Good Morning! Let’s start the week in the Asia-Pacific…
North Korea
- It looks like US officials met secretly with North Korea three times in 2011 and 2012 without telling Japan or South Korea. Â Why the US loaded heavy equipment, including a bulldozer, on their plane during a stopover in Tokyo remains a complete mystery. Â Not surprisingly, the Japan-US relationship appears strained on the issue of sharing intelligence about nuclear proliferation.
- Rory Medcalf finds a few silver linings in North Korea’s latest mushroom cloud.
- Our very own Duck blogger, Robert E. Kelly, comments on BBC World News about the North Korean tests and the existing sanctions regime.  We need to buy Bob a Tivo.
Singapore
- Rare but real protests are happening in Singapore over the plans to dramatically increase the number of immigrants in one of the world’s most densly populated city-states. Â I love the posters which say: “We are not your sheeple!” Â Is it too early to dust off my copy of Chee Soon Juan’s Your Future, My Faith, Our Freedom? Yeah I thought so, lah.
- Dual use technology and a death in Singapore makes for a riveting read.
China
- Chinese military hawks argue for killing one of the three “running dogs” of the US in Asia in order to make the rest heel.
Japan
- Malcolm Cook at the Lowy Institute notes that Japanese FDI to China as a share of total flows to China have stayed relatively stable with a slight uptick in 2012 despite all the tensions.
- The Hoover Institution has uploaded the diary of US General Joseph Stillwell who visited East Asia in 1911. Â He was a far cry from Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited East Asia as a young officer, but his private diaries will be of interest to history buffs.
Vikash is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Asian Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. His main areas of academic interest are (post-) globalization, economic development, and economic freedom, with a regional focus on South Asia
- Vikash Yadavhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/vyadav
- Vikash Yadavhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/vyadav
- Vikash Yadavhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/vyadav
- Vikash Yadavhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/vyadav
- Vikash Yadavhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/vyadav
- Vikash Yadavhttps://www.duckofminerva.com/author/vyadav
Re Stillwell: and he also spent much of the late ’30s and into the ’40s in the region, iirc. See B. Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China.
On a different pt, that WR Mead post appears to be recycling a newspaper article that was linked at the Duck by someone else (R Kelly maybe) a while back. That’s ok, I guess we can have the Chinese hawks again…
Actually I think it was Dan who linked it.