CINA

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THE WAR ABOUT OIL AND POLITICAL INFLUENCE

First of all: don't misunderstand - neither the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan nor the "People's" Republic of China are states I would like to see as states we should support. But anyway, the following article, published today in the Hong Kong based Asia Times is just very interesting for to understand the direction of the economic and political developments in the present days and the near future in the Asian region... Just read (study...^^) it..

China lays down gauntlet in energy war
By F William Engdahl

On December 15, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) inaugurated an oil pipeline running from Kazakhstan to northwest China. The pipeline will undercut the geopolitical significance of the Washington-backed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC)oil pipeline which opened this past summer amid big fanfare and support from Washington.

The geopolitical chess game for the control of the energy flows of Central Asia and overall of Eurasia from the Atlantic to the China Sea is sharply evident in the latest developments.

Making the Kazakh-China oil pipeline link even more politically interesting, from the standpoint of an emerging Eurasian move towards some form of greater energy independence from Washington, is the fact that China is reportedly considering asking Russian companies to help it fill the pipeline with oil, until Kazakh supply is sufficient.



Initially, half the oil pumped through the new 200,000 barrel-a-day pipeline will come from Russia because of insufficient output from nearby Kazakh fields, Kazakhstan's Vice Energy Minister Musabek Isayev said on November 30 in Beijing. That means closer China-Kazakhstan-Russia energy cooperation - the nightmare scenario of Washington.

Simply put, the United States stands to lose major leverage over the entire strategic Eurasian region with the latest developments. The Kazakh developments also have more than a little to do with the fact that the Washington war drums are beating loudly against Iran.

The new China pipeline runs 962 kilometers (598 miles) and will take China a third of the way to Kashagan in the Caspian Sea, one of the world's largest accessible oil reserves. Kashagan is the largest new oil discovery in decades and exceeds the size of the North Sea. This is a major reason Washington has such a strong interest in supporting democratic regime change in the Central Asia region of late.

In the next 10 years, Kazakhstan plans to almost triple oil production, prompting the landlocked nation to seek new export routes because the country wants to avoid pipelines through Russia and excessive Russian dependence. China is now among Kazakhstan's major target markets.

Best public estimates are that Kazakhstan has 35 billion barrels of discovered oil reserves, twice the amount in the North Sea, and may hold about three times more, according to a Kazakh government report released on November 18 in London. German oil engineers have privately reported that recent drilling by Italy's AGIP, the current oil consortium leader for Kashagan, a huge field offshore Kazakhstan southwest of Tengiz, has confirmed enormous oil deposits there.

The government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev plans to produce 3.6 million barrels a day of oil from all fields in Kazakhstan, onshore and off, by 2015. For 2005, they expect to average about 1.3 million barrels a day, making Kazakhstan far larger than Azerbaijan, and second in oil production of the former Soviet states only to Russia.

The December 15 opening of the new Kazakh-China pipeline was a major event for Beijing. Zhang Guobao, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planning agency, attended the opening. CNPC has invested more than $2.6 billion in Kazakhstan since 1997.

Beijing takes the geopolitical prize
In October, Beijing scored a second major geopolitical coup when China completed a $4.18 billion takeover of PetroKazakhstan Inc. It was, in a sense, revenge on Washington for the blocking of the China acquisition of Unocal. US oil majors had made major efforts to lock up Kazakhstan oil after discovery of major oil offshore in the Kashagan field. They failed. ExxonMobil was charged with bribery of Kazakh officials to win a presence in the Kazakh oil business, and a senior Mobil executive was later jailed on US tax evasion in New York tied to the Kazakh bribery payments.

Nazarbayev enjoys good relations with Russia's President Vladimir Putin. He was general secretary of the Communist Party when Kazakhstan was part of the USSR, and is regarded as a sly fox in terms of dealing with Moscow, while also keeping a clear distance from Moscow.

