The Turtle House

Monday, 13 May 2013

Here's a good article about China's Peoples Liberation Army soldiers in fighting in Korea in the war there. On-line, it also has a very nice short video of these old soldiers today. Worth viewing

Xinxiang, China (CNN) -- Duan Keke greets visitors with a crisp salute and a few pieces of candy.

The 80-year-old man stands at the gates of Henan Provincial Military Hospital in China where he has lived in retirement for years, dressed in an olive green army uniform and soldier's cap, carrying a long wooden stick that he taps against the pavement as he walks.

"Thank you," he cheerfully repeats to hospital guests -- in Korean.

Duan is a Chinese veteran who fought and bled for North Korea in the Korean War.

Sixty years ago, U.S. and Chinese-led armies battled each other to a bloody standstill in a conflict between North and South Korea that left millions dead. In 1953, both sides signed a truce that has left the Korean Peninsula dangerously divided to this day. Last March, during an orchestrated campaign of international saber-rattling, the communist regime in North Korea declared that armistice agreement invalid.

More: Why the Korean War still matters

Kim Jong-Un visits the Ministry of People's Security on Wednesday, May 1, as part of the country's May Day celebrations.

Kim Jong Un and North Korea's military

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$Photos: Kim Jong Un and North Korea\'s military$ Photos: Kim Jong Un and North Korea's military

China's influence in the N. Korea crisis

U.S., China agree on North Korea

Disputed islands buzzing with activity

In 1951, Duan was only 18 years old when he volunteered to join the Chinese People's Liberation Army. That same year, Duan was deployed to help defend Korean communists from Western-backed troops on the Korean Peninsula, shortly after China emerged from its own deadly civil war.

"The people of Korea were suffering," Duan says.

"We were watching the Korean people and we had all gone through war. You look at China, the revolution, the struggle against the Japanese, many people had died," Duan continues, recalling preceding years of turmoil in China.

"Seeing the people of Korea farming the land and being killed by enemy planes ... what were they to do if they could not farm? The planes would just come and bomb them to death. We had to help protect the people of Korea."

Today, Duan leads visitors down a dark corridor, past framed black-and-white photos of Chinese army heroes, to a tidy room in the hospital he calls home.

Aside from a nephew, Duan saiys he had no living relatives.

His neighbors are also elderly veterans dressed in military fatigues. They chat outside the hospital ward, seated on park benches.

The uniforms are a source of pride for the retired military residents, but also apparently a hospital safety measure in case one of them wanders too far outside the grounds and into the city.

"They're worried that the veterans that came from the countryside will get lost, so when they come here they make them wear uniforms to keep them safe," Duan says.

Much of what Duan recalls from the Korean War years seems to revolve around digging trenches, which he says provided essential protection from American warplanes.

"Digging trenches is not easy ... It's not soil, it's rock," he says, adding that they used their bayonets to break up the rocks.

Though Chinese military units were accompanied by Korean translators, Duan says Chinese and Koreans soldiers were not allowed to fraternize.

However, another Chinese Korean War veteran says he did have face-to-face encounters with U.S. soldiers.

Former infantry soldier You Jie Xiang says his mission was to guard American prisoners of war held far back from the front lines.

"Handling the captives was very dangerous," You says. "They might kick you so I had to tell them to stay on their knees."

More: North Korea photos and maps

Duan says he remained in Korea until 1953, when he was severely wounded in battle.

During his two year deployment, one of Duan's missions was to charge up a mountain carrying explosives towards well entrenched Western-backed troops.

"They're shooting guns at you," he says, holding his walking stick up to his shoulder like a rifle and making shooting noises. "We had to bring up the explosives and bomb them, using explosives and flaming oil."

Duan was wounded at least twice. He rolls back a sleeve to show scars from severe burns resulting from what he said was an airstrike.

And in the privacy of the medical ward, he insists on dropping his pants and lifting his shirt to show deep scars in his abdomen left by bullets that struck him during a battle on a mountain. Duan says he was shipped home after this injury, which left him maimed and unable to reproduce.

The sight of the elderly war veterans in their baggy uniforms contrasts sharply with the vision of modern China that has grown up around them.

