Loser In the Game of Chicken

When I was reading news reports on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s return to Pyongyang from his visit to China early last month, a faded image of a small Korean boy resurfaced in my memory out of half a century of oblivion.

The boy was one of my classmates at the elementary school in a remote village in South Korea nearly 70 years ago.

The North Korean dictator somehow reminded me of the obnoxious little kid who was disliked and avoided like a leech by everyone in our class. He was not unusually big or strong but managed to bully everyone because he had a big brother who was four years older than us.

His family, I remember, was extremely poor and yet he always was in possession of a pocketful of candies and marbles that he had “confiscated” from us. He even forced us to give up our lunch boxes so that he didn’t have to skip a meal. Luckily for us, his family moved out of our village a couple of years later, and the memory of that awful boy soon faded away.

As we all know, Kim Jong-il visited China shortly after a South Korean navy ship was attacked and sank in the West (Yellow) Sea. A month-long, meticulous investigation by South Koreans aided by a team of foreign experts established—based on undeniable and watertight evidence—that the North Koreans had perpetrated the crime.

Outraged and angry at the latest in North Korea’s unending series of terrorist acts against them, South Koreans vowed to retaliate. President Lee Myung-bak’s government declared it would force the impoverished but belligerent North to pay a price for the unprovoked attack.

South Korea and its ally, the United States, also announced that they would hold a joint naval exercise as part of demonstrations to show their determination to confront possible further provocation from the North. In addition, Seoul moved to have the United Nations condemn North Korea for the attack and tighten its existing economic sanctions against Pyongyang as punishment.

The North Koreans, as usual, resorted to their well-worn tactics, claiming that it was South Korea itself that had “staged” the incident and sank its own navy ship. It even threatened to launch an all-out war against the South if Seoul tries to retaliate against them.

Although Kim Jong-il and his running dogs in Pyongyang barked loudly, they must have been scared nonetheless over a possible military action by the South against them. For, Kim dragged his ailing body to Beijing apparently to seek Chinese reassurance that they would continue to stand by their North Korean puppets no matter what happens.

In the ensuing game of chicken between the North and South, it is Seoul, it seems, that has blinked and let Kim Jong-il get away with murders once again. South Korea and the United States postponed their announced naval exercise indefinitely while the United Nations has not taken any action against North Korea as of early June.
The Seoul government even issued a statement saying it would refrain from taking any step that could provoke North Korea.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did visit Beijing but was unable, obviously, to exert any effective influence over the Chinese leadership. Judging by the action—or rather, inaction—of Beijing, China’s role of big brother for the North seems to be unchanged, if not strengthened.

Thus, like the obnoxious kid that my classmates and I had to put up with in our elementary school days, that cruel and insufferable dictator Kim Jong-il, riding piggyback on his big brother, will keep terrorizing and murdering South Koreans with impunity as China continues to expand and wield its power and influence over its neighbors.

Kim Jong-il knows, no doubt, that right now, the United States can’t do anything much for South Korea not only because it has its hands full with two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—but also because it is suffering serious financial difficulties that include an enormous debt to China. It has been reported that Beijing has dragged its feet on the U.S. request for Chinese efforts to help maintain peace in the Korean Peninsula.

One only hopes that the overconfident Kim Jong-il will not take any more rash and miscalculated action against the South that could easily trigger another all-out war that would surely reduce the two Koreas to one huge heap of rubble.
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Living With Ants (II)

The other day, I played god with a couple of tiny ants, members a species that is smaller than a grain of rice. Hundreds of thousands of them have invaded our house and have been living with us for years. That is why I wasn’t very upset when I saw them crawling around the edges of the bathtub when I was taking my morning bath.

I decided to get rid of them but not immediately. I wanted to see how strong their instinct for survival was. I realized that I was being cruel. But my desire to observe their behavior in the face of imminent death was stronger.

First, I built a puddle of water around them with warm bath water scooped up with the palms of my hand in order to see them struggle to get out of their watery confine and escape. Apparently, though, they are not good swimmers.

Despite their desperate efforts, they could not wriggle through water. But they never gave up; they ran around tirelessly in search of a possible exit for more than five minutes.

I found out that in the world of ants, there are also individual differences. One ant was obviously stronger physically than the other. It continued to scurry around while the other one gradually slowed down, eventually stopped running altogether and lay there as still as though it was dead.