In October, Russia's Lukoil failed in its bid to buy up the Kazakh state oil company, PetroKazakhstan, in a privatization. Nazarbayev indicated a major geopolitical shift in strategy, compared with a decade or more ago, when it appeared that Washington was to be the major foreign ally of Nazarbayev. At that time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's company, Chevron, became the lead oil contractor and operator in the Kazakh Tengiz oil field. That was just after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the US oil presence in Kazakhstan was a major US political priority supported by the Bill Clinton administration.

The Chevron Tengizchevoil consortium formed the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) in 1993 amid great fanfare. After years of haggling with the Kazakh government, Chevron finally constructed a pipeline from Tengiz on the Caspian's northeastern shore to the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Following years of pressure, most members of the CPC group, including Chevron and Oman Oil Co, decided to not pursue future expansions of the CPC line.

Now, a decade later and with the scope of Kazakh oil deposits dwarfing any in the region, with its recent confirmed drillings in the Kashagan field, Nazarbayev has scored a political balance of power coup by turning to Beijing.

In October, Nazarbayev announced that CNPC had won the bid to buy PetroKazakhstan. What will be important to watch, now that Nazarbayev won re-election on December 4, further extending his 14-year reign, is to what extent Washington begins to play up "human rights abuses" by Nazarbayev.

A fledgling "Orange" revolution a la Ukraine has sprung up behind opposition candidate Zharmakhan Tuyakbai and his party, For a Just Kazakhstan. He came in second with 6.6% of the vote and cried fraud, but Washington's and the US media response were muted this time. Rice, in a major trip to shore up sagging US influence in Central Asia on October 10-13, held a private meeting with Tuyakbai. He is clearly being groomed for a possible future role, but clearly not yet.

Washington suffers strategic setback
A major setback for Washington's Eurasian encirclement strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia came several months ago when Uzbekistan's autocratic president Islam Karimov told Washington it could no longer use the Karshi-Khanabad military air base in southeast Uzbekistan, a major piece in Washington's Eurasian chess board play, put into place after September 11, 2001.

Since strong US protest over the government's bloody suppression of protests against a state trial of alleged Islamic fundamentalists in Andijan last May, Karimov's relations with Washington have deteriorated. Karimov's decision to move so aggressively was no doubt influenced by the successful March "Tulip" revolution which toppled Askar Akayev in neighboring Kyrgystan and set the stage for the July election of opposition and US-backed candidate Kurmanbek Bakiev.

On July 29, Karimov announced he was evicting the US entirely from the airbase with a January 2006 exit date. In October, the US Senate, as retaliation, voted not to pay $23 million in base user fees to Uzbekistan for past use. Moscow and Beijing have both moved into the vacuum. A look at the map will indicate why. Uzbekistan is strategic for control or to prevent control by foreign powers such as Washington, of Central Asia and pipeline routes linking Russia, China and Kazakhstan. In October 2004, Moscow secured a long-term military base agreement to station thousands of Russian troops in the capital, Dushanbe, a move by Moscow to limit the spread of Washington-backed "color revolutions" in the region.

That appeared to redraw the Eurasian geostrategic map in Moscow's favor, with the recent US loss of Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is now effectively Russia's main ally in Central Asia.

Washington's position in Eurasia and its future relations with Kazakhstan suddenly assumed high priority. Clearly, the Bush administration decided the time was not ripe to try a full-blown "Orange" revolution in Kazakhstan this month, at least not until Washington's position in the region was stronger. That was a clear purpose of the October Rice visit.

But now with the strong geopolitical turn of Nazarbayev toward playing Beijing to offset potential Washington domination in the region, the situation has begun to change dramatically. A year ago, China attempted to buy out a 16% share in the Kashagan consortium from British Gas, which was willing to sell. That sale was blocked by US consortium member ExxonMobil, the company subsequently charged with bribery and convicted. Now China has opened an oil flow out of Kazakhstan to the East, not the West.

This has major strategic implications for the future of the Washington-backed BTC oil pipeline. That pipeline was built by the Caspian Oil Consortium headed by British Petroleum, and was backed by both Clinton and George W Bush, despite the fact that it was the most costly and least viable oil route out of the Caspian.

