If the leaders of Tokyo and Seoul do not assist at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, Friday, February 4, they have not adopted the American position of the boycott.
Analysis. Immediate neighbors of China and the main allies of the United States in North-East Asia, South Korea and Japan are placed in a delicate position by confrontation between Beijing and Washington. The two countries louve between the obligations imposed by their alliance with the United States and the need to house their Great Asian neighbor.
Illustration of this dilemma, the resolution adopted by the Japanese Parliament, expressing “the concern” on “the serious situation of human rights”, “especially in the autonomous ÎGoure region Xinjiang, Tibet, inner Mongolia and Hong Kong “. This text, which succeeds the tour de force not to explicitly mention China, has no less aroused a protest from Beijing.
This ambiguity is found with the Beijing Olympic Winter Games, which open, Friday, February 4, without the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, nor the Japanese Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida. But neither South Korea nor Japan endorsed the way of Washington boycott, London and Canberra.
Human rights are not historically the preferred international communication instrument of Seoul and Tokyo. In South Korea, the time of military dictatorships (1946-1987), the question did not arise. As Seoul, Tokyo had married the “ethics” of the cold war, whose eradication of communism was the priority, and, at best, to deplore the abuses of Dictators supported by Washington in Asia.
Miscellaneous imperatives
In 1980, in South Korea, as a result of the violent repression by the elite troops of the Gwangju civilian population in rebellion against dictatorship, Japan reacts little. This repression, which officially made two hundred dead (a thousand, according to the opponents), was faster forgotten abroad than that of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, 1989. While the latter boasts indignation in the West, Tokyo remained discreet in his condemnation, just suspending a few months his loans to China.
In March 1990, with the US President George Bush Father, the Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, insisted on the need to reintegrate China into the international community and the international community. Encourage to pursue economic reforms, promoting better respect for human rights. A swept optimism since the arrival of Xi Jinping, in 2013.
The Nippone “reserve” is observed after the coups in Thailand, in 2014, and in Burma, in 2021. South Korea adopted a similar attitude. Criticized by Seoul, the coup of the Burmens generals did not dissuaded the South Korean authorities to strengthen the links with Rangoon, as part of his “new policy towards the South” – that is to say. Southeast Asia.
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