Your China-Japan-Two Koreas Post

All intertwined:

China’s COVID-19 infections have rapidly spread to the countryside, and small towns, raising concern about China’s Lunar New Year, which falls on Jan. 22, when a large number of holiday travelers are expected as people return to their hometowns for the celebration.

While hospitals in big cities were overwhelmed by a sudden onslaught of COVID-19 patients in December, the situation outside the cities is even more worrisome because of the large rural population and a lack of medical resources.

“Caijing,” a mainland China state-controlled media, said on Dec. 24 that it recently interviewed local residents, pharmacies, and hospital staff in small cities and towns in Shandong, Jiangxi, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Anhui, Hubei, Yunnan, Hebei and other provinces about their local situations.

“We are not afraid of being tested positive for COVID, we are afraid that we can’t get medicine to treat it,” interviewees said.

China News Weekly reported on Dec. 28 that it recently spoke with three village doctors from Shaanxi, Hebei, and Anhui provinces about the current status of the epidemic in rural areas. They said there was a shortage of medicine, a shortage of manpower, and doctors are becoming infected one after another.

The mainland news site reported on Dec. 28 that Yang Chun, a village doctor in Yankou Town, Xixiang County, Hanzhong City, Shaanxi Province, said his village has only two doctors to care for more than 4,000 people. The lack of access to medicine is the biggest problem, he said.

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Japan has launched an official investigation into the unprecedented numbers of people dying after receiving the Covid-19 vaccination.

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Japan said on Monday that it had scrambled jet fighters and dispatched aircraft and warships over the past two weeks to keep tabs on China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier and five warships that conducted naval manoeuvres and flight operations in the Pacific.

Japan monitored the operations after the Chinese naval group, which included missile destroyers, sailed between the main Okinawa island and Miyakojima island into the Western Pacific from the East China Sea on Dec. 16, Japan’s Defense Ministry said in a press release.

Before returning the same way Sunday, the Chinese carrier conducted more than 300 take-offs and landings of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, the ministry added, although it did not report any incursions into Japanese territorial waters or skies.

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Japan will serve as a nonpermanent member of the U.N. Security Council in 2023-24, with its diplomatic ability expected to be tested at a time when the council is seriously dysfunctional over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Tokyo takes a nonpermanent seat of the council, in charge of ensuring international peace and security, for a record 12th time since it became a member of the United Nations in 1956 following its previous 2016-17 term. The country holds the presidency of the council in January 2023.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, in a speech on Monday, condemned Russia for its aggression on Ukraine, arguing that the country, one of the five veto-wielding permanent Security Council members, is “attempting to break the international order.”

Kishida vowed that Japan, as a nonpermanent member, “will play the role of advancing reform to restore the functions of the United Nations.”

In 2022, the Security Council saw a sharp division between three of its permanent members — the United States, Britain and France — and the other two — China and Russia — over the war in Ukraine, as well as North Korea’s repeated firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Takahiro Shinyo, an international politics professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, said that Japan’s ability to help stop “high-handedness” by Russia and China will be “put to the test” after becoming a nonpermanent council member.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has pledged to increase his nuclear arsenal in the new year to stifle U.S. and South Korean hostile acts, in a policy-setting address in which he left almost no opening for a return to long-stalled disarmament talks.

In a speech that came at the end of a nearly weeklong meeting of his ruling Workers Party, Kim said Washington and Seoul are taking aim at his government, which raises his need to produce even more nuclear weapons, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported on Sunday.

“Now that the south Korean puppet forces who designated the DPRK as their ‘principal army’ and openly trumpet about ‘preparations for war’ have assumed our undoubted enemy, it highlights the importance and necessity of a mass-producing of tactical nuclear weapons and calls for an exponential increase of the country’s nuclear arsenal,” KCNA cited Kim as saying in a report, referring to his country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Kim’s report to wrap up the plenary meeting of the Central Committee of his ruling Workers’ Party appeared to take the place of his traditional New Year’s Day address. He also pledged that his country would launch its first military satellite and develop a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile, which could be used to deliver a warhead to the U.S. mainland.

 

Oh, that was nice of them:

Hong Kong’s outspoken Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen was allowed to leave the southern Chinese city to pay his respects to the late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in Vatican City, his secretary said on Tuesday.

Zen, a 90-year-old retired bishop, will attend the funeral Mass, led by Pope Francis, at St. Peter’s Square on Thursday and return to Hong Kong on Saturday, the secretary said.

Zen was elevated to cardinal by Benedict in 2006, which he said signaled the pope’s focus on China.

In recent years, the democracy advocate has been sharply at odds with Francis over the Vatican’s agreement with Chinese authorities on the appointment of bishops. Zen contends the deal betrays pro-Vatican Catholics in China and the clergy who have suffered persecution there.

He appeared in court on Tuesday to apply for a leave from the city, his secretary said.

He and five others were fined in November after being found guilty of failing to register a now-defunct fund that aimed to help people arrested in widespread 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

Zen was first arrested in May last year on suspicion of colluding with foreign forces under a Beijing-imposed national security law. His arrest sent shockwaves through the Catholic community, although the Vatican only stated it was monitoring the development of the situation closely.

While Zen has not yet been charged with national security-related charges, he was charged with failing to properly register the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which helped pay medical and legal fees for arrested protesters. It ceased operations in October 2021.

 

South Korean lunar spacecraft sends back pictures of the Earth and the lunar surface:

Some mood music.