Shall we recap what’s been going on over in North Korea these past twenty-four hours? So much action has hit in the fan in just a single DPRK day it’s rendered me positively doolally. To wit,

• former President Jimmy “Give the Palestinians Their State Already!” Carter flew into Pyongyang on a mega-publicized rescue mission to escort long-time North Korean prisoner and born-again US preacher Aijalon Mahli Gomes back Stateside. Check out the photos.
• Bam Bam is rumored to be in China yet again as we speak, visiting with heir apparent Kim Jong-un. The two are likely getting a dressing-down from PRC President Hu Jintao along with a list of precise marching orders on how to formulate DPRK’s statecraft over the next couple of months to avoid bloodshed on the Korean peninsula once more.

Two major events to rock the region.

Don’t tell me, though, that you’re surprised any of this is happening. Didn’t I warn you that September’s set to be a month of thrills, chills, and pratfalls as the Korean Workers Party (KWP) is set to convene for the first time in dog’s years to announce Kim Jong-un’s ascendancy to the NK throne and Bam Bam’s official “retirement” from the scene, a la Fidel Castro?

Yet more important to our purpose is the why all of this is happening now.

Can it all really be this simple?! Is the hardline recalcitrant pygmy dictator having anxiety attacks as he flits like a hummingbird between Pyongyang and Beijing aboard his special armed choo-choo train? Can the DPRK be coming apart at the seams? Better yet: are we witnessing history in the making on the Korean peninsula?

Let’s examine the issues…

The Cheonan Sinking:

On March 26, 2010, someone — or, rather, something — sank the South Korean navy corvette Cheonan in open South Korean territorial waters. The UN hastily appointed a commission of inquiry which laid the blame squarely on Kim’s tiny shoulders — regardless of whether a rogue faction of his generals were responsible for the sinking.

The Russians appear to doubt the veracity of the commission’s claims and have gone on record denying North Korean involvement in the naval tragedy which lead to forty-six maritime deaths. Naturally, the North Koreans forcefully deny the report’s findings, demanding to see a hardcopy of the report which the Blue House is reluctant to pony up. For now, the incident remains at a sweaty tense standstill. Everyone is on tenterhooks, especially Bam Bam Malone.

Recently, the US and their ROK allies have buddied up on seaborne exercises in what appears to be a prelude to a second “Korean War,” which has Kim and his court fearing for their mortal lives. If push comes to shove, are the North Koreans well-provisioned enough to resist and disrupt a northward thrust by a combined US/South Korean naval and land force?

The Cheonan fiasco has so far proved nothing but a crippling embarrassment to Kim Jong-il. Moreover, it has his Chinese comrades-in-arms biting their long nails to the quick realizing that if hostilities were to break out again on the peninsula, their nation’s economic plans and superpower aspirations are in danger of being disrupted.

If Kim is indeed in China right now as we speak — his second highly irregular “secret” visit in three months — this can only mean one surefire thing: the Chinese are taking the US/ROK military threat very seriously and they don’t trust Kim has the sanity nor the intelligence to navigate the rocky shoals of what’s sure to come over the next few weeks (or less?).

Kim Jong-un’s Long-Awaited Succession:

A succession, I add, which is hardly assured come September, given the dreadfully tenuous hold Jong-un has upon DPRK’s military strata.

Kim likely dragged along his youngest on this most recent “secret” Chinese visit to formally introduce the Chinese Central Committee to his country’s next supreme leader. The Chinese, for their part, will likely use this golden opportunity to reassure the Kims of their continued commitment to financial and diplomatic support to weather this current diplomatic crisis despite Pyongyang’s seeming efforts to do everything in its power to aggravate Beijing and stick it fulsomely to the Chinese leadership. It must be noted that the North Koreans hate getting schooled by Beijing. Despite it with a vengeance, in fact, even if they know it’s a devil they know well and reluctantly acknowledge as their lifeline.

Kim’s “secret” visit was likely planned during his previous visit back in May, custom-tailored as an open show by the Chinese to signal to the rogue elements of North Korea’s military that if they harbor coup-y thoughts against Jong-un following his succession (or in the event of Bam Bam’s sudden croaking), the Chinese won’t let the incident pass unchecked.

