Party of Six

Security news involving Japan, North Korea, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and the United States
Another busy week in East Asia. To begin, Japan’s Cabinet took one of the final necessary steps toward allowing the Prime Minister or military officials to shoot down North Korean missiles without Cabinet authorization (a story ITA has been monitoring for some time). The Cabinet approved the bill Tuesday, after the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (which is conservative and technocratic), throwing a sop to pacifist coalition partner New Komeito, added a measure to the bill to require the Prime Minister to report any such action to the Diet immediately afterward. The measure, which must now be approved by Japan’s House of Representatives, is an essential part in developing a functioning chain of command for Japan’s missile defences, being built in partnership with the United States. (Whether said defences will work is unlikely.)
Meanwhile, Japan continued to examine the possibility of placing economic sanctions on North Korea, especially the DPRK’s fishing fleets (a followup to a post last week). Japan Times reports that such sanctions could cost Pyongyang a billion dollars a year–from a GDP that’s only about $17bn to begin with. Japan Times also notes that remittances (transfers of currency) from Japan to the North have also fallen by more than a third from 2003 to 2004, largely because of stepped-up investigation of travelers heading to the hermit kingdom.
Finally, Japan also took a major step by inserting itself into the discussions between China, Taiwan and the United States over the status of Taiwan, which China claims is a breakaway republic, the United States says is at the very least an autonomous island, and Taiwanese leaders increasingly hint may declare formal independence. (If you’re confused, don’t be ashamed: read Wikipedia’s article on Taiwan’s status, and pay close attention to why Taipei formally claims that Mongolia is part of Taiwan.) Washington Post explains that Japan will join the U.S. today in declaring Taiwan a “mutual security concern,” thereby formally committing Tokyo to maintaining the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. In effect, this means that Japan is signalling to Beijing that the United States would not be alone in repelling a mainland invasion of Taiwan. This puts last month’s news that Japan has drawn up plans for repelling a Chinese invasion of Japanese territory in better context. New York Times notes the complexities involved, including the close and deep economic ties linking all four countries together. Reuters underscores that the renewal of the U.S.-Japan security alliance also signals that Japan will become a “strategic hub” from which the United States can deploy its forces from the Korean peninsula to the Middle East. (Japan’s Self-Defence Forces, its military, has established a presence in Iraq.)
China, predictably, is dissatisfied with these moves. People’s Daily carries the official message that CIA chief Porter Goss’s testimony that China is destabilizing the situation in Taiwan sent “a false signal to Taiwan”. But People’s Daily also writes that “U.S. relations with Beijing have been relatively good in recent months;” the newspaper cites in particular the cooperation between the United States and the PRC over North Korea’s now-declared nuclear weapons program. New York Times cautions, though, that China’s role in the six-party talks over the DPRK’s nukes may not be entirely helpful. Many in Beijing view the possibility of Korean reunification on Seoul’s terms as being a potential disaster for China, and adding to their concerns is suspicion of American motives in East Asia.

“Although many of our friends see it as a failing state, potentially one with nuclear weapons, China has a different view,” said Piao Jianyi, an expert in international relations at the Institute of Asia Pacific Studies in Beijing. “North Korea has a reforming economy that is very weak, but every year is getting better, and the regime is taking measures to reform its economy, so perhaps the U.S. should reconsider its approach.”

Washington Post points out that although China has promised economic incentives to get Pyongyang to return to the bargaining table, the U.S. is telling foreign capitals that North Korea shouldn’t be rewarded for becoming the tenth nuclear weapons state.
As all of these high-level negotiations are taking place, we should remember that democracies can be affected by what can seem to be minor incidents. Christian Science Monitor picks up on one such, the release of a film discussing the assassination of South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee in 1979. Monitor argues that the film has reopened generational and ideological wounds in the South Korean psyche–and, more importantly, the electorate–because Park was the symbol of anti-Communism and economic development, while more recent Korean leaders like Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun have pursued policies of reconciliation with the North. Indeed, many sources attest that a number of South Koreans fear the United States more than Kim Jong-Il’s Stalinist regime to the north.