For Chinese, Hard Questions About North Korea Hit Close to Home

And it’s dangerous for Chinese to ask hard questions that hit close to home. But why would Chinese find the nostalgia of visiting North Korea sufficiently rewarding to pay money for that dubious privilege? Maybe because human beings have a natural obsession with the things they fear the most, and because for many Chinese, the fear persists:

I have spoken with many of these Chinese travelers and have always been struck by how seldom their accounts dwell on the stark human costs of a system like North Korea’s, or on the political system that makes such extreme repression and deprivation possible on a national scale.

Xianhui Yang’s “Woman From Shanghai: Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp,” a newly translated collection of firsthand accounts that the publisher calls “fact-based fiction,” is about what might be called the Gulag Archipelago of China. Reading it, one begins to appreciate why travelers to North Korea are so reluctant to reflect on human suffering: the reality of North Korea today is too painfully close to a situation endured by the Chinese well within living memory. [Howard W. French, N.Y. Times]

Read the rest of French’s review to see how North Korea’s present ties into China’s past, although I doubt that even in China, all of that is completely in the past.

I sometimes wonder if China’s support for Kim Jong Il might have dropped away a decade ago had we made half as much effort to demonize China for its rape of North Korea as China has made at demonizing America, or demonizing Japan for its rape of China and Korea half a century ago. Not until now has an American administration made even a superficial effort to make Kim Jong Il into a diplomatic, moral, and historical liability for China.