Korean Misgivings

A new war is brewing in the Korean Peninsula, and one that might go both nuclear and global.  Hence, Uncle Cephas sadly moves from his recent meditations on biblical themes to the areas of international politics, an area in which he has worked and which formed one of his areas of specialization for his Ph.D. in political science.

Kim Jong-eun's recent saber-rattling does not represent the ravings of an unhinged madman, nor is it the posture of a man yet too immature to handle the power entrusted to him. It is a calculated move to bring about one of the long-standing goals of the Pyongyang regime and its protector in Beijing, namely, the removal of meaningful US influence from Northeastern Asia.  A re-opening of the Korean War seems to offer this, especially since the US has seemed thoroughly unprepared for such an eventuality up till now.

Communist Chinese policy has been testing the Obama administration for a number of years now. On a state visit, the pianist Lang Lang played "My Motherland", a theme from a Korean War-era propaganda film that glorified killing Americans. No official response was forthcoming, assuring Beijing that this administration is not wary of Beijing's intentions. Beijing is also well aware that both official America and the major American media are positive towards Beijing and trust it to be a restraint on rather than an enabler of North Korean ambitions.  Washington breathes a sigh of relief when Beijing cuts off supplies to Pyongyang for a day or two; but fails to ask other questions.

The buildup of Chinese land and air forces along the Yalu and Tumen rivers and the deployment of its naval power in the Yellow Sea seems more a signal to Kim's regime that Beijing is watching his back rather than trying to warn him to refrain from drastic action. Further, recent cyber attacks on South Korean banking and communications targets, traced to China, and hacking American computers also suggest "dry runs" for military technologies which China has been openly pursuing for a number of years.  The choice of a South Korean target also suggests that Beijing is also thinking in terms of a reopening of Korean hostilities.

Kim is no fool.  His bellicose noises echo those of his father, who drew numerous concessions through threats.  This, and continuing Chinese rhetoric about the "lips and teeth" relationship between Communist China and North Korea, tell him that he has nothing to fear. 

Further, the Communist giants had a longstanding history of loyalty to allies and clients, while the US has long proven itself fickle (as even Israel and Britain are learning from the Obama administration).  This, perhaps, coupled with the excellent training the East German Stasi used to give the security forces of erstwhile Soviet Third World clients, goes far in explaining the unending string of Communist successes in the so-called Third World throughout the Cold War.

To fight the next Korean War, US policy needs to consider what it would take to successfully counter a Communist Chinese intervention.  Yet it shows no sign of doing so. American cyber-warfare capabilities remain in their infancy, and the smart money in Washington continues to bet on cooperation with the PRC.

The men who rule in Beijing also know that we are not watching them.  Further, they have everything to win from a new Korean War in which the US is again unprepared for their intervention on behalf of Pyongyang.  Aghast at the possibility of a repeat of 1989, dismayed that even "progressive" opinion in the West sympathized with the protesters in Tiananmen, aware that they are the last and best hope for 20th century totalitarianism, confident that they can rally their population against a perceived foreign threat, and students of Sun Zi, they are probably confident that they can trap the Obama administration into a war that the US will lose.

Should war break out in the Far East, it is hard to see how the Middle East will keep quiet.  Certainly Iran will be emboldened to show some support for Beijing and Pyongyang, both of which contributed to its own nuclear development. A preoccupied America could easily lead Arab rejectionists (who are clearly the winning party) to launch new attacks on Israel.  Erdogan's Islamicist Turkey would not be a reliable US ally in such a scenario, threatening the possible breakup of NATO. At no time have dangers been so great.

The US and South Korea need to mobilize world opinion against Pyongyang--although that will be difficult in an era in which even the American administration sees its foreign policy as a neo-colonialism of which it must be ashamed.  Both need to quickly develop their own cyber-warfare capacities and plan for a conlfict in which Mainland China will again be a key player.

A Model of Interethnic Harmony: Dogmeat Among the Yao

Ages ago, Uncle Cephas once had the honor of serving in Uncle Sam's "striped pants brigade"--even if the only stripes he had on his pants were on the boxers underneath the dress trousers.  This service to his country led me to the city of Guangzhou, the vibrant hub of the Ling Nan region of China, which consists of the provinces of Guangdong and Hainan, plus the Guangxi Zhuang Auntonomous Region.

While some of my recollections are safely tucked away with various levels of classification in the archives of the State Department, returning to the teaching profession and encountering some of the attitudes prevalent among my colleagues, including those who write the curricula with which I must sometimes swindle my charges and their families, I've decided to dust off memory and re-tell some of my experiences, only stripped of information which might harm others.

