South Korea unveils measures to support North Korean defectors https://t.co/Nsi6YbXJ8a

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) November 27, 2016

North Korean officials pay tribute to the bier of Ryu Mi-yong, former member of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly of North Korea and chairwoman of the Central Committee of the Chondoist Chongu Party, in Pyongyang on Nov. 24, 2016, in this photo released by the (North) Korean Central News Agency. Ryu died of lung cancer at the age of 95 the previous day, the agency said. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)

It looks like more people are beginning to realize that the North Korean problem is really a Chinese problem.  Here is what journalist Gordon Chang thinks should be done by the incoming Trump administration to address the Chinese backing of North Korea:

North Korea looks impossible to solve, and it is if we see China as on our side. It is not.  But if we treat China as part of the problem, which it most certainly is, then we can begin to craft solutions, like secondary sanctions. Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, will stop supporting North Korea only when the costs of doing so are too high. So far, his country has suffered almost no penalty.

To impose costs, Trump’s administration could, among other things, cut offending Chinese banks off from the global financial system, sanction every Chinese proliferator, and impose his threatened 45% across-the-board tariff on China’s goods. He could end negotiations on the Bilateral Investment Treaty and treat Chinese businesses like Beijing treats American ones.

And Mr. Trump, starting January 20, will have the tools to raise the costs on Beijing. The Chinese will surely retaliate, but they have few effective options for a long-term struggle. After all, last year they ran a $334.1 billion trade surplus in goods and services against the United States. Trade-surplus countries are vulnerable in trade wars, and that is especially true of a China with an already fragile economy that is dependent on the American market.  [Forbes]

You can read the rest at the link.

Via a reader tip comes news that ROK government held a meeting with USFK to address changes they want made to the US-ROK Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA):

South Korea and the United States on Tuesday had a joint committee meeting to discuss various issues on their agreement governing the legal status of American forces stationed in South Korea, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday.

The 197th joint committee meeting of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which defines areas of legal responsibility of the 28,000-strong U.S. soldiers here, was held at the foreign ministry in Seoul. The SOFA meeting is held once or twice a year, and this was the first time since last December that South Korea and the U.S. officials convened.

The foreign ministry said Yeo Seung-bae, the foreign ministry’s director-general for North America and his counterpart Thomas Bergeson, deputy commander of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), touched on issues such as education of American forces on local law and customs, the USFK’s stable employment of South Korean workers and environmental problems near the U.S. bases here.

The ministry added that the two sides also talked about implementation measures taken after a live anthrax sample from a U.S. military laboratory was shipped to a local military base by mistake and caused alarm bells to go off in the country last year.

The meeting took place before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump — one of whose campaign pledges was to have allies, including South Korea, pay more for American troops stationed in those countries — took over the White House.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but the ROKs are still complaining about the oil leak issue in the Seoul subway system they have been blaming on Yongsan Garrison for years now.  You would think if the oil leak was coming from Yongsan they would have found it by now.  The other thing in the article that caught my attention was that they are still complaining about GI crimes.  The article even states that the US military crime rate has steadily dropped since 2010 from an already extremely low crime rate compared to the surrounding Korean population.

You can read more about the US-ROK SOFA at the below link:

https://www.rokdrop.net/2008/02/gi-myths-the-unfair-us-rok-sofa-agreement/

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday.  Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.

I did not realize that the only Asian who spoke at the Republican National Convention was a Korean-American that was part of Donald Trump’s National Diversity Coalition.  She recently gave an interview to the Joong Ang Ilbo about the election of Donald Trump:

Among the speakers for the 2016 Republican National Convention in July was Lisa Shin, a Korean-American ophthalmologist. She was the only Asian-American who spoke at the event. Dr. Shin has served as one of the 60 advisers to the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, the U.S. President-elect Donald J. Trump’s campaign organization established with the stated aim of reflecting the will of ethnic minorities in America.“I think for Hillary, she had a lot of paid people,” said Dr. Shin during a phone interview with the JoongAng Ilbo. “But I didn’t hear a lot about grass-roots activists like I did with Trump. I believe that there was so much momentum, energy and enthusiasm with Trump. Hillary was disconnected from the people. She was what we call elite. She thought she was privileged.”

Dr. Shin is expected to play an advisry role representing Korean-Americans in the Trump administration, although she has not received any formal requests from the transition team yet. The following is an excerpt from the interview.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest of the interview at the link.  It will be interesting to see if she receives an appointment somewhere within the Trump administration.

