Upon receiving the news of North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Il's death, China's leading internet video site, Youku.com, carried a black banner at the top of its home page. It's a mark usually reserved for disasters in China. It showed up during the recovery from the devastating Sichuan earthquake in 2008, and again earlier this year after the Wenzhou high-speed train crash. But Kim Jong-Il? His departure from the world stage was hardly a disaster. I could not believe that China actually wanted its people to join in the mourning for this knucklehead.
China shares a weird kinship with North Korea, or the DPRK, as we're told to call it. There's a common political and social ideology, but really, that's about it. Yet, a lot of Chinese are envious of the impoverished Hermit Kingdom. Either secretly or overtly, they wish China was more like North Korea, closed to public scrutiny, locked-down from foreign influence, belligerent to its neighbors. When the North Koreans told the foreigners in Pyongyang to take a hike during the mourning period for Kim Jong-Il, you could almost hear Chinese hands applauding the move.
The whole big-brother / little-brother relationship between China and the DPRK would probably be OK, except for the fact that Kim Jong-Il had a few flaws. He starved his people, closed-off all international access, rejected technology that would have helped economic development, backed the kidnapping of foreign nationals, shelled and killed islanders in rival South Korea, exploded nuclear weapons, and launched short-range missiles over Japan. This guy was a wrongheaded deadbeat from start to finish, and the Chinese should have been happy to see him go.
If China wants to be all buddy-buddy with the region's most destabilizing nation, fine. But it's hardly the mark of world leadership, even third world leadership.
No comments:
Post a Comment