The KWP All-Party Congress:

All of this is seemingly coming to a head in advance of the summit next month. Efforts are being made to shore up support for the astonishingly inexperienced Jong-un, reassuring him that, in essence, he has a Big Brother bully backing him up in case things get all uppity in the North Korean capital come September/October.

Releasing Aijalon Mahli Gomes now:

With Gomes’ Friday release in the wake of Carter’s Pyongyang milk run, there are no longer any American citizens locked away in DPRK prisons for illegally crossing North Korean frontiers and no flies in the ointment straining US-DPRK non-relations. The slate now cleared for the North Koreans to rejoin the on-again, off-again 6-Party talks and return to the denuclearization table.

Without zero moral debts to the Americans stemming from the detainments of Euna Lee, Laura Ling, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, or Robert Park, the lone stumbling block impeding a peaceful settlement of the Cheonan incident has now been decidedly eliminated. Hence Kim’s China visit.

So are there going to be instructions from the Chinese again?

Can all this be so lickety-split?

The skeptic in me doesn’t want to gobble the floating oily Kim chum so easily.

I mean, that’s it?

• invite Carter to Pyongyang for the photo op and baby kisses (he was supposed to have been there to see Lee and Ling released, but a last-minute snag had Bill Clinton there instead)?
• release the near-suicidal Gomes and fly him back with the former President to great fanfare and grab-assing?
• schlep Kim Jong-un to the next four-eyed meeting with Hu Jintao for the official Chinese sign off on the succession, declaring to the rest of the world that North Korea is fully-prepared to go nuke-free?

And all because of a the Cheonan‘s untimely sinking? All this because of some ape-like saber rattling in South Korean waters off the coast of North Korea, brandishing the allied US/ROK fleets of might?

Can Kim be really this scared of what the future holds for his own father’s “Paradise on Earth?”

The Equalizer:

Kim has proven again and again that he’s willing to gamble the entire (Kim) farm on a single “kamikaze”-like bet.

That he’s perfectly prepared to imperil his entire population to bitter starvation, place his army on a perpetual war-footing, and threaten to bring calamity down upon the heads of the entire region by aiming one of his purported uranium-tipped warheads at Seoul, Japan, or worse (the existence of which hasn’t been independently verified by the IAEA).

I witness all of these events on the news ticker today and my “North Korea-watching” mind sudden contrives umpteen different contingency scenarios the Dear Leader might have cooking in the back of his soggy noodle, all carefully rehearsed and orchestrated to achieve maximum bang for the buck and PR sizzle.

Can we be witnessing history-in-the-making? A straightforward Bam Bam mea culpa begging for forgiveness?

Has Kim suddenly realized:

• the frailty of his addled physical condition,
• the inability of his chosen heir to rule if he passes, and
• the determination of both the US and the South Koreans to witness the dismantlement of his dictatorship, even at the cost of a small naval skirmish that will likely result in several hundreds of military casualities?

It goes without saying that veteran North Korea watchers typically demand slightly more convincing proof that this isn’t another one of Kim’s little shams in advance of some down-home September Pyongyang pageantry. Ach…

Welcome home, Aijalon. Welcome home in any event.

Double, double toil and trouble;
fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Yes, once again Denise Chong, that best-selling author and fellow Canuck, stirs the ol’ hot pot again with her latest snipe at Zhongnanhai’s corrupt geriatric set over their handling of the whole so-called “6-4 Incident.” Enter her latest smashing volley, Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship.

Recounted through the heartfelt memories of Lu Decheng, the intellectually dullest of the trio of wayward Liuyangers who one-timed oil paint-filled egg shells from a local jian bing stand at the Forbidden City’s omnipresent portrait of the Great Helmsman, Chong spins a vivid tour-de-force tale depicting the aftermath of their arrest and subsequent incarceration in the dying days of the late-’80s student democracy movement.

During the spring of what would become that fateful ‘89 year, Lu along with his friends Yu Zhijian and Yu Dongyue were caught up in the fervor of ousting the Party leadership once and for all. They became drunk on the idea of setting the People’s Republic’s sails firmly on a course for integration with the West along with the abolition of China’s corrupt glad-handing society.

