Great Expectations: Washington, Beijing, and the North Korean Nuclear Crisis
Abstract Throughout the North Korean nuclear crisis, the Bush administration has believed that China is the most crucial player in the effort to find a solution. Washington has frequently expressed disappointment that Beijing is not willing to put more pressure on its misbehaving client. China faces a dilemma, however. Although most evidence indicates that Chinese leaders are not happy about Pyongyang's quest for nuclear weapons, keeping the Korean peninsula nonnuclear is not China's highest priority. Beijing is even more concerned about preserving North Korea as a geographic buffer between the U.S. sphere of influence in Northeast Asia and the Chinese homeland. China does have substantial economic leverage over North Korea, since it supplies a major portion of the country's food and energy supplies. The PRC is cautious, however, about using that leverage to coerce Pyongyang regarding the nuclear issue. Chinese leaders fear that putting too much pressure on Kim Jong Il's regime could cause the North Korea...
China and the Korean peninsula: Playing for the long term
Halting North Korea's nuclear program is not the ultimate end that China hopes to achieve. China's calculations, interests, and goals are more long term and complicated, comprising a hierarchy of these six objectives.
The General Theory of Relativity
THE WORD “SPECIAL” IN “SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY” means that the theory is restricted to those frames of reference for which the law of inertia holds, that is, inertial frames of reference.* Einstein sometimes referred to them as Galilean frames of reference. At first glance, it does not seem reasonable to expect that the principle of relativity can be extended to non-inertial frames. The reasons are fairly obvious. The principle of relativity that we have been using states that the laws of physics have the same form in all frames of reference to which the principle applies. In other words there should be no way to determine by an experiment which of two frames of reference is in motion relative to the other.