Then, I witnessed an amazing scene. The stronger one approached the weaker one and in what appeared to me to be a gesture of nudging, pushed its head against the body of the exhausted fellow ant. Of course, I had no way of knowing whether ants actually communicate with each other and, if they do, how.

Anyway, to my great surprise, the one that I thought was dead, started moving again. And pretty soon, it began running again, not with its companion, but separately.

Meanwhile, the bathwater was getting less and less warm as I forgot to replenish it with hot water as I usually do. I was too preoccupied with my observation of the ants’ behavior.

Then, a disaster befell on the physically stronger ant. While it was frantically trying to find a route for escape, it run over the slippery edge and fell into the tube. And for a few moments, I thought it had no chance of surviving in the larger body of water, however tepid the water had become.

But lo and behold! It not only survived the fall but was vigorously moving in the soapy bathwater. Impressed by the tenacity of such a small creature and taking pity on it, I fished it out in my palm and returned it to his former “watery prison.”

Some may say that I was being needlessly cruel, but I had become extremely impatient with all the ants that had been bothering us everywhere in our house day and night. And I have killed them mercilessly whenever I spotted them. The couple of ants I ran into in the bathroom could not be an exemption. I contemplated what could be the best way to send them to their death. The answer was hot water. I knew the water didn’t have to be scalding hot.

I turned on the hot water, cupped some of it in my hands and sprinkled it on the two ants, which were reduced to a couple of dark specks instantly.

Coming out of the bathroom, I did not feel sorry for them. But somehow, I didn’t feel any vengeful elation either. Nevertheless, as I was drying myself, I turned on my CD player, knowing that the music it would play would be Mozart’s Requiem.
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How Long Should We Wait?

I have said this before but I’ll repeat it here again because I’m upset with God, yes, God. He has not been keeping his promise to us. He said vengeance is His and He will repay. But He has not kept his promise with regard to Kim Jong-il, the North Korean dictator.

(Before I go any further, I must apologize to my friends for writing so much about North Korea which is, I’m sure, one of the most distressing and uninteresting topics to think about. In the absence of any other serious events, however, one is forced more or less to discuss whatever it is that is developing in that part of the world).

Not counting his dad’s crime of killing more than 2 million people half a century ago, Kim Jong-il has been killing hundreds of innocent South Koreans, not to mention millions of his own people in the North, for decades. And yet, God has not punished him. I wonder what is holding Him up. Don’t they say that justice delayed is justice denied?

Sure, God moves in mysterious ways as they say. So, He has his own way of working on vengeance. But today, the murderous North Korean leader is not only alive and kicking but also continuing to play god himself, killing people at will and getting away with the murders.

That’s not all. Due, no doubt, to years of debauchery and decadence, he is reportedly suffering from kidney disease and has had a stroke and yet, he has “miraculously” recovered from them. Instead of doing soul searching and repenting his crimes, he still seems to be enjoying torturing and killing people.

In the latest adventure, he is strongly suspected of ordering his navy to blow up and sink a South Korean patrol ship in South Korean territorial waters in the West (Yellow) Sea nearly two months ago. Some 46 South Korean sailors perished in the unprovoked attack.

Fearing retribution from the South, he is said to have visited China in order, as some press reports speculate, to discuss ways to counter possible action from the South with Chinese leaders, his big brothers and protectors.

It is true that everything that the North Korean dictator does should necessarily be veiled in secrecy. So, some said he visited China in order to beg for more food aid for his starving nation while others were still naïve enough to hope that he was trying to discuss with the Chinese the possibility of returning to the Six-Party Talks on the denuclearization of his country. (When will they learn to regard Kim Jong-il and his followers simply as a bunch of gangsters whom they should never trust?)

From my perspective, I would say that he visited China to beg for more financial and food assistance in exchange for the right to use the strategic port of Chungjin in northeastern North Korea. There have been reports that China was trying to extend its power and influence all over Asia including the East Sea (which is known in some quarters as the Sea of Japan).

Or, maybe Kim Jong-il wants to invite Chinese tourists to visit the scenic Kumgangsan (Diamond Mountains) resort, which his regime has recently seized from the South. South Korea’s industrial group, Hyundai, and some others had built the resort in the North at the cost of tens of billions of won, but Kim Jong-il and his henchmen recently arbitrarily seized control of its operation.

