan, North Korean/Chinese border
THE North Korean refugee had one request for her captors before the young Chinese soldiers led her back across the steel-girdered bridge on the Yalu River that divides two “socialist allies”.
“She asked for a comb and some water because she said that if she was going to die she could not face going to heaven looking as dirty and dishevelled as this,” recounted a relative of one soldier who was there.
What happened next is testimony to the rising disgust in Chinese military ranks as Beijing posts more troops to the border amid a crisis with North Korea over its regime’s plan to stage a nuclear test.
The soldiers, who later told family members of the incident, marched the woman, who was about 30, to the mid-point of the bridge. North Korean guards were waiting. They signed papers for receipt of the woman, who kept her dignity until that moment. Then, in front of the Chinese troops, one seized her and another speared her hand — the soft part between thumb and forefinger — with the point of a sharpened steel cable, which he twisted into a leash.
“She screamed just like a pig when we kill it at home in the village,” the soldier later told his relative. “Then they dragged her away.”
Such stories are circulating widely among Chinese on the border, where wild rumours of an American attack on nuclear test sites have spread fears of a Chernobyl-type cloud of radiation and sparked indignation at the North Koreans. “I’ve heard it a hundred times over that when we send back a group they stab each one with steel cable, loop it under the collarbone and out again, and yoke them together like animals,” said an army veteran with relatives in service.
As international tensions over North Korea have soared, China has deployed extra combat units of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to man the border from the Yalu River in the south to the Tumen River near Russia - evidently fearing the risk of chaos and collapse.
The troop trains were rolling even on the Chinese mid-autumn festival on Friday. Civilian traffic on a main line was halted to allow one train to pass, with carriages jammed with glum soldiers in camouflage uniforms and flat cars carrying olive-green military vehicles.
And while a few off-duty men strolled with their sweethearts under the full moon along the banks of the Yalu, others watched from outposts at the silent, darkened shores of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“All visits by Chinese have recently been stopped,” said a local official. “They gave us no reason for it.”
The bomb test could come as early as today, the eighth anniversary of Kim Jong-il’s ascent to the top of the North Korean Workers’ party and one day before South Korea’s foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, seeks election as secretary-general of the United Nations.
Last Friday, North Korea’s traditional allies, Russia and China, joined in a UN security council warning that a weapons test - likely to be in a disused mine 6,000ft underground in Shijung district near the Chinese border -would attract “universal condemnation”. It has put the Chinese under maximum pressure to restrain Kim. Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is due in Beijing today to urge on the effort and the leader of South Korea is coming to make the same plea on Monday.
China’s dilemma is that its ruling elites are still bound to those of North Korea by a like-minded political authoritarianism. President Hu Jintao has even praised North Korea for keeping to its Stalinist politics, a view he may be repenting now that Kim has brought China to the brink of a nuclear crisis.
Beijing’s main fear is that if Kim tests a bomb - the CIA believes he has enough plutonium for four; other US experts think more - then Japan will feel it has no choice but to acquire its own atomic arsenal. That would destroy the balance of power in northeast Asia that has kept the peace since the end of the second world war.
China’s secondary fear is that if Kim’s regime collapses, hundreds of thousands of desperate, hungry North Koreans, some armed, will flood across its border to sow unrest and instability.
The Chinese regularly round up small groups of escapees. But uncounted thousands have slipped into the towns and villages inhabited by ethnic Koreans in the border provinces, building gleaming new towers and labouring in fields of fat corn.
China’s prosperity lures the poverty-stricken but has failed to convince North Korea’s leaders to deviate from their course of rigid state control.
“Why are they poor?” asked a local official, who was drinking heavily in a bar at festival time. “Because that gangster Kim Jong-il spends all the money on nuclear weapons!” Several Chinese soldiers have died in clashes with rogue North Korean soldiers who have crossed the border, shot up buildings and, in one case, robbed a bank with their AK-47s.
A PLA platoon leader was killed last year while catching five North Koreans who had attacked a hotel, robbed guests and kidnapped the manager, according to state media. Shots were fired yesterday as five North Korean troops crossed into the southern side of the demilitarised zone that separates the two countries.
