The North Koreans have to be hyper-sensitive to Chinese on maneuvers along their border even if ostenibly for "training." China's defense ministry dismissed reports that this show of force had anything to do with keeping the North Koreans in line as "purely hype," but that claim was pro forma. The Chinese amply made their point by parading tanks and self-propelled projectiles - 150-milimeter cannon - through the streets of Yanji, the capital of the ethnically Korean Yanbian region above Chiuna's Tumen River border with North Korea. While Park will meet Xi for a crucial summit the next day, Choe will content himself, at best, with chatting with lesser officials who undoubtedly will express their relief that the threat to the "stability" of the Korean peninsula is over. Instead, Kim is sending Choe Ryong-hye, formerly defense minister and vice marshal, who lost out to Hwang Pyong-so in a power struggle but survives as secretary of the Workers' Party. North Korea's relations with China are so terrible that Kim Jong-un hasn't been there once since taking over from his father, Kim Jong-il, in December 2011. The last thing he needs is obstreperous North Koreans messing up the show with a war.įrom the Korean viewpoint, the occasion is all the more significant since South Korea's President Park Geun-hye will be there along with a bunch of other world leaders, including Russia's President Vladimir Putin. President Xi Jinping will be there, showing off before his people and the world. This week, on Thursday, September 3, the Chinese are staging what may be the grandest parade in their history - an extravaganza marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. The Chinese, moreover, had one immediate reason for wanting the North Koreans to hang on in Panmunjom for as long as it took to defuse the crisis. North Korea's 1.1 million troops, underfed and ill-equipped, could not wage war for more than a few weeks, if that, without massive infusions of extra fuel that China isn't willing to provide. Impoverished people scrounge for scraps in mountains stripped of trees, but machinery, motor vehicles, planes and ships lap up oil. Oil, however, accounts for 80%-90% of North Korea's energy needs. That's where U.S., Chinese and North Korean generals signed the armistice that ended the Korean War in July 1953, and it's also where Hwang and South Korea's national security adviser, Kim Kwan-jin, on August 25 signed another historic agreement that ended the threat of a shootout across the DMZ between beefed-up North and South Korean forces. That assessment from the field level summed up the most compelling reason for North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un to send his number one deputy, Vice Marshall Hwang Pyong-so, to the "truce village" of Panmunjom in the middle of the DMZ about 40 miles north of Seoul. He wasn't worried - "not with China telling everyone to back down." and South Korean warplanes bombed targets in the Seung-jin fire drill field, a vast playground for war games in which tanks rumbled and roared and 150-mm cannon boomed on cue. "We'll see if war pops up," he remarked laconically as U.S. army Sergeant Eric Flynn knew what he was talking about when I encountered him behind an M2A3 Bradley - a "fighting vehicle" that looks like a tank - at a live-fire drill before thousands of mostly South Korean spectators about 20 miles below the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.
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