Whatever the reason for his visit to China, one thing is sure: he is up to no good for the majority of his countrymen and women, not to mention, the entire Korean people. Yet, no one, indeed, no country in the rest of the world, seems to be able to do anything about him. That precisely is why, I, for one, am impatient while waiting—interminably—for God to mete out his punishment to Kim Jong-il if only to prevent him from killing any more innocent people. After all, he is one of the greatest sinners in the later half of the 20th century and beyond and there should not be any more delay in bringing him to face divine judgment for his crimes.
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North Korea, Once Again

The North Koreans are apparently in a state of euphoria these days (perhaps, extreme hunger brought on an hallucinatory state?) as they celebrate the 98th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, the late founder of their Stalinist country and father of the current dictator, Kim Jong-il.

While an untold number of its people were dying of hunger and malnutrition, the impoverished country spent 5.4 million dollars to import 60 tons of fireworks and lit up the usually dark skies over its electricity-starved capital, Pyongyang, in celebration on the eve of Kim Il-sung’s birthday, April 15.

It was also reported to have bought some 200 expensive foreign cars in order, no doubt, to present them to the military brass and Kim Jong-il’s lackeys in the party and government who keep Kim’s cruel regime going.

According to the latest information reaching South Korea from the North, which is, for all intent and purposes, one huge gulag, North Koreans were also elated by the news that one of South Korea’s navy ships had exploded and sank in the West Sea, just south of the Northern Limit Line (NLL), or the maritime border separating the North and South.

The South Korean navy ship, patrolling the area, sank more than a month ago, killing 44 sailors and marines. And South Korea, with the help of experts from the U.S. and other foreign countries, has been investigating the cause of the incident.

Pyongyang’s official press ridiculed the South by saying that South Korea which many North Koreans thought was scientifically advanced, has turned out to be an inept nation, unable to figure out what happened to one of its own navy ships.

However, as mounting evidence began to point to an external attack, possibly (who else?) from North Korea, Pyongyang pulled out its time-honored and well-known trick of blaming its adversaries. Even al-Qaeda claims responsibility whenever its members launch terrorist attacks. But not the North Koreans.

Whenever they have been caught red handed in the wake of so many terrorist attacks, they have invariably turned the tables on Seoul, claiming that it was the South Korean themselves who committed the heinous acts against their own people.

Thus, after launching the fratricidal Korean War (1950-53) in order to communize the South, they claimed that it was the South that started the conflict that killed more than two million people. After they bombed the Martyr’s Mausoleum in Burma in October 1981, killing 18 ranking South Korean government officials; and after they blew up the Korean Air plane over Burma in December 1987, killing 115 innocent South Koreans, they insisted that the bombings were the work of South Koreans themselves, even though North Korean agents were subsequently caught and confessed.

But who, in their right mind, would believe such an absurd claim? Yet, North Korean leaders have continued to play this kind of childish game whenever they were cornered with clear and glaring evidence against them.

And this time, I am sure, won’t be an exception. The North Korean leaders were said to have already launched a propaganda barrage saying that the sinking of the navy ship was of the South’s own doing. They probably think that the rest of the world is as crazy as themselves and as gullible as their cowed and frightened people.

The North Koreans are obviously counting on the fact that Seoul won’t be able to do anything much against them even if it finds out for sure that the attack was perpetrated by the North. They must know that the South as well as the United States will not be able to take even limited, punitive action against them as it could very well escalate into a full-scale conflict.

Besides, they seem to believe that they are an invincible nation that can put up a fight against any country in the world. Why, they are now a military power with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction!

Indeed, there are very limited military options that the South can take even if it is convinced that 44 of its young men were the victims of a cowardly and unprovoked attack.

All South Korea can do is to strengthen military preparedness against further attacks while re-educating and heightening the morale of the officers and men and women of its armed forces for future attacks which the North now seems to launch with impunity.

Let’s face it, the South Korean military has been lax since all its members were born long after the Korean War and grew up in the 1980s and 90s when their country was governed by leftist presidents—Kim Dae-jung and Roh Mu-hyun—who had taken a pro-North Korean policy of appeasing Kim Jong-il’s regime in Pyongyang.

Many of the South Korean young people were taught by so-called “progressive” teachers, politicians and civic leaders to regard North Koreans as their brothers and sisters first, not as enemies who are out to destroy South Korea. As a result, there was a time when a majority of university students said in an opinion poll that they would fight side by side with the North Korean army against the United States if war were to break out between the United States and North Korea.

