Adam Cathcart is Assistant Professor History at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington and the editor of SinoNK.com.

The pigs were being slaughtered in the streets when the news of Kim Jong Il’s death arrived in Dachuan, a small logging village in the mountains of western Sichuan province. Over the immense and extended cacophony of the blood-letting, the retired head of the local bank explained, with a bit of apologetic joy, that the villagers were getting ready for Spring Festival, then turned back to the news from Pyongyang, shaking his head at the retrograde tendencies of China’s Korean socialist brothers.

It was a fitting juxtaposition, watching events in North Korea amid the production of reams of red pork with rich peasants in China. Meat, after all, was the sine qua non of success for Kim Il Sung and his son, both of whom proclaimed their magnanimous desire to make good on the promise of “rice with meat soup” in every pot (and a tile roof for every rural house). Yet, as even a cursory read of virtually any analysis or short trip to the North Korean border with China can attest, the battle for higher living standards—as opposed to monuments—in essentially every place outside of the DPRK’s model capital has been lost. Mao Zedong said he could do without meat, making revolution with just grain and rifles, but North Korea has ample rifles but no grain, and the revolution is dead.

Amid the welter of random, confusing, instructive, and occasionally cruel responses to Kim Jong Il’s death among Chinese, Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 has been a touchstone. This particular parallel, encouraged by Chinese state media, is significant because it implicitly holds out the hope that a market-oriented North Korean Deng Xiaoping might yet emerge out of the factions assumed to be maneuvering in Pyongyang. But North Korea is hardly exiting the “fractured rebellion” of a Cultural Revolution. The DPRK remains instead in the thrall of a persistently centralized leadership system in which Kim Il Sung and his son had purged, jailed, exiled, or killed all the advocates of possible systemic alternatives. In Andrei Lankov’s phrase, the “blade of state of state remains sharp enough to cut off its diseased parts,” and gazing at the grizzled ranks of the Pyongyang senior elite, it seems unlikely that some wholesale adoption of Chinese-style market reforms is in the offing.

The Reluctant Embrace of Kim Jong Un
On December 21, Wen Jiabao went to the North Korean embassy in Beijing, bowed to Kim Jong Il’s portrait, and said: “We believe that with the Korean Workers’ Party under the leadership of comrade Kim Jong Un, the North Korean people will certainly powerfully pass through their grief, pushing forward to new successes in socialist construction.” It was a turn of events which but a few years earlier would have been seen as unlikely. Since Kim Jong Il’s stroke in 2008, and the rumors of Kim Jong Un’s existence as a viable successor to his father in early 2009, the CCP has gone through a number of stances toward the idea, ending in the acceptance of the successor. In the aftermath of the North Korean nuclear test of May 2009, Beijing loosened its grip on journalism about the DPRK in the Chinese media, using the new latitude to serve the Party’s foreign policy purposes. Publications about the North Korean role in starting the Korean War were suddenly acceptable, and, more importantly, a number of unflattering portrayals of the “weird” Kim family began to emerge. Chinese public intellectuals like Zhu Feng and Shen Dingli speculated about rapid changes in North Korea and the CCP made clear its desire, at the very least, for North Korea to transition to a more collective leadership centered in the Korean Workers’ Party rather than in the enfeebled Kim Jong Il or his relatively unknown successor.

However, after Kim Jong Un’s formal unveiling at the September 2010 KWP Congress in Pyongyang, the discourse shifted decisively toward a more supportive line toward the “young general.” Likenesses between Chinese and North Korean political cultures were emphasized; in mass magazine portrayals, CCP scholars encouraged Kim Jong Un to “make his mark via some achievements in writing about communist theory.”

Even Kim Jong Un’s foreign experience was highlighted in Chinese media as beneficial. It seemed that in some important ways, Kim Jong Un could be used to send home the message to China’s unreceptive youth: It may be fine to spend a few years studying abroad and fall in love with Michael Jordan, but when you come home, it’s all about the Young Pioneers and Party building. More importantly, the junior Kim’s probable role in North Korean attacks on the South Korean vessel “Cheonan” in March 2010 and on Yeonpyeong Island in November 2010 was downplayed in the PRC. South Korean stories which asserted that Kim Jong Un had assumed control over North Korea’s northern border security, like most narratives focused on refugees, did not enter the public discourse in China.

