US Chinese standoff over West Sea"If U.S. bases on Korean soil are used for operations directed at China, South Korea would not remain a peripheral observer...Retaliation would not fall on distant decision-makers, but on Korean cities, infrastructure and citizens."https://t.co/kQVPlSNbJI
— Gregory Elich (@GregoryElich) February 25, 2026
Excellent MBCNews report on US-Chinese air confrontation over West Sea. US fighter aircraft launched from Osan AFB, South Korea.South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense lodged a complaint with U.S. Forces Korea over a brief standoff between American and Chinese fighter jets, according to local media.
— Stars and Stripes (@starsandstripes) February 24, 2026
Read more at: https://t.co/HB0zPbXKgN
FinCEN regulation (31 CFR Part 1031.320) y The Chinese cultural sphere graphically- I obtained the graphic below and description from a Quora post by Jamin addressing the question whether a Chinese person could read or understand Korean written in hanja/hanzi. I was unable to directly elicit and post the link to this interesting write up by Jamin. The exact topic of his post isBiden and Blinken's dream of a seamless trilateral military alliance with South Korea and Japan has turned to dust. Takaichi is just too right-wing and deeply pines for the bad old days of Japanese colonialism. https://t.co/sxrhBSHTHo
— Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) February 23, 2026
Can a Chinese person understand Korean that is translated exactly word by word into Chinese?This is a link I found indirectly on google- https://learninglanguages.quora.com/https-www-quora-com-Can-a-Chinese-person-understand-Korean-that-is-translated-exactly-word-by-word-into-Chinese-answer#:~:text=Can%20a%20Chinese%20person%20understand,in%20Chinese%3F%20The%20characters%2C%20%E2%80%9C%E6%B1%89%E5%AD%97%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E5%9C%88 I used to marvel at a few old South Korean newspaper front pages I had saved just before we returned to the US in 1990. Those newspapers were printed with the mixed hanja/hangeul script still in use in some South Korean newsprint. This chart below from Jamin's quora post shows the mandarin script iterations in the different East Asian countries in the Chinese "cultural sphere" historically. Not sure what the first script is. Think it might be Hokkien or Hakka, don't recognize it.
The characters, “汉字文化圈” (East Asian cultural sphere), as they appear in Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese — languages that could be written, either fully or partially, using Chinese characters or a variant thereof (looking at Vietnamese over there) This might blow your mind, but it is possible to write at least part of Korean in Chinese characters. Called Hanzi in Chinese and Hanja in Korean, these characters can be used in Korean since it has historically borrowed a lot of Chinese vocabulary, so even if Korean is its own language family and the grammar and sentence structure may not resemble those that you find in Chinese languages (which is why Korean has its own alphabet, hangul), you can still use Chinese characters that represent Chinese vocabulary to get your point across in Korean — and a Chinese speaker may understand the gist of it, without knowing any Korean. Something similar can be done with Japanese, but more people are aware of the use of Chinese characters in Japanese than they are of the use of Chinese characters in Korean, because the latter isn’t all that common anymore.Shaun Rein: Took THAADs away from South Korea "against what South Korea wanted." Doubt that very much. First of all THAAD provides virtually no defense against North Korean missiles, rocket artillery, drones, and artillery targeted on South Korea. They do however aggravate the hell out of China, which South Korea has very little interest in doing. If Moon Jae-in could have gotten the US to withdraw all THAADs he would have done so. It was a fait accompli by President Park done just before he got into office. She agreed to it. Only one battery was actually deployed in the field at Seongju, the rest were warehoused. It is very unlikely President Lee's position is any different from that of Moon Jae-in. The removal of patriot missile batteries by the US would be viewed differently. High altitude ballistic missile trajectories (within the THAAD envelope) in North Korean missile tests are primarily the result of range restrictions imposed on intermediate and longer range ballistic missiles because of the political consequences that may follow long range trajectories overflying Japan. This missiles would be wasted in attacks on South Korea. Those North Korean ballistic missiles are intended for use against US bases in Japan, Japan itself, Pacific targets, and potentially at some future time, Hawaii and the US mainland.
