Sixty years after the end of major hostilities between US led forces and North Korean and Chinese forces in the Korean War, China has released a death toll for the soldiers it sent into combat.
The provinces of Jilin and Liaoning in North Eastern China have been much in the news recently due to devastating floods which have caused material damage and loss of life.
But in this area it’s another type of flood that has Chinese government officials more worried in the long term. And that’s the possible deluge of North Korean refugees from across the border should the government there ever collapse.
In an historic move last week, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan made an apology to the Korean people, for his nation’s crimes against them, to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Japanese annexation of the Korean peninsula.
But on the Asian mainland, many Chinese see the apology as a strategic move to undermine China.
Andrew Livingstone on the apology that was, and the apology that was not.
It was supposed to be one of the highlights of the Korean Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. Instead, it led to an online war. It centered around Korean pop sensation Super Junior, an act that routinely sells out major venues each year they come to Shanghai.
Word had gotten round at the Expo that there were 5,000 free tickets on offer, but when fans came to collect, it turned out that most of these had been given out to Korean groups, and only 500 tickets remained. A stampede followed, during which some witnesses said fans of the group began abusing and spitting at police. This led to an immediate online backlash against Super Junior fans, under an umbrella campaign called 69 Jihad, 6-9 referring to June 9th.
The campaign was a coordinated attack of “spamming and condemnation of Korean pop fans on well-known forums, and even brought down Super Junior’s official website.