The CCP’s evident nervousness about stability in North Korea, and its protective stance toward the DPRK, means that no loud public doubts about Kim Jong Un’s inexperience are presently welcome. Suggestions that the successor is incapable of leading, when allowed at all, are placed in the mouths of foreign experts like the International Crisis Group’s Daniel Pinkston, and qualified with some implication that South Korean media reports could all be false anyway.

North Korea appears to have made only a minor rhetorical concession to Chinese pressure by referring to the idea of “uniting around the Korean Workers’ Party and Comrade Kim Jong Un,” a phrase codified in the DPRK’s official response to the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s initial statement of regret at Kim Jong Il’s death.

Economic and Cultural Exchanges
The legacy of Kim Jong Il’s rapid—one might almost say rushed—advancement of cooperation with China in 2010 and 2011 hangs in the balance, and the CCP will be eager for cross-border trade and tourism to resume. A rather explicit December 20 editorial in the Huanqiu Shibao, entitled “China is the Reliable Friend Upon Which North Korea Can Rely during Transition,” stated: “We suggest that as soon as it is appropriate, Chinese high-level leaders go to North Korea, where they will intimately communicate with North Korea’s new leaders at this special time that Pyongyang can send a distinct signal to the world [by taking the Chinese path].”

In the weeks prior to Kim Jong Il’s death, China had been pressing for more clarification and motion on the two new island trade zones in the Yalu River near Sinuiju. While the Chinese side has been investing an immense amount of money in construction of what is essentially a new city outside of Dandong and a large new super-highway worthy bridge to the DPRK, the North Pyong’an leadership has been everything that privately infuriates Chinese partners: uncommunicative, inaccessible, and (according to the Daily NK) suddenly purged.

Far more promising is the development at Rason, on the far northeastern edge of the Korean peninsula, where China has brought in an old Korea hand named Tian Baozhu, a Kim Il Sung University graduate and former Consul-General in Pusan, to set conditions for further Chinese investment in this highly-desired port which finally offers eastern Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces access to the sea and cheaper means of shipping coal to ports like Shanghai. Rason remains a source of rumors from South Korea and the active advocates of immediate North Korean collapse, who often imply that China is not simply constructing the port but has secured it with a few thousand PLA troops. Such impressions are unlikely to slow the CCP in its push for more access and faster development of Chinese business interests, particularly in the minerals sector, in North Korea.

Chinese cultural exchanges with North Korea have been, in the DPRK context, incredibly extensive. The oft-maligned Korean Central News Agency has opened up exchanges with Xinhua, performing arts delegations tour across the Chinese mainland, and a Confucius Institute is open in Pyongyang with some 800 students. Tourism to the DPRK, another area of possible peril—seven Chinese tourists and businessmen were killed in a mysterious crash outside of Pyongyang on Thanksgiving Day—is an area where the Chinese side puts a great deal of stock and aims to develop further from even remote cities like Qiqihar and Mudanjiang. The extent to which the North Korean side remains committed to the speed and intensity of these relationships is something which the Chinese government is particularly keen to observe.

Border security on the northern frontier remains a complex and sensitive issue, as well as military-to-military relations. The fact that eight North Korean border guards were reputed to have run headlong into the Liaoning hills in late November is not to be forgotten; the fact that China was hosting the Japanese Self-Defense Forces Navy in Qingdao (of all places) from December 19-23 is another area which under normal conditions might cause strain on Sino-North Korean relations.

Kim Jong Il’s death does not alter the fundamentals of the bilateral relationship, but it does offer an opportunity to take stock of this most fraught and significant relationship. The speed and intimacy with which it continues is of interest to us all.

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried — as is evident in everything from politics to popular culture, from statistics to anecdotes. Yet from late 2007 to 2012, Barack Obama has been establishing new rules of racial referencing. In general, his utterances follow a disheartening pattern. When he is ahead in the polls, has won an election, and is not campaigning, then he emphasizes the unity of the country. But when he is running for president, or campaigning for others, or sinking in the polls, he and his closest associates predictably revert to charges of racial bigotry, albeit usually coded and subtle. America is redeemed when it champions the Obamas, but retrograde when it does not.

Obama’s race-based strategy is predicated on some unspoken assumptions: Any short-term damage incurred by engaging in racial tribalism can easily be later erased by soaring teleprompted speeches on racial harmony; the media will either not widely report his emphases on race or generally support his charges; a person of color can hardly be culpable of racial polarization himself given the history of racial discrimination in this country.

