Senate Asian Geopolitics

I've been wanting to make this thread for a while however I was waiting for the outcome of the whole Senate debacle.

As we keep hearing on the news, there's been heightened tensions in Asia these past couple of years. The most notable dispute that gets covered is the Senkaku Islands, which is in being claimed by Japan, China, and Taiwan. I won't waste your time with the Darth Ghost style wiki wall of text on it, but you can get a decent background from the wiki article and some other good articles written about it in the past year (avoid BusinessInsider, they keep predicting a China Japan war every month). Lesser known disputes include a Russo-Japanese dispute over the Kuril Islands, which seem to not be as relation-damaging an issue considering the overall cordial visit between Japanese PM Abe and Putin a couple of days back.

Last November, China created an ADIZ which increased tensions in the region, and more recently, Japanese PM Abe and Philippines President Aquino III made comparisons between the expansion of the PRC and 30s Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, the Abe administration's fumbling over acknowledging Japanese WWII war crimes, his visit to a Japanese war memorial that contains the names of war criminals, and most recently asking the UN to register letters from kamikaze pilots alongside other historically important documents have angered China and damaged relations between Japan and South Korea, whom many see as an important unified anti-China front.

Just earlier today (or yesterday), the PRC and Taiwan have had their highest diplomatic meeting since the Nationalists were driven off mainland China.

Oh great, I've turned it into a Ghost post. Let me stop there and pose a question for the thread, which I hope turns into the general Asian politics thread. What's going to happen next? These countries I've discussed are all economically dependent on each other. Are we going to have unending 3rd grade passive aggressive spats and calling each other "Asian Hitler?" Or is Business Insider correct and war is looming ahead?

 

There were no comfort women during WWII!

 

Whenever China and Japan prepare to out-immature one another, it's great for Taiwan. Always sees an influx of Japanese capital.

To answer Vivec's question - I don't know. Certainly I think Taiwan is moving to reintegrate with China, probably when sufficient assurances are given about the level of autonomy on the island (HKSAR was basically an advertisement for a Taiwna/China reunification). While the residual mistrust between China and Japan at the official level may remain for rhetorical purposes, the economic realities may guide them away from war.

 

You may be correct

http://www.japantoday.com/smartphon...-of-s-korean-magazine-angers-japanese-readers

 

Speaking of HKSAR, this article doesn't paint a too great state of affairs.

Why it's dangerous to say 'we are all Chinese' in Hong Kong

 

If any form of war does occur between these states, I don't think it'll be be based on any of the current disputes, at least as they stand now. Perhaps some unexpected internal crisis might escalate things to the point where conflict breaks out in the future, but I don't think the pressure is nearly strong enough yet for them to pursue military options against each other. North Korea is, of course, the wild card - the new leader's instability and need to assert his control might very well drive him to do something his father was at least smart enough to realize wouldn't end well for anyone involved.

 

I really can't believe Abe was stupid enough to visit Yasukuni Shrine as well as pushing other revisionist narratives about World War II. I'm mostly a partisan of Japan, since I think China's propaganda attacks and other provocations are wholly unwarranted...but Abe is not helping here. The stuff that Japan did in World War II was very, very bad, and Japan's current leaders ought to acknowledge this...doing so will also allow Japan to better make the case that it has changed greatly for the better. In short, better to make a stand for the here and now...don't try to rehabilitate a past that doesn't deserve to be rehabilitated.

 

Isn't China the only country now that is practicing true communism? Probably a really stupid question, but I was just wondering.

 

With North Korea, it's interesting to note that the South Korean government is expected to buy 4 Global Hawk UAV's from Boeing in the upcoming weeks. The Global Hawks that South Korea are purchasing come with an enhanced sensor package that is only listed as a "signals and imagery intelligence exploitation package.." Which is a long way to say that it can intercept North Korean communications and take pictures of where NK's mobile rocket launchers are. It's another step that the South Korea government is taking to achieve self-sufficiency with policy-regards to the North.

Due to the technology involved, the US government has to approve the sale, but the administration has already indicated that it will.

 

That would depend, I think, on how you define "true" communism. I don't think any country has ever managed to achieve anything approaching the ideal advocated by its creators, and even China has done quite a bit of drifting from where it started.

 

No, it's a state-controlled capitalist economy, run by autocracy.

 

China's "communism" is basically a joke these days. If I'm not mistaken, they've got an income disparity that makes America's look like nothing.

 

Oh yeah, Cantonese Chinese hate mainlanders. They see them as at best, boorish and at worst as classless nouveau riche outsiders who don't understand proper behavior.

Mainlanders, OTOH, see a strong economy, great housing, and a prosperous future with little room for worrying about Hong Kongolese (I made that up, but you can use it) concerns.

