Search Results for: remittances market

September 20, 2014

NKPW: North Korea cracks down on remittances from refugees to their families

Our latest edition of North Korea Perestroika Watch comes via the Chosun Ilbo, which quotes North Korean insiders as saying that the tolerance of markets is temporary, and that a crackdown will come in due course: Hyun Dong-il at Yanbian University said, “Major changes are taking place in North Korea, but the ruling elite says it is still intent on adhering to the planned, socialist economic model.” North Korean academics studying at Yanbian University apparently say that the changes are “temporary”...

Categories Capitalism

February 8, 2011

South Korea should close Kaesong and encourage remittances.

The Chosun Ilbo reports that as the North Korean diaspora swells, those who have escaped are forming stronger financial links with their hungry families in the homeland. And this has some people concerned: North Korean defectors settled in South Korea are sending some US$10 million a year to their families back home, it was reported on Sunday. The amount is expected to grow as there are more than 20,000 North Korean defectors in the South and the number is increasing,...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics/Refugees/Regime Change/Subversion

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...

Categories Human Rights/Resistance/Sanctions

Understanding North Korea Sanctions: Policy Options to Force Disarmament & Reform

Let no one say that there’s nothing more we can do. Although additional sanctions could help to close loopholes in the current North Korea sanctions regimes, with the passage of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act and U.N. Security Council 2270, our priority should now shift to enforcing the existing sanctions. Enforcing existing sanctions: Work closely with the South Korean National Intelligence Service to exploit the financial intelligence delivered by recent high-level defections. Recent reports suggest that managers of North Korean...

July 12, 2016

Prisoners of the People: N. Korea’s guerrilla society has political implications (updated)

Over the last year, I’ve become convinced that if technology can break the electronic barriers between North Korea and the Outer Earth, it would be possible to keep the broken promises of the Sunshine Policy by bypassing Pyongyang and engaging directly with the North Korean people. Governments, churches, and NGOs could harness markets, smuggling networks, and private agriculture to help North Koreans feed the hungry, heal the sick, share information and ideas, begin to rebuild their broken civil society, and...

Categories Capitalism/Health & Disease/Resistance/Subversion

May 2, 2016

Preparations for North Korea’s party congress spur anger, resistance, and dissent

Over the last year, this site has closely tracked growing signs that North Korea’s elites are discontented with Kim Jong-un’s leadership and fearful of being purged, and of falling morale and discipline in the North Korean military. More recently, we’ve seen extraordinary outbreaks of dissent among North Korea’s overseas workers, including the group defection of 13 restaurant workers and a reported mutiny by 100 workers in Kuwait. Whether these incidents reflect popular sentiment inside North Korea itself is a harder question to...

Categories Capitalism/Class Warfare/Resistance

April 20, 2016

Pyongyang’s sanctions are the ones that hurt the North Korean people the most.

Last month, I wrote about one slightly surprising consequence of sanctions against North Korea — sanctions have prevented Kim Jong-un from selling off and exporting resources needed by the North Korean people, which has flooded North Korean markets with cheap coal and seafood. Now, we’re starting to see something like the converse of this, in which restrictions on what North Korea’s donju and purchasing agents can import is forcing them to find other ways to kick up steep “loyalty payments”...

Categories Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

April 18, 2016

Dear President Park: Make Reunification Your Legacy

Last week was a tough week for Park Geun-hye, when her party lost its majority in the National Assembly. The simplest explanation for this is that historically, ruling parties usually take beatings in mid-term elections, particularly when their own voters don’t show up to vote. The ruling party may poll well in the abstract, but a party that enters an election divided is likely to underperform expectations.  Republicans, take note. And don’t look so smug, Democrats. Something like this appears...

Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Propaganda/Reconstruction/Subversion

December 8, 2015

Inter-Korean phone calls can keep the promises of the Sunshine Policy

Twenty years of state-to-state engagement between North and South Korea have not lived up to Kim Dae-Jung’s promises. Pyongyang has taken Seoul’s money, nuked up, and periodically attacked South Korea for good measure. Rather than reforming, it has invested heavily in sealing its borders. Pyongyang sustains itself on foreign hard currency, even as it cuts off the flow of people, goods, and information to its underprivileged classes. It knows that if it fails to do this, members of those classes...