Since I teach ESOL,among other things, I have sat through certification seminars on various aspects of linguistics and language policies.  In the latter, I have heard the People's Republic of China praised as a model of accommodation of ethnic and linguistic minorities.  After all, 56 diffferent people groups are recognized as official national minorities, and the development of their languages and cultures are supposedly encouraged.  However, the real story is that, as with every other society, much of what is done in and by the Chinese Communist government is actually for ease of administration rather than to accommodate and care for segments of the population. 

For example, are the Lakkja of Guangxi really Yao, when the languages usually classed as Yao are of the Hmong-Mien family (constituting the Mien part of the group), when Lakkia turns out to be Thai-Kadai?  Apparently, the Lakkja were, in ages past, subject to Yao chieftains, hence they belong to the Yao "nationality".  But, shouldn't a revolutionary socialist regime pay scant regard to tribal or "feudal" (after all, China's historical narrative had to be battered into conformity with what Marx said had to be the case) ties forged in a benighted past?  Or, why are Manzhou and Xibe classed as separate peoples, when their languages are mostly mutually intelligible (at least, the half-dozen or so surviing speakers of Manzhou are reported to be able to follow speakers of Xibe)?
I can understand why mutually unintelligible languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, Minnan, Wu, Mindong, and Hakka are called "dialects", when they vary as much as French and Rumanian, since their speakers are all from the ancient Hua-Xia ethnoc and culture, a little bit like Western Europe never letting go of the imperial Roman identity, and reducing French, Galician, Italian, and Castillian to "dialects" of something they would insist on calling "Latin".

But I've digressed too far, when my real purpose is to set the record strait on China and its minorities.

Occasionally, junior officers would be called on to carry briefcases, take notes, and write up cables on the journeys of their superiors to meet with the Chinese movers and shakers of the consular district.  One such trip was to an autonomous county inhabited by the Yao, a "colorful" highland people whom I had encountered before among the hill tribes of Thailand's Golden Triangle and among refugees from Communist Laos. Come to think of it, thanks to many of them having fought on the wrong side of the long Lao Civil War (like their distant Hmong cousins), there are now Yao living in the USA, too.

The first sight of the Yao was along one of the roads leading into the Autonomous County.  Three heavily burdened Yao--two women and one man--shuffled along under enormous loads of firewood carried on tumplines.  They were short, brown, very weathebeaten-looking and clad in traditional homespun, including the dirty red turban and sash of the man.  This was in marked contrast to the Yao of northern Thailand, who, in their jeans and t-shirts, couldn't be picked out from any other ethnos frequenting the Chiengmai night market, unless one was with a linguist who could eavesdrop on snatches of their conversation. While one might praise the Yao of upland Ling Nan for their "authenticity", conversations with various persons soon revealed that the real reason for their maintenance of traditional garb was that a child's simple store-bought dress might put a Yao peasant family back several months' earnings.  Hence, the traditional homespun remained in fashion.

But, there was another angle.  In northern Thailand, I had discovered that classical Chinese was a sort of liturgical language to the local Yao, whose religion was actually a mix of Daoism and Mahayana Buddhism not too different from that of the various Han groups of Ling Nan such as the Cantonese and Hakka.  Hence, I was able to read a booklet about the ancestral deity Pan Hu, a talking dog.  The occasional piece of anthropological literature I'd seen also made mention of a cult of a dog ancestor.

Well, in the Autonomous County, I hit it off well with the Han deputy magistrate (the magistrate, or xian zhang [县长] was a Yao, but didn't seem to say much).  After all, I had a smattering of Hakka dialect from my years in Taoyuan and Hsinchu counties in Taiwan as well as Putonghua, and the deputy magistrate happened to be Hakka.  I asked the deputy magistrate whether the local Yao observed the dog ancestor cult.  Apparently, something went amiss in either transmission or reception, and, in reply, I received a lecture how in the dark days before Liberation, the Han had despised the Yao, wrote the Hanzi for the Yao with the dog radical, but with the glorious advent of the People's Republic, that had all changed, all were equal,and the Yao ethnonym was now written with the human radical. 

Passing a row of newish, albeit Spartan, rural housing, the deputy magistrate conspiratorially whispered that the Yao peasants still lived with their livestock.  "Very backwards! 好落后吧"  However, I maintained my diplomatic presence of mind and refrained from observing that the Hanzi for "home" or "family" in Chinese--Jia 家--represents a pig under a roof.  Perhaps it was that I had already uttered one gaffe, and did not wish to add another; perhaps it was because I didn't have the heart to go on and explain as well how many white Americans claimed descent from what my mother called "pig-in-the-parlor Irish".

Well, things generally went well.  My senior colleague was fairly certain he'd name the deputy magistrate as someone to go on an exchange visit to the States. There was an official banquet back at the Xian government offices.  It featured a lot of free-flowing mao tai, braised palm civet, and a number of other delicacies.  But, we had hit it off so well with the deputy magistrate that he insisted on treating us to the sort of hospitality he liked; an informal late night snack at a local place run by a bunch of other Hakka-speaking Han folk in the area.

