Kim Jong Un’s decision to launch a long-range missile on the eve of the Lunar New Year was the second time in his just over four-year reign that he has deliberately provoked Beijing on China’s most important holiday. In 2013 he set off a nuclear device on February 12, two days into Lunar New Year celebrations, sending highly irritated Chinese bureaucrats scrambling back to their desks in Beijing from family gatherings in their ancestral home towns. Now he has done it again. In a February 3 article entitled “North Korea’s rocket plans seen as disrespectful to China,” the Associated Press