Why China Sucks: Nine North Korean Refuges Returned By China After Trying Escape Troll's Tyranny And Live In Freedom

It appears clear that in China the idea of the persuit of liberty is an ideal not worthy of defending, but instead, worthy of crushing.

Once again, China has pushed back the notion of universal freedom.  This time nine North Korean defectors who have escapted the young troll's tyrany have been forced to return to the isolated northern prison located on the Korean penninsula known as North Korea by China.

The nine individuals seeking to live in freedeom were initially captured in Laos, a South Korean news report stated.

In light of previously known freedom paths to freedom, does this shift in events present a new policy by Laotian and China that North Koreans seeking to escape from the young troll no longer be assisted in their quest for freedom?

It appears this way.

Over 25,000 North Koreans Have Previously Escaped Via China

The question that has to be asked is, 'What leverage did North Korea have, if any, on these two countries that caused them to return this nine young men?'

Previously, Laos had been assumed to be a safe route for North Koreans seeking to live in freedom and flee the monsterous control of the dictator who collects Nike sneakers and seeks out Dennis Rodman as a political advisor (As reported by the New York Times today, the trolls first choice was Michael Jordan).

Activists say that defectors who are returned to North Korea can be punished or even killed by the regime, considered one of the world’s most repressive and brutal. In today's enviornment, I think it is important to ask ourselves, how far would the troll go to make a point?

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported the defectors were flown back to North Korea on Tuesday despite a request from South Korea that China not repatriate them.

The report said the defectors, aged between 15 and 23, fled to Laos through China last month and were caught by Laotian authorities earlier this month. Laos sent the defectors to China on Monday, weeks after a Laotian delegation visited the North Korean capital.

In a statement, the U.S. State Department said it was concerned about reports and urged “all countries in the region to co-operate in the protection of North Korean refugees within their territories.”  Close to 25,000 North Koreans have left their country since the Korean War, most of them over the last 10 years.

Often with the help of Christian missionary groups and having paid thousands of dollars to people smugglers, they have traditionally travelled first to China and then onward through Southeast Asian countries to Thailand, where they can fly to South Korea with the help of the government in Seoul. Defections across the land border between the Koreas are very rare.

China, North Korea’s foremost ally, does not recognize North Korean defectors as asylum seekers and can return them. Isn't that wonderful?  Once again, and for what seems to be 'forever' China denies the right of the individual to know liberty.

“It’s tragic and disappointing,” Kim Eun-young, an activist with the Seoul-based Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, said Thursday of the reported repatriation. “We fear defectors will now feel more intimidated about trying to come to South Korea through Laos or other Southeast Asian countries.”

Overall, I think the world really needs to aks if this act is a shift in China's policy of allowing refuges to pass through its country in route to South Korea or other nations that welcome them. If it is a change in policy, well, to put it mildly - that sucks.

Some of you may be interested in knowing that the sequel to 'The Den of The Assassin' weaves a story jettisoned in great length in North Korea.

North Korea's Leader: War Is The Answer

Many of us outside of those who are actively serving in the military or who have previously served in the armed forces appear to not be too worried about events taking place in North Korea as the isolated, notoriously secretive nation prepares to launch medium-rage missiles as the young toad's rhetoric of war-mongering escalates. 

Granted, North Korea is on the other side of the world from the United States and Canada, and perhaps the non-chalant attitude is because it is commonly believed that an attack by North Korea cannot reach our homeland.

Perhaps this is correct, but with over 1 Million active duty military, a strong-standing army, and in reality, very little to lose as that nation's economic and social platforms are near non-existent, war is not only a possibility but an economic and socially advantageous probability for North Korea.

Which means that our friends in South Korea and Japan are in trouble.

Distinctively, as much as the war-mongering little toad desires to capture the southern part of the divided penninsula (South Korea), his real goal appears to immortalize himself as another mythical leader.  And how can he achieve this?

