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April 29, 2010

North Korea Freedom Week: Brief Update

Just got back from the demonstration across from the Chinese Embassy in Seoul. For those who have been wondering, they said the balloon launch will be at 11 a.m. tomorrow (Saturday) at Freedom Bridge. Full schedule available here. I’m off to the PSCORE event from 1 to 5:30 p.m. (Friday) at the Press Center in Gwanghwamun. But first, here’s a flier for the screening of Crossing in the basement of the chapel building at Yonsei Unversity at 4 p.m. I...

Categories Activism/China/Human Rights
April 15, 2010

China Helps North Korea Import Infant Formula New Cars Despite U.N. Sanctions

I dedicate this post to John Feffer and Christine Ahn, who may now rest in the security of knowing that U.N. anti-proliferation sanctions aren’t causing starvation in North Korea: Around 100 Chinese-made cars have been brought into North Korea through a checkpoint on the border with China, probably for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to give to favored officials. The delivery was made on Tuesday, two days before former leader Kim Il-sung’s birthday, which is the biggest holiday in the...

Categories China & Korea/Sanctions
April 9, 2010

North Korea and China Feast Amid Famine

As the food situation in North Korea continues to deteriorate for its most vulnerable, a South Korean NGO is sending 300 tons of flour and other supplies to help feed 12,000 “marginalized” people, including kids in 50 orphanages. The article mentions nothing about monitoring or nutritional surveys, so pray to a God they can’t that there will be a few dollops of gruel left for their begging bowls after all of the theft, diversion, and corruption. Note, by the way,...

Categories Appeasement/China & Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Six-Party Talks
March 31, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch: Evan Ramstad and Aidan Foster-Carter

It is now possible to say that a new consensus is emerging that the North Korean regime’s stability is in doubt. The latest article to strike this tone is from Evan Ramstad in the Wall Street Journal: North Korea’s authoritarian regime appears to be weakening and the prospect of its collapse is being discussed anew by longtime observers, though there is still a broad debate about when that could happen. [Wall Street Journal, Evan Ramstad] You’re on your own from...

Categories China & Korea/Regime Change
March 26, 2010

Hooray for Google

John Bolton writes in the Wall Street Journal: Google’s decision to stop censoring searches on its China-based servers, rerouting search requests instead to its uncensored Hong Kong facilities, is historic. Google has shown itself unwilling simply to be on the receiving end of whatever Beijing dishes out–and highlighted the growing importance of Hong Kong and Taiwan in shaping the decisions that foreign businesses in China must make. When an enterprise of Google’s global dimensions and visibility reverses course in China...

Categories China
March 20, 2010

Rumor: U.S., China Planning for “Upheaval” in N. Korea

The United States Thursday denied reports that it will soon have closed-door discussions with South Korea and China on plans for upheaval in North Korea. “I have not been told we are going to have this type of meeting at this particular point,” a senior State Department official said, asking not to be named. “If we are working on that in sort of an early stage, that could be possible.” [Yonhap] Normally, I’d be tempted to believe this because they...

Categories China/Reconstruction/Regime Change/U.S. Military
March 20, 2010

North Korea Lures Rajin Investment as It Threatens to Confiscate Kumgang

If you want to understand precisely how Kim Jong Il has managed to lure billions of dollars into a money pit that has delivered little discernible return on billions of dollars in investment, look no further than Kim Young Yun’s recent op-ed in the Joongang Ilbo for an object lesson in how incapable of learning some people are, particularly while under the influence of nationalism: Should we just sit back and watch the port of Rajin being handed over to...

Categories China & Korea/North-South/Sunshine
March 17, 2010

Chinese Academic Admits what U.S. State Dep’t Won’t: Kim Jong Il Will Never Disarm

North Korea is using annual military exercises as an excuse to “bolster up its war deterrent,” the latter term being the traditional code-talk for nuclear weapons. This ought to put North Korea’s rumored return to six-party talks in context. So should this Asia Times piece by our friend, the seasoned Korea reporter Don Kirk (buy his book!), who quotes Beijing University professor Wang Jisi. Wang, speaking at a conference in Seoul recently, showed a much better appreciation of reality than...