There also was a false sense of superiority among the South Korean populace that somehow their country is stronger militarily and otherwise than the North, perhaps because they had been used to reading the reports that South Korea has far outstripped the North economically.
But we must all realize that in addition to its nuclear bombs, North Korea is possibly stronger than the South militarily and South Korea could easily sustain a crippling, if not decisive, blow if North Korea’s one-million strong armed forces decide to launch an all-out attack as they did in 1950.

In this respect, I hope that the latest naval skirmish will be a wakeup call for all the democracy loving South Koreans.
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The Unending Conflict

My heart went out to the families of the South Korean sailors and marines who lost their young lives when a naval patrol ship exploded and sank in the West Sea near North Korea last Friday.

While offering deeply felt condolences, however, many of us could not help wondering what has caused the South Korean military as well as the Seoul government to take such a long time to find out what triggered the explosion. More than three days after the incident, no one seemed to know whether the ship was hit and, if so, by what, much less by whom.

What’s more curious was the hast with which government authorities cast doubt on the possibility of “a North Korean involvement.” But one could not help asking if they did not know what exactly caused the explosion, how could they say North Koreans could not have done it?

Then, the Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC) somehow seemed to have conclusive evidence that North Koreans were not involved in the incident. The MBC-TV is the television station that is being run by our old anti-American leftist friends who, if you remember, concocted and spread lies against the imports of American beef allegedly tainted by mad-cow disease. And for some reason, foreign news media in Seoul quoted the MBC report and sent out their initial dispatches to the rest of the world saying it was not a North Korean attack.

Our memories are still vivid about the last naval clash between the South and North that occurred on November 10, 2009 in the same West Sea. A North Korean warship intruded into the southern territorial waters, crossing the so-called NLL (Northern Limit Line) or the maritime border separating the two Koreas. In the clash, the South Korean navy destroyed and sank a North Korean warship and Pyongyang vowed that it would repay their losses a thousand fold in the future.

Then, only a few days before the latest naval clash, North Korea threatened that it would use a nuclear bomb if “anyone,” meaning the South, obviously, should try to bring down Kim Jong-il’s regime in Pyongyang. Has the administration of South Korean president Lee Myung-bak been shaken up by the nuclear threat so that it has so quickly ruled out a North Korean attack this time?

Strangely, though, North Korea has been uncharacteristically silent on the sinking of the South Korean warship. Not that the North Koreans would admit their responsibility even if they were responsible for sinking the ship. Confronted with unshakable evidence, it would use the childish but time-honored trick to shift the blame to the enemy by claiming that it was the South Korean government that sank its own naval ship in order to foment trouble for the North.

In any event, I do not want to see the incident, however grave it was, escalate into a more serious conflict. But I, for one among many, no doubt, would like to know what really happened if only to let the souls of the young soldiers who sacrificed their lives in the incident rest in peace.
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Casualties of War

As I grow older, I often look back and wonder, of all things, what kind of life I would have had if I had been born a girl. The answer, of course, is simple and clear. Women's lives on the whole are not any easier than men's. Nonetheless, I have engaged in that idle speculation ever since I heard that when my mother conceived me, she and my father wanted a boy so desperately that she locked herself in a room at a Buddhist temple and prayed for 100 days. They had enough daughters and felt they deserved a boy.

In Korea at that time (and even now, I might add), a married couple has to have a boy in order to keep the family's bloodline going--for what that is worth.

When the Korean War broke out, and I was drafted into the South Korean army to fight the Communist invaders from the North, my parents prayed for my life in a Catholic Church every day. Shortly before the war, my mother had died and Father married a Christian woman. So, my father moved from the Buddhist temple to the Christian church to pray with my stepmother for my safety. I don't know how influential their prayers were but I somehow survived that brutal war.

During the war, it appeared that women were better off than men, who had to risk their lives on the frontline. Then again, women were not safe either. To back up this point, I'll tell you a story of a girl I knew.

She was the younger sister of the wife of one of my cousins. She was a year younger than I was but girls mature sooner than boys of the same age, as they say. She had apparently taken an unusual interest in a boy--me--when we were still in middle school. I knew for a fact because when our girl servant went to her house on errands, she asked all kinds of questions about me. She even sent me a couple of letters. I couldn't make sense out of what she was trying to say in her letters, but thinking back later, I figured they must have been something akin to a "confession" of love.