By attacking the United States homeland as well as foreign military installations.

Last week the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported North Korea loaded two missiles onto mobile launchers; in response, South Korea sent destroyers to its northern neighbor's coast.

Immediately thereafter, the North Korean government also says it plans to restart a major nuclear reactor it shut down as part of an international deal five years ago. And leader Kim Jong-un ordered rockets readied to strike U.S. military bases in the Pacific, not to mention the U.S. mainland. (It's not clear that North Korea's missiles have that kind of range.)

Amid this brinksmanship, North Korea remains remarkably shut off from the rest of the world. Read on for what's known about the hermit country. [Nuclear Security: Best & Worst Countries (Infographic)]

As a novelist, I have had great interest and concern over North Korea and the dangers this nation presents to the free world. In my international espionage thriller 'The Den of the Assassin', I touched upon the grave realities that North Korea is a nation that needs to go to war because culturally, its leaders need to appear mythicize themselves.  In my upcoming novel 'Predators Games', North Korea and some of this nation's oddities are intricate themes in my historical fiction thriller that I hope will entertain and educate readers everywhere.  Here are a few things I find of great interest:


1. Isolation nation
The Korean peninsula has long been a battlefield for the world powers nearby. Japan controlled Korea (then one nation), until the end of World War II; after Japan's surrender, the United States and Soviet Union sliced the country along the 38th parallel, with the United States administering the south and the Soviet Union controlling the north.

This division became permanent after the United Nations failed to negotiate a reunification in 1948. The first president of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, declared a policy of "self-reliance," essentially shutting the nation off diplomatically and economically from the rest of the world.

It's a philosophy called iuche, or self-mastery. The idea is that the North Korean people must rely on themselves only. This philosophy, according to Kim Il Sung, required North Korea to maintain political and economic independence (even in the face of famine in the 1990s) and to create a strong national defense system.

2. Mythical leaders

North Korea's ruling dynasty has always cast itself as somewhat supernatural. Founder Kim Il Sung was known as Korea's "sun," and claimed control of the weather. Along with his son Kim Jong Il's birthday, Kim Il Sung's birthday is a national holiday. After his death, Sung was embalmed and still lies in state in Pyongyang.

Kim Jong Il's mythology is no less extensive. His birth was hailed as "heaven sent" by propagandists, and state media has often touted impossible feats: He scored a perfect 300 the first time he tried bowling, and shot five holes-in-one the first time he played golf. Upon his death in 2011, the skies about the sacred mountain Paektu in North Korea allegedly glowed red. [Supernatural Powers? Tales of 10 Historical Predictions]

Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il's son and successor has yet to have quite so many tall tales told about him, but the news media have described the new leader as "born of heaven" upon his ascension to head of state. In December 2012, North Korean state media declared the discovery of a lair supposedly belonging to a unicorn ridden by Tongmyong, the ancient mythical founder of Korea. The story wasn't an indication that North Koreans believe in literal unicorns, experts said, but a way to shore up Kim Jong Un's rule and North Korea's cred as the "real" Korea.

3. National prison
All the fanciful and funny myths about North Korea's dictators cover up a disturbing truth, however: Some 154,000 North Koreans live in prison camps, according to South Korean government estimates. (Other international bodies put the number at closer to 200,000). There are six camps, surrounded by electrified barbed wire. Two camps allow for some "rehabilitation" and release of prisoners, according to "Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West" (Viking, 2012). The rest are prisons for life.

"Escape from Camp 14" tells the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person known to have escaped from one of these camps and to have made it to the outside world. Shin was born in the camp; his father was imprisoned because his brother had abandoned North Korea for South Korea decades earlier.

Torture, malnutrition, slave labor and public execution are ways of life in the camps, which are known from satellite imagery. An Amnesty International report in 2011 estimated that 40 percent of camp prisoners die of malnutrition.

