North Korea has executed three leaders of a house church it raided in North Pyongan Province, and sent the remaining members to a labor camp. The report comes via North Korean Intellectuals’ Solidarity:
According to the sources, the arrests and executions were carried out in mid-May. “At that time, right after the disastrous currency reform, police discovered 23 Christians in Kuwal-dong, Pyungsung County, in Pyongan Province, who met at an underground church. After their arrest, they were interrogated at length. Eventually, the group’s “ringleaders” were sentenced to death and executed. The others were sent to Kwan-li-so (Penal labour colony) No 15 in YodÅk.
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The market continues to be the one institution North Korea can’t suppress and has to allow to operate openly:
A Unification Ministry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the information’s classified nature, said North Korean authorities recently introduced price caps on the two staples at markets in Pyongyang.
“The regime appears to be increasingly allowing markets to take over the role its rationing system once played,” the official said, adding that the two items were not on the monitor list when his ministry obtained a copy of the document in February.
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For a country with such an extraordinary talent at the printing of currency, North Korea certainly does fiscal policy badly:
“If prices of products continue to fluctuate and transactions freeze in the market amid instability after the North’s recent currency reform, the possibility is high that even salaried workers at state-run companies will be much affected,” the Korea Development Institute said in the report.
To address the complaints of one of the regime’s key constituencies, Pyongyang might seek to print and supply more money to the workers, which the report said could result in inflation, prompted by a budgetary deficit. “If this turns out to be the case, deficit-sparked inflation will take place, worsening price fluctuations that the North has already been undergoing,” the report said.
So far, that’s speculation, although North Korea has previously tried to soothe state workers by paying them with more worthless currency.
The Arirang Festival as state-sponsored child abuse.
The ROK Army declares war against cussing.
“We must make it clear that if China can’t make North Korea give up its nukes, we have no choice but to build our own.” I don’t really have a problem with that.
North Korea fires more artillery off its west coast.
That doesn’t make sense. Surely skill in the printing of money would tend to imply that a great deal of printing has gone on, and a great deal of printing would surely mean the probable initiation of an inflationary spiral the like of which Weimar Germany might be proud. That would seem to imply that skill in the printing of money might actually be a reliable indicator of fiscal incompetence.
I don’t think that was really the point, though, was it.
“Deficit-based inflation” already exists. The price of a kilo of rice in August 2009 was 2400 old won: now it is 120,000 old won per kilo. That’s real inflation, whatever “deficit-based inflation” is supposed to mean. It’s even worse when one considers the decline in the purchasing power of the new Won against the Yuan and the dollar — and, of course, as you have been pointing out, US Treasury is ensuring they don’t have legitimate dolars anymore either.
Remember how the Soviet Union imploded when Reagan challenged it to keep up? It weasn’t just weapon failure, but military demoralization, national alcoholism, declining birthrates, institutionalised absenteeism, failed agriculture, obsolescent machinery and no real consumer sector, plus the anarchic effects of foreign music and samizdat. You see it all again in the DPRK.
We’re best just standing off and letting its eternal fraternal ally China pick up the pieces.
I have watched “State of Mind.” The article on the mass games gives a more realistic, showning the darker side, than that movie.
In a bit of shameless self-publicity, I fleshed out the execution of catacomb Christians at Pyongan here.