The Koreas

[sravakavarn]

It is funny how much calmer (South) Koreans are about this recent dust-storm than Americans who seem to think this is the same as launching cold war nukes already. That said, this does feel a bit more serious than normal. I lived through tensions between DPRK and ROK rising just outside of Seoul. Americans freaked out, Koreans only got tense during the Yongpyang Island shelling. Anyway, Mr. President does seem a bout more loose cannon than normal, but even he has tried to calm talk of pre-emptive strike. The NYT has a good article on it, and China's complicated towing the line recently. 

Comments

[matrixmann]

Sounds like a play as they always stage it: Media generates more of a fear bubble than there really is to get.

[sravakavarn]

That is what I am thinking too, but I am hearing the Japanese social media world freak otu over what looks to be solid-fuel ICBMs in a military parade yesterday. That said, looks like, and works as are different things. It will very interesting right now to watch China.

[matrixmann]

Japan also has taken a more unhealthy course over the past years. More into a direction that seemed like "dancing to America's pipe".
Might be a result from that.
Not to forget - one doesn't know which kind of social and economical problems the country has. After a nuclear power plant which went poof and still the answers to it almost all are on a debtcounter of the general populace, guess there's still quite some stuff to distract from.

[sravakavarn]

Yeah, things in East Asia have taken a turn for the weird since I left in both ROK and Japan. The Park administration being a perfect example.

[matrixmann]

Ever since the territory fights over those several islands (only the reason on the cover, I'd think), this has turned into a chessboard of American interest and will to get each other to turn on each each other, especially on China. For all the apparent reasons American politics always make noise aginst anything abroad.

[conuly]

The really interesting thing, to my mind, is that China is increasingly being treated as the major world power worth listening to. Maybe I'm wrong, but it does seem to me that when I was a kid, "China warns" this or that about anything not directly connected to China would've been treated like, I don't know, South Sudan or Armenia issuing that warning. And even a few years ago, the response would've been "Yeah, so what, China? Your idea of human rights sucks, and you're not exactly the voice of calm in Asia, so who cares?"

[sravakavarn]

China is the second largest economic power on earth, and while its ideas about "human rights" do suck (although some of the points they make about the selectivity of human rights concerns are salient), you really can't work in the region without them.

[conuly]

No, you can't. But it still surprises me that they've crept up in how much respect they're given, and nobody comments on that.

Then again, it's possible I read entirely the wrong articles when I was younger and am just confused.

Edit: And I don't mean to sound like I think this is wrong or bad or anything like that. God knows we had enough years of people listening to America's point of view, because when you're carrying a big enough stick, you don't need to speak softly. It's just different from what I grew to expect when I was small.

[sravakavarn]

I loss sleep over the fact I think China is becoming a bit like America when I lived in South Korea because I was waiting for the day that China would just claim its historical supremacy over the entire korean peninsula and not just the 1/3 of 조선 that is currently the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. Most people don't know that in inter-Asian imperial conflicts of the 18th and 19th century, the country that would become the two modern Koreas was split between China and Japan. The Chinese parts remain in China as Yanbian and one of the 52 recognized minorities.

(This is why I laughed an answer on Quora about how China had never done Imperialism. You don't have 18 major ethnic groups and 52 total ones without Imperialism)

[conuly]

(This is why I laughed an answer on Quora about how China had never done Imperialism. You don't have 18 major ethnic groups and 52 total ones without Imperialism)

Hell, even if you don't know much about Chinese history, does the word "Tibet" ring any bells?

China's done every flavor of imperialism, sheesh.