Search Results for “crackdown market”

August 2, 2014

Crackdowns fail to reverse marketization of Peoples’ Economy

THE ELITES ARE DISGRUNTLED at Kim Jong Un’s impulsive temper and insensitivity, according to this Chosun Ilbo report. Separately, this report talks about endemic corruption and economic inequality in North Korea. Meanwhile, a third Chosun Ilbo survey of 100 North Koreans in China suggests that the marketization of the peoples’ economy has passed the point of no return. Between 70 and 90 percent of North Koreans make ends meet by buying and selling goods in the grey or black market now that the...

Border Control/Capitalism

September 19, 2017

Organized crime enters North Korea’s markets

From the perspective of North Korea’s poor, the era of Kim Jong-un has been a time of increasing state control over information and borders, but also a time when the state has taken a relatively (by North Korean standards, anyway) laissez-faire approach to market trade. There are exceptions, of course, including crackdowns on South Korean imports and on the Chinese mobile phones that could have made cross-border trade so much more efficient, but the general trend is for State Security Department...

Capitalism

January 24, 2017

North Korean market traders are fighting The Man

Via Yonhap: “It’s not that hard nowadays to see women stand up to despotic wardens and security agents while shaking their fingers at them at jangmadang,” the Radio Free Asia (RFA) said, citing a source in Pyongyang who recently visited China. “In such cases, nearby observers also join in and push the officials, something that was very rare to see just a few years ago.” Now North Korean people are no longer giving in to officials unconditionally, the source said....

Capitalism/Resistance

July 1, 2015

Daily NK: Massive brawl in Musan market after traders resist confiscations

This may be the most significant known incident of anti-regime resistance by North Korean civilians since the Ajumma Rebellion that followed the 2009 currency confiscation: A massive brawl between Ministry of People’s Security [MPS] agents and vendors at a marketplace in Musan County last Friday has led to an urgent dispatch of county security and safety agents along with the complete shuttering of the market. The clash occurred after angry vendors tried to resist the confiscation of their goods by market...

Capitalism/Resistance

June 3, 2015

Markets, food, and trade: steps forward, leaps backward (Pts. 1, 2 & 3)

~ Part 1 ~ Do you still remember March, when the “May 30 measures” were the next wave of “drastic” perestroika that would change North Korea? Those measures were supposed to “give[] autonomy management of all institutions, companies, and stores,” including “control over production distribution and trade from the state to factories and businesses,” and thus awaken “the inner potential of the country.” But today, Andrei Lankov, who has been one of the most forward-leaning predictors of economic reform...

Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid

June 23, 2014

North Korea Perestroika Watch: Crackdowns on food, information, borders intensify

OFK readers likely have offered a diverse spectrum of adjectives to describe the views expressed on this site, but one that most of them would probably affirm is “contrarian.” After Kim Jong Un’s coronation, it was briefly fashionable to perceive him as a reformer. I argued that little substantive evidence supported this theory, and cited evidence that His Porcine Majesty was closing down the border, statistical evidence that refugee flows to the South had fallen dramatically as a result, and...

Border Control/Famine & Food Aid/Subversion

January 28, 2014

Kim Jong Un’s border crackdown is a case study in how trade can help isolate, starve, and terrorize the North Korean people.

Rimjingang and the Daily NK have been running a stream of bleak reports on the dramatically worsening situation along the border between China and North Korea. In the six-week period since the purge of Jang Song Thaek, North Korea has virtually sealed that border by ordering border guards to shoot would-be defectors, increasing its use of cell phone detectors, torturing and bribing people into revealing the names of others, and flooding the zone with the most insufferable petty despots the human mind can conjure...

Anju Links/Border Control

January 14, 2013

North Korea Glasnost Watch: Kim Jong Un’s Border Crackdown Is Working

The most superficial things you’ve probably heard about Kim Jong Un are the closely related ideas that he is, or must be, a latent reformer because he (a) appreciates aspects of Western culture, (b) has a fashionable wife, and (c) had a Swiss education. As examples, I’ll cite this report by Jean Lee, this and this from Joohee Cho of ABC, and this exercise in straw-grasping by John DeLury. The problem with this theory is that it isn’t supported by...

Border Control/Famine & Food Aid/Refugees

June 19, 2010

WaPo: North Korea Lifts Market Restrictions

In Part Three of my capitalist manifesto, I’d documented North Korea’s efforts throughout 2009 to destroy the markets on which most of the North Korean people had come to rely on for their survival. The efforts included with bans on imported goods, the closure of large markets, the imposition of restrictions on who could sell in others, and finally, the Great Confiscation, which wiped out the savings of millions of families, along with the working capital of the traders who...

Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid

April 10, 2008

Good Friends: Rations Suspended in Pyongyang; Population Survives on Savings, Markets

A new Good Friends dispatch is up on the Web. The obvious caveats apply: it’s 100% hearsay. Good Friends reports that the traders who feed the northeastern city of Chongjin are now wandering from town to town to find food. Many are going to Sinuiju and finding nothing; the place is in the middle of a major crackdown on markets. Although Good Friends does not say so explicitly, protests in Chongjin appear to have ended, possibly with the dissenting female...

Famine & Food Aid

August 18, 2022

How sanctions helped bring down the Soviet Bloc

Among sanctions critics who oppose America’s foreign policy goals or sympathize with its adversaries, a common cliche is that “sanctions never work.” A more nuanced criticism from skeptics of American power is that sanctions alone cannot cause states to change the policies that Washington and its allies oppose. A third argument is that sanctions are not an end unto themselves. The first argument is demonstrably untrue; the second is a half-truth; and the third is too self-evident to be worth...

Europe/History/Sanctions

April 23, 2019

The “experts” were wrong. The sanctions are working.

The fact that even the New York Times says so didn’t make it so; it just made it harder for people who trust the New York Times to deny it. But for those of us who’ve always put more stock in the Daily NK and Rimjin-gang, the evidence has been piling up for more than a year. Our chronology begins in March 2016, two months after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test and one month after Congress passed the North Korea Sanctions...

Sanctions

February 20, 2019

Save Congress a Seat at Hanoi: On North Korea, Sanctions, Treaties & Politics

WHO STILL BELIEVES THAT DONALD TRUMP IS THE GREAT NEGOTIATOR HE CLAIMS TO BE? Certainly not Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, or Mitch McConnell. Certainly not Kim Jong-un. Certainly not the people doing the most futile job inside the Beltway right now–writing Donald Trump’s intelligence assessments about North Korea, or of just what he persuaded Kim Jong-un to do at Singapore. Drink a toast to them. Better yet, buy them one. Many people in government now, up to and including John...

Diplomacy/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics

December 10, 2018

Rape, revenge, sanctions & North Korea’s hated Ministry of Love

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, Machiavelli mulled the question of whether a tyrant should seek to be feared or loved. The Ministry of State Security or MSS is North Korea’s analog to Orwell’s Ministry of Love,1 but in reality, it is Kim Jong-un’s most feared and hated enforcer. It targets “spies, subversive elements, and political criminals” — the people the state fears most. It runs North Korea’s most horrific prison camps, of which one North Korean woman interviewed secretly by the BBC said, “It is...

Human Rights/Resistance/Sanctions

November 13, 2018

North Korea’s mining industry is collapsing, and steel may be next

OVER THE LAST YEAR, THE BRAVE COVERT CORRESPONDENTS of the Daily NK and Rimjin-gang have reported from inside North Korea on the effects of sanctions on North Korean industry. It’s now clear that those effects have been severe. That’s good news, because North Korea’s mining and steel industries are closely linked to its military and its WMD programs. It’s also terrible news, because a lot of people who depended on those industries are now living through some very hard times....

NK Economics/Sanctions

February 28, 2018

You want maximum pressure? Oh, I’ll show you maximum pressure.

SINCE LAST WEEK, WHEN THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT announced 56 designations of ships, shipping companies, and trading companies, reporters have been emailing me to ask whether this is finally the “maximum pressure” the Trump administration has been talking about. The short answer is “no.” In terms of length alone, yes, this was the largest set of North Korea designations ever, although we should discount for the fact that most of the 28 ships were effectively designated twice (once per ship, and...

Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions

December 1, 2017

Cash & credit squeeze hits China-North Korea trade

One of the more maddening tropes I see in reporters’ coverage is a question that’s usually presented as dispositive to the success of sanctions: “Will China cooperate?” For reasons I’ve already explained and don’t have time to repeat today, I always answer that question by asking what the questioner means by “China.” The point being: yes, it would be nice if Xi Jinping finally came around to the rising risk that Kim Jong-un will bring war, instability, disrepute, and bankruptcy...

China & Korea/Money Laundering/Sanctions

November 2, 2017

A top defector risked his life to tell us of Pyongyang’s plans & vulnerabilities. The media put its own words in his mouth.

Before I get to what Thae Yong-ho did not say at CSIS on Tuesday, and when he testified the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday, let’s start with what he did say. By now, you probably know that Thae was North Korea’s Deputy Ambassador to the U.K. before he defected in August 2016. This week, Thae made his first visit to the U.S. I could not have been more impressed or moved by his words. Do yourself a favor and bookmark...

Defectors/Korean War II

Search Results for: crackdown market