Debating North Korea
As rumbles from North Korea’s sixth nuclear test in September 2017 subsided, debate within China exploded into character assassinations and insults. Zhu Zhihua 朱志华 a little known scholar from the Zhejiang Association of International Relations savaged Jia Qingguo 贾庆国, prominent dean of the Peking University School of International Studies, for his proposal to start contingency planning talks with the US and South Korea, which ‘copy the US’ and ‘hint a military attack may be the next step’. Evoking the spectre of Cultural Revolution struggle sessions, he insinuated Jia held a wrong ‘political standpoint’. Jia hit back, calling Zhu a career…