Heeding the poetic words of student leader, Uighur activist Wu’er Kaixi, the “sun shining off of Mao’s portrait was so bright that the people couldn’t open their eyes to what was going on around them.” Hopping on the overnight choo-choo via Changsha, the three impressionable young cats — caught up in the inexorable flow of thousands from all across the nation descending on Beijing (or Peking as it was still then known in the West, still stuck in Wade-Giles mode) — somehow found themselves in the thick of it at the center of T-Bone Square, rocking it on ’til the break of dawn against the Big Bad Red Machine.

Chong employs a nifty literary technique shifting back and forth between what was and what is, flashbacking to our impressionable ones’ preparations as they eagerly anticipate traveling north to the capital, matched against their deep-seated doubts about what they were monumentally about to do. The portrait vandalizing incident was only an afterthought, can you believe it?

I found the most harrowing portions of this book — quite expectedly — to transpire inside the jail where the three were sentenced to life imprisonment for defacing the People’s Property. A couple of the guards sympathized with their cause, while many others were tasked with the deplorable job of smashing their willful spirits and crushing the resistance out of them via a daily slew of humiliation, physical abuse, and in several cases, unmitigated torture. Their prison authorities somehow remained convinced that they’d succeed in luring the young men, especially the brilliant Zhijian, from of their “counter-revolutionary” paths, by inculcating in them the values of Mao’s Homo Sineticus, the “ideal” modern Chinese super-ego.

Decheng, a bus mechanic and driver by trade, was the least educated of the bunch at the outset. His journey is magnificent because his life changes by 180-degrees by story’s end. Dongyue, youngest and most impressionable, was a mere wet-behind-the-ears type at the crime’s time, a mere teenager. Zhijian was the one with all the bright ideas and coffee house theories, the one who read all the European classics, and the one who became most disillusioned by the end thanks to the students’ perfidy in refusing to come to the three’s aid by secreting them away from the lurking plainclothes PSB goons at the time, instead offering them up like sacrificial lambs.

Given that Decheng was our narrative vessel in Egg On Mao, we came to learn of the harshness of the boys’ prison conditions through his arduous journey in his own words. As he arrived at the stark realization that the West was absolutely powerless (or unwilling?) to convince the PRC’s Party higher-ups to spring him and his mates from the cavernous clink, Decheng set out to improve his skills and brain power while living out the typical prison double life.

Compelled to undergo the routine Maoist ideological indoctrination and daily hammering of Marxist-Leninist Thought, Decheng would mechanically nod his noodle during classes, only to “raid” the prison library later in the evenings to feast his eyes on anything he could get his meat hooks on: well-thumbed, outdated tomes on all manner of Western theory and thought — all in English which the guards couldn’t read — realizing that eventually his salvation would come and he should be prepared for that eventuality. Guards would needle him for his seeming craziness; the mere sight of Decheng reading stuff that looked as if though it could maim, rather than educate, him elicited many giggles. In time, howe3ver, this strategy would prove ultimately successful, confounding the dastardly designs of the prison system.

By 1998, Decheng was a free man — first, gaining asylum in Canada, where Chong learned of his story.

There’s a lovely parallel story in this book, and that’s the love affair between Lu and his young bride Qiuping, a woman he eventually weds prior to performing the fateful deed.

Even before the first yolk is hurled at Mao’s grim, moled likeness, Decheng and Qiuping have birthed their first tot — a XX Chromosomal Child Unit. His subsequent imprisonment, despair, and eventual divorce from his wife who fears her man will never be released for the ignominy caused to the Party’s international image, is a touching counterpoint to the violence taking place within the prison compound’s walls. The brutal and repeated attempts by Decheng’s prison warders to destroy his rebellious soul do nothing to diminish his abiding passion for his wife and their oft-stated commitment to “never accept a divorce, neither in life nor in death.” When news of Qiuping’s request for a divorce trickles through to Decheng via a letter he receives from a guard, it momentarily sidelines him as he struggles to reason out the rationale for her irrational behavior. When she eventually remarries, it nearly slays him, though he soldiers on knowing that in the aftermath of Deng Xioaping’s October 1992 demise — the man responsible for approving the murderous actions by soldiers on the Square against their own citizens — changes may be soon afoot in the “peaceful” People’s Republic.

