Class Warfare

February 28, 2019

How to negotiate a lasting peace in Korea, feed the hungry, and heal the sick

Let’s say you still believe in a negotiated disarmament of North Korea, something to which I assign a ten percent probability at most. Or, let’s say you don’t. Suspend your disbelief and assume that aggressive sanctions enforcement—the enforcement Kim Jong-un tricked Trump into calling off nearly a year ago—becomes a sufficient threat to the solvency and cohesion of Kim Jong-un’s regime that he comes back to the table next year, offers to submit a complete declaration of his WMD programs...

Class Warfare/Democracy/Diplomacy/Sanctions/U.S. Law

January 1, 2018

How Kim Jong-un, China & the autumn gales set a death trap for North Korea’s fishermen

By now, you’ve probably seen the ghastly reports of boats from North Korea washing up against the Japanese coastline with the desiccated or skeletal remains of their