In a recent speech before a Latino audience, President Obama, in blasting congressional Republicans, recalled that he had run for office because "America should be a place where you can always make it if you try; a place where every child, no matter what they look like, where they come from, should have a chance to succeed." The obvious conclusion from his increasingly frequent "look like" trope is that his critics predicate success in America on just the opposite criteria. That is, supposedly racist opponents do not wish every child to succeed, and so it certainly matters to them a great deal what Americans should "look like."..

Kevin M. Kruse, an associate professor of history at Princeton, is the author of the forthcoming “One Nation Under God: Corporations, Christianity, and the Rise of the Religious Right.”

...The concept of “one nation under God” has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.” After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

During the Great Depression, the prestige of big business sank along with stock prices. Corporate leaders worked frantically to restore their public image and simultaneously roll back the “creeping socialism” of the welfare state. Notably, the American Liberty League, financed by corporations like DuPont and General Motors, made an aggressive case for capitalism. Most, however, dismissed its efforts as self-interested propaganda. (A Democratic Party official joked that the organization should have been called “the American Cellophane League” because “first, it’s a DuPont product and, second, you can see right through it.”)

Realizing that they needed to rely on others, these businessmen took a new tack: using generous financing to enlist sympathetic clergymen as their champions. After all, according to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in America, ministers had more to do with molding public opinion” than any other....

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).

I just returned from a quick trip to Great Britain, which once ruled a fifth of the world’s inhabitants and a quarter of its land mass. But then the British instituted a system of social welfare, including national health care, which diminished their strength and confidence – and paved the way for the dissolution of their empire.

So said presidential hopeful Rick Santorum earlier this month in Iowa, where he ran a close second to Mitt Romney in the Republican caucuses. Critics quickly seized on Mr. Santorum’s confused chronology, noting that the British left India – the jewel of their empire – in 1947, and their National Health Service wasn’t established until 1948.

Yet when I recounted Santorum’s remark to a colleague in England, he had a very different response: “Why does the guy like empire so much?”

The answer isn’t hard to find. Like most of the other GOP candidates, Santorum seems to see America as the rightful heir to British global domination. All we need is a firm belief in our own superiority, which the British allegedly forsook after World War II....

[M]y colleague in England, who happens to be Irish ... wryly pointed out [that] nobody in Ireland – which suffered three centuries of vicious British rule – would ever put in a good word for imperialism.

Neither should we. If we really want to be an “exceptional” world power, we should resist the idea of empire wherever it arises. Despite what you hear from Rick Santorum, health care didn’t bankrupt the British Empire. In all the ways that matter, it was bankrupt from the start.

Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University. For a list of his recent books and online publications, click here. He has previously written on mass culture, along with other topics, in his An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces (Anthem Press, 2008).

On LA Progressive’s pages, I have read many articles and commentaries which threaten not to support President Obama’s reelection.  Although I distrust political labels, I consider myself a liberal and progressive, and thus a leftist, but I differ from some of you in several ways.

First, I embrace an ethics that is heavily consequentialist.  A consequentialist would not say, “it is always wrong to lie.”  What if a Nazi asked you if you were hiding a Jew during World War II​? A consequentialist would consider the consequences of his/her actions, whether it be lying or voting in November and let that affect his/her decision.

I understand and admire some people who take a different approach and have written at length on one of them, pacifist (even during World War II) Dorothy Day​.  Her approach to ethics stressed more the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of an act.  But I side more with various thinkers like Max Weber​​, Isaiah Berlin​​, and Reinhold Niebuhr​​ (Obama’s favorite theologian) who advocated a more consequentialist ethics.  These three men also took what they considered a realistic approach to politics and recognized the importance of compromises and toleration.

This did not mean ignoring the importance of political passion and pressure.  Weber wrote that “devotion to politics, if it is not to be frivolous intellectual play but rather genuinely human conduct, can be born and nourished from passion alone.”  And Niebuhr wrote:  “Political strategy, therefore, always involves a combination of coercive and persuasive factors. . . . The welfare of society demands that enough social intelligence and moral idealism be created to prevent social antagonism from issuing in pure conflict and that enough social pressure be applied to force reluctant beneficiaries of social privilege to yield their privileges before injustice prompts to vehemence and violence.”

