BEIJING - Last year a Beijing-based South
Korean journalist, Park Ki-sung, scored a major
"scoop" when he reported for the Yonhap News
Agency that North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, was
paying a "secret" - though afterward Park revealed
it was not quite so secret - state visit to China.
Beijing authorities do not take lightly
reports of "state secrets", especially when they
involve a visit by their neighboring socialist
leader who, if anything, is more secretive in his
movements than China's leaders. They suspected a
"leak" and arrested the former
Chinese ambassador to South
Korea, Li Bin.
Now the Korean journalist
has taken the unusual step of publicly denying
that Li Bin was his source for the story in the
hopes that it will lead to his release. Li remains
in police custody for leaking state secrets.
"It was not ambassador Li Bin from whom we
learned about the itinerary of Chairman Kim's
visit to China," Park said in a post on his
personal weblog.
In his blog piece "Li Bin
is innocent", however, Park said he was making the
unusual claim "not so much to defend Li's
innocence but as to safeguard his [own
professional] reputation and pride" as a
journalist.
In other words, Park was
saying that he and his colleagues nosed out the
story about the North Korean leader's secretive
visit to China on their own, independently,
without any insider's help within the Chinese
government.
In China, "state secrets" is a
very broad term. It covers not just the kind of
sensitive information that one would see in a
James Bond movie, but also includes something that
usually isn't considered so sensitive in other
countries, such as leaking the questions for a
college entrance exam before the actual test date.
Beijing hasn't disclosed what secret Li
supposedly leaked, yet it is widely speculated in
the Beijing and Hong Kong media that his arrest
had to do with his disclosures on either the
six-party talks or the North Korean leader's visit
to China, while giving more weight to the latter.
Kim Jong-il rarely travels outside his
country, allegedly concerned about his personal
safety. If he does, the North Korean media never
announce it beforehand. If the destination is
China, it is more furtively crafted. It is only
after Kim completes his trip and returns to
Pyongyang that either the Chinese or North Korean
media report about it.
But this trip to
China was an exception. The foreign media knew
about it even before Kim took off. Once inside
China, despite a complete Chinese-media blackout,
a Japanese television crew even succeeded in
capturing Kim in TV footage at a hotel lobby in a
southern Chinese city.
Park said the
Japanese TV crew followed his team's lead, and he
explained on his blog the way he was able to track
Kim's movements in China.
He said his team
learned about Kim's imminent visit to China
through a businessman in Dandong, a Chinese city
bordering North Korea. Dandong is a place where
Kim's train has to pass through when he visits
China. Kim rarely uses an aircraft for fear of
"terrorist attacks".
Then, through a local
police officer, Park's team obtained the date and
time for Kim's passing through the region. The
team also dispatched people to each train station
after Dandong to monitor the movement of Kim's
train.
However, Park's crew lost track of
Kim after his train entered the northern city of
Shenyang. From then on, Park said, he used various
local contacts to find out Kim's location,
including soliciting help from a personal contact
in the airline business.
His thorough
checking of the air routes wasn't in vain. He got
to know that there were a North Korean Koryo
passenger airplane and a small Gulfstream
aircraft, which is often used by Chinese leaders,
stationed at the airport of the southern city of
Wuhan.
Park's team also benefited from
Chinese bloggers who wrote about "something
strange" happening in their cities. For example,
some bloggers wrote that the road linking the
airport to the Donghu Hotel in downtown Wuhan was
blocked by police for two days.
With
journalistic cunning, Park called the hotel
pretending to be a guest wanting to make a
reservation. The hotel told him it couldn't book
him because "some important foreign guest" was
there.
Park couldn't list all the details
of how his team tracked down Kim's whereabouts in
China, but said this is how he and his team
figured out Kim's movements from beginning to end
"as if putting together pieces of a puzzle".
The Chinese authorities' belief that
someone inside the government had leaked the
information was tantamount to acknowledging his
team's ability in accurately locating Kim's
whereabouts in China, Park wrote on his blog. He
added that he hoped the Chinese government would
read his blog and withdraw its suspicion that Li
Bin was the Chinese government source who leaked
the "state secrets".
Li Bin grew up in
Beijing, graduated from North Korea's Kim Il-sung
University and lived in Pyongyang for 19 years
before he served as China's top envoy to South
Korea from 2001 to 2005. He once interpreted for
the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and also
for his son Kim Jong-il during their visits to
China in 1986 and 1999, respectively.
After completing his tour of duty in
Seoul, Li returned to China to serve as vice mayor
of a coastal city, Weihai, in Shandong province.
The assignment was seen as a sign that Li was
being groomed as a potential political
heavyweight, as it is common practice in China to
send a promising official to a province before
calling him back to the central government.
President Hu Jintao, for example, was also sent to
remote Gansu province before being promoted to a
higher post in the central government.
However, with Li's arrest, it is unclear
how his career will unfold from here.
Sunny Lee is a journalist based
in Beijing, where he has lived for five years. A
native of South Korea, Lee is a graduate of
Harvard University and Beijing Foreign Studies
University.
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