Former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had been the chief Washington lobbyist advocating the BTC route to circumvent Russia. Its construction was undertaken on the assumption that it would carry not only Baku oil, but also a major share of Kazakh oil from Tengiz and offshore Kashagan oil fields. Oops!

A larger China energy strategy
The December China-Kazakhstan pipeline opening is one part of a massive Chinese plan to secure as much Kazakh oil riches as possible.

The Chinese plan to connect several pieces of infrastructure - part Soviet-built, part Chinese-built - then reverse the flow of some of them and forge a new export corridor stretching from Kazakhstan's oil-rich Caspian basin, including Kashagan, through a series of western and central-Kazakh oil zones, and ultimately into China. With completion of this major project, China will for the first time have secured a source of imported energy not vulnerable to US aircraft carrier battle groups, as is the case with present oil deliveries from the Persian Gulf and Sudan.

Before opening the new pipeline, China imported only 25,000 bpd from Kazakhstan. Once the link between Kenkiyak and Kumkol is finished, connecting existing infrastructure near the Caspian with the portion inaugurated on December 15, the project will pump 1 million bpd. That would be about 15% of China's crude oil needs.

China then plans to tap into production from dozens of Kazakh sites it has acquired during the past several years. This is oil that currently goes west, or north through Russia.

Beijing still prefers the color 'red'
Beijing has also studied the Washington-backed series of regime changes across Central Asia and the "color revolutions" from Georgia to Ukraine and most recently Kyrgystan, and has evidently decided to "nip in the bud" any similar non-governmental organization efforts within China, or in areas strategic to long-term China energy security.

Kyrgystan's "Tulip" revolution last July sounded alarm bells in Beijing. Possible Chinese pipeline links to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran and or Russia would clearly be threatened by a ring of new pro-North Atlantic Treaty Organization neighbors and states between western China and its potential oil sources. Their alarm led to warmer ties between Uzbekistan's Karimov and Beijing in recent months, as well as an invitation from Moscow-tied Belarus President Yuri Lukashenko.

The Washington journal Foreign Policy ran a short item in its October edition by an apparent Chinese dissident. The article, titled, "China's Color-Coded Crackdown", is worth quoting:

In China's halls of power, the fall of post-Soviet authoritarian regimes has raised the uncomfortable specter of a Chinese popular uprising. According to the Hong Kong-based Open magazine, a report by Chinese President Hu Jintao, titled "Fighting the People's War Without Gunsmoke", is guiding the Chinese Communist Party's "counterrevolution" offensive. The report, disseminated inside the party, outlines a series of measures aimed at nipping a potential Chinese "color revolution" in the bud.

Some Chinese apparently call it the Battle of the Two Georges - George Bush and global financier George Soros. The Foreign Policy piece continues:

Perhaps the most telling sign of China's concern has been its crackdown on non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Beijing believes that international organizations, especially advocacy NGOs, have acted as Washington's "black hands" behind the recent regime changes in Central Asia. A recent issue of a biweekly journal run by the Communist Party Propaganda Department referred to Washington's "$1 billion annual budget for global democratization" and identified NGOs such as the International Republican Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Institute of Peace and the Open Society Institute as organizations that "brainwash" local people and train political oppositions.

In late August, ahead of a visit by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Chinese police raided the office of the Empowerment and Rights Institute, a human rights group supported by the NED. A new regulation offering more freedom to NGOs was initially expected later this year. No longer. The Ministry of Civil Affairs has now stopped processing registration applications, effectively freezing many groups' operations. Instead, the only government offices taking an interest in NGOs are the national security agency [China's secret police] and public security forces.

Both have launched investigations into local NGOs. Some senior Chinese managers working for international NGOs have been called in for "private talks" with authorities, though no related arrests or detentions have been reported. Some NGO offices have had plainclothes security officers show up in an effort to clandestinely ferret out information on foreign staff and organizations. Environmental groups have been singled out for a massive government survey, most likely because they have angered powerful agencies by successfully initiating public debates on controversial issues, such as genetically modified foods and huge dam projects, and because only around 10% of green groups are currently registered with the state.