The years of starvation and conflict seem like distant history, in a country that is now the world's second largest economy, as well as home to billionaires, gleaming sky-scrapers, luxury shopping malls and brand new airports.

The veterans at the Henan Provincial Military Hospital say China's newest generation know little of the hardships they suffered in Korea.

"Young people? Of course they don't know," says You, the former infantry soldier who once escorted imprisoned American GIs. "These wars took place decades ago. All the young people have no idea."

Asked whether Koreans understood the sacrifice Chinese troops had made, the veteran shakes his head "no."

"What do the Koreans know?" You asks himself out loud. "They know what the Korean (government) tells the Korean people."

This modern-day ambivalence towards North Korea is echoed by some Chinese intellectuals.

Recently, Deng Yuwen openly challenged the Chinese government's alliance with North Korea in writing. Partly as a result, he lost his job as deputy editor of the Study Times, a journal published by the Communist Party.

"The current laissez-faire attitude the U.S. and China have towards North Korea is comparable to that of (former British Prime Minister Neville) Chamberlain towards Germany before World War II," Deng said, in a recent interview with CNN.

If Pyongyang continues threatening its Asian neighbors, Deng argued, Beijing should take steps to reign in the regime, like freezing North Korean accounts in Chinese banks.

"The unpredictability of North Korea's policies prove its nature is dangerous," Deng said.

Veterans who risked their lives for North Korea more than half a century ago have little to say about the current government in Pyongyang.

But they do not seem to hold a grudge against their former American enemies.

When asked by an American reporter whether he had any message for the U.S., Duan responds by saying, "the Americans are peaceful people."

Next to him, several of his fellow veterans nod in agreement.

"I think the Americans did not want to go to war (in Korea). War is death."

Asked whether he feared war might once again break out on the Korean Peninsula, Duan expresses confidence that the Chinese government would prevent hostilities from erupting.

"The central government will handle it. It is guided by the ideas of Mao Zedong," he says, referring to the founder of Communist China.

"Big countries don't want war and we're against war and this is what we've been taught."

Sunday, 12 May 2013

pictures of people

The greatest worry lately in the world of US aggression was that the UN spokesman noted that there was no evidence that the Syrian Government was using chemical weapons upon its own people, but that rather the Syrian opposition, supported by the US, had been using this form of horror-warfare. This official UN report, and the astute official responsible for it, were denounced quickly, and then the news just went along as usual. After all, if it was the Syrian opposition, supported by the USA who were responsible for using chemical weapons, then where did the Syrian Opposition get them from? A good question that is not allowed to be asked. A good question that is not allowed. We must keep it as though :These guys are the good guys, those guys are the bad guys, and we have proof that the good guys are being destroyed by the bad guys unfairly, so we must give weapons to the good guys...as it was in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, and Iran and now in Syria. We can destroy Syria if the government are the bad guys, so we will fabricate it so they are, even though the 'good guys' are using horrific poisons on their own people. The truth doesn't matter. The profit matters.

Now that it is May, the annual April US war-games on the border with North Korea have finished, and the nuclear bomb-packing US stealth bombers have moved away, and so the North Koreans have put their ICBMs away (and they do have them, and have had them for years, and everyone knows), so the level of risk for a big war has gone down again, as it does, every year in May. Every year.

The next spike re 'total war' will be when the US sells more offensive weapons to Taiwan as it does annually. Then China will become cranky again.

The predictability of the US' annual destabilisations of North Asia, and in the South China Sea, is yawningly obvious.

The purpose: Destabilisation to maintain US influence, where otherwise there is no need for US presence at all; and to totally stop the resolution of all issues at the local level... to stop agreements, to stop unity in Asia, to stop compromise and reason, to stop peace from being assured.

Why? Because it's good for American business, the world's biggest Arms dealers; and that's all. That is the morality of it. To divide, so as to create markets for weapons that otherwise would not be necessary at all.

What does Australia do? We kowtow to this US vision of omnipotence as policeman, and give over sovereign Australian land and logistics to the American military, so they can keep destabilising our major trading partners, and our real friends.

