October 7, 2014

Why is North Korea exporting food while its people go hungry?

North Korean food exports to China have increased by more than 35 percent compared to the same period last year, and are at their highest levels in at least four years, according to Chinese customs data. [….] [I]n the first eight months of the year, North Korea exported more food than it received in food aid in the whole of 2011 according to a recent World Food Program (WFP) report. [NK News, Leo Byrne] And this, shortly after the regime...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
October 6, 2014

I’d tell you what I think of North Korea’s sudden mini-summit …

but Robert Koehler has already told you roughly what I think, so I can save most of the keystrokes. North Korea has had more false rehabilitations than Linsday Lohan, Robert Downey Jr., and the entire membership of Grateful Dead, combined. It would take nothing less than the announcement of a coup d’etat for me to take this at all seriously. I wonder if Pyongyang’s Southern Wind ploy means that its Hostage ploy with Japan is about to blow up, as predicted....
Categories North-South/Sunshine
October 6, 2014

Resign, Margaret Chan

Chan, the head of the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO), probably owes her job to her pedigree as a Communist Party quisling in Hong Kong‘s public health bureaucracy.* As Hong Kong’s Director of Health during the SARS outbreak, Chan’s public statements made her the object of widespread derision and ridicule. Later, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council commissioned a Select Committee to conduct an exhaustive study on the response of the government and its officials. The Select Committee’s Findings about Dr. Chan’s performance, which begin on...
Categories "United" Nations/China
October 6, 2014

Prediction: the Kaesong worker safety inquiry will be a whitewash.

You may recall that several weeks ago, some North Korean workers at Kaesong fell ill with symptoms of benzene poisoning. The bad news is that we still haven’t heard a peep of protests on the workers’ behalf from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, for some reason. The good news is that the Korean government cares enough about appearances to have ordered a safety inquiry: The South Korean government began a two-month probe Thursday into the working conditions at 33 factories in the...
Categories Kaesong
October 5, 2014

Xi Jinping’s thuggery will mean China’s decline

In Hong Kong, the state has outsourced the more petty forms of its thuggery to gangsters. On the mainland, tactics like these are well-established and, so far, presumably effective. But in a literate, educated, civil society, they have caused an angry backlash and further energized the protest movement. For how long? Only time will tell whether the protest movement or the state has more persistence, but in the end, people who have lived in an advanced and vibrant civil society aren’t about to consign themselves...
Categories China
October 3, 2014

Choe Ryong Hae, down but not out

So he’s alive, and obviously still fairly influential. This delegation would represent one of the highest-ranking North Korean delegations South Korea will have received for several years. ~   ~   ~ Update: More from Ju-Min Park of Reuters and Anna Fifield of The Washington Post, who observes: The trip — the first such high-level visit in more than five years — comes at a time of intense speculation about North Korea’s leadership, given that Kim, the third generation leader of the communist state, has...
Categories Kremlinology
October 3, 2014

Australia-Korea FTA causes Kaesong backlash

I couldn’t have said it any better than this, and Jay Lefkowitz may be the last person who did: “We can’t see how the Australian government in good conscience could bring such goods into the country,” he said. “It’s absolutely appalling, it basically would make the Australian government and Australian consumers complicit in the exploitation of North Korean workers by their government, and would ensure that Australian dollars are going directly into the pockets of the North Korean regime. Let’s...
Categories Kaesong
October 3, 2014

New Focus: No one in or out of Pyongyang (updated)

The report is now a few days old, and I’m curious to know whether this can be confirmed by anyone else, and whether this has changed since it was published. North Korea restricted entry and exit permissions to Pyongyang three days ago, a New Focus correspondent reports. The source could not confirm whether this move was related to Kim Jong-un’s disappearance from the public eye for the past 26 days. On the ground, the measure is informally being suggested to...
Categories AP Watch/Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
October 2, 2014

Does North Korea have tunnels under Seoul?

Gen. Hahn Sung-Chu never believed North Korea could dig a tunnel that reached Seoul — until now. Standing inside a basement of an apartment block in the heart of the capital, the former two-star general in the South Korean military says, “This is a kind of invasion, North Korean soldiers working underneath us.” Hahn says residents had complained of underground vibrations, but the subway does not run beneath them. [CNN] I’d be much more surprised if the North Koreans didn’t have tunnels...
Categories NK Military
October 2, 2014

Park: Human rights are part of “our core agenda” with North Korea

I wonder whether, when, and how these words might actually translate into tangible policy: On Tuesday, Park made it clear that the North’s nuclear and human rights issues are “our core agenda in our policy toward North Korea. “We should not be passive in these issues out of fear of North Korea’s backlash,” Park said in a Cabinet meeting, a comment that marked a clear departure from her liberal predecessors who rarely spoke about the human rights issue as they sought reconciliation...
Categories Human Rights/North-South
October 2, 2014

Kim Jong Un has abandoned that plan to build 100,000 homes in Pyongyang …

according to The Daily NK’s sources, one of whom expressed the same reaction I had: “Perhaps he’s worried there will be another collapse and has pulled out of it.” In a few cases, “people with money,” presumably people who got rich through their state connections or positions, have taken over to complete the projects. I wonder how that will affect the safety of the construction methods.
Categories Inside NK
October 1, 2014

Global Times denounces N. Korea coup rumors; State Dep’t says “no confirmation”

China’s Global Times, which must be on edge over the burgeoning protest movement on Hong Kong’s streets, angrily denounces internet rumors of a coup in North Korea. The rumors that Jo Myong-rok, a late North Korean vice marshal who died four years ago, arrested Kim in a coup and sent his lieutenants to South Korea for negotiations, were quickly denied by South Korean diplomats in Beijing. In the commentary titled “For those who make up rumors of coup in North...
Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
September 30, 2014

President Obama, speak up for Hong Kong

As we speak, an extraordinary, courageous, and dignified popular movement is rising in Hong Kong, and the state’s reaction to that movement is increasingly menacing. It may well be the case that confronting Xi Jinping publicly could dig him in, strengthen nationalist and xenophobic elements, and be counterproductive, but silence will be read as license. Right now, Xi is weighing the costs and benefits of suppressing the protests violently. The President could do much to deter such a course with...
Categories China
September 30, 2014

This guy rode a bicycle from North Korea to Mongolia while evading the Chinese police.

“One time I was sent back to North Korea through a broker so I couldn’t trust anybody any longer. So when I came out to China again I got a map and a compass and a bicycle, I just went”, he explained. “I prepared a little mini tent, a change of clothes, a little of the money I earned,” park said, describing the items he took with him from the North. “I didn’t know how long it was going to...
Categories Refugees
September 30, 2014

Kurt Campbell: We need tougher sanctions on North Korea.

Kurt Campbell, President Obama’s former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs and now CEO of The Asia Group, continues to debunk the pair of academic urban legends that North Korea sanctions (a) are maxed out, and (b) therefore, not a promising policy alternative. At a forum in Seoul last week, Campbell called on his former boss to “further toughen financial sanctions against North Korea” if it continues to refuse to give up its nuclear program and continues its military...
Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions/Six-Party Talks