Meanwhile, Beijing has commissioned researchers from several provincial academies of social science to study the activities of NGOs in China. NGO publications such as directories experienced unexpectedly strong sales in recent months, as they no doubt became convenient study tools. Likewise, experts have been dispatched to Central Asia to study how those color revolutions first sprung roots. In a May 19 Politburo meeting, senior administrators from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where foreign research funds are usually well received, were reminded of the "acute and complicated struggle in the ideological realm in the new millennium". In other words, be careful about the political implications of your research.

According to sources in Beijing, final decisions on the government's approach to NGOs will be made in a November meeting of the State Council, China's highest executive body. As long as the clouds of color revolution are hovering over Central Asia - some, for example, expect storms in Belarus - the Chinese government will stay on high alert ... Beijing's moves against the country's NGO community remain largely unnoticed outside China. If the international community wants an open and democratic China, it should pay more attention to the survival and growth of Chinese liberal institutions. Otherwise, the country will be destined to remain the same shade of red.

Beijing-Tehran-Moscow
At the end of 2004, Beijing signed a $70 billion energy agreement with Tehran, China's largest Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries energy deal to date. China's state Sinopec agreed to buy 250 million tons of LNG over 30 years from Iran, as well as to develop the giant Yadavaran field. That agreement covered the comprehensive development by Sinopec of the giant Yadavaran gas field, construction of a related petrochemical and gas industry including pipelines.

As part of the huge Iran-China economic cooperation agreement, China's state-run military construction company, NORINCO, will expand the Tehran Metro underground.

A second phase in the Iran-China strategic energy cooperation will involve constructing a pipeline in Iran to take oil some 386 kilometers to the Caspian Sea, there to link up with the planned pipeline from China into Kazakhstan.

On signing the deal, Iran's Petroleum Minister announced that Tehran would like to see China replace Japan as Iran's largest oil importer. As well, Iran has what are estimated to be the world's second largest reserves of natural gas after Russia. Iran is a place of enormous strategic importance to China, to Japan, to Russia, to the European Union, and for all these reasons, to Washington as well.

Iran supplies about 14% of China's oil. Along with Russia, China has been involved since the late 1990s in supplying nuclear technology to Tehran. In 1997, Beijing, under Washington pressure, nominally agreed to stop nuclear-related shipments to Iran, but the flows are believed continuing as the Iran relation is strategic and critical to China's energy security.

China, a veto member of the UN Security Council, has repeatedly called for the issue of Iranian nuclear development to be dealt with by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA's chief, Nobel Peace Prize awardee, Mohamed ElBaradei, has earned the enmity of Washington war hawks for his open declarations of lack of evidence in both Iraq and now of Iranian atomic bomb capability.

Given the nature of the Bush administration's rush to war in Iraq in 2003, where China had a major stake in oil development, and the subsequent US blocking of other Chinese attempts at securing energy independence, including Unocal, it is not surprising that Beijing is taking extraordinary measures to secure its long-term oil and gas supply.

Energy is the Achilles' heel of China's economic growth. Beijing knows that only too well. So does Washington. A decision by Washington to take military action against Iran now would pull a far larger cast of actors into the fray than Iraq.

F William Engdahl is author of the book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order from Pluto Press Ltd. He can be contacted via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GL21Ad01.html

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...反국가주의!!!

FIGHT RACISM AND NATIONALISM!

...??? f... you!!

Following article I found today in IHT (www.iht.com )

A young Japanese woman in the comic book "Hating the Korean Wave" exclaims, "It's not an exaggeration to say that Japan built the South Korea of today!" In another passage, the book states that "there is nothing at all in Korean culture to be proud of."

In another comic book, "Introduction to China," which portrays the Chinese as a depraved people obsessed with cannibalism, a woman of Japanese origin says: "Take the China of today, its principles, thought, literature, art, science, institutions. There's nothing attractive."

The two comic books, portraying Chinese and Koreans as base peoples and advocating confrontation with them, have become runaway best sellers in Japan in the past four months.

