July 2007 – Page 2

July 11, 2007

China Attacks Dissent in America and It Expands Its Power to Intimidate the Neighbors

Strategy Page says they are, and that the FBI is so busy looking for terror cells that China can get away with it: In the past year, many copies of the Epoch Times have been stolen and destroyed, and editorial staff have been physically attacked by men who appear to be Chinese. Editorial offices have also been attacked, often at night, to make it look like a burglary. China has also been putting pressure on Chinese language newspapers in the...

Censorship/China/NK Military/U.S. Military/Washington Views

July 10, 2007

‘Before she was executed, my mother looked at me.’

I’ve been blogging about stories like this for three years, and I still can’t believe human beings are capable of some of the things that my rational minds knows they’re fully capable of: On Nov. 29, 1996, 14-year-old Shin Dong Hyok and his father were made to sit in the front row of a crowd assembled to watch executions. The two had already spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp’s torture compound, and Shin assumed they were among...

Human Rights/The Camps

July 9, 2007

All Quid, No Quo

If Andrei Lankov is right and most North Koreans secretly know that they don’t really live in an earthly paradise, these must be confusing times. Any of them who mull the oddities of the wider world in the privacy of their own minds must be asking themselves: “Why do they pay us?” If North Korea has few natural resources and a dwindling population of a few million, why does it seem that everyone on earth lines up to pay tribute...

"United" Nations

July 5, 2007

Introducing ‘Area Studies’

My friend Richardson has announced the launch of a new blog covering his non-Korea material: Area Studies. Update your blogrolls and bookmarks accordingly. I hope this won’t mean less reading at DPRK Studies, but something tells me that other demands on Richardson’s time are about to increase dramatically, so I wish him the best.

Blogs & Blogging

July 5, 2007

The FTA and ‘Fortress Korea’

It can be disturbing to find so much to agree with in the writings of someone who doesn’t share your outlook on the bigger picture. I generally favor the lowering of trade barriers and oppose the protection of domestic industries from the competition of a fair and open market. Note the key caveat in that last sentence, for defining “fair and open” is where the devil is. I suspect Alan Tomlinson defines it more narrowly than I do, and that...

NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics

July 3, 2007

Anju Links for 7/3

Forgive the light blogging of late, the result of competing obligations, a bigger project I hope you’ll see here soon, and frankly, a lack of interesting fodder in the news recently. * When I read that South Korea was already preparing to ship fuel oil to North Korea (see also), even before Yongbyong is shut down, I thought that seemed a bit overconfident. AF 2.0, as explained by Chris Hill to the Congress, specified that the first 50,000-ton delivery...

An Alliance?/Anju Links/Appeasement

July 1, 2007

The War the Media Won’t Show You

When our soldiers retook a village from al Qaeda near Baqubah, Michael Yon was there to show us, in extremely graphic images, what the terrorists did to the men, women, and childen who once lived there, and even to their animals. The Times and the Post were not there and won’t show you images like this. They won’t show you the al Qaeda that kills Iraqis in Iraq, Britons in Britain, Spaniards in Spain, and Americans in America. We seem...

Terrorism/Iraq

Monthly Archive: July, 2007