4. Daily life in North Korea
Given North Korea's secrecy, it's hard to imagine what daily life in the country is really like. In the book "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" (Spiegel & Grau, 2009), journalist Barbara Demick interviewed North Koreans who escaped to South Korea. They describe a society tied by family (during the famine of the 1990s, parents and grandparents starved first, trying to save food for their children) and inundated with propaganda.

"In the futuristic dystopia imagined in 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only color to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea," Demick writes.

It's not clear how many North Koreans buy into this propaganda. Interviews with North Koreans in China by the New York Times suggested that smuggled DVDs from South Korea have enabled average North Koreans to get a glimpse of the world outside their borders.

Very recently, foreign journalists on supervised trips in Pyongyang have been allowed 3G connections on mobile phones, enabling real-time pictures of daily city life.

5. Difficult adjustments
With such limited access to the outside world, North Koreans who do make it out often struggle to adjust. Many are paranoid, a skill that served them well at home where anyone could turn anyone else in to the police for saying the wrong thing. Some are cognitively impaired by early malnutrition. And few know anything about world history outside of North Korean propaganda.

"Education in North Korea is useless for life in South Korea," Gwak Jong-moon, principal of a boarding school for North Korean refugees, told Blaine Harden, the author of "Escape from Camp 14." "When you are too hungry, you don't go to learn and teachers don't go to teach. Many of our students have been hiding in China for years with no access to schools. As young children in North Korea, they grew up eating bark off trees and thinking it was normal."

According to Harden, the suicide rate for North Korean refugees in South Korea is two-and-a-half times that of the rate for South Koreans.

Click here to order a copy of The Den of the Assassin.  Remember, I continue to donate 100% of my e-book proceeds to the I CARE Foundation.

Kindest regards to all,

Peter Thomas Senese

Cyber-Warfare: Confirmation Of China's Unit 61398 Attacks American Businesses

A secretive Chinese military unit is believed to be behind a series of hacking attacks, according to U.S. computer security company Mandiant.  Of course the Chinese government strongly denied the accusation, and then attempted to turn around the accusation by stating that China was in fact the victim of U.S. hacking.

Now those of you who have read my novel 'The Den of the Assassin' have learned a few things about cyber-warfare, and how the real world military threat is not going to be between foot soldiers, but will be fought in cyber war, where countries can realistically attempt to use one nation's own military weapons against themselves by taking control of the weapons when they are deployed.  An unconfirmed example of this is when the Iran military is believed to have landed a U.S. Drone on Iran's soil.

But there is so much more at stake, and part of China's end-game is to remove the United States dollar as the world currency. 

How could they accomplish this?

By shaken the financial infrastructure of America's banking and commerce centers vial cyber warfare, that's how.

Imagine if the United States Federal Reserve gets hacked into, or several of our largest banks for that matter?

What if our national grid gets shut down?

If you think this is not possible, then you better think again.

The truth of the matter is that nations such as China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, and others have sizeable military personnel units (tens of thousands in the case of China's 'Blue Army') dedicated to cyber-warfare.

Now, the United States is far from sitting ideal; however, the reality is that if the Chinese government had their military cyberware units attack American companies on American soil, then sadly, we are very much at war.

                                          Is China Declaring War On The United States?
                                     

                                                      Special Mandiant Video Report


The following was issued by Rueters:

The company, Mandiant, identified the People's Liberation Army's Shanghai-based Unit 61398 as the most likely driving force behind the hacking. Mandiant said it believed the unit had carried out "sustained" attacks on a wide range of industries.

 
"The nature of 'Unit 61398's' work is considered by China to be a state secret; however, we believe it engages in harmful 'Computer Network Operations'," Mandiant said in a report released in the United States on Monday.
 
"It is time to acknowledge the threat is originating in China, and we wanted to do our part to arm and prepare security professionals to combat that threat effectively," it said.
 
