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January 1, 2018

How Kim Jong-un, China & the autumn gales set a death trap for North Korea’s fishermen

By now, you’ve probably seen the ghastly reports of boats from North Korea washing up against the Japanese coastline with the desiccated or skeletal remains of their crews. You’ve probably also read reports speculating about why. This post will sift through dozens of those reports, discard the theories that the evidence refutes, and assemble the more plausible ones into a coherent explanation that the evidence supports. As it turns out, most of what you’ve read about North Korea’s ghost ships...
Categories Capitalism/China & Korea/Class Warfare/Japan & Korea/Resistance
December 1, 2017

Cash & credit squeeze hits China-North Korea trade

One of the more maddening tropes I see in reporters’ coverage is a question that’s usually presented as dispositive to the success of sanctions: “Will China cooperate?” For reasons I’ve already explained and don’t have time to repeat today, I always answer that question by asking what the questioner means by “China.” The point being: yes, it would be nice if Xi Jinping finally came around to the rising risk that Kim Jong-un will bring war, instability, disrepute, and bankruptcy to...
Categories China & Korea/Money Laundering/Sanctions
November 9, 2017

China cheats on the coal ban again

I still remember my excitement, bordering on giddiness, when in May 2013, a few big banks in China froze some North Korean accounts. That action came two months after the Treasury Department designated North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank, and just over a week after Ed Royce dropped the first draft of the NKSPEA. But as we’ve learned from our friends in the FBI and the Justice Department since then, big Chinese banks began clearing the FTB’s transactions as soon as...
Categories China & Korea/Sanctions
August 9, 2017

Washington sounds ready for a trade war with Beijing over North Korea

Just as our diplomacy with Pyongyang has always failed because we were unwilling to induce a regime-determinative economic or political crisis there, our diplomacy with Beijing over North Korea (and other differences) has always failed because we were unwilling to attach a high enough cost to its willful support for Pyongyang’s proliferation. As Professor Lee put it, Beijing will not enforce sanctions against Pyongyang “unless the costs become unbearable on China.” A trade war, needless to say, would hurt both...
Categories China
July 14, 2017

For Beijing, a sharper choice on N. Korea: accord and prosperity, or discord and chaos

Writing in Foreign Affairs this week, Zhu Feng sketched out a vision of the thinking in Beijing from the perspective of a person more reasonable than Xi Jinping has been, so far. Zhu’s piece suggests the outlines of an agreement with Beijing to defang Kim Jong-Un and manage North Korea’s transition to peace. Alas, Zhu Feng is not in charge in Beijing, and Xi Jinping is. Suspend your paranoia that this essay is only an artifice to persuade us that...
Categories China & Korea/Reconstruction/Regime Change/Resistance
June 28, 2017

China finally pays a (symbolic) price for its North Korean slave trade

This blog has long posited that a nuclear North Korea will not coexist with us and that war with it would be inevitable; that preventing another Korean War will require a focusing an assortment of financial, diplomatic, and political pressures on Pyongyang; and that to deter China’s government and industry from undermining that pressure will require us to pressure China itself. This will carry costs for both economies, and to the relationship between the two governments. Relations with China will...
Categories China & Korea/Human Trafficking/U.S. Law
June 13, 2017

C4ADS: Pyongyang’s networks in China are “centralized, limited, and vulnerable” to sanctions 

Because I’ve already given too many minutes of my life to the moveable farce named Dennis Rodman, I’m devoting today’s post to something more consequential: the Center for Advanced Defense Studies’s new report exposing more North Korean financial networks in China, and dispelling the misinformation that North Korea is isolated from the financial system and thus sanctions-proof. (Full disclosure: I advised C4ADS on the drafting of the report, without compensation of course.) Money quote: The continuing misperceptions of North Korea...
Categories China/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
June 8, 2017

China is cheating on the North Korea coal import ban (again) (with updates)

Via the indispensable Leo Byrne: Two North Korea-linked ships have arrived at two separate coal terminals in Shanghai since Sunday, while one other was departing the area after having left a third facility at a similar time. Satellite imagery shows that each of the terminals is equipped to handle coal. The UN currently restricts member states from importing North Korean coal, while Beijing has said numerous times that it has suspended all imports for the remainder of 2017. “Imagery indicates...
Categories China/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
April 20, 2017

Make Korea China Again? Xi Jinping confirms colonial ambitions for Korea.