Author Chong was censured for this book in the PRC. No surprise there. While she doesn’t personally do any of the criticizing about the events which took place on T-Bone Square — nothing is couched in her own words save for her parting caustic remarks in the Epilogue and Acknowledgments — the mere fact that she’s chosen Lu Decheng as the vessel of her apparent disapproval with the septuagenarians inhabiting the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee have now branded her as a PRC persona non grata. She won’t be able to return now, though she likely made her peace with this reality the instant finger touched laptop keypad.

Given that she had a year and a half to contemplate her fate — the duration of all her interview sessions with Lu Decheng in Canada, where he now lives — this was a well-designed goal.

Why you should read this book, friends?

Egg on Mao was likely the first straightforward and direct account about the actions of the perpetrators of the portrait defacement, told in their own words. No third-party stuff here, folks, or PRC spin-meistering for our ravenous Western investigative appetites.

Also, for those of you late-arriving (and young) Western stragglers who are convinced that TAM was a student-lead and directed protest crushed by the heavy-handed Chinese state apparatus, complete organized student hierarchies and chains of command on T-Bone Square itself, you’ll be shocked to discover that chaos was more the order of the day during those fateful two months. Chong does well to highlight this through the authentic recollections of Lu himself. Good job.

At 249pp, your bottom-line cost to purchase this brand new is just a few cents shy of a short paper route (wink, wink). The copy isn’t crafted to wallop you over the noggin from its apparent brilliance, and Chong, for lack of a better term, “keeps it real.”

This is a mean-slugging account of a very unusual time in China, an era when things were still in flux and the regime was deathly afraid of losing its balls years before Hu Jintao’s policy of China’s “harmonious rise” was even promulgated. I polished the book off on the trusty exercise bike over the course of a few days, wagging my head in several spots as I made my way through in astonishment, careful not to permit sweat droplets to damage its pristine acid-free (and lovely-smelling) pages. Cautious, as well, was I to ensure that my neighbors didn’t think I was becoming a closet Maoist, what with the Chairman’s identifiable head on its cover, even if it was smeared in a cocktail of egg and paint goo.

If you’ve already read the book and digged it hard, let us know.

If you haven’t caught it yet, it’s not the sort of “China book” that will make you dizzy-busy (so busy, you’re dizzy) from its girth and heft. ;-) Try it, Mikey, you’ll like it. I promise.

And, oh yeah…my name is Adam Daniel Mezei and thanks again for tuning in.

Love,
ADM

ps I’m in search of a new “China book,” friends, so if you’ve got any suggestions for me — which I promise to subsequently review — kindly let me know.

huxia juqui

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(What’s Bam Bam smiling about now?)

Given the sheer lawlessness of North Korean society and how practically any sort of mayhem could take place there without notice, it’s not an entirely implausible notion that a debilitating cyber attack against the US might emanate from within its borders. Apparently, Bam Bam has at his disposal a $56M slushy war chest for precisely these sorts of cyber-actions.

More to our purposes, let’s examine the rudiments of how such an attack might go forth in the event the Dear Leader chucks all caution to the wind and finally goes for broke in the waning days of his hapless reign.

I also strongly encourage you to have a read of the linked article as it quotes famous hacker Charlie Miller‘s recent speech to NATO about this very subject. Miller briefly goes into how a North Korean cyber attack would play out.

Cheap machines that wreak havoc:

The caliber of technology we’re talking about here isn’t state-of-the-art. There are enough second-hand pieces of gear out there that can capably achieve Bam Bam’s aims.

Used machines would have as their ultimate purpose the direct infiltration of the United States’ critical telecommunications networks (not the National Security Administration/NSA, as that would be too heavily firewalled).

Miller describes how botnets — when a host computer is infiltrated and begins to do a cyber attacker’s bidding — would be triggered and programmed to detonate on the very same day. He uses as an example the so-called “Zero Day” bug which he described to delegates at a recent NATO speech. Zero Day can lie dormant for as long as 348 days before being summoned. All it would take it for someone to talk into a control room, plug in a USB key with the offending virus, upload, and walk away. Weeks later, the attack command would be issued and the sum of all our fears would play out.

