Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Tangled relationships in north Asia: resources

This week a meeting in Beijing between the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan failed to budge either side from the impasse in trade relations. I am not writing a considered review of this situation yet. Here is some background.

At the end of the week South Korea announced that it would not renew a 2016 agreement with Japan for sharing intelligence directly with Japan. Sharing will still occur via the United States.

The stresses in ROK-Japan relations have a long history.

In the early 1800s the Kingdom of Joseon in Korea was loyal to the Qing Dynasty in China, and observing the military interventions in China of European imperial powers and the opening by force of Japan by the United States, Joseon was determinedly a 'hermit kingdom'... until Japan succeeded in an opening by force of Korea after the manner of the opening of Japan by the US. Imposing an unequal treaty. Korea was a colony of Japan until the end of World War 2 and a peace treaty was not signed until 1965.

The 1965 treaty is at the centre of current controversy. For Japan it was a conclusion of issues of reparation. For the ROK not so, a situation aggravated by the treaty having been entered into by the dictator president Park Chung-hee. Also part of the issue is that Japan at the time wanted to make payments to individuals directly. South Korea rejected that and said it would do whatever disbursement. The Park administration in fact used the reparation funds for the most part for major infrastructure projects, notably the Seoul-Busan freeway and the Pohang Iron and Steel mill... foundations for South Korea's development since.

In the past few years there has been agitation in South Korea for reparations for comfort women, sex slaves of Japanese forces in World War 2. The daughter of Park Chung-hee, Park Geun-hye, was president of the ROK from 2013 until impeached in 2017 and had signed an agreement with Japan to bring the comfort women issue to closure — an agreement considered inadequate by public opinion and the present ROK government.

There has been persistent anger in in Korea and China at the way the Japanese Government has sought to alter history and its role in WW2 and longer wars with Korea and China, notably through revision of officially shaped textbooks.

The Moon adminstration in Seoul has sought a new relationship with North Korea and the two Korean governments have succeeded in reducing the arms along the demilitarised zone. At the same President Trump has embarked on negotiations with North Korea. In this process, Japan has felt excluded, President Abe also anxious about prospects of trade conflict with the US.

see link at left
Abe faced elections recently and succeeded in getting a solid majority but not sufficient in size to allow amendment of the constitutional restraints on defence. In securing the elections he played right wing cards especially against Korea. Apart from particular issues in debate, there appears to be a fundamental issue of views in Japan, and views of Abe, of Korean people as unequal to Japanese. This is explored in depth here, article the header of which is alongside here.

 30 August: see also this. “Abe’s refusal to engage with S. Korea marks end of Japan’s status as peaceful country,” says Haruki Wada

South Korea also perceives moves by Japan to diminish relations with Korea, in its relegation to a minor position in the Indo-Pacific strategy, rather than a close team in north Asia. There are complex emotions.

For further current news and discussion in Korea, see these:

http://english.hani.co.kr/

https://en.yna.co.kr

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzznO4xSV8BKnUBPyswtCUw  (Arirang TV news, well presented)

and for Japan

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/ is limited value

https://www.w3newspapers.com/japan/ gives you a range of sources to explore.


And for wider regional:

https://www.asiatimes.com/

https://www.scmp.com/

both out of Hong Kong.

Best to hunt Asian sources rather than depend on news organisations elsewhere. And to regard all sources as reflecting local opinion and perspective, rather than certain evidence. We should similarly look with care at the quality and perspective of media in Australia, the US and Europe, tending so often be briefly caught up in passing violence. The Guardian is especially (and very disappointingly) guilty of this in the Third World, rushing a generalist to bash out a story and duck off to the next big thing. This is a problem that arises increasingly when even the media we would like to trust most are confronted by limited budgets requiring fleeting coverage of more and more.



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Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Thinking through the choppy issues in trade and strategic threat.

As published today in John Menadue's blog.