 

Isn't that how they look at Tibet, Xinjiang, and all those other non-majority Han areas of China? The whole "we'll improve your economy, and therefore we get to do whatever the hell we want with you" treatment?

 

That's not what Ender meant by "not worrying"

 

The sabre rattling raises the intriguing question of who would win in a fight between Godzilla and the Dragon King.

 

http://m.bbc.com/news/world-asia-26379804

Doctors without borders has been expelled from Myanmar on accusations that they are biased towards the minority Muslim population in that country, which leads to another topic I wanted to address in this thread.

There has been a lot of tension between the Rohingya Muslim minority and the Buddhist majority. Mainly buddhist mobs spurred by buddhist extremists (yes that's a thing) led by a monk who calles himself the Burmese Bin Ladin: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...ar/10177815/Burmas-bin-Laden-of-Buddhism.html

Many Rohingya have been killed, Muslim vendors suffer from racism by Buddhists who will not do business with them and are therefore in poverty, and the Burmese government seems to either turn a blind eye or are okay with it. These people are facing ethnic cleansing and very little is being done about it.

 

this is correct

 

Alright. Glad to know that then from now on.

 

Yeah, the Burmese Buddhists are going on all these anti-Muslim pogroms and keeping them confined to run-down ghettos...and when foreigners point this out the Buddhist majority complain about how the Muslims are getting biased treatment and how outsiders won't see them for the traitorous, fifth-columnist scum that they are. I'd say someone has an inverted sense of morality here, and it's probably not the foreigners.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/w...ts-in-sri-lanka.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1

Meanwhile in Sri Lanka, Buddhist extremists continue to persecute the Muslim population.

 

MEANWHILE, IN SRI LANKA

i read a good article once (might have been in the atlantic Ender Sai... either that or harper's) that compared the dynamic in sri lanka to the dynamic in israel. basically, the thesis was that the sinhalese majority in sri lanka, (majority buddhist, but the conflict seems easier to understand along ethnic lines), feels itself to be a minority in sri lanka, because of the large minority of tamils, (hindu, with sizeable muslim and christian minorities), in the country. the tamils came from southern india at the behest of the british (yup, colonialism's fault again) and there's still a **** ton of them there, across the straight from sri lanka. this gives the sinhalese a dangerous siege mentality, which enables the more fascistic members of their political culture to muster broad or at least tacit support from the sinhalese majority when they decide to persecute the tamils. when the tamils inevitably organize and fight back, the self-fulfilling prophecy of the dangerous tamil fifth-column is complete and serves to justify a wave of further repression. the situation has a lot of interesting parallels with israeli jews feeling like a persecuted minority because their country is surrounded by arab muslim nations, and kicking the arab muslim minority population under their sway whenever possible to make themselves feel in control

vivec i dunno how i feel about having subcontinent geopolitics in the same thread as east asian geopolitics. it almost seems like they could support two different threads, in terms of massive scope of each. although maybe the fact that this thread hasnt even reached a page after 5 months means i should just shut it

 

HKSAR is always interesting for me.

It's guaranteed to be independent until 2049, I believe. Think there's a 50-year guarantee? And everyone there is already pissing and moaning about the fact that it might still happen in thirty five years.

Meanwhile, Ender is correct -- there are stores in Tsim Sha Tsui who won't sell to HK Chinese, because they might buy only one Rolex; they want to sell 8-12 Rolexes to mainlanders who just want to look like Ender without understanding what it means to be Ender.

It's a totally bizarre place where I stay in a five-star hotel build around modern amenities and art, attached to a 16 floor mall, smack in the middle of an industrial shopping zone (like a "spring store" where you can buy any kind of spring you want [they have it in the back]) with prostitute room rentals around the corner. I can't imagine Taiwan wants that level of identity confusion, but on the other hand they are a little more detached from the "motherland" so it may be fine for them.

 

Well, yes and no. The main difference is that ethnically, the Hong Kongolese (lololol) are still Han but culturally they are Guandongren - aka Cantonese. Taiwanese share much with the general mainlanders by way of speaking putonghua - "Mandarin" and being culturally closer to Fujianren. Food in Taiwan is either very closely aligned to Fujianese cuisine (aka Hokkien cuisine) and heavily influenced by northern food (i.e. what we called Pekingese). All this can be traced to the island's roles as firstly a holiday destination and then as the seat of exile for the KMT as well as not too far from Fujian province on the coast.

So reintegration, which I believe is inevitable, will probably be a lot easier on the Taiwanese. There will be pockets of strife but in not being a British colony, they never had a taste of truly Western life.