Newsweek: Information Blockade Is Crumbling

According to the report, another must-read, natural curiosity and market forces are doing what a decade of the Sunshine Policy and government-controlled trade couldn’t do–open up North Korean society.

. . . North Korea, long one of the world’s most isolated societies, has grown vulnerable to the flow of information from the outside world. North Koreans are watching Western movies on hidden video players and tuning in to Korean-language broadcasts from the South on illicit radios. In the border regions, mobile phones are ubiquitous, meaning that some defectors can keep in touch with their families back home. Much of this information is making clear to North Koreans that there is a vast prosperity gap between their society and the South’s.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for the link, btw, and a hat tip to The Lost Nomad.

The regime may have much explaining to do once the North Korean people realize how well people are eating in Daejon. Several months ago, a reporter from The Times of London reached similar conclusions after a foray across the border. I’ve previously blogged about the rapid proliferation of cell phones into the North, and about a recent New York Times report on the ideological disillusion that North Koreans experience after seeing the relative freedom and prosperity of China.

All four of these reports share a common theme–the spread of information about the outside world is very bad news for the North Korean regime.

Meanwhile, a new source of information from North Korea has opened up–NK News, which has posts of KCNA articles going back to 1996, all searcheable with a database called “STALIN” (STatistical Analyzer of Language In North korean propaganda). DO NOT MISS the KCNA Random Insult Generator! HT: The Marmot.