The public discussion of trade war and security issues is too simplistic. Trump’s bilateral adventures in liking and bullying will mean discussion of structural changes in regional affairs to which Australia will not be party. Trump is not a passing phenomenon. We cannot say as some are saying “our alliance is with the US, not Trump”.
I am sitting at a computer attached to the internet via two things. A modem of ordinary quality, provided by my ISP, a Chinese brand, with 5G connectivity to the computer. Beyond the modem is the National Broadband Network, large parts of which are made in China. I suspect that those Chinese bits are not the elements of the NBN that fail us often here. I can’t see the strategic case against Huawei without mention of such inconvenient details.
I read the tabloid-stirring news of the US-China trade war. The Deal Artist, among changes and shocks in terms on offer, seeks to hit China by killing the world’s leading communications technology company, Huawei. Equally involved is Apple, whose products dreamt up in California are manufactured in China. There are other companies in similar situation, with Google now forced to cut off use of its software use in Chinese products.
But it’s not a simple bilateral matter.
According to a report released last year by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) titled, “A New Smartphone for Every Fifth Person on Earth: Quantifying the New Tech Cycle,” which analyzed the global smartphone supply chain, “the supply chain has evolved over the last few years and become more complex,” consisting of “large shipments [of intermediate goods] from several Asian countries to China, where final manufacturing and assembly of most smartphones takes place. [. . .] The main contributors to this complex supply chain were Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan Province of China.”
This network of mutual reliance is a major element in the rise of East Asia. With the movement of components goes language. Businesses communicate with each other. Governments nod and bind together. The ways to deal with the simple-minded US bash of China will be discussed and resolved by very smart people in this region. What languages they use, what they resolve to do, will reshape the world. Australia is not part of that evolving world.
On this ranking of international competitiveness
Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Taiwan, China, rank ahead of Australia. We delude ourselves in sense of superiority.
President Trump has been in Japan recently and, cloaked slightly in macho entertainments, has given Prime Minister Abe a roughing up. Gavan McCormack has written recently about the curious instabilities in Japan, and Abe’s circumstance.
In my view Abe’s obsequious approach to the US reflects his awareness that Japan’s economy has not recovered from its last trade war with the United States in the 1980s. The next trade war with the US will likely take down Abe and more. Trump gracelessly disagrees with Abe on North Korea as they stand together and patronisingly says he will talk to Kim Jong-un about allowing an Abe-Kim meeting. He gives this Prime Minister his approval to talk to Iran, a task, in representing the US, likely to be as successful as Menzies’ excited desire to talk to Egyptian President Nasser and tell him not to take the Suez Canal in 1956. Though Japan has been assiduous in its pursuit of good relations with the oil producers since the 1973 oil shock, that represents how Japan could be wedged away from the US, not an asset in speaking somehow for the US.
To fend off the next US economic shocks for Japan for a bit, Abe ordered another 105 F35 aircraft. An aircraft of which Wikipedia at today’s date says:
As the largest and most expensive military program ever, the F-35 became the subject of much scrutiny and criticism in the U.S. and in other countries. In 2013 and 2014, critics argued that the plane was “plagued with design flaws”, with many blaming the procurement process in which Lockheed was allowed “to design, test, and produce the F-35 all at the same time,” instead of identifying and fixing “defects before firing up its production line”.By 2014, the program was “$163 billion over budget [and] seven years behind schedule.” Critics also contend that the program’s high sunk costs and political momentum make it “too big to kill”.
Aircraft of this type are enthusiastically sought by air forces because others might have similar and because of the general enthusiasms that infect air forces. Of course a Japanese purchase like this needs to be seen in the context of Japan’s large foreign reserves and negligible cost of money in Japan.
Big tech items, military and civil, are central to the approach of the US to stem the tide of declining competitiveness. The Boeing 737MAX built in haste with accountant imperatives
has (yet to be measured) negative consequences for the US, political and financial. There are 96 MAX aircraft grounded in China and Chinese airlines will seek compensation for this loss. As will others.
We have recently been witness to an alleged security alert in the Persian Gulf. With suggestions that Iran must be responsible for non-critical damage to several oil ships not shown to journalists and drone attacks from places unknown on pumping stations in Saudi Arabia causing slight damage. In response to this US naval forces in the Gulf have been expanded, to a total strength there much greater than the rest of NATO could assemble anywhere. There is ambiguity in threats by the US towards Iran. It seems to me that the major achievement of this American deployment against a declared threat has been Presidential approval of arms sales that would probably not be approved by Congress. I find my suspicion has been articulated already by The Intercept.
There continues to be discussion as to whether we should take sides with either China or the US. I wrote recently about how the choice is about how to see the world.
But war commitment too often arises from inadvertence and unexpected foci of irritation inflaming public opinion and policy: from Sarajevo 1914, to the Gulf of Tonkin 1964, excuse for widening US commitment in Vietnam, to the minor event near the Gulf of Tonkin in 2019 involving the Australian navy.
Menzies said in 1939 that as Britain was at war with Germany, so was Australia. We live still on such a slope of easy commitment. At what level are alternatives discussed and by what strategic judgement are we engaged in Indo-Pacific exercises aimed at China, far from Australia, far from the US? Where is the debate?
Dennis Argall’s career included work in Foreign Affairs and Defence departments and overseas postings including Washington and as Ambassador to China.
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Thursday, May 16, 2019

a big gap in writing

My health has made writing difficult, daily severe headaches and other chronic pain issues.