Categories Appeasement/Border Control/Capitalism/Engagement/Refugees/Sunshine

September 28, 2015

A guerrilla health care system for North Korea’s poor

Gullible leftists and U.N. nincompoops who take North Korea’s claims of socialist equality at face value love to bleat about the wonders of its free universal health care, but those bleats have little basis in reality. A 2010 study by Amnesty International found that Pyongyang provides less for the care of its non-elite citizens per capita than almost any other nation on earth: The North Korean government has failed to adequately address the country’s ongoing food shortages since the 1990s....

Categories Health & Disease

August 20, 2015

Revenge attacks demoralize North Korea’s security forces

Yesterday, Yonhap reported the possible purge of Won Tong-Yon, head of the United Front Department,* which handles North Korea’s propaganda. The report remains unconfirmed, but it would be consistent with reports that Kim Jong Un has put his 25 year-old sister, Kim Yo-Jong — known for her “eccentricity to the point of weirdness†— in charge of North Korea’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. If so, Miss Kim may have a reason to consolidate control over her own fiefdom. Won was...

Categories Kremlinology/Resistance

June 8, 2015

Guerrilla Engagement: A strategy for regime replacement and reconstruction in North Korea

~ 1 ~ One day, either this President or the next one will awaken to the realization that the regime in Pyongyang is collapsing, and that he has just inherited the costliest, messiest, and riskiest nation-building project since the Marshall Plan. The collapse of North Korea will present South Korea – and by extension, its principal treaty ally, the United States – with a nation-building challenge unlike any in recent history. After all, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria all had some...

Categories Capitalism/Reconstruction/Regime Change/Resistance/Subversion

December 9, 2014

Of course, a better North Korea policy means more than sanctions

Professor Haggard is skeptical that a “sanctions only approach” toward North Korea could work, which compels me to expand on why I agree, and on what a better approach would look like. It should go without saying that no act of Congress can ever be more than part of a complete foreign policy, something that, by constitutional design, only the executive branch can wield. Certainly the imposition and enforcement of tough sanctions are at the heart of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, H.R....

Categories Anju Links/Diplomacy/Sanctions

November 16, 2014

Defectors spread rumors, warns news service that spreads propaganda, disinformation, and fake photos

The Associated Press, the guardian of the grotto that holds the cuneiform clay tablets recording the sacred commandments of the journalistic profession, has published a hit piece warning its readers to beware of the North Korean guerrilla news services that have stepped forward to fill the void left by corporate news organizations, including the AP. Its lede: Video secretly taken in North Korea shows public executions by firing squad. The country is said to begin a currency revaluation that turns disastrous. Leader Kim Jong Un is...

Categories AP Watch

October 7, 2014

Why is North Korea exporting food while its people go hungry?

North Korean food exports to China have increased by more than 35 percent compared to the same period last year, and are at their highest levels in at least four years, according to Chinese customs data. [….] [I]n the first eight months of the year, North Korea exported more food than it received in food aid in the whole of 2011 according to a recent World Food Program (WFP) report. [NK News, Leo Byrne] And this, shortly after the regime...

Categories Famine & Food Aid

September 29, 2014

H.R. 1771: A response to Stephan Haggard

Stephan Haggard has published the second of two comments on H.R. 1771, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, at KEIA’s blog, following Bruce Klingner’s first post on the subject. Haggard and I have a history of genial disagreement about North Korea policy, but I find much more in this thoughtful and well-considered post to expand on than to argue with. Haggard has obviously read and understood the legislation before opining about it. (Marcus Noland, Haggard’s co-author at Witness to Transformation,...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law

September 26, 2014

U.N. should fund its aid programs from Kim Jong Un’s Swiss accounts.

The Wall Street Journal updates us on the dire financial state of the U.N. World Food Program’s operations in North Korea. The United Nations aid program for malnourished North Koreans may close after raising only a fraction of the money it needs to operate in the country, a senior U.N. official said in a call for donations. “We may need to scale down or think about closing altogether,” Dierk Stegen, the Pyongyang-based North Korea head for the U.N. World Food...

Categories Europe/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

September 8, 2014

N. Koreans are bootlegging liquor in Muslim countries

Last week, NK News published a detailed report on a black market in alcohol run by North Korean diplomats in Pakistan. Almost simultaneously, The Daily NK also reported that two North Korean “chauffeurs,” dispatched by the regime to Qatar, and nominally working for private companies there, had been arrested for bootlegging. Two North Korean men are being detained in Qatar under suspicions of the distribution of illegal liquor; Voice of America [VOA] reported on September 4th, citing the Gulf Times, Qatar’s English language newspaper. The...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Money Laundering