It's Friday night, it's Top of the Pops, it's a surprisingly catchy North Korean pop song called 내이름 묻지 마세요! https://t.co/C4gyaaVYji

— James Pearson (@pearswick) November 25, 2016

Protesters hold a candlelight rally at Gwanghwamun Square in central Seoul on Nov. 26, 2016, to call for President Park Geun-hye’s resignation. Park has been under pressure to step down over a nation-rocking political scandal involving her and her longtime confidante Choi Soon-sil. (Yonhap)

With the death of Fidel Castro today I thought this article from a Cuban-American journalist that criticizes San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s support of Castro was worth sharing:

And because Kaepernick apparently doesn’t understand his words apply to him before he can apply them to others, I ask the man who protests oppression why he wore the Castro shirt when the tyrant is demonstrably a star on the world’s All Oppressor team?  (………….)

At this point I hope Kaepernick is starting to realize how untenable his position is relative to the Castros. Even Malcolm X, who met with Castro in New York, for years afterward declined invitations to visit him in Cuba. I’m hoping Kaepernick understands one should not make broad statements about standing up for people’s rights, then slip into a Fidel Castro shirt, suggesting approval for a man who has spent his days on the planet stifling people’s rights.

And that’s exactly the moment Kaepernick shows how lost he truly is. Because in the next breath, Kaepernick, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, explains to me, the guy born in Havana, how great Castro really is.

“One thing Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest literacy rate because they invest more in their education system than they do in their prison system, which we do not do here even though we’re fully capable of doing that,” Kaepernick said.

Is this real life?

First, Cuba does not have the highest literacy rate. Second, don’t be surprised if the same people who report Cuba’s admittedly high literacy rate are related to those who report its election results — the ones in which the Castros get 100 percent of the votes.

Third, could it be Cuba doesn’t have to invest a lot in its prison system because, you know, dungeons and firing squads (El Paredon) are not too expensive to maintain?

Finally, it’s bizarre that Kaepernick is extolling the education system of a country where people believe launching out into shark-infested seas to flee is a better idea than staying there.  [Miami Herald via This Ain’t Hell]

You can read much more at the link, but someone should ask Kaepernick if he would where a Kim Il-sung t-shirt?

He might as well because Kim Il-sung and Fidel Castro have done much of the same things to establish oppressive one party rule in their respective countries.  It just that the leftist ideology that Kaepernick advocates for tends to overlook Castro’s oppression compared to Kim Il-sung.  This just shows what a hypocrite Kaepernick is to be protesting supposed oppression in America, but is happy to be seen wearing a shirt featuring Fidel Castro.

The issue of foreign English teachers being forced to take a HIV test before gaining employment in Korea has come up again:

To teach English in Korea, Christina had to prove she was not HIV-positive.

The US citizen was reluctant, but complied with the rule, undergoing a blood test for HIV and submitting the results to local authorities in order to get a job at a public school.

When she found out that Korean and Korean-American teachers at the school were exempted from the test despite doing the same job, she was offended.

“It perpetuates perceptions of foreigners as dirty, dangerous and impure. I think it is discriminatory and xenophobic,” said Christina, who first came to Korea in 2010 and now teaches in Gwangju.

“It also perpetuates stereotypes about HIV and the people who have it,” she told The Korea Herald.

For nearly a decade, South Korea has made it mandatory for foreigners wishing to work here to undergo blood tests for HIV, rejecting those found to be HIV-positive.

This policy, introduced in 2007 after complaints from locals over “dangerous law-breaking foreigners,” including English teachers, may come to an end soon, as the government is considering a recent recommendation by the country’s human rights panel to do away with it.

“The Justice Ministry is collecting opinions from relevant ministries such as the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health and Welfare to decide whether to accept the recommendation,” it said in response to an inquiry by The Korea Herald.

A recommendation of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea is not legally binding, but the government must decide whether to accept it within 90 days. In this case, the deadline is Dec. 7.  [Korea Herald]

You can read much more at the link, but over at Gusts of Popular Feeling there is a good run down on the history of the HIV testing law.

For those who are not long time readers of the ROK Drop the passing of the mandatory HIV testing law had nothing to do with concerns about HIV or drugs.  It began in 2005 when English Spectrum-gate occurred.  Some foreign English teachers made derogatory comments about Korean women on the English Spectrum website that a Korean netizen noticed.  It soon exploded within the Korean Internet community who rallied to take down the webpage.  However, the taking down of English Spectrum did not stop the Korean netizen fury against what they believed to be unqualified foreign English teachers running around the country taking drugs and molesting Korean women. An Anti-English Spectrum group was formed that actually wanted to provoke incidents with foreigners in certain university areas in order to push them out.

The controversy led the Korean government to order a crackdown against foreign English teachers.  The crackdown got so bad I felt compelled to offer my advice to English teachers on how to blend in as a US GI.  The anti-English Spectrum group was eventually able to lobby to get laws passed in 2007 to make it harder to get an E2 visa which is how the HIV testing came about.  Since then the Korean government has faced accusations of discrimination, but have refused to revoke the HIV testing law.  It looks like within the next few weeks we will know if South Korea will continue to enforce this discriminatory law.