We did manage to get to Italy in 2018 but that's my last long journey.

A greeat pleasure to have unplanned conversations, chance encounters, with people in Italy far from touristworld including in Arezzo with Pier Ferruccio Rossi who just came up to us to talk in a phone shop. Here is his good humoured articulation of being an eighty year old poet.



I am about to have a week in hospital for ketamine infusion managed by a rheumatologist who has done this for fifteen years. See this too. Dreaming of writing more often afterwards.

Meanwhile I invite your attention to this excellent paper on north Asia by Gavan McCormack, on how well states measure up and have capacity for essential change in these turbulent times.

Gavan is a committed and practical academic, as here, out on prohibited waters at Okinawa, for background see the paper linked from previous paragraph.



or if you prefer terrible recordings by eminent people in Britain of longer account of last year's book...

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Friday, April 14, 2017

and more on Korea

IxxJxxE

Can someone please explain how come it is OK for the US and certain other countries to have hundreds and up to thousands of nuclear bombs, but North Korea, Iran and unspecified other countries cannot have any?
Is there something I am missing about the apparent hypocrisy here? Is might is right the important message?
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    Dx Yx
    Darren Yorston is a Friend of The Conversation

    In reply to I..
    Because America good, North Korea bad.
    The US tried to stop the Brits from acquiring atomic nuclear weapons. Quite ironic considering the Brits and Canada were both involved int he Manhattan project. Winston Churchill wrote about it in his history of the Second World War.
    If you look at global politics it’s having nuclear weapons that places you in the boys club. The US resists others countries from acquiring nuclear weapons because it reduces their power over them; Mutually Assured Destruction is a successful deterrent.
    Whilst North Korea may be a threat to world peace, what I think is more important to the US is that a nuclear armed North Korea is less likely to be threatened. Countries without nuclear weapons cannot fight back against the US, a nuclear armed country can.
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      Dennis Argall

      In reply to I..
      Ixxx, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which came into force in 1970 recognised those states which had already tested nuclear devices as Nuclear Weapon States, others as Non-Nuclear Weapon States. With some increasing difficulties this has been a major instrument in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. At the outset, Australian ratification was opposed by a number of powerful people who wanted us to have a nuclear weapon capability.
      A small number of significant countries are not parties: Pakistan, India and Israel. South Africa is the only country to have had a nuclear weapon program and abandoned it. Iran has been a party since 1970, the negotiations with Iran are within a legal framework such as also binds Australia. The DPRK is unique in having signed on and then left after a few years. That is part of the issue.
      The other part of the issue is that the Korean war did not end in 1953, there was an Armistice. The Military Armistice Commission (MAC)continues to meet in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) on the 38th parallel in Korea. The participants are the ‘Chinese Peoples Volunteers’, the [North] Korean Peoples Army and the United Nations Command.
      The defence attache in the Australian Embassy in Seoul is a participant in the MAC as are other participants on the UN side in the Korean war. Why and how this is the only occasion on which the UN has been a belligerent is for separate research.
      The ROK at the outset would have no part in the armistice, these days it does.
      For decades the conventional forces arrayed on either side of the DMZ have exceeded any elsewhere. There have been many flashpoints.
      In my view, too much US policy and too much media focus is shaped by the US forces hypertrophic buildup in relation to Korea. There have been political and diplomatic betrayals on either side.
      There is no way forward in war in Korea. Koreans do not want a war.
      South Korea’s (ROK) GDP is slightly smaller than Australia’s. It is a member of the G20. The ROK’s transformation since 1980 is in many ways as astonishing as China’s… with the added consideration that caught in the middle of what I describe above, they have headed step by step towards a sound democratic system from military dictatorship.
      There’s been some history in the past several weeks but my judgement still rests pretty much as here:
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            Dxxx Yxxx 
            Darren Yorston is a Friend of The Conversation