Categories China & Korea/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Uncategorized
February 16, 2010

Didn’t I Tell You? Yuan Becoming De Facto North Korean Currency

The Chosun Ilbo picks up this Open Radio report: The broadcaster quoted a North Korean source as saying North Korean banknotes are nothing but pieces of paper, and almost all goods are traded in yuan. “Not even cart pushers would accept won for their work,” the source said. Having watched their new currency plummet in value over less than a month after the reform, North Korean residents realized that the yuan is a safer asset, the station added. Just as...

Categories China & Korea/NK Economics
February 16, 2010

China Will Give Kim Jong Il $10 Billion, Violating the Spirit and Letter of U.N. Security Council Resolutions It Voted For

[Update: More here, at the Daily NK] Consistent with reports I’d linked previously, China is now offering a financially beleaguered Kim Jong Il a massive bailout, in obvious retaliation for America’s assistance in helping Taiwan to defend itself against the Chicom missiles aimed at its cities, and likely also as a way to bail Kim Jong Il out after the self-inflicted catastrophe of The Great Confiscation. China’s decision factors in the assumption that America lacks the spine to respond by...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Sanctions
February 14, 2010

China’s Loathesome Treatment of North Korean Children

I make no secret of my contempt for the Chinese dictatorship, because the Chinese dictatorship holds humanity in contempt. It cuts down the hopes of its people with machine guns and crushes them under tanks. It considers itself entitled to intrude into and oppress their aspirations anywhere on earth. It murders innocent refugees, then it forces their innocent and vulnerable children to live in terror: According to the foster father, who preferred to remain anonymous, “It is illegal [so] we...

Categories China & Korea
February 11, 2010

China: We Have No Dissidents!

CHINA declared on Thursday it had ‘no dissidents’, just hours after a Beijing court upheld an 11-year jail term for one of the country’s top pro-democracy voices. ‘There are no dissidents in China,’ foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters at a regular news briefing. [AFP, via Singapore Straits Times] Either they just strayed into Alejandro Cao de Benos’s alternative reality, or I just didn’t know they’d been there all along.

Categories China/WTF?
February 3, 2010

“Hail Ants” View of China Is Politics, Not Economics

So goes the meme: America can’t press human rights in its diplomacy with China, or insist that China stop enabling and start pressuring Kim Jong Il, because China now owns a controlling interest in America. It’s not difficult to find examples of this view, though it turns out to a more prevalent theory among editorialists than economists. Our old friends at Al Gore’s Current TV sum up the argument this way: President Barack Obama will work hard to build trust...

Categories China
January 21, 2010

Benefit Concert for Stateless Orphans in China

Last Saturday night, January 16th, friend Lauren Walker put together an intimate evening of music at Yogiga Gallery in the Hongdae area of Seoul. Though by “intimate” I do not mean quiet. “A Night for North Koreans: Stateless Orphan Benefit Concert” raised over 700,000 won (~US$617) for an orphanage in China. Possibly 10,000 or more children of North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers are stateless, because they cannot be registered with the Chinese authorities, lest the mothers be caught and...

Categories Activism/China/Human Rights/Refugees
January 15, 2010

Apocalypse Watch: China Cancels Gay Beauty Pageant

From this report on the cancellation of the Mr. Gay China Pageant, I learn: 1. For all of the party’s apparent success at maintaining, er, tight control over society, social change is putting the state in conflict with individuals: “I feel really sad. This was going to be a very good event to show a positive image of gay people,” said Wei Xiaogang, a pageant judge and host of Queer Comrades, a popular Internet talk show on gay issues. 2....

Categories China
January 3, 2010

China Pursues Dual Strategy on Sanctions Compliance

For what little it’s worth, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice says that because of UNSCR 1874 sanctions, “North Korea is feeling far greater pressure to halt its nuclear weapons program than it has in the past.” Well, maybe. I think the sanctions are still insufficient to disarm North Korea, because Kim Jong Il still thinks he can either ride them out, or bait-and-switch our diplomats, just like he did to Madeleine Albright and Chris Hill before. And as I never tire...

Categories China & Korea/Sanctions
December 17, 2009

North Korean Arms Shipment Linked to Iran and China

Did I call it or what? Weapons seized in Thailand from an impounded plane traveling from North Korea were likely destined for Iran, a high-ranking Thai government security official was quoted by Reuters as saying regarding the findings of a team investigating the arms. “Some experts believe the weapons may be going to Iran, which has bought arms from North Korea in the past,” said the official. The official was quoted as saying the Thai investigating team considered Iran the...

Categories "United" Nations/Axis of Evil/China & Korea/Iran/Missiles/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD