US teen protests in Beijing for North Korea

A 13-year-old American boy campaigning to turn the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea into a peace park attempted to get the Chinese president’s attention Monday by staging a brief protest near Tiananmen Square before being led away by police.

Jonathan Lee presented a sign saying “peace treaty” and “nuclear free DMZ children’s peace forest” outside Tiananmen Gate just north of the square in central Beijing.

Less than a minute after Lee began his demonstration, a police officer confiscated the boy’s sign and cleared away journalists who had been contacted by Lee’s family ahead of time. Three or four uniformed police officers then hurriedly escorted Lee and his mother away without commotion.

Police held the pair and a few hours later Lee and his mother, Melissa Lee, returned to their hotel where they were joined by the boy’s father and sister. The Lees’ treatment by Chinese authorities was lenient compared with the often rough handling forced deportation given to most foreigners charged with the same violations.

The boy, from Ridgeland, Mississippi, is trying to persuade the leaders of North and South Korea, China and the United States to work for reunification of the two Koreas. Passionate and strong-willed, Lee is the latest and youngest activist to try to bring peace to the heavily militarized Korean peninsula, divided since the 1950-53 Korean War in which both the U.S. and China fought. The U.S. is Seoul’s ally, stationing troops in the well-off nation, while China is the main economic and diplomatic backer of the isolated, impoverished North.
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>The Korean War is the name given to a civil war between the nations of North Korea and South Korea, which were created out of the occupation zones of the Soviet Union and United States established at the end of World War II. The conflict began on June 25, 1950, and fighting continued until an armistice on July 27, 1953, although, since no official peace treaty was signed, the war is still not technically over.

Artist Pablo Picasso’s painting Massacre in Korea (1951) depicted violence against civilians during the Korean War. By some account, civilian killings committed by U.S. forces in Shinchun, Hwanghae Province was the motive of the painting. In South Korea, the painting was deemed anti-American, a longtime taboo in the South, and was prohibited for public display until the 1990s. Picasso’s paintings made no allusions to Communist atrocities.