Search Results for: rimjingang

November 6, 2010

Rimjingang Takes Covert Journalism to the Next Level

The first English language edition of Rimjingang is about to come out. It will be a dead-tree quarterly, and thus far, Rimjingang has very little presence on YouTube. These are strange things to observe in a publication whose survival depends — literally — on its technological sophistication at hiding memory cards and playing cat-and-mouse with the regime’s cell phone trackers: The quarterly Rimjingang has been available in Korean and Japanese since 2008. The English edition will be published about twice...

Categories Inside NK/Resistance
September 28, 2009

L.A. Times on Rimjingang

Rimjingang was recently established in Japan, and trains and equips North Koreans as journalists to go back into their homeland to cover the news that other media can’t: The footage, taken surreptitiously from a speeding motorcycle, was jarring: It showed the Soonchun Vinylon factory, which many defectors claim has been secretly used to produce lethal chemicals, including nerve gas. But the video showed a deserted complex slouching forlornly on a weed-strewn stretch of countryside. The experts sat wide-eyed. They had...

Categories Inside NK/Media Criticism
March 18, 2016

Designation of N. Korea’s propaganda agency could mean trouble for AP Pyongyang

Yesterday, a reader — he can identify himself if he chooses to do so — asked me an excellent question that had not occurred to me: what are the implications for the Associated Press’s Pyongyang Bureau of the Treasury Department’s designation of North Korea’s Propaganda and Agitation Department for censorship? From Treasury’s Wednesday press release: OFAC has designated the Workers’ Party of Korea, Propaganda and Agitation Department (the “Propaganda and Agitation Department”) as an agency, instrumentality, or controlled entity of the...

Categories AP Watch/Censorship/Sanctions
December 16, 2015

Attention North Korean generals: You have exactly six months to plot your coup.

Notwithstanding some reports to the contrary yesterday, it looks like Kim Jong-Un’s big party congress will proceed in May, as planned. According to the Korean Institute for National Unification, a South Korean think tank, personnel changes will be on the agenda: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is expected to reveal his new aides in a major community party convention to be held in May next year, a South Korean government think tank said Tuesday. [….] Chances are high that it will set...

Categories Engagement/Kremlinology/NK Economics
October 26, 2015

North Korea versus the media: Any guesses?

Today, I offer you two journalists’ perspectives on North Korea’s most recent efforts to use journalists as unwitting propagandists and image-makers, and how well the journalists resisted it. First, the fiercely independent Don Kirk reports on how North Korea censored journalists who crossed the border to cover the family reunions supervised hostage visitations at Kumgang. The problem exploded as reporters accompanying nearly 400 South Koreans on the first of two sets of reunions entered North Korea at the eastern end...

Categories Media Criticism
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
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...

Categories Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid
April 17, 2015

Expert: cash shortage could undermine Kim Jong Un’s succession

You won’t find a more authoritative open-source study of North Korea’s police state than the one Ken Gause did for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. When it comes to North Korea’s internal security, kremlinology, and command systems, Gause earns a great deal of respect among North Korea watchers. So when Ken Gause tells Yonhap that Kim Jong Un “has not fully consolidated his power,” and is at risk of failing to do so “in a couple of...

Categories Kremlinology/Sanctions
January 30, 2015

Meth prices inching up in North Korea

Rimjin-gang updates us on the meth trade in North Hamgyeong, in the extreme northeast of North Korea: I would say that the buying and selling of these substances are far more active than ever before. The price for these products is increasing. A year ago it was 100 Chinese RMB (around 16 US dollars) for 1 gram. Since the beginning of this year it has increased to 100 RMB for 0.8 gram. A small sack of product, made for only...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/NK Military
January 7, 2015

Dear Professor Lankov: Shall we make it double or nothing?

As he did in 2012, Andrei Lankov has gone all-in supporting the latest rumors of economic and agricultural reforms in North Korea, calling them “revolutionary.” The Wall Street Journal’s excellent Alastair Gale describes Lankov’s prediction, notes the skepticism of the South Korean government, and notes that Lankov is “not often associated with very bullish views on North Korean reform.” The plan, he says, citing recent visitors to the country, would give more freedom and land to the country’s farmers. North...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
December 16, 2014

Suki Kim responds to critics of her decision to go undercover

It’s ironic to read how the people at PUST–who’ve suppressed their religious, political, and moral beliefs to accommodate and assist the world’s most oppressive regime, and also, to suppress the truth about it–have challenged Suki Kim’s ethical decisions. But some of those criticisms might be more valid coming from other sources, so Kim addresses them on her web site. I can’t disagree with Kim’s justification that overt journalism has failed us. There is a long tradition of “undercover” journalism—pretending to be something one is not in...

Categories Books & Films/Foreigners in N. Korea
November 17, 2014

North Korea perestroika watch

Two new reports from The Daily NK update us on Kim Jong Un’s efforts to (as Don Gregg put it) “change the nature of his country.” Certain areas bordering China in Yangkang Province have been labeled “danger zones” as the latest effort by the North Korean authorities to beef up surveillance and inspections in the region. This move, in conjunction with the installation of new radio wave detectors to track down those making international calls, is the latest measure aimed at preventing...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Refugees
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 28, 2014

Associated Press perestroika watch

The AP’s Pyongyang Bureau Chief, Eric Talmadge, has managed to coax the AP’s business partners at KCNA into letting him and photographer David Guttenfelder travel from Pyongyang to Mt. Paektu in the far north, by car. Having been duly warned not to got lost—or “you will be shot”—Talmadge and his minder stocked up on fuel coupons, Evian, and Skippy, and headed off toward Wonsan. Even on the loneliest of lonely highways, we would never be without a “minder,” whose job was...

Categories AP Watch
October 14, 2014

If Yoon Sang-Hyun’s information is correct, North Korea spends six times as much on luxury goods as on food for its hungry (corrected).

South Korean Saenuri Party lawmaker Yoon Sang-Hyun, citing Chinese Customs data and “studies on North Korean trade patterns” compiled by the National Intelligence Service South Korean government,* has leaked a report alleging that in 2013, Pyongyang imported $644 million in luxury goods. Yoon says this is enough to buy “more than 3.66 million tons of corn or 1.52 million tons of rice, far more than the country’s food shortage of 340,000 tons estimated by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
September 12, 2014

Malnutrition and disillusionment take their toll on the North Korean military.

Rimjin-gang reports that the NKPA is finding that after a full generation of hunger and depressed birth rates, there are fewer young North Korean men who meet its physical standards, and many of those who do dodge the draft. I’d assume that draft-dodging in North Korea requires one to have the financial means to pay significant bribes, and if the possession of such financial means is still largely a function of songbun (hereditary political caste), then the disillusionment has entered...

Categories Anju Links/NK Military