ASIA / PACIFIC
Page 16 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
April 2, 2018
Key moments in the North Korea-China relationship
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim
Jong Un’s surprise visit to China makes clear that Beijing,
the North’s only major ally and chief provider of energy
and trade that keeps the country’s broken economy afloat,
will have a major role in any effort to rein in the North’s
nuclear program.
A look at key moments in relations between North
Korea and China:
October 1949: North Korea and China establish
diplomatic relations.
October 1950: China intervenes in the Korean War
and engages in combat with U.S.-led forces, saving North
Korea from defeat. The war ends in 1953 with an
armistice.
November 1958: North Korea founder Kim Il Sung
visits China, shortly after China withdraws troops from
the Korean Peninsula. He successfully requests economic
aid in meetings with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. Kim
goes on to visit China and the former Soviet Union many
times through the 1960s while maintaining a balancing
act between the competing communist powers and
consolidating his leadership at home.
April 1982: Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visits North
Korea to attend celebrations of Kim Il Sung’s 70th
birthday. Kim visits China five months later to discuss his
plans to pass his leadership to his son, Kim Jong Il, and
DIPLOMATIC HISTORY. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, right,
shakes hands with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, left, at the logging
house in Beijing, China, in this September 17, 1982 file photo. Relations
between North Korea and China have spanned from 1949 to the present.
(Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP Images, File)
also reassure Beijing that the North wouldn’t tilt toward
the Soviet Union once he’s no longer in power.
August 1992: China establishes diplomatic relations
with South Korea, complicating its relations with the
North.
May 2000: Kim Jong Il, who took power in 1994 after
his father’s death, makes the first of his eight visits to
China as the North Korean leader. The trip was
reportedly aimed at consulting with the Chinese
leadership weeks before Kim’s summit with then-South
Korean President Kim Dae-jung, which opened a
temporary era of rapprochement between the rivals. Kim,
rumored to have had a fear of flying, travelled to China on
a green-and-yellow armored train that was also used by
his son in March.
August 2003: North Korea joins the first round of
six-nation nuclear talks in Beijing, which include China,
Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. The
talks continue periodically over the next several years
before stalling.
December 2011: Kim Jong Un takes power after the
death of his father.
May 2013: Senior North Korean official Choe Ryong
Hae visits China as Kim’s special envoy and meets with
Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
October 2015: Senior Chinese official Liu Yunshan
visits the North and attends a military parade with Kim.
March 2018: Kim visits Beijing for a meeting with Xi,
weeks after the announcements of his planned summits
with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and U.S.
President Donald Trump.
The Ohtani Dilemma: Can fantasy accommodate a two-way star?
Continued from page 13
eligible as a pitcher only, in part because
they’re skeptical of his hitting ability.
Yahoo has taken a different approach:
creating two distinct Ohtanis — one a
pitcher, one a hitter. The same player
doesn’t have to draft both, meaning Ohtani
could be split between teams.
“Our engineers would have needed to
substantially rebuild the fantasy product,”
to create one Ohtani, wrote Yahoo’s Andy
Behrens in a statement in December.
“This would have been an enormous
undertaking, disrupting other initiatives
and delaying the game. And in the end,
Ohtani’s owners still would not have
received 100 percent of his stats.”
Yahoo’s programmers aren’t alone in
opting against a program re-write. The
National Fantasy Baseball Championship
is only allowing users to draft Ohtani as a
pitcher.
If Ohtani legitimizes himself as a
two-way fantasy threat, the ideal scenario
for owners is that his hitting and pitching
stats are both tracked, regardless of where
he is in the lineup. For fantasy sites,
though, that would mean a complete
restructuring of the software to track
batting stats for all pitchers. Start going
down that road, and owners might be able
to get a boost from slugging pitchers like
Bumgarner, too.
Schoenke, who is also chairman of the
Fantasy Sports Trade Association, said
sites didn’t have time for that undertaking
between December and opening day.
Expect that to change if Ohtani — or
perhaps Tampa Bay Rays two-way
prospect Brendan McKay — emerges as a
fantasy-worthy talent on both sides. If
Ohtani can win 20 games and hit 40 home
runs, users are going to demand sites like
CBS, ESPN, and Yahoo undertake a
massive system re-write.
“People in fantasy baseball are secretly
rooting that he doesn’t make it as a hitter
so it can kind of go back to what it was,”
Schoenke said.
Fantasy fanatics like Schoenke are still
dreaming, though. In the past, the most a
player could help your team in a standard
league was in five categories — five for
pitchers, five for hitters. But a 10-category
player? “That throws a wrench in
everything,” he said.