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Monthly Archive: March, 2008

March 22, 2008

China Arrests 40 More North Korean Refugees (Updated: Threatens UNHCR, Too; More Refugees Leave China and Thailand)

And the gold medal in brutality goes to … Chinese police have arrested some 40 North Koreans in a series of raids on a border area in Liaoning province, with others detained as they tried to cross the Tumen River into China, according to authoritative Korean sources.  [….] Plainclothes Chinese security agents conducted a large-scale raid March 17 on North Korean defectors in Shenyang, Liaoning province, arresting about 40 people, sources in China who spoke to RFA’s Korean service on...

Categories China/China & Korea/Refugees
March 21, 2008

Changing Channels, Part 2

NORTH KOREA’S AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N. has been suddenly and unexpectedly replaced for the second time in just 18 months: North Korea’s Ambassador to the UN Pak Gil-yon will be replaced in April, it emerged on Wednesday. A South Korean government official said, “I understand that Ambassador Pak will return to North Korea soon. It doesn’t seem likely that he is leaving his post for health reasons.”  [Chosun Ilbo] Recall that the last North Korean Ambassor to the U.N., Han Song-Ryol,...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy
March 21, 2008

Tibet Updates

WORDS I NEVER THOUGHT I’D SAY:  Hooray for France.  A DARFUR ACTIVIST  GROUP  will hold an illegal protest  in Beijing during the Olympics.   Not even the Chinese can get away with brutalizing foreign,  non-Asian  liberals, or jailing them for years like they did Steve Kim.  CHINA’S BRAND IMAGE is suffering in the region, too.  Most of the press coverage has focused on  a possible effect at the Beijing Olympics, but Asian nations that had seemed alarmingly deferential to the Motherland...

Categories China
March 20, 2008

The Beginning of the End: Food Shortages Reach Pyongyang (Updated)

[Update: Welcome to all of you who are coming in from Gateway Pundit and Best of the Web, and many thanks to James Hoft and James Taranto for linking.] Now that I’ve just spent five days writing this dissertation on North Korea’s worsening food situation, there’s dramatic new information that alters the entire analysis. This may be the single most significant event in North Korean history since the invention of blogs, because if it’s true, the regime is finished. North...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Regime Change
March 20, 2008

Anju Links for 20 March 2008

HUMANS  AGAINST HUMAN  RIGHTS!    A group calling itself the Buddhist Human Rights Committee of South Korea isn’t uniformly enthusiastic about human rights: “That the S. Korean government has raised human rights issues of North Korea shows that the government, at the instigation of the U.S., is pursuing a policy of division which fosters mistrust and confrontation between the people of South and North Korea. Denouncing the U.S. as capitalist Yankees who detest and despise human beings, the committee said...

Categories Anju Links
March 20, 2008

MUST READ: WaPo Predicts Food Situation Will Pressure Kim Jong Il (Updated and bumped)

The Washington Post is the latest news source to note the deterioration of North Korea’s food situation.  The  Post suggests that  this time could be different from the Great Famine, when millions died quietly.  A grim rite of spring in Northeast Asia is the calculation of how many North Koreans could starve before the fall harvest — and what the neighbors are willing to do about it.  This year, though, the famine bailout season is more urgent, more complicated and...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
March 19, 2008

Tibet Updates, and the Images China Doesn’t Want You to See

BARBARA DEMICK IS IN CHINA, filing reports about the spread of the protests beyond Lhasa and the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Tibetan activists said at least 15 more were killed near a remote mountain monastery in Sichuan province when paramilitary troops fired at a crowd of demonstrators who waved the Tibetan flag and chanted, “Free Tibet!” and “Bring back the Dalai Lama!” [L.A. Times] The surviving protestors then attacked a police station and government offices with Molotov cocktails. Guess which incident...

Categories China/Human Rights/Uncategorized
March 19, 2008

“Most of the film had to be kept secret for the past years.”

