Asia's new rift: asylum seekers

Chinese troops are unrolling barbed wire around the embassies of Beijing – as diplomatic tensions rise in East Asia.

The general cause: Nearly 12 months of sporadic defections by North Korean refugees into embassies and consulates in China.

Tensions heightened last week after Japan sent deputy foreign minister Seiken Sugiura to investigate an incident in which Chinese officials dragged North Korean asylum seekers out of the Japanese consulate in the northeastern city of Shenyang. Tokyo is demanding an apology and the return of the refugees, but China is refusing to do either. China says its police were invited into the consulate.

"In the past few days, Japan has neglected basic objective facts and put forward some unreasonable criticism and demands, harming China's international image," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said at a news conference this week.

China insists it acted in accordance with the Vienna Convention's rules on diplomacy, which treat embassy land as sovereign territory.

The latest incident may be stoking latent tensions between Asia's two biggest powers and dragging South Korea into the middle of the spat for its failure to aid thousands of North Korean refugees. The most recent rush by asylum seekers is just one of several similar publicity stunts designed to embarrass the South Korean government for its largely failed "sunshine policy" of openness toward North Korea.

German doctor Norbert Vollertsen, a controversial figure who spent 18 months as an aid worker in North Korea, is one of the main organizers of the refugees' embassy rushes, which some see as a means to pressure South Korean President Kim Dae Jung into dealing more directly with the refugee issue.

Earlier this week, Dr. Vollertsen announced plans to send thousands of refugees to South Korea by boat as the country hosts the World Cup soccer matches.

"We will try to create pressure on the South Korean government and maybe some others," he said Monday in Seoul.

For Mr. Kim, the problem is sticky. He has been loath to jeopardize his dream of a lasting détente with the North – by aiding the 150,000 or more North Korean refugees in China. Those refugees are turned away by South Korean diplomats in China and advised to try to make their way to a third country. South Korea also does not want to antagonize China, a key diplomatic and economic partner. China has previously helped the refugees by quietly ignoring their presence or treating them as economic migrants, not refugees.

The issue is also one on which Tokyo is staking out high moral ground.

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