Coordinated from a central location like Pyongyang which the world has virtually no access to, a proliferating virus would be almost impossible for tech experts to trace. The original outbreak of a hostile e-attack might even be blamed upon politically-sensitive nations like China or Russia, and implicating them in a scandal might be part of Bam Bam’s grand design, as had happened during January 2010′s apparent “Chinese” cyber-attack on Google.

Why a North Korean cyber-attack just might work:

There would be scant incentive for the US/ROK alliance to retaliate against Pyongyang in the event critical US or South Korean telecom networks were compromised. Why?

For one, what could they possibly damage there, other than crushing what little infrastructure remains for the DPR Korea’s citizenry outside its capital? A strike against the north would only cast it into an even darker shadow, with untold deprivation in its aftermath, greater than what the country endured during the so-called Arduous March famines of the nineties.

As described by hacker Miller, once a virus would “leave the building,” North Korea would be essentially scot-free. Counter-accusations might even be leveled against the United States by North Korea for the US’ wanton aggression against an otherwise blameless nation. Since no proof of the virus’ existence in North Korea, would be found or for even having emanated from there it would essentially mean the event didn’t even happen. Kim has proven to be beyond wily when it comes to skulduggery of this ilk.

Then there’s the on-again, off-again nuclear threat, the poisoned chalice that the South Koreans and their American allies are reticent to quaff from.

If US/ROK retaliation for a perceived North Korean cyber-attack were on the order table, Bam Bam might just crank up his ol’ whirling rhetoric machine and counter with threats to let fly Seoul- and Osaka-bound nuke-tipped missiles from Yongbyon. This alone — if the past decade-plus is any indication — would be justification enough to put the kibosh on any potential spanking the Americans and ROK Forces might wish administer on Bam Bam’s Paradise On Earth.

So where does that leave things?

As usual, Kim has all his turtledoves in a row. We’re starting at our usual series of if-then scenarios.

To wit:

Scenario #1: If the North Koreans cyber-attack US/ROK telecommunications networks and drumbeat against Pyongyang, Kim will unsheathe his nuclear rapier. And never one to be pushing an already unstable silent-but-deadly demagogue into passing his personal point of no return, Washington will back off and “negotiate” an amicable solution with the Non-proliferating Six Parties at a so-called “neutral” location, possibly at November’s G20 Summit in Seoul.

Scenario #2: If the Americans refuse to believe Kim’s nuclear threat is credible and advise the ROK to promptly attack North Korea for a) the DPRK’s perceived hack-attack and b) March 25, 2010′s sinking of the Cheonan, the Chinese aren’t going to take any of this sitting down. Wanting affairs to stay as “harmonious” as possible on the Korean peninsula, and doing anything in its power to thwart a northern influx of stark raving DPRK refugees into Yanbian across the Yalu and Tumen Rivers, Beijing will use every diplomatic trick in the book — from economic sanctions to Security Council vetoes — to prevent the South Koreans from laying a finger on any of Pyongyang’s chinny-chin-chin hairs. And no one seems to want to tussle with the Chinese these days for some reason.

Scenario #3: If the Koreans don’t heed either the PRC’s broad warnings or their American handlers’ sharp advice to play things cool and instead launch perhaps a seabound strike across the Northern Demarcation Line (where the Cheonan went down), Bam Bam might be tempted to press that godforsaken red nuke button of his. Worse yet, while Kim himself might want nothing to do with a nuclear holocaust on his soil, the present power rift in his security apparatus caused by his choice of youngest son Kim Jong-un as successor might take things out of his hands. It could mean ever direr consequences than the Cheonan. Its sinking may even have been a prelude heralding something eminently worse. “Rogue generals” within Kim’s security system might have wished to send an unequivocal signal to Kim on who’s really running the show.

Conclusion:

In advance of September’s Korean Worker’s All-Party Congress (KWP Congress), things may yet remain tranquil. But given what happened this March, nothing is ever predictable up on the Kim Farm.

Four weeks between now and then along the 248km stretch of the 38th? In North Korea, that’s like eons.