Subversive Cells

This week’s must-read is the Chosun‘s story about how cell phones are breaking the information blockade around North Korea. The regime’s crackdown on cell phones hasn’t overcome the strong family ties inherent in Korea’s culture, and it hasn’t stopped North and South Koreans from wanting to talk to their relatives across the DMZ:

As Lee talked to his brother for the first time in 50 years over a crackling line, he couldn’t stem the flood of tears. Inter-Korean projects to reunite families may work for the 50 or 100 lucky few each year, but two mobile phones managed to connect a man in Seoul to his kin in the near-impenetrable North Korean province of North Hamgyeong in seconds. In North Korea, mobile phones are serving as conveyer belts of information from the outside world to help combat decades of state-sponsored propaganda and misinformation, opening up a new channel of comminication (sic) between the two sides. Since fleeing to the South, Lee is constantly harassed by friends and officials across the border hoping to trade useless documents or information for money.

Who is behind this subversion of the workers’ paradise? China(!), which has actually upped the power on its cell networks, allowing cell service to reach deep inside the North:

The fact that the two sides are now connected in this way is entirely thanks to Chinese cell phones. As Chinese communication firms expand their cell phone services, they have begun installing relay stations along the Sino-North Korean border, which has kindled a cell phone boom in North Korea. In summer 2003, mobile phone signals could only be accessed on high-altitude slopes astride the Sino-North Korean border. Last Fall, however, a relay station was build (sic) along the frontier that extended the service to people’s homes in border areas and large swathes of China and South Korea. The devices are charged using pre-paid phone cards, and cost roughly 400 Chinese yuan (W50,000-60,000) for three month’s use. With the recent strengthening of border controls, cell phones have become essential to officials and merchants conducting business along the border. The first thing North Koreans request before doing business with Chinese is a cell phone, and demand for South Korean handsets is high.

Score another point for the “liberalization through capitalism” theory, which I generally accept, but with grave reservations in a case like North Korea where the regime will never allow it to go too far (and here, it’s Chinese capitalism that’s spilling into North Korea). Not surprisingly, North Korea is doing its best to crack down:

Along with the suspension of service, the North Korean authorities are also strictly controlling the use of cell phones. One North Korean trader who goes back and forth from China said, “In Musan, North Hamgyeong province alone, the authorities have confiscated 300 cell phones as part of a recent concentrated crackdown in the border area. They’ve purchased a large number of the newest radar units from Japan and have begun to monitor radio waves 24 hours a day.” He added that if authorities discover signals indicating someone has made a cell phone call to South Korea, that person is unconditionally sent to a political camp for reform. However, the game of hide and seek between cell phone users and the state security apparatus continues.

You wonder what a determined American effort could do if the Chinese can do this much collaterial damage to the regime by sheer accident. So how many Chinese cell phones fit in a small UAV?