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Category: NK Economics

July 20, 2008

The End of Sunshine

Don Kirk has some straightforward observations about scholars in Washington, who, remarkably enough, are  still  debating how North might reform its economy, as though the  decade-long Sunshine experiment had never happened.  Kirk saves his most acerbic observation for one of the participants in a recent seminar: Probably no Washington think-tanker has been quite so divorced from reality of late, at least in public utterances, as Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. In a recent commentary he held up Vietnam as...
Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming/NK Economics
July 11, 2008

North Korean Soldier Kills South Korean Tourist [U/D: And Demands a South Korean Apology]

[Update 2:   Her name was  Park Wang-Ja.   As her body was returned to a grieving husband and son, North Korea  reminded us that  the Korean  word for “chutzpah” is “juche”: North Korea expressed regret Saturday that one of its soldiers shot dead a South Korean tourist at a resort area of the North, but blamed the tourist for trespassing into an off-limits military zone and demanded South Korea apologize for the incident.   Pyongyang also rejected Seoul’s request to send a...
Categories Appeasement/NK Economics/NK Military
June 18, 2008

Some Good Friends Updates

With busy times in recent days, I’ve fallen behind on posting Good Friends updates.  I’ll try to catch these up a few at a time, and I’m just going to post the summaries Good Friends sends as well, without having had time to read the bulletins themselves.  Here’s number 139, dated June 9th:  good-friends-139.pdf * Senior Officials at Gimchaek Steel Mill Meet Over Absentee Workers * Difficulties at Gimchaek Caused by the Bankruptcy of the Jangsaeng Company * Workers and...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
June 1, 2008

Pyongyang Soju Story Takes a Strange Twist

There’s more news about Steve Park, a/k/a Park Il Woo, the importer of the foul-tasting  Pyongyang Soju, who was charged with acting as an unregistered agent for South Korea by giving its agents off-line intel about his business trips to Nouth Korea. Park has since pled guilty to lying to FBI agents.  When FBI agents asked Park whether he’d had any contact with South Korean officials Park not only denied it, but denied that he’d had any contact within the...
Categories NK Economics/U.S. Law
May 23, 2008

Death Star

Throughout the year the animals worked even harder than they had worked in the previous year. To rebuild the windmill, with walls twice as thick as before, and to finish it by the appointed date, together with the regular work of the farm, was a tremendous labour. There were times when it seemed to the animals that they worked longer hours and fed no better than they had done in Jones’s day. On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
April 7, 2008

China Steps Up Efforts to Undermine U.S. and U.N. Sanctions Against N. Korea

The single most important provision of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, for which China cast a disingenuous “yes” vote, is the provision that requires member states to “ensure” that funds flowing into North Korea are not used for its WMD programs. Similarly, Resolution 1695 requires states to “exercise vigilance” against efforts to fund U.N. sanctions. Now, in the wake of U.S. Treasury sanctions that have put the North Korean regime under unprecedented pressure to meet its disarmament obligations, China is...
Categories China/China & Korea/Money Laundering/NK Crime/NK Economics/Proliferation/WMD
March 27, 2008

You can check out any time you like, but they can never leave.

Hello?  Room service?  There’s a hissing sound coming from my chandelier! North Korea is converting part of its embassy in Berlin into a hostel to earn foreign currency for Kim Jong Il’s cash-strapped regime, Japan’s Sankei newspaper reported, citing diplomats it didn’t identify. The Cityhostel Berlin will initially have 37 rooms at a charge of 20 Euros ($31) per head a night, Sankei reported. A reception with a grand piano is being built and a Korean restaurant is due to...
Categories Europe/NK Economics
March 24, 2008

North Korea Cancels Christmas?

Christmas as  North Koreans have  known it for decades has been the nativity of Kim Il Sung, the dead god-king, eternal president, founder of the state, and  father of Kim Jong Il.   His conception marked The Year Zero on North Korea’s juche calendar.   He  is idolized in statues; in portraits in every home, office, and classroom; and on the money.  Citizens must wear his likeness on pins that they can be punished for losing, and which  sometimes indicate the wearer’s...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics/Regime Change
February 27, 2008

Shafted: Winners, Losers, and Casualties of the North Korean Mines

As the North Korean regime struggles to sustain an already marginal economy that actually shrank in 2006, it is accelerating its sell-off of its mineral resources. Again, China appears to be the main buyer, again, corruption is throttling the state’s earning potential. As mineral prices soar on world markets, foreign access to mines in the North is accelerating at a rate unseen in the more than five decades since the division of the Korean Peninsula, according to South Korean government...
Categories China & Korea/Human Rights/NK Economics
February 21, 2008

North Korea’s Economy: Does Change Equal Reform?

