This week’s News on China. • Syrian president returns to China after almost 20 years • 19th Asian Games started in Hangzhou • Particle accelerator to produce semiconductors • ‘Comfort women’ film debuts in Japan
As South and North Korea begin a cautious, deliberate and “sincere” process of peace talks in the hope of defusing regional tensions in a neighborly manner, right-wing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has suddenly sounded alarm bells over the “unacceptable” moves by Pyongyang, playing up its nuclear program and weapons development as a reason to bolster Japanese military might in a move he claims would protect the Japanese people.
Japan’s current nationalist leadership downplays and denies many crimes from World War II, but a global movement continues to press for a recognition of the mass rapes and murders of so-called “comfort women,” reports Dennis J Bernstein. By Dennis J…Read more →
After Donald Trump threatened the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” I spoke to K.J. Noh, a peace activist and scholar on the geopolitics of the Asian continent.
Rehearsing Armageddon
Ann Garrison: North Korea is standing up to the US’s 4800 “locked and loaded” nuclear weapons with an estimated 30 to 60 of its own. Do you think it would still be standing without them?
K.J.Noh: It’s hard to imagine so.