            In reply to Dennis Argall
            Sure. However, I think that most people are of the view that nuclear, biological and chemical weapons are bad and should be gotten rid of. As a result people find it somewhat hypocritical that countries such as the US maintain large stockpiles of nuclear weapons and in many cases chemical and biological weapons as well. If nuclear, biological and chemical weapons are intrinsically bad then it doesn’t matter who has them.
            The US continues to have to these weapons because having the biggest stick is best. Ivo is correct; might does make right. There are enough nuclear weapons in the world to make a mess of our planet, more countries having them won’t make the world any more a wasteland.
            The US isnt trying to prevent North Korea from having nuclear weapons because it will attack the US. The US wants to prevent North Korea because a nuclear armed North Korea is less threatened by US threats and cannot be manipulated. China, Iran, Russia are all proof of that. The US cannot try the things it does on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria with nuclear armed countries BECAUSE nuclear war IS a consequence that neither side will enter into.
            Conventional warfare is a different matter, and Iraq, Libya, Syria are all examples of that. There is no risk to the US for attacking those countries. That is the exact reason why the US wants to strike at North Korea, so that it CAN do it without consequence.
            Might makes right.
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              Dennis Argall

              In reply to Dxxx
              I don’t think there is any moral right for anyone to possess let alone use any weapons of mass destruction. The landscape there is bleak and certain.
              I don’t think the US can strike north Korea without consequence. Not at all. And I think a number of people have been pointing that out to Trump including the President of China and the presidential candidates and the armed forces of south Korea.
              The total land mass of North Korea 120,000sq km and south Korea 100,000sq km is about the same as Victoria, Australia (230,000sq km). The total area of the United Kingdom is 240,000 sq km. In no sense can you have a war in the north that does not embroil both, inflict massive casualties on both. There are 50 million in the south, half that in the north, altogether three times the Australian population, 11 times the population of Victoria. And more than the population of the United Kingdom. The GDP of south Korea is slightly less than Australia’s; half that of the UK. Busy and crowded places.
              The three Chinese provinces adjacent to Korea – Jilin, Heilongjiang and Liaoning – have populations totalling more than 100 million. There is a short border (17km) between the DPRK and Russia, while the border between the DPRK and China, running along mountains and rivers, is 1400km.
              If you doubt that the Chinese - at large - might not take seriously the placement of the THAAD high altitude anti-missile device in south Korea recently (still a debate in the presidential elections) please note that to the end of March hitherto large Chinese tourist numbers have fallen 60%. 180,000 Chinese soldiers died in Korea in the Korean war. China is as close to Korea as to Vietnam, but the Vietnam war is over.
              The first people who have to sort out the issues in Korea are the Koreans. Next come China and Japan. The place of Japan is muddled to the extent that both Japan and the ROK are allies of the US, while both ROK and DPRK, especially the DPRK, have deep feelings about issues involving WW2 and long earlier Japanese colonial occupation. With China - mixed. China entered the Korean War as US forces approached the Chinese border in 1950 and General Macarthur wanted to carry the war to Beijing with nuclear weapons. President sacked Macarthur to stop him. The working relationship between China and the ROK is very large now but is only a couple of decades old.
              I take heart from the fact that the Chinese former Vice Foreign Minister now with high level responsibility for nuclear and Korean affairs has spent this last week in Seoul in smiling meetings with all the presidential candidates as well as government officials. As I also take heart from the presence of Russian naval vessels in south Korea on a goodwill visit.
              There are smart and powerful countries there who know that war won’t work, who don’t want a war. We spend too much time surrounded by game and movie memes and daily news of conflict. This has to be different. We have to shift our heads.
              I very much doubt that anyone in higher levels of the US defence forces, or National Security Advisor McMaster, or Defence Seretary Mattis, believes a war would work… even though they have rooms full of war plans. The north Koreans know a war won’t work but this column is too small a space to work through why they are not crazy. To say they are crazy one then has to say Trump is crazy. That is not a sensible place to go to secure the peace.
              There is a higher risk now of war by misadventure than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
              But against that there is some reassurance that the strategic and tactical intelligence resources focused on the peninsula are the deepest and most effective anywhere.
              At the same time it is pathetic to see Autralian media and politicians gobble up the US defence media line.
              Sending a carrier task force to Korea? It only just left Korea, it’s cancelled a visit ot Australia, sob sob..
              North Korea fired five missiles in the direction of Japan? These were old Scud type missiles, now nice for everyone at the beginning of US-ROK exercises which HAVE FOR DECADES given rise to US media and intelligence briefings irresponsibly saying “wolf, wolf, north Korean wolf” when it’s response to US-ROK movements.
              Why are we so suckered? The ROK armed forces this week said there will be no war, they don’t want a war, they want a peaceful solution to the problem. Who has reported that? If I, with a seven year old computer and a brain 66 years older than that computer can find out these things, why can’t the ABC? Or…
              I don’t think the discussion last night here, with a number of people speaking rudely of north Korea and proposing nuclear strike is anything other than trumpian. We have to stay cool.

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