As regular readers of this site know, China is opposed to unilateral sanctions, except when it isn’t. In the case of North Korea, China is also opposed to the multilateral sanctions it voted for in the U.N. Security Council; consequently, North Korean missiles ride on Chinese trucks, North Korean proliferation networks operate openly on Chinese soil and launder their money through Chinese banks, North Korea’s weapons are made from components and technology procured from or through China, and those weapons...
Categories China & Korea
April 5, 2017

Dear Korea: Let’s talk about China’s plans for you in its new co-prosperity sphere

Ever since China embarked on its retaliatory campaign against South Korea, of state-orchestrated protests, business closures, and boycotts, I’ve often tweeted that China is opposed to unilateral sanctions, except when it isn’t. Recently, the Asan Institute released the results of a survey showing that this campaign has done the unthinkable — it has made China even more unpopular than Japan in the eyes of South Koreans. For anyone who has lived in South Korea, it’s hard to overstate the significance of...
Categories China/Propaganda
March 22, 2017

Royce introduces bill to toughen sanctions on N. Korea; subcommittee holds hearing

The big news yesterday was that Ed Royce, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has introduced a sequel to the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, or NKSPEA. You can read the full text here, but briefly, the bill — Expands the mandatory and discretionary sanctions in NKSPEA 104 to match the sanctions added by UNSCR 2270 and UNSCR 2321. It also adds a few more, like authorizing Treasury to sanction anyone who imports food from North Korea — a...
Categories China/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
March 17, 2017

Will China cooperate on North Korea sanctions? That depends on which “China” you mean.

I often talk about the importance of pressuring China to pressure North Korea. When I do, people sometimes cock their heads like my dog would do when he heard a new sound, and ask me whether China would cooperate with that. I answer this question with a question of my own: “Which China?” China, for all its top-down authoritarianism, isn’t a monolith. Like most societies, it has different constituencies with different views that fear different risks and pursue different interests....
Categories China & Korea/Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 15, 2017

UN report finds extensive evidence that China hosts N. Korea’s proliferation networks

A new report from the Wall Street Journal, quoting “U.S. and Asian officials,” says that the Trump Administration is considering “increasing financial penalties on Chinese companies in response to growing evidence of their support for North Korea’s weapons programs.” Such as: In a case that particularly alarmed the Trump administration, a North Korean businessman attempted to use Pyongyang’s embassy in Beijing to export a lithium metal that is used to miniaturize nuclear warheads, according to the U.N. report. [Wall Street...
Categories China & Korea/Missiles/Proliferation/WMD
March 8, 2017

China is waging economic war against S. Korea. We must stand by our ally.

Less than two years ago, I wrote of the coming Korea missile crisis. That crisis has now arrived. As I’ve documented at this site, that crisis is, in large part, a crisis of China’s making. North Korean missiles are made in part from Chinese technology, in large part from components purchased in or smuggled through China, and that are almost always procured by North Korean agents who operate more-or-less openly on Chinese soil. North Korea’s missiles ride on Chinese trucks....
Categories An Alliance?/China/China & Korea/Japan & Korea
January 27, 2017

China’s latest cheating on North Korea sanctions is a test for Trump

Like most people, I would prefer that the new President of the United States refrained from conducting diplomacy by Twitter. Without endorsing the medium, I gave a qualified endorsement to the message President Trump sent to China when he accused it of not helping to reign in His Porcine Majesty. Trump was right about this, of course. Over the last several years, the U.N., no less, has published a wealth of evidence that China has (almost certainly willfully) violated the North...
Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Sanctions
January 3, 2017

Trump’s tweets show the right instincts on North Korea.

Kim Jong-un’s New Year speech turned out to more interesting than I’d predicted. No, he isn’t going on Atkins; he’s threatening to fire an ICBM that can hit the United States with a nuke. One wonders how the usual suspects at 38 North will spin this speech into predictions of glasnost and perestroika, but for now, consistent with another prediction I made, Kim Jong-un’s transition-year provocations are molding the President-Elect’s policy at a critical moment, and not to Kim Jong-un’s...
Categories China & Korea/U.S. Politics
December 13, 2016

Trump is right: China isn’t helping us disarm N. Korea

The Chinese government and the anti-anti-Beijing commentariat in the U.S. are apoplectic over Donald Trump again ”” this time, because Trump questioned the sacrosanct one-China policy and China’s cooperation in disarming North Korea: Trump’s latest foray into East Asian affairs came when he was asked by “Fox News Sunday” about the planning for the Dec. 2 call. He said he learned about the call “an hour or two” before it took place but said he understood the stakes. “I fully...
Categories China/U.S. Politics
December 6, 2016

The U.S. may (finally) be serious about capping North Korea’s coal exports

For almost three months after North Korea’s fifth nuclear test, the U.N. Security Council remained deadlocked over how to respond, with the U.S. and its allies pressing to limit Kim Jong-un’s access to hard currency and China trying to shield its belligerent protectorate from the consequences of its behavior. Among the most hotly debated questions was how to limit North Korea’s coal exports to China, one of His Porcine Majesty’s most important sources of hard currency. Although UNSCR 2270, passed...
Categories China & Korea/Sanctions