In their graphic and unflattering drawings of Japan's fellow Asians and in the unapologetic, often offensive contents of their speech bubbles, the books reveal some of the sentiments underlying Japan's worsening relations with the rest of Asia.

They also point to Japan's longstanding unease with the rest of Asia and its own sense of identity, which is akin to Britain's apartness from the Continent. Much of Japan's history in the last century and a half has been guided by the goal of becoming more like the West and less like Asia. Today, China and South Korea's rise to challenge Japan's position as Asia's economic, diplomatic and cultural leader is inspiring renewed xenophobia against them here.

Kanji Nishio, a scholar of German literature, is the honorary chairman of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, the nationalist organization that has pushed to have references to the country's wartime atrocities eliminated from junior high school textbooks.

Nishio is blunt about how Japan should deal with its neighbors, saying nothing has changed since 1885, when one of modern Japan's most influential intellectuals, Yukichi Fukuzawa, said Japan should emulate the advanced nations of the West.

Fukuzawa also said Japan should leave Asia by dissociating itself from its backward neighbors, especially China and Korea.

Nishio, who wrote a chapter in the comic book about South Korea, said Japan should try to cut itself off from China and South Korea, as Fukuzawa had advocated.

"Currently we cannot ignore South Korea and China," Nishio said.

"Economically it's difficult. But in our hearts, psychologically, we should remain composed and keep that attitude."

The reality that South Korea had emerged as a rival hit many Japanese in 2002, when the countries were co-hosts of soccer's World Cup and South Korea advanced further than Japan. At the same time, the so-called Korean Wave - television dramas, movies and music from South Korea - swept Japan and the rest of Asia, often displacing Japanese pop cultural exports.

The wave, though popular among Japanese women, gave rise to a counter movement, especially on the Internet. Sharin Yamano, the young cartoonist behind "Hating the Korean Wave," began his strip on his own Web site then.

"The 'Hate Korea' feelings have spread explosively since the World Cup," said Akihide Tange, an editor at Shinyusha, the publisher of the comic book. Still, the number of sales, 360,000 so far, surprised the book's editors, suggesting that the Hate Korea movement was far larger than they had believed.

"We weren't expecting there'd be so many," said Susumu Yamanaka, another editor at Shinyusha. "But when the lid was actually taken off, we found a tremendous number of people feeling this way."

So far the two books, each running about 300 pages and costing around $10, have drawn little criticism from public officials, intellectuals or the mainstream media.

As nationalists and revisionists have come to dominate the public debate in Japan, figures advocating an honest view of history are being silenced, said Yutaka Yoshida, a historian at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. Yoshida said the growing movement to deny history, like the Rape of Nanjing, was a sort of "religion" for an increasingly insecure nation.

"Lacking confidence, they need a story of healing," Yoshida said. "Even if we say that story is different from facts, it doesn't mean anything to them. Many historians feel exhausted in trying to fill the gap between facts and what people want to believe."

The Korea book's cartoonist, who is working on a sequel, has turned down interview requests. The book centers on a Japanese teenager, Kaname, who comes to have a "correct" understanding of Korea. It begins with a chapter on how South Korea's soccer team supposedly cheated to advance in the 2002 Word Cup; subsequent chapters show how Kaname realizes that South Korea owes its current success to Japanese colonialism.

"It is Japan who made it possible for Koreans to join the ranks of major nations, not themselves," Nishio said of colonial Korea, claiming Japan even gave Koreans their identity because "they had no pride in their history."

But the comic book, perhaps inadvertently, also betrays Japan's conflicted identity, its longstanding feelings of superiority toward Asia and of inferiority toward the West. The Japanese characters in the book are drawn with big eyes, blond hair and Caucasian features; the Koreans are drawn with black hair, narrow eyes and very Asian features.

That peculiar aesthetic, so entrenched in pop culture that most Japanese nowadays are unaware of it, has its roots in the Meiji Restoration of the late 19th century, when Japanese leaders decided the best way to stop Western imperialists from reaching here was to emulate them.