The Chinese authorities are also irate over an influx of counterfeit US dollar bills and vast quantities of fake Viagra from North Korea. Some 50,000 Chinese gamblers a year are estimated to cross the other way to squander their money, much of it suspected to be the fruits of official corruption, in a North Korean casino.
The sense that Kim’s regime is losing control lies behind the Chinese military buildup. But some South Korean MPs fear China could grab territory from the north in the event of a collapse.
Makes sense.
And as you said -- Red China and the U.S. are not on the same side.
Not that WE know about anyway. I'm sure that as soon as it happens there will be a dozen or more governments around the world that will know about it through various monitering methods, but they might not tell us about it right away.
Governments aside, thousands of university/research seismographs would pick up the compression waves. There are quite distinct.
No secrets here.
I think the Chinese deal with the United states is essentially complete. Probably just last minute adjustments are left. Chinese guarantees to Japan are probably unsettled. The Japanese Abe government is an indication this is so.
The Russian - Chinese deal appears complete also. The United States government is a bit miffed at being left out of that one. A major Russian - Japanese deal is in the works with negotiation now at the "who gets what and who pays for it?" stage.
The politics of East Asia are most interesting.
North Korea has been China's pet pit-bull and now the Chinese are discovering that their pet has rabies. North Korea with nuclear weapons presents a problem for China as it does for everyone else. It is interesting that even the Chinese communists are getting disgusted with the inhumanity of the North Korean regime.
Everybody gets a piece except S. Korea, whose brilliant superman called Roh Moo-hyun still hallucinates that he got everything in control.
I look at Kim the same as I do Clinton...anything to stay in the news, anything to be in the spot light.
Perhaps the test was yesterday. More of a phhttt than a boom. Nobody wants to go down in that mineshaft, but the chief engineer automatically gets the short straw.
It's not china's to take. Do you imagine the South Koreans want the chicoms sitting on top of them?
The inhumanity of the chicoms is of the same stuff as the norks.
This should be 'interesting'....
Interesting. Certainly the NPRK is an important part of Beijing's Japan strategy. On the other hand a Japan able and willing to fight a nuclear war is not.
A nice little North Korean "provocation" could be a convincing casus bellum. Perhaps a fabricated "Archduke Ferdinand" incident?
NK's current situation seems, to this poster, very similar to the situation faced by the hostage-takers in Iran, on the day President Ronald Reagan walked up to that podium.
Except this time it's not the American president whose presense itself in office, changes the course of history.
It is Abe, who is shaking Asia today.
China analysis concludes we Americans are China's eventual enemy. This is the same sort of simplistic analysis which led to the book several years ago called "The Coming War with Japan".
In that book - the role of a rising China, was completely ignored, as the authors concluded America would inevitably fight another war with Japan.
Chinese analysis of America as its biggest threat - is falling into the same trap, in reverse.
Japan could go nuclear in a matter of weeks. Big time. Not just a couple large heavy, primative bombs - Japan could become one of the most significant nuclear powers on earth, almost immediately. They've got all the parts. Knowhow. Technology. Electronics. Launch capability. And fuel.
Literally, all that's lacking is the "go" order.
Abe is the sort of leader, who would give that order, if pressed.
China has been so busy preparing for America as the threat - they took their eyes off Japan - the country which conquered China in the last war. A war during which China, and America incidentally fought on the same side.
Japan, could become the 800 pound gorilla in the room with China. Dwarfing its neighbors, and standing toe to toe with China - presenting a far closer, and far more immovable threat than America, with our whining Democrat opposition.
Japan could present a far tougher opponent to China, than even we could.
China's leaders and people are just now realizing how serious that possibility has just become. Almost overnight.
Ronald Reagan was just inaugurated.
In Tokyo.
I'd be willing to bet there are subtle difference between seismic profiles of underground nuclear blasts (even small ones) and underground high explosives detonations of similar yield.
Anyone know for sure?
There is considerable difference, even when the nuclear device is set off in a oversized cavity to promote "decoupling".
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.