Tony Sullivan's List: Places to watch: East Asia

• . Ordinary citizens who bravely ran to the National Assembly building, blocked armored vehicles, and stood up to martial law troops prevented the coup. After that, many more people consistently took to the streets to demand the impeachment of Yoon.
• In addition, the coup forces and their remnants still remain. Currently, eight cabinet members, including the Prime Minister, the Minister of National Defence, the Minister of Public Administration and Security , and the Minister of Justice, are currently facing charges of aiding and abetting the coup.
• The investigation into the involvement of high-ranking prosecutors in the coup has not even begun. Many of the police superintendents and superintendents-general who were promoted in February included pro-Yoon police officers.
• The far right will regroup and fight back, and mobilisation against them will have to resume. Since the Yoon impeachment movement held counter-protests in the centre of Seoul and at universities in March, the far right has slowed down. In the future, it seems that counter-protests against the far-right should also be organised in local communities.
• Even if leader of the centre left Democratic Party Lee Jae Myung wins the presidential election, the far right will soon launch a large-scale counter-mobilisation

3 more annotations...

• On 3 December 2024, South Korea’s right-wing president, Yoon Suk Yeol, attempted an “auto-coup”, declaring martial law in a live televised address.
• triggers that led to Yoon trying to declare martial law
• public outrage and a row over the death of a marine, for which the higher-ups in the military brass were responsible.2 They tried to cover up their responsibility
• A second immediate issue was conflict over South Korean foreign policy due to rising geopolitical tensions. Yoon was in favour of going fully on to the side of western imperialism, backing the United States and being on friendly terms with Japan. The DP, although they’re not in favour of siding with China, are keener on trying to strike a balance between the two camps.
• Of course, there was also the re-election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in early November, which gave more confidence to Yoon. The current far right tends to take its cue very much from Trump and the US. They also exploit the Protestant Christian right infrastructure to build their support and their movement. That’s a particular feature of the South Korean right.
• A third immediate cause was that Yoon was very much into, and accepted, conspiracy theories by far-right YouTubers, claiming that the last general election in South Korea was rigged
• The deeper, but less direct, reason had to do with the growing economic crisis. Price inflation had been sharply on the rise, there was high unemployment and interest rates were up. The Yoon government’s responses to the economic problems was austerity, and that led to many young people being unable to find jobs, causing a lot of anger. Also, a lot of small-scale businesses and self-employed people were having a hard time. The biggest bases of support for the far right now are unemployed young people and small businesspeople who went bankrupt.
• The people who rushed to parliament on the night of the coup were mostly ordinary people. Not just us, but also DP supporters, workers and young people, or members of the Progressive Party, a Stalinist party. So those are the kinds of ordinary people who stopped the coup, and afterwards, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) held street rallies for a few days.11 The KCTU also announced they were going to organise a general strike, but this turned out to be just a bluff.
• Over the past five years, the Stalinists have taken over the leadership of the KCTU, and their strategy is economistic or sectionalist on the one hand, populist on the other.
• Over the past decade or so, the Stalinists have been divided into roughly two camps, aside from other really small factions. The mainstream faction is so opportunistic as to be indistinguishable from non-Stalinists in many ways. They try to hide their sympathies toward North Korea in public, and they are obsessively tail the DP.
• The members of the minority group are on average around ten years younger. They’re more militant and more openly pro-North Korea. Despite being ostracised and excluded by the mainstream elements, this smaller section of the Stalinists, in their way, also pursue a Popular Front with the DP. However, this smaller faction has been more keen on confronting the far right, so we had a good working relationship in the counter-mobilisations recently.
• We publish our weekly paper and also, in between issues of our paper, we publish leaflets which we distribute at rallies. Both of these are very well received, and we have gained a lot of interest and people following us. So, through our efforts at counter-mobilisation, we have created a growing periphery, with which we can engage politically and who are favourably disposed towards us. But this is not yet leading to a new surge in membership.
• The speed of developments in South Korea seems to be amazingly fast. It took only a heartbeat from the auto-coup to the storming of the courtroom building, and it’s difficult to predict what will come next, given the speed of developments and the highly charged geopolitical situation. You could see things explode in the near future, and you cannot rule out open military conflict.

11 more annotations...

• on March 12th during a protest by thousands of coal miners in the dingy streets of Shuangyashan, a city in Heilongjiang province near the border with Russia
• The demonstrators gathered outside the headquarters of Longmay, the largest mining company in the north-east and Heilongjiang’s biggest state-owned enterprise (SOE).
• The protest was one of the biggest by workers at an SOE for many years. It was an indication of the problems that China’s government will probably face as it seeks to cut excess capacity among SOEs like Longma
• the labour minister, Yin Weimin, said that 1.3m coal workers and 500,000 steel workers could lose their jobs over the next five years.
• Other estimates say 3m-5m people may be thrown out of work in these industries as well as in aluminium production and glassmaking. That is far fewer than the tens of millions who lost their jobs during SOE restructuring in the late 1990s. But the economies of some cities, including Shuangyashan, are driven by a handful of large SOEs. In these, downsizing will be traumatic and possibly turbulent.
• Labour unrest is rising everywhere as economic growth slows

4 more annotations...

• Australian military forces had been blooded in foreign wars in New Zealand against the Maori people in the 1860s, in the Sudan (1885-1886), in the Boer War (1899-1902), and in the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900-1901).

• “The tragedy is they don’t realise that as women age they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their MA or PhD, they are already old, like yellowed pearls.”