As those sentiments took root, the Japanese began acquiring Caucasian features in popular drawing.

Many of the same influences are at work in the other new comic book, "An Introduction to China," which depicts the Chinese as obsessed with cannibalism and prostitution, and has sold 180,000 copies.

The book describes China as the "world's prostitution superpower" and says, without offering evidence, that prostitution accounts for 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product. It describes China as a source of disease and depicts Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi saying, "I hear that most of the epidemics that broke out in Japan on a large scale are from China."

The book waves away Japan's worst wartime atrocities in China. It dismisses the Rape of Nanjing, in which historians say 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese were killed by Japanese soldiers in 1937 to 1938, as a fabrication of the Chinese government devised to spread anti-Japanese sentiment - "postwar China's biggest hit."

The book also says the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 - which reportedly researched biological warfare and conducted vivisections, amputations and other experiments on thousands of Chinese and other prisoners - was actually formed to defend Japanese soldiers against the Chinese.

Please don't forget, for example last Friday, how many Japanese comrades are fighting shoulder at shoulder with the Korean comrades against war, exploitation and oppression!

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Here Asia Times wrote exactly what I think and say since about 3 years. Of course an E. Asian Union - and I think it will include sooner or later at least Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam - will be a capitalist project. So we have to create before the capitalists create their union our union - a union of the "ordinary" people (workers, peasants, anti-war activists, progessive artists...) from "below"!!

Thinking the unthinkable, a Confucian union
By Jan Krikke

JOMTIEN, Thailand - In 10 to 15 years East Asia will form a political-economic union along the lines of the European Union. It will follow the reunification of the two Koreas, likely to occur around 2007. A "Confucian" union will integrate Japan into East Asia the way the EU integrated Germany into Europe. By about 2020, the East Asia Union will be the world's most powerful bloc, ahead of the EU and US-led North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). And its core will be China.

Amazing? Credible? Incredible? Making these bold predictions is Lawrence Taub, an American futurist living in Tokyo, who recently visited Thailand. Taub has a long record of forecasting global trends in astonishing detail. In the 1970s, he predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, Iran's Islamic Revolution, and the entry of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)...

Is Taub risking his reputation by predicting a Confucian Union between China, Korea and Japan? Tensions are rising between Japan and South Korea over fisheries and possibly mineral-rich islands and sea beds, still unexplored; between Japan and China over oil and gas-rich islands where exploitation is contested. Resentment toward Japan runs deep in both China and Korea, over colonialism and World War II atrocities, and a union of almost any sort between the three countries would seem improbable to most observers. But Taub is adamant. "Enemies can become friends almost overnight," he told Asia Times Online in a sit-down interview.

Taub predicted the formation of a Confucian Union in his book, but during an interview with this correspondent he proposed an additional reason: that Korea and China would be able to "neutralize" any Japanese military threat - both nations are concerned about what they see as the threat of renewed Japanese militarism - by absorbing it into a political union. That makes the overall argument for a Confucian Union even more compelling.

"France and Germany formed the European Union less than a decade after fighting a bitter war. The EU integrated Germany into the European family of nations and neutralized its militaristic tendencies. But more importantly, the formation of unions is a sign of our times. Regional economies are banding together. They integrate their economies to pack a bigger punch in the global trade arena. Unions like NAFTA, ASEAN, the EU, and Mercosur [a South American economic union] make individual states stronger vis-a-vis other blocs."

Macro-history with a twist

Lawrence Taub is not an average, popular political observer or predictor of the future. He is among a select group of scholars to have developed a comprehensive macro-history. Macro-historians rely on "grand narratives" of human history to forecast future scenarios. Recent examples are Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. Most historians and political commentators usually focus on their own areas of expertise - economics, technology, culture, business - which narrow the scope of their forecasts. Moreover, they tend to be Eurocentric and male-oriented. Taub is neither. His macro-history draws on Indian and Chinese thought, and like few other macro-historians, he claims women will play a key role in shaping the future.