China's Defense Ministry issued a flat denial of the accusations and called them "unprofessional". It said hacking attacks are a global problem and that China is one of world's biggest victims of cyber assaults.
 
"The Chinese army has never supported any hacking activity," the Defense Ministry said in a brief faxed statement to Reuters. "Statements about the Chinese army engaging in cyber attacks are unprofessional and not in line with facts."
 
Unit 61398 is located in Shanghai's Pudong district, China's financial and banking hub, and is staffed by perhaps thousands of people proficient in English as well as computer programming and network operations, Mandiant said in its report.
 
The unit had stolen "hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations across a diverse set of industries beginning as early as 2006", it said.
 
Most of the victims were located in the United States, with smaller numbers in Canada and Britain. The information stolen ranged from details on mergers and acquisitions to the emails of senior employees, the company said.
 
The 12-storey building, which houses the unit, sits in an unassuming residential area and is surrounded by a wall adorned with military propaganda photos and slogans; outside the gate a sign warns members of the public they are in a restricted military area and should not take pictures.
There were no obvious signs of extra security on Tuesday.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said the government firmly opposed hacking, adding that it doubted the evidence provided in the U.S. security group's report.

"Hacking attacks are transnational and anonymous. Determining their origins are extremely difficult. We don't know how the evidence in this so-called report can be tenable," spokesman Hong Lei told a daily news briefing.

"Arbitrary criticism based on rudimentary data is irresponsible, unprofessional and not helpful in resolving the issue."

Hong cited a Chinese study which pointed to the United States as being behind hacking in China.
"Of the above mentioned Internet hacking attacks, attacks originating from the United States rank first."

"ECONOMIC CYBER ESPIONAGE"

Some experts said they doubted Chinese government denials.

"The PLA plays a key role in China's multi-faceted security strategy, so it makes sense that its resources would be used to facilitate economic cyber espionage that helps the Chinese economy," said Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer and co-founder of CrowdStrike, one of Mandiant's competitors.

Though privately held and little known to the general public, Mandiant is one of a handful of U.S. cyber-security companies that specialize in attempting to detect, prevent and trace the most advanced hacking attacks, instead of the garden-variety viruses and criminal intrusions that befoul corporate networks on a daily basis.

But Mandiant does not promote its analysis in public and only rarely issues topical papers about changes in techniques or behaviors.

It has never before given the apparent proper names of suspected hackers or directly tied them to a military branch of the Chinese government, giving the new report special resonance.

The company published details of the attack programs and dummy websites used to infiltrate U.S. companies, typically via deceptive emails.

U.S. officials have complained in the past to China about sanctioned trade-secret theft, but have had a limited public record to point to.

Mandiant said it knew the PLA would shift tactics and programs in response to its report but concluded that the disclosure was worth it because of the scale of the harm and the ability of China to issue denials in the past and duck accountability.

The company traced Unit 61398's presence on the Internet - including registration data for a question-and-answer session with a Chinese professor and numeric Internet addresses within a block assigned to the PLA unit - and concluded that it was a major contributor to operations against the U.S. companies.

Members of Congress and intelligence authorities in the United States have publicized the same general conclusions: that economic espionage is an official mission of the PLA and other elements of the Chinese government, and that hacking is a primary method.

In November 2011, the U.S. National Counterintelligence Executive publicly decried China in particular as the biggest known thief of U.S. trade secrets.

The Mandiant report comes a week after U.S. President Barack Obama issued a long-awaited executive order aimed at getting the private owners of power plants and other critical infrastructure to share data on attacks with officials and to begin to follow consensus best practices on security.
Both U.S. Democrats and Republicans have said more powerful legislation is needed, citing Chinese penetration not just of the largest companies but of operations essential to a functioning country, including those comprising the electric grid.

                                      China Accuses The United States of Cyber Warfare

The reality of cyber warfare is upon us.  There is real cause for concern.  Fortunately, the United States has not ignored these threats.