March 28, 2024

Remaining South Korean Managers Leave Plant in North

The withdrawal of the 43 factory managers meant that the Kaesong Industrial Complex, in the North Korean border town of Kaesong, was emptied out except for seven South Koreans who will remain for a few days to sort out a dispute over unpaid wages.

When that is settled, South Korea is expected to turn off the electricity it supplies to the complex, which until now has been one of the most brightly lighted parts of North Korea, a country shrouded in darkness at night because of a severe lack of fuel.

South Korea had planned to withdraw all 50 of its citizens from Kaesong by 5 p.m. Monday, but a dispute over the payment of some wages and taxes owed North Korea delayed their departure. In the end, 43 factory managers were allowed to cross the border shortly after midnight, while five officials and two communications technicians from the South agreed to stay on to sort out the dispute.

North Korea pulled out all of its 53,000 workers from Kaesong on April 9 in a protest against joint military exercises by the United States and South Korea that it said raised the possibility of war. It also blocked South Korean managers and supply trucks from entering the complex.

But it was not until Friday, when the North rejected a proposal for dialogue, that the South announced a decision to pull all of its 175 managers and officials, who had stayed in Kaesong hoping that the complex would reopen. Of those, 125 crossed the border on Saturday, loading as many finished products as they could carry on the trunks, seats, roofs and hoods of their cars.

The emptying out of the Kaesong complex represents a new low in inter-Korean relations. South Korea cut off all other economic ties with North Korea in 2010, blaming it for the sinking of a warship and the deaths of 46 sailors. North Korea cut off all military and Red Cross hot lines with the South last month, removing all official ties between the Koreas except for the lines of communication between their civil aviation authorities.

The American-South Korean military drills ended Tuesday. But there was no sign that the two Koreas would end their dispute over the Kaesong complex anytime soon.

“Our offer for dialogue still stands,” Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae, South Korea’s point man on the North, said in a speech to government advisers on Tuesday. “But North Korea must abandon its trite behavior. If they act like this, who will invest in the North?”

Even if the Kaesong complex resumed operation, Mr. Ryoo said, it would take a lot of effort by the North to dispel the mistrust it sowed among South Korean and other potential investors by the way it forced the shuttering of the factory park.

Since it began operations in late 2004, the Kaesong industrial park, where South Korea ran factories with low-wage North Korean labor, had served as a symbol of Korean cooperation. But in recent years, as those ties deteriorated and the two Koreas shed other joint projects, the complex stood as the last vestige of the “sunshine policy” the South pursued from 1998 to 2008. That policy was built upon the idea that projects like the Kaesong complex would encourage North Korea to open up and engage more with the outside world.

But the complex, built in “a very carefully constrained environment” that essentially detached it from the rest of North Korea, “has not led to the kind of systematic openings and interactions” that the supporters of the project had hoped for, Kurt Campbell, a former American assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said during a conference organized by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul on Tuesday.

So far, the Kaesong complex is the biggest casualty in the standoff that developed after North Korea’s nuclear test in February.

North Korea indicated that it was placing military priorities over the $90 million in hard currency its Kaesong workers earned annually at the factory park.

On Saturday, the North said shutting the complex down for good would allow the North Korean military to redeploy more troops, artillery and tanks along the border just north of Seoul, the South Korean capital, “thus opening up the route of advancing to the South.” The building of the Kaesong complex pushed those North Korean troops away from the corridor between Kaesong and Seoul, which had served as the North Korean Army’s main invasion route at the outset of the Korean War in 1950.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/world/asia/remaining-south-korean-managers-leave-north-korean-plant.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Chinese Warship May Be Nearly Ready

The photos of the carrier, the Varyag, which China bought from Ukraine in 1998, appeared Wednesday on the Web site of Xinhua, the state news agency.

It was the first time that Xinhua had given visual evidence of the carrier project, which is widely seen as a linchpin of China’s military modernization and naval ambitions. The country’s efforts have raised fears among foreign governments that China will use a more robust military for expansionist purposes or to press for regional dominance.

Xinhua cited a military analysis magazine based in Canada, Kanwa Asian Defense Review, as saying that the ship would be ready to sail this year. The fact that Xinhua used that information in a photo caption appeared to be an official endorsement of that view.

Xinhua’s headline with the photos said: “Huge warship on the verge of setting out, fulfilling China’s 70-year aircraft carrier dreams.” One caption said: “A few days ago, domestic online military forums consecutively published photographs of the Varyag aircraft carrier being reconstructed at China’s Dalian shipyard. From the pictures, we can see that this project is entering its final stage.” The caption noted that construction on the ship’s bridge was almost done, with the exception of a radar system.

The online sites it referred to are discussion forums used by Chinese military enthusiasts.

Andrei Chang, the founder of the Canadian magazine and a Hong Kong resident, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that the photographs published by Xinhua showed the carrier at a much more advanced stage of reconstruction than he had expected.

He said that his magazine had received photos of the carrier taken in February, but that those photographs did not show any paint on the ship’s upper structure, while the ones published by Xinhua did.

“The speed is very, very amazing,” Mr. Chang said. “It’s surprised me.”

The day before Xinhua posted the photos, another Chinese news organization, Global Times, a populist newspaper that is not considered an official Communist Party mouthpiece, ran the same photos. The images appeared first on military forums starting on Monday.

On Thursday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman was asked about the carrier photos at a regularly scheduled news conference in Beijing. “Please refer to the relevant authorities for details,” said the spokesman, Hong Lei. “I would like to emphasize that China follows a peaceful path of development.”

In January, photographs emerged on Chinese military forums of the J-20 stealth fighter, which has been under construction in Sichuan Province.

The appearance of the photos came just days before Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates visited China. Military officials tested the fighter while Mr. Gates was in Beijing, which led to a puzzling and awkward diplomatic moment between Mr. Gates and President Hu Jintao.

Jonathan Kaiman contributed research.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/world/asia/08carrier.html?partner=rss&emc=rss