When asked about other historians, political commentators and futurists, Taub.. pointed to Alvin Toffler's "third wave" theory as an example. "Toffler accurately describes the transition from agricultural to industrial to post-industrial society. That's a valid model, but it's only part of the picture. Toffler's macro-history could not predict the rise of East Asia as the world's leading economic center, nor the emergence of religious fundamentalism as the strong political force that it has become, which in the long run will evolve and have profound socio-economic implications in the future." ...

Taub said several factors will make the formation of a Confucian Union inevitable, among them a shared cultural heritage and growing international competition. "Despite a turbulent past and lingering animosity, the three countries speak the same cultural language, and their economies are increasingly integrated. Last year, China replaced the United States as Japan's largest trading partner. With the largest dollar reserves in the world, Japan and China resemble two mountain climbers linked by a rope. Technological cooperation between China, Japan and Korea is growing. Over-reliance on US-made software has fueled concerns about national security and industrial espionage and led to an initiative to develop CJK Linux, an Asian version of open source software."

Korean unification

Taub believes a reunified Korea will precede the formation of a Confucian Union. Asked about how reunification would come about, he said it would not be a repeat of the German experience. "North Korea is much poorer than East Germany was at the time," he told Asia times Online. "Spontaneous reunification is unlikely. But there will be a parallel with the German example. Just before it happens, when it will seem impossible, the momentum toward reunification will surge rapidly. The momentum is likely to start building in 2006, with reunification probably in 2007. The last hurdle will be the fate of North Korea's current leaders. They will insist on guarantees they won't be thrown in jail. China may offer them asylum."

Recent developments appear to support Taub's forecast. In December last year, the Guardian reported that European policymakers have been advised to prepare for "sudden changes" in North Korea. A European delegation, after visiting Pyongyang, predicted the collapse of the regime. The Guardian also cited Chinese academics who report a growing number of defections among North Korean diplomats. The South Korean press reported that the Austrian police prevented the assassination of Kim Jong-il's son Kim Jong-nam, by backers of another son of Kim Jong-il. All signs point at a power struggle in the top of the North Korean leadership, which in turn may explain the dying nation's nuclear saber-rattling.

Confucianism, communism, nationalism

Taub said he does not foresee problems with democratic Japan and Korea forming a political union with communist China. He believes pragmatism will prevail. He also pointed out that communism has become a mere label in China's political theater, but argued at the same time that communism and Confucianism have many similarities.

"Confucianism and communism, especially as introduced by Mao [Zedong] Ho [Chi Minh], and Kim [Jong-il] (in fact it was Kim Il-sung, no chr.!), were compatible," he said. "Confucianism, like communism, has no Godfather figure. And communism's strong state sits well with Confucian tradition, which is centered on the group, the family, the community, and the state. When the Deng Xiaoping government initiated reform, the ideological transition was smooth. The government didn't have to worry about the weight of opposing tradition, only about the Gang of Four - Mao's wife Jiang Ching and her three Cultural Revolution radical allies. All it had to do was go from socialism without a free market and private enterprise to socialism with a free market and private enterprise."

Taub has argued the name "socialist democracy" is not an oxymoron. "It perfectly describes the half-communist, half-capitalist hybrid system that all industrialized or industrializing countries are currently developing," he said. "It is a system that is half market and private business-driven and half highly central-government-regulated. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan also have that system - in fact Japan pioneered it - but they call themselves capitalist. Most Western European countries call themselves social democracies, which sounds pretty close to socialist democracy."

William Kelly, intercultural communications lecturer at the University of Southern California who wrote a foreword to Taub's books, pointed out that nationalism - strong in China and Korea and growing in Japan - will not necessarily be a hindrance to the formation of a Confucian Union. "It is obvious that the only way to fulfill the desire for national glory as well as economic success is by getting together in a union and being stronger than the other two blocs [the EU and NAFTA]," said Kelly. "First, Japanese militarism could be neutralized by such a bloc. But the real future danger could be Chinese rather than Japanese nationalism, since there is much resentment and a sense of grievance behind it."...