A Chinese Maneuver

The Lunar New Year's Day that fell on February 14 this year by the Gregorian calendar, is one of the most joyous holidays for most Asians, including the people of North Korea.

However, for our cousins in the North, this year was an exception. They were reported to have cast the Lunary New Year's holiday aside in order to celebrate the birthday of their dictator Kim Jong-il, which happened to be a day after New Year's Day.

The traditional holiday, in other words, meant nothing when it was pitted against the mother of all festive days in North Korea--that is the birthday of the current ruler and the son of the founder of the pseudo-Communist regime, Kim Il-sung, who is worshipped by the North Koreans as a demigod.

While starving North Koreans wished "many happy returns" and a long, long life for their Dear Leader, his lackeys searched far and wide and bought many exotic animals and offered them to him as birthday presents, according to South Korean press reports. The animals included, it was said, some turtles that symbolize long life and rhinoceros.

Kim Jong-il, who reportedly survived a stroke a few years back and is suffering from other illnesses such as chronic diabetes, was able to bounce back physically, thanks to Chinese herbal medicine that included doses of the boiled horns of rhinos. They, of course, are an endangered species and poaching is prohibited under international law.

Earlier in November last year, the Kim regime undertook currency reform, entailing the redenomination of the North Korean currency, won, at the rate of 100 to 1. The unexpected reform wreacked havoc on the country's crumbling economy. It was also said to have brought extreme hardship to people who were already suffering acute shortages of food and other daily necessities.

As the level of public discontent and anger rose sharply, Pyongyang has been trying its best to divert atttention, resorting to its old trick of blaming "the U.S. imperialists and their puppets" in South Korea for their economic hardship. Pyongyang has also been threatening armed strikes against the South all winter while telling its people that it is only the military that can insure their safety from foreign aggression.

Meanwhile, partly due to the chronic mismanagement of the nation by the reclusive regime and partly due to the sanctions imposed by the United Nations to force Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons development plans, the country is in the throes of struggling with a sagging economy.

We all remember that in the late 1990s, North Korea faced total collapse but was saved in the nick of time by the then South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, who provided Kim Jong-il with billions of dollars in emergency bailouts. North Korea, however, lost sympathetic South Korean leaders after 10 years of leftist government in Seoul, which was replaced in 2008 by that of the conservative Lee Myong-bak Administration which has been reluctant to help the North unless Pyongyang promises to scrap its nuclear program.

Now faced with another economic meltdown, North Korea has turned to China, its only remaining ally. China was reported to have agreed to invest US$10 billion in North Korea to help build railways, harbors and other social-infrastructures, presumably creating jobs for North Koreans.

And some members of the news media in South Korea and elsewhere said that China appeared to have made the decision in an effort to motivate the impoverished neighbor to rejoin the Six-Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear issue. This, however, is only wishful thinking. For I firmly believe that North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons under any circumstance because they are the only guarantee or lifeline, if you like, for the existence of Kim Jong-il and his regime.

What's more, China will never press Kim hard enough for North Korea to give up its nuclear bombs even though it often pretends to share international concerns over North Korea's nuclear ambition. There is no reason for Beijing to worry about Pyongyang's possession of nuclear weapons as it literally holds the fate of the Kim Jong-il regime in its hand.

China's decision to invest so much money in North Korea is part of its strategy to lay the groundwork--or pretext--to go into North Korea and install a puppet government should the Kim Jong-il regime collapses and civil unrest and political chaos ensue. For such an eventuality, China will never allow South Korea, one of the staunchest allies of the United States, to intervene in North Korea, much less try to unify the two Koreas.

In any event, chances for the Korean people to see their countries reunite in the foreseeable future seems to have receded further by China's latest sly maneuver.

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