The trouble was I was too shy to respond to her approach. I couldn't event look at her without blushing, much less talk to her whenever we met at family gatherings. Then, the war broke out, and I forgot all about her--that was until I heard the shocking and sad news of her death while I was away in the army.

What happened was that while the North Korean forces occupied Seoul, the capital of South Korea, her brother-in-laws--that is my cousin--worked for the so-called people's committee of the city, which was set up by the Communist party.

After the North Korean forces were repelled from Seoul by South Korean and U.S. troops, my cousin was captured and summarily executed by nothing more than a squad of South Korean soldiers. That is not all. They went to the dead man's house and gang raped the girl. Overwhelmed by the shame and despair, she later hanged herself.

Hearing that story, I felt intense anger and hatred toward those who had perpetrated the crime taking advantage of the chaos of war. I also felt a vague sense of regret that I had been unable to reciprocate her feeling toward me. Anyway, the incident showed me that women were not any safer than men nor were their lives any easier.

Throughout the war, brutality and inhuman acts that often led to death were inflicted nonchalantly as though they were routine exercises. And as an infantry solder, I had to witness them countless times so that, in the end, I became very insensitive and callous like most of my fellow soldiers. I simply stopped feeling any sense of outrage or indignation. But those scenes must have been buried deep in my unconciousness; years later, they would float to the surface, as it were, like nightmares.

One of those nightmares also involved a woman. She must have been the wife of a farmer, who had no doubt been hiding in her isolated house near a mountain pass, unable to flee from her village when the other did. She was caught either by a group of retreating Communist troops or by the advancing forces of the democratic South.

As our platoon searched the house, we happened to come upon her body. She was obviously in an advanced stage of pregnancy, and yet she had been raped before being stabbed in her abdomen with a bayonet.

Cynically, the man who committed the crime had stuck a Chrysanthemum in between her legs. The whole scene was so gruesome and sickening, I almost threw up as I ran out of the room. At the same time, I was so totally indignant and angry at all men in general that I had a hard time resisting an urge to shoot one of my superiors, who laughed at me and said, "Hey, kid you have a long way to go to become a real soldier."

How could the man who obviously liked flowers enough to pick one and carry it along with him in the battlefield, turn around the next moment and commit such a beastly and heinous crime? I simply couldn't figure it out.

Talking about war, I have noticed a recurring phenomenon in time of war, namely, the killing of "innocent civilians." Many people, especially so-called humanitarians and other self-righteous persons, beat their breasts and condemn the combatants, including and especially the soldiers of their own country. But as every soldier who has been to war knows "civilian casualties" are often unavoidable, however, regrettable they may be. That actually is one of the reasons, I believe, why so many people oppose war in the first place. But war occurs regardless of our beliefs and wishes.

And once you are at war, you are in it up to your neck.

While I was also in the thick of it for more than and half years during the Korean War, I never shot my rifle in anger, that is to say, I did not shoot with an aim to kill anyone, It was possible someone on the enemy side got wounded or even killed by the bullets I fired blindly, but as far as I know no one was. That means that I was a pretty bad solider. But to this day, I think I was fortunate--fortunate that I didn't have to kill anyone.

Nevertheless, I become exasperated whenever some self-righteous people get upset and condemn soldiers for killing "innocent civilians" without knowing the precise circumstances. Few soldiers in their right mind would kill another human being knowing that he or she was a non-combatant. But in a situation where you have to kill your enemy or get killed by them and where you have to make a decision instantaneously, you have no choice but shoot first and ask questions later. Innocent civilians get killed by stray bullets or shot at when they are forced to become a shield by the enemy. These situation occur often and they are regrettably unavoidable.

But what I cannot forgive or forget are those--soldiers on both sides--who take advantage of the confusion and chaos to commit crimes that have nothing to do with war. They include rape and the killing of innocent and helpless women as well as plundering and stealing other people's valuables with impunity.

After I became a newsman years later, I thought about digging into the aforementioned incident in which one of my distant relatives was brutally killed by a group of soldiers. But I came to realize that investigating such a killing during the war that took place a quarter of a century before and especially by the soldiers of "our own side" was well nigh impossible.

Looking back on my life, I have no particular complaint on the whole. In fact, I feel I have been fortunate in many ways, except when the horrible war ruined what should have been the best period in my life. Because of those bitter nightmarish experiences of war, I have come to believe that we must try and avoid war at any cost.

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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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