January 7, 2025: North Korea continues to be a threat over 70 years since the Korean War ended. In 1953 the Korean war stopped. An armistice was signed and prisoners of war were exchanged, but troops remained lined up along a four kilometers wide DMZ/DeMilitarized Zone that stretched from coast to coast. There was a ceasefire agreement, not an end to the war. All attempts at negotiating an end to the war in the last half century have failed. The three years of fighting caused 325,000 American casualties, including 33,651 dead. South Korean troops suffered 415,000 killed, while other nations fighting North Korea suffered 15,000 casualties. The communist forces suffered 1.5 million killed, most of them Chinese because North Korea would have lost without massive reinforcements from China. There were several million civilian dead.

After the war, North Korea experienced a period of economic growth as its industrial facilities were rebuilt with Russian aid. From 1904 to 1945, Korea was a Japanese colony, and the north had mines, railroads and factories built by the Japanese. The south, which always had more farmland and was turned into a largely agricultural area to help feed Japan. During the Korean war, industrial and transportation facilities were heavily damaged, and reconstruction was slower in the south.

In the 1970s, foreign investment in the south began to grow, and local entrepreneurs began to start, or expand their businesses. By the 1980s, North Korea's centrally planned economy was falling apart because so much money was diverted to military spending, and lack of marketing resulted in products that could only be sold to other communist nations. When the Soviet empire fell apart in 1991, the markets for most North Korean goods disappeared. Corruption and lack of investment in agriculture resulted in food shortages, as well as the collapse of most industrial enterprises, except those that made weapons. Food aid from the Soviet Union ceased and that led to widespread hunger in North Korea during the 1990s when several million civilians starved to death.

Post-1991 documents from the Russian archives showed that Stalin appointed Kim Il Sung as ruler of North Korea and in 1950 ordered him to invade South Korea and unite Korea. When that did not work, Russia ordered China to rescue the North Koreans. China complied and told Russia that the Chinese debt was paid to Russia for assistance in the 1949 Chinese Communist Party victory during the 22 year long civil war.

In 2010, an article appeared in a Chinese magazine describing the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. What was unusual about the article, in a government approved publication, was the frank admission that North Korea had started it all, by invading South Korea. But once news of the article spread, and was posted on Internet sites, the Chinese government ordered the article withdrawn and denounced it as untrue. The unofficial reason was that China wished to avoid angering North Korea. This, despite the fact that Chinese participation in the war killed or wounded over a million Chinese soldiers. Even Chinese leader Mao Zedong lost a son in Korea.

Since 1950, it had been the official Chinese position that the war started with a South Korean invasion of the north, to which the north responded by moving into South Korea. For decades, all communist nations accepted this version, even though all evidence pointed towards the north invading first. Then, in the 1990s, the Russian government released telegrams sent before 1960, by Russian and North Korean leaders, making it clear that Russia wanted the invasion, and that North Korea duly carried it out.

Chinese troops entered North Korea in late 1950, to prevent American forces from occupying all of Korea, and that resulted in a two year stalemate along the current inter-Korean border which is now the DMZ Demilitarized Zone. To justify the Chinese losses, and maintain good relations with North Korea, China continued to insist that South Korea had started the war, even after everyone agreed that Russian leader Josef Stalin and North Korea had been the instigators.

What this incident really tells North Korea is that China has admitted the truth about who started the war by authorizing the article's publication in the first place but is so sorry for this accident and officially sticks by the earlier lie.

The Korean War lies and deceptions linger longer because China and North Korea want it that way.