He applied these ideas already in 1932 to the black struggle for justice.  He declared “the Negro​ will never win his full rights in society merely by trusting the fairness and sense of justice of the white man. . . . Neither will the Negro gain justice merely by turning to violence to gain his rights. . . . If he is well advised he will use such forms of economic and political pressure as will be least likely to destroy the moral forces, never completely absent even in intergroup relations, but which will nevertheless exert coercion upon the white man’s life.”

Considering these words and Niebuhr’s strong influence in Protestant circles, it is not surprising that he had a strong influence on Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.  In his famous April 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King wrote:  “We have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.  Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.  Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”

On April 13, 1970, two years after King’s assassination, the editor of the journal Christianity and Crisis wrote to Niebuhr:  “Let me tell you that Andy Young told me recently that in the quiet hours when he and Martin King would sit and talk that Martin always said he was much more influenced by you and Paul Tillich​ [another important Protestant theologian] than by Gandhi and that the nonviolent technique was merely a Niebuhrian stratagem of power.  Enough said!”

For workers, Niebuhr also advised pressure tactics because “the group which is able to wield the most economic and political power really determines its [the state’s] policies.”

The advocacy of various forms of pressure by Niebuhr and the employment of nonviolent pressure tactics by Gandhi and King all suggest that among the masses and non-politicians, political wisdom often calls for more partisanship and passion and less compromise than for politicians, who often must compromise to advance the common good.

Gandhi and King were not modern-day politicians, but more akin to the Biblical Jewish prophets who attacked the evils of their day.  These two modern prophets displayed the “prophetic charisma” that Weber believed was helpful to challenge an increasingly rationalized and bureaucratic state.

More recently, Cornel West​ has emphasized the importance of prophetic action within the political realm.  He asks, for example, “Can prophetic religion, in all of its various forms, mobilize people, generate levels of righteous indignation against injustice—not raw rage at persons, not ad hominem attacks—can we put pressure on President Obama?  He’s listening to technocratic elites in his economic team who have never had any serious concern with poor people and working people.”  Without necessarily agreeing with all that West states, his stress on moral fervor against injustice seems appropriate.

So I applaud the passion and pressure that many of you, my fellow leftists, demonstrate in fighting for such noble ideals as peace, equality, freedom, and justice.  And I recognize that President Obama has not always pursued these goals as passionately as you would like.  But our roles as private citizens and his as president are different.  Politicians must always remember that politics is, as Bismarck once stated, “the art of the possible.”

As John Kennedy​ wrote in his Profiles in Courage:

We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure.  But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles.  We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves.  We can resolve the clash of interests without conceding our ideals.  And even the necessity for the right kind of compromise does not eliminate the need for those idealists and reformers who keep our compromises moving ahead. . . . Compromise need not mean cowardice.  Indeed it is frequently the compromisers and conciliators who are faced with the severest tests of political courage as they oppose the extremist views of their constituents.

We, as private citizens, can and should apply pressure.  The president often must compromise if he (or, hopefully some day, she) desires to advance the common good.

Has President Obama often perfectly balanced his desire for justice and the need to compromise?  Undoubtedly not.  Like all of us, he is an imperfect creature.  But as I hope to demonstrate in a forthcoming essay, “Barack Obama​ and Political Wisdom,” he admires political wisdom and often demonstrates it.

In 1968, for the Democratic nomination I first supported Robert Kennedy​ and then, after his tragic assassination, Eugene McCarthy​.  But after Hubert Humphrey won the nomination, I voted for him against Richard Nixon in the November election.  Some of my leftist friends refused to vote for him and instead wrote in McCarthy—in California he received more than 20,000 write-in votes.

Even then, I took the more consequentialist position I still do:  a vote for McCarthy (he ran again as a third-party candidate in several later elections), Nader, or anyone else on the left rather than the Democratic candidate often helps the Republicans.  And whatever my reservations about the Democratic candidates, I thought they would advance the common good more than would the Republicans.

Columnist Nicholas Kristof  reminds us that in 2000:  “Many Democrats and journalists alike, feeling grouchy, were dismissive of Al Gore​ and magnified his shortcomings.  We forgot the context, prided ourselves on our disdainful superiority—and won eight years of George W. Bush.”  He concludes, “This time, let’s do a better job of retaining perspective.  If we turn Obama out of office a year from now, let’s make sure it is because the Republican nominee is preferable, not just out of grumpiness toward the incumbent during a difficult time.”