So says the director of a new South Korean film about a North Korean orphan living secretly in China. “Crossing,” a story directed by Kim Tae-gyun and starring Korean TV star Cha In-pyo, depicts an 8,000 km arduous and lonely journey made by an 11-year-old North Korean boy in search of his coal-miner father who ended up defecting to South Korea. [….] “I had to be very cautious in making this film because of the political sensitivity of the defector...

Categories Censorship/Refugees
March 18, 2008

Rule of Law or Rule By Law?

The Hanky has the vapors over President Lee’s plans to let the police use a bit more force against violent protestors. The plans include detailed rules on the use of force, and plans to arrest people who engage in violence and cross police lines. To this, the Hanky reacts with hyperbolic charges of a return to dictatorship: President Lee seemed to have been encouraging the police when he said, “If foreign television programs show the nation’s unlawful, violent demonstrators wielding...

Categories Censorship/Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society
March 17, 2008

Anju Links for 17 March 2008

CONDI RICE, COMMENTING ON THE FAILURE of the bilateral nuclear talks in Switzerland last week, confirms that “substantive differences remain” with North Korea, and that “she does not expect any immediate breakthrough.” Not even Chris Hill can deny it: Top U.S. nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill indicated Sunday that North Korea has, for now, responded unfavorably to U.S. proposals he presented to his North Korean counterpart to resolve a snag in the six-party process for denuclearizing the country. But the U.S....

Categories Uncategorized
March 17, 2008

The Ides of 3ì›”

So why is Lee Myung Bak is avoiding ideological fights with the left?  Probably because he’s concentrating his energy on purging his own party of political enemies, including supporters of Park Geun-Hye.    The Grand National Party has as expected eliminated a large number of its 62 incumbent lawmakers from the Gyeongsang Provinces, the party’s political heartland, in the selection of candidates for the general election next month. Twenty-five lawmakers or 43.5 percent were eliminated, the largest number in the...

Categories Korean Politics/The Fifth Column
March 17, 2008

Bread, Peace, and Kalashnikovs for Tibet (Not Necessarily in that Order)

Those Tibet protests continue to spread, although more outside Tibet proper than inside. Lhasa looks like an armed camp: CNN reports on the spread of the protests to other regions: The Chinese are making the best traction they can by reporting on the excesses of Tibetan protestors, while effectively keeping their own excesses off the TV screens. One thing the Chicoms do with great efficiency is censorship. They’re blacking out CNN, too: And of course, the usual suspects — U.N.,...

Categories "United" Nations/China
March 16, 2008

Tibet Updates

Although protests against the Chinese colonization are spreading geographically, it looks as though a massive Chinese show of force has restored Chinese control to Lhasa, at a cost of about 80 dead. Here’s a good slideshow of news photos and some recent video news reports. The first is from Sky News: Another casualty of the protests has been democracy free speech in India, whose government is arresting Tibetan protestors. Here’s a report from Australia. I will warn you that these...

Categories China
March 16, 2008

Chinese Academic: Accept North Korea as a Nuclear Power

China has a habit of using academics and scholars to float foreign policy trial balloons. Dingli Shen, a Professor and Executive Dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University, recently visited North Korea, something he would not have done unless he spoke for at least a part of the Chinese government. Shen, a physicist and a former Professor of “American Studies,” has also acted as a quasi-governmental mouthpiece on North Korea here and here. Here’s what now: The...

Categories China/China & Korea/Six-Party Talks
March 15, 2008

Chris Hill Resignation Watch

The Edsel has thrown a rod, so today, we inaugurate a new OFK feature, where I’ll be (I hope) regularly updating you on any hints that Christopher Hill will take responsibility for the increasingly undeniable failure of Agreed Framework 2.0. Now, I should note that this entire feature is pretty much baseless, grounded entirely on my own speculation, gossip that’s probably false, and the fact that it would make perfect sense. Hey, I can’t change history and I can’t predict...

Categories Six-Party Talks