Cleaning Up the 20th Century

By JIM YARDLEY
New York Times Magazine

BEIJING

FOR more than three years, the grinding, often exasperating negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program have been about taking the bomb away from Kim Jong-il. As if that were not complicated enough, the agenda is now becoming more ambitious. One new goal could be loosely described as cleaning up the 20th century.

Starting tomorrow.

That is when diplomats from the United States, North Korea, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia will reconvene in Beijing with a docket that is still dominated by nuclear disarmament but that also now includes unresolved disputes that have bedeviled northeast Asia for decades. The process might accomplish far more than denuclearization — a formal peace treaty ending the Korean War could be one dramatic possibility. Or it could just as easily collapse under the weight of so many moveable pieces and kill a nuclear deal, too.

“This process, not unlike a video game, gets more and more difficult as you go into more and more levels,” Christopher R. Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and chief American envoy, said earlier this month in New York.

History can be omnipresent or repressed in northeast Asia, but nearly everyone agrees it is festering and unresolved. Historic resentments and nationalist anger are volatile and easily inflamed, as evidenced by the outrage that followed recent comments by Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, about Korean “comfort women” in World War II. Yet, most often, that anger is compartmentalized to protect the hum of commerce. China and Japan conduct record bilateral trade even as public attitudes in both countries can range anywhere from mutual distrust to open loathing.

(Continued here.)