I think Kristof is correct.  So I ask you, my fellow leftists, do you really think any of the Republicans likely to win their party’s nomination would further our ideals and the common good more than Obama?  Do you think, for example, a Romney, Santorum, or Gingrich would nominate Supreme Court justices more to your liking?

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" (Times Books) and author of the forthcoming book "Governing America" (Princeton University Press).

As the South Carolina primary approaches, Mitt Romney has been struggling to respond to the blistering attacks from Newt Gingrich and a super PAC that supports his candidacy.

Gingrich opened up a line of attack on Romney's past work at Bain Capital, depicting Romney as a heartless capitalist, a "corporate raider," who made his money off other people's misfortunes. "Their greed," says the narrator of Romney and others like him, "was only matched by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits ..."

Romney spent the final days of the New Hampshire primary trying to respond. He tried to turn the attack on its head, presenting himself as defender of the market economy and Gingrich as someone who was unexpectedly sympathetic to "European" ideas about government.

Although the response served its purpose, Gingrich has exposed Romney's greatest vulnerability in the campaign against President Barack Obama. Gingrich took Romney's greatest strength -- his background as in the world of business -- and turned it into a weakness....

Simon Schama is a professor of history and art history at Columbia University.  He has been an essayist and critic for The New Yorker since 1994, his art criticism winning the National Magazine Award in 1996.

Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest

Libya may be in a better place without Muammar Gaddafi, but the country is certainly not out of the woods quite yet. Nobody expected a functioning government by now, but the liberal interventionists who supported the war were hoping for something better than what we now have.

The Washington Post reports that factional violence between rival rebel groups has picked up again, casting doubt on the possibility of a healthy democracy emerging any time soon.

“We are now between two bitter options,” [Chairman of the Transnational Council Mustafa] Abdel Jalil told a gathering in the eastern city of Benghazi late Tuesday. Either “we deal with these violations strictly and put the Libyans in a military confrontation that we don’t accept,” he said, “or we split, and there will be a civil war.”

The militias . . . appear to believe they must keep an armed presence in the capital to ensure they receive their share of political power […]

Tripoli is now an unruly patchwork of fiefdoms, each controlled by a different militia. Police are rarely seen, except when directing traffic, and there is no sign of the newly created national army.

If Libya falls into another civil war, who will NATO bomb then?

The fledgling government is struggling to establish a national police force and army and is unable to quell the fighting. NATO may have accomplished its ultimate goal of ousting Gaddafi, but it seems to have lost interest in its stated goal of ensuring civilian safety and dignity.  Part of this is that the only part of Libya’s government that some westerners care about is working: the oil is flowing. Part of it is compassion fatigue: the world has only a very limited amount of political and military energy for humanitarian concerns.  And part of it is what we can call Reconstruction Syndrome: as the Yankees discovered in the postwar South, it is much easier to defeat armies in the field than to build a new society on the ruins. Sooner or later, the carpetbaggers and the troops who back them give up and the good old boys are pretty much free to do what they want....

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

President Obama has just ordered massive cutbacks in defense spending, eventually to total some $500 billion. There is plenty of fat in a Pentagon budget that grew after 9/11, but such slashing goes way too far.

Fairly or not, the cuts will only cement the now-familiar stereotype of Obama’s desire to retrench on the world scene. They follow symbolic apologies for purported past American sins, bows to foreign royals, and outreach to the likes of Iran and Syria. Abroad, such perceptions can matter as much as reality, as our rivals begin hoping that Obama is as dubious about America’s historically exceptional world role as are they....

The reason why our deficit is more than $1 trillion is not just that we have multimillion-dollar jet fighters or tens of thousands of Marines. Defense outlays currently represent only about 20 percent of federal budget expenditures and are below 5 percent of our gross national product. Those percentages are roughly average costs for recent years — despite an ongoing deployment in Afghanistan. In contrast, over the last three years we have borrowed a record near– $5 trillion for vast unfunded entitlements — from a spiraling Social Security and Medicare to an expansion of the food-stamp program to include one-seventh of America. Yet many Americans would probably prefer a new frigate manned by highly trained youth to discourage our enemies, rather than another Solyndra-like investment or a near– $1 trillion stimulus aimed at creating jobs in “shovel-ready” projects....