The experts agree that North Korea’s economy has changed in the years since it shed a couple of million people, give or take a million. There’s some consensus that the survivors have learned to trade, and that markets have grown. There’s also some consensus that regime officials are participating to a degree. There ends the consensus: some claim that reform is again afoot; others claim that change is driven by necessity, and that official participation is mostly a matter of...
Categories NK Economics
February 4, 2008

Kaesong Workers Recoup Stolen Wages on the Black Market

With all the questions about how much pay  Kaesong workers actually collect, we’ve always  suspected that their earnings  must be  far  more than most of their North Korean neighbors.  For one thing, the workers are hand-picked loyalists; the regime  must want to keep them relatively content.   Yet no one really believed that the workers received the “official” wage of around $60 a month, after “voluntary” deductions and the bite of the inflated official exchange rate. I figured it was just...
Categories Human Trafficking/NK Economics
January 22, 2008

Plan B: How to Disarm Kim Jong Il Without Bombing Him

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.    — Albert Einstein Plan A, gentle diplomacy,  has  again  failed to disarm Kim Jong Il.  Whenever this happens (every time it’s tried) advocates of doing the same thing over and over again fall back on The False Choice, whether expressly or by implication:  it’s  their way or war.  They know better, of course, which technically makes this a lie.   And usually, this lie  stands uncorrected: “People...
Categories Diplomacy/Money Laundering/NK Economics/Six-Party Talks
January 11, 2008

Time running out for the FTA?

Here.  Americans sometimes observe that South Korea shouts for equal treatment while actually expecting to be treated like a coddled infant, and I’d cite the handicaps it demanded on the imports of  cars and agricultural products as a good example to support that.  Based on the two-faced behavior and unreasonable  demands of the South Koreans throughout the FTA talks, the U.S. Trade Representative  should have had the guts to  walk away  and wait for Roh’s clock to run out.  Sadly,...
Categories NK Economics
October 21, 2007

The Unstoppable Self-Destruction of Kim Jong Il

[Updated below]   We  often hear reports that China has curtailed or cut aid to the North Korean regime.  I’ve usually been skeptical of those reports because I believe that Kim Jong Il’s arch-patron  China wants us to believe that it’s being “helpful” in disarming North Korea of its nuclear programs, but actually considers  it a useful distraction  for  American power in the region.  Now,  a new report  claims that China is holding up cross-border rail traffic to the North  over...
Categories China & Korea/Diplomacy/Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Il/NK Economics
September 18, 2007

Chaos Conquers North Korea

I had really wanted to publish  a Q&A with Professor Andrei Lankov this morning, but since Yahoo’s e-mail service has gone from bad to worse, it’s simply not possible for me to even open up my e-mail to pull up his responses.  So spread the word:  Yahoo! mail stinks.  Meanwhile, there’s a wave of fresh evidence, most of it via the Daily NK, to support Lankov’s thesis that North Korea can’t control the spread of chaos  or the erosion of...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/NK Economics
September 11, 2007

Noland and Haggard: Kim Jong Il’s Palace Economy Is Broken

North Korea is a land made in the vision of John Edwards:  to a greater extent than almost anywhere, there are two North Koreas.  That division is even preserved by a semi-official, hereditary caste system.  That’s why it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say  that North Korea’s economy is near collapse; one of the North Korean economies — the peoples’ economy — collapsed  a dozen  years ago.  What was left of it was severely disrupted by the Great Famine, when...
Categories Money Laundering/NK Economics
August 27, 2007

North Korea Calls Off “Arirang”

No Arirang  for you.  North Korea has suspended its large-scale gymnastic and artistic performance due to damage from recent heavy rains, the country’s state media reported Monday. “It has now become hard to continue the performance as working people in different parts of the country are all out to recover from the flood damage these days,” the Korean Central News Agency said. “The performance is expected to be staged again after the flood damage is cleared away.” The “Arirang” festival,...
Categories NK Economics/North Korea
August 18, 2007

WSJ: ROK-U.S. FTA to Die a Quiet Death

If the  Wall Street Journal  says the FTA is now dead, it must be so:  Only two months after pressuring Seoul to insert labor and environmental concessions, House Democrats now say they won’t approve the FTA in any case.   [WSJ] But if the WSJ says “House Democrats” say it, is it necessarily so? This news  reaches us  via Brendan Carr, whose post on the subject will do just as well if you’re not a WSJ subscriber.  His blog is a...
Categories NK Economics