My senior colleague, who was manfully fighting back the effects of an already sufficient dose of mao tai, turned vaguely green as we approached the open eatery.  On a slab of concrete, a woman squatted over the freshly killed corpse of a smallish dog, busily removing the hair from its skin.  The Hanzi on the shop clearly indicated that the specialty of the house was dog braised with turnip; and the deputy magistrate, our congenial host, praised the dish to the skies. In fact, it was an excellent dish.  While Uncle Cephas prefers beef, pork, or mutton braised with turnips, the dog meat tasted a bit like something between pork and mutton, although a little more intense than either.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm an animal lover.  I raised cats when I was a boy, and I've always liked dogs, albeit as long as they were somebody else's responsibility.  But, one of the "things" about diplomatic life is that you don't insult your hosts by shouting "eeeeeuw" like an eight-year-old girl at a well-intentioned dinner. And it just so happens that for almost all of the Han groups of southernmost China--Cantonese, Hakka, Teochiu, Hoklo, Hokkien, whatever--whether on the Mainland, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, dog is a delicacy.

And it was during the repast, with the mao tai flowing freely, that Uncle Cephas inadvertently got his answer to the status of the dog ancestor cult among the Yao of Ling Nan.

The deputy magistrate's driver and security chief were both local Yao.  While the Hua-Xia and Western cultures exchanged jokes and toasts, these two men sat motionless and silent, their hands at their sides, their heads bowed, and their down-turned lips looking as if--in the words of Mrs. Cephas' Hakka-speaking Taiwanese folk--three catties of pork were suspended from them.  I honestly and truly felt bad that I was enjoying myself when these two hard-working men, whom I, by my very presence in their bailiwick, had kept from going home to their families, were probably feeling as if I were urinating on their ancestral graves. Indeed, I felt bad about the sadness of my fellow human beings (even though I am an Evangelical Christian, and the Yao driver and security man were clearly "heathens") throughout the following day all throughout the drive back to the Consulate.

So, I suppose, even among dialectical materialist Communist Party members, the cult of the dog ancestor remains alive and well among the Yao of Ling Nan.  And  I guess that the Party's manuals for cadre among national minorities do not explain how to show proper respect to traditional, "pre-scientific" beliefs.

I wonder.  Do the Yao think that the modern Communist's totem animal is the ape?

China Sets a Trap [?]

The British periodical _Guardian_ reports that Wikileaks reveals that China is privately ready to abandon North Korea, and may be open to Korean re-unification under Seoul. This sounds very suspicious. It is more likely that Chinese officials are planting misinformation with their American counterparts, possibly setting a military trap.

It is more than conceivable that pretending a willingness to abandon the Kim dynasty of Pyongyang is a way to make America over-confident should Pyongyang re-open the Korean War. A renewed Korean War in which America remains unprepared for massive Chinese Communist support for the North Korean state provides Beijing with a golden opportunity to trap US forces, move on Taiwan, isolate Japan, and possibly remove the American presence from the Western Pacific for good. It would allow Beijing, in a single dramatic conflict, to fulfill a large part of the what the regime sees as its historic mission, namely, to end the legacy of Western imperialism in the Far East. Beijing's official organs never broach the possibility that Taiwan's continuing wariness about reunification, despite its clear lack of international support and a government headed by the pan-Blues, may just have to do with differing indigenous political evolutions on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait; but insist that the existence of a "China Irredentia" can only be because of the nefarious plots of first Tokyo, then Washington. Similarly, the performance of the Chinese forces in the Korean War of 1950-53 remains a large part of China's self-image as a rising power. Should a Beijing-Pyongyang alliance win a second Korean War, with Communist absorption of Taiwan as a further benefit to Beijing, China would be in an excellent position to completely eclipse Japan as a power in the Far East.

Naked Chinese pressure on a number of neighboring governments to boycott the Nobel ceremony that honored Liu Xiaobo is a reminder that Beijing remains the last, best hope of 20th century totalitarianism. It is certain that China feels that its rising power permits it to censor critical voices not only at home, but abroad as well. It is therefore inconceivable that a Korea reunified under a multiparty government allied to the United States (and, with reunification, possibly confident enough to undertake a final reconciliation with Japan) could be truly welcome to Beijing's rulers. The Korean minority in China's northeast is already a vector for underground Christian propaganda; and the possibility of their becoming a vector for political dissidence would only be strengthened by Korean reunification on Seoul's terms.

As students of Sunzi, China's leaders know that one of America's great weaknesses is a deep desire to believe that the Chinese Communist regime is fundamentally benign, internationally responsible, and not really represented by the continuing anti-American message found in China's government-controlled media. This is something they know they can use for political and military leverage, just as they have used it to gain international economic respectability in the face of such practices as using prison and child labor.

Hence, the US Government should take such feelers from Beijing with a large grain of salt.