China’s reaction to THAAD reveals its immaturity

While we were in the impeachment turmoil over the past few months, China took a variety of restrictive measures on Korean businesses and pop entertainers operating in the country. It appeared that anti-South Korea hysteria was brewing across China, instigated by the media under control of the authorities. 
The first shipment of the THAAD anti-missile system arrived here last week in full view of the Korean media. When more components are delivered here to be installed on a hill in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, China will increase pressures on Korea to have the THAAD programme cancelled, possibly by the next administration.
Xi Jinping has chosen the Lotte Group as the first direct target of Chinese retaliatory measures. The Korean corporation’s nearly 100 commercial outlets came under the Chinese authorities’ fire and sanitary checks which resulted in more than half of them being forced to close down. More will face permanent or temporary closures as long as Chinese officials believe such measures will have any effect in altering the Korean and US plans on the THAAD.
It’s sorry that Lotte has to suffer for no other reason than trading its golf course for a piece of property owned by the Korean military. As soon as the Defence Ministry mentioned the land deal with Korea’s fifth-largest conglomerate for the THAAD deployment, China began taking punitive steps against Lotte stores. What had initially been posed as routine inspections quickly produced arbitrary closure orders. 
Korea bashing is spreading to other business areas. These Korean enterprises had invested in the Communist-ruled country with the capitalist economic system that needed foreign money, technology, materials and services to sustain growth. As if regarding them as parasites of its economy rather than benefactors, China is kicking them out in reprisal for their government’s security policy. Their anti-South Korean narratives generally appeal to public emotion, some using deception and demagogy. Of the many diatribes appearing in printed and Internet media, one contributed by a retired rear admiral of the People’s Liberation Army naval department stood out for its radical and fantastic ideas. Luo Yuan, introduced as a social commentator at the PLA Academy of Military Science, surprisingly suggested “surgical operations” on Seongju to eliminate the facility.
“It is important for China to let the ROK [South Korean] people know that the THAAD did not bring security to the ROK but danger,” the military theorist said in his article contributed to the China Military magazine. 
Strategic differences may be settled through strategic negotiations, not by retaliation on private businesses, which is only detrimental to the peaceful order of global commerce and trade. China would not listen to the US assurance that THAAD is neither designed for nor capable of harming China’s security interests and its X-band radar system would be so fixed as not to scan Chinese territory.
If it is to oppose the THAAD deployment, China should do something to free the region from the North’s missile and nuclear threats. Its arrangement of six-party talks in Beijing in the 2000s provided a stage for North Korea to cheat the international community while accelerating its programs for weapons of mass destruction.
Beijing has recently banned importing coal from North Korea as a part of UN sanctions. But the world community has been hugely disappointed at China’s meagre record of fulfilling its global obligations as a permanent member of the Security Council and one party of the “G-2”, with regard to implementing UN resolutions against the North. 
People-to-people relations between South Korea and China and bilateral economic ties have grown briskly since diplomatic normalisation in 1992. Exchange visits between top government leaders have produced protocols declaring a “strategic cooperative partnership” to contribute to peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia. This framework of good neighbourly ties is being shattered by the giant country’s egotistic, myopic, shortsighted actions to foil the deployment of THAAD batteries essential for our defence against lethal North Korean attacks. The Lotte Group, ironically, is seeing a considerable rise in consumer trust here, which has had a positive impact on overall local sales sufficiently offsetting losses in the Chinese market. If mutual boycotts expand in the tourism area, both sides will be inconvenienced while THAAD will be installed here anyway.
China will someday become a mature and truly leading member of global society, when editorial cartoonists here will no longer have to make anatomical renditions of the Chinese leader with a walnut-sized brain inside a big head and a small heart resembling a coffee bean. It will be long after the Chinese realise that Koreans cannot be bullied into concession by any kind of retaliation over a matter that involves its survival.