Asia will work out what is best for Asia as time goes by. Australia is in the area, but we are not Asia at all. Why? Because we have no interest or investment in peace at all, but rather the opposite. Asia knows this.

Wednesday, 8 May 2013

Interesting Article: Working in Australia with a different sounding name

You are applying for a job and you work hard on your resume. You type in your qualifications and experience. And of course your name. Maybe you do not give a second thought to this. After all, what s in a name when you are applying for a job? Surely, it is only your degrees and experience that matter, not your name or ethnicity. If two job applicants have exactly the same resume, they should have an equal probability of being selected for a job interview, shouldn't they?
To investigate this, my colleagues - Andrew Leigh, Elena Varganova - and I carried out a large-scale field experiment in Australia. Our goal was to see if there is any labour market discrimination against ethnic minorities.
With one in four residents born overseas, Australia is often regarded as something of a poster child for its ability to absorb new migrants into its social and economic fabric. Skilled migrants are selected through a points system, which gives preference to applicants with high qualifications and workers in high-demand occupations.
Australia's points-based immigration policy has not only been much admired, but has also been adopted by other countries, including New Zealand and the UK. And in Australia, we give everyone a fair go, don't we?
Well, maybe not… To investigate if there is ethnic discrimination by employers, we conducted what is termed a correspondence discrimination study, in which fictitious individuals, identical in all respects apart from their ethnicity, apply for jobs.
After obtaining ethics approval from the Australian National University, my co-authors and I randomly submitted over 4,000 fictional applications for entry-level jobs. In terms of number of applications submitted, this was one of the biggest correspondence studies ever conducted. The large size of the study allowed us to look at a range of ethnic groups, where ethnicity was indicated only by the name of the job applicant. The names we used were from five broad ethnicities: Anglo-Saxon, Indigenous, Italian, Chinese and Middle Eastern. We were interested in measuring call-back rates for interviews, and we focused on urban areas alone.
In all cases, we applied for entry-level jobs and submitted a resume indicating that the candidate attended high school in Australia. The findings were both startling and robust.

Consider Anglicising your name if you live and work in a country where Anglo names are in the majority. Or if you do not, consider changing it to match with the dominant group.

Alison Booth

In particular, we found that ethnic minority candidates would need to apply for more jobs in order to receive the same number of invitations to interviews. Moreover, these differences vary systematically across ethnic groups. To get as many interviews as an Anglo applicant with an Anglo-sounding name, an Indigenous person must submit 35 percent more applications, a Chinese person must submit 68 percent more applications, an Italian person must submit 12 percent more applications and a Middle Eastern person 64 percent more applications.
This study has implications for the individual jobseeker as well as for policy.
For the individual, what is the advice? Consider Anglicising your name if you live and work in a country where Anglo names are in the majority. Or if you do not, consider changing it to match with the dominant group. This is the counsel given by some immigration lawyers. They sometimes also recommend that you do not put your country of birth on your application and only mention your language skills if they are relevant to the job you are applying for.
But can policymakers also do something? Yes, and here is one suggestion. Policymakers can implement anonymous job application procedures and can undertake - or commission - a field experiment to evaluate their effects. First, find a few companies or government departments. For these companies, set up two groups - the treatment group and the control. The control group might be all job applicants for the previous year and the treatment would be all the new applicants for the next year for whom anonymous job applications would be introduced. (Alternatively the control group might be half of all new applicants, and then introduce anonymous job applications for the other half.) Evaluations would consider whether or not this process is cumbersome, and evaluate its impact on ethnic and gender call-backs for the treatment group, compared with the control group.
Is this possible? Of course it is, and it has been done. In Germany, in November 2010, the Federal Anti-discrimination Agency initiated a field experiment along these lines, with anonymous job applications (no name, no photograph, no ethnicity or gender). The results showed that standardised anonymised application forms were associated with equal chances of applicants of different minorities receiving a job interview. This is just as you'd expect. Standardised anonymous application forms were also found to be easily implemented.
Can this be done this in other countries? Let us see what the policymakers and anti-discrimination agencies have to say.
Alison Booth is Professor of Economics at the Australian National University and an ANU Public Policy Fellow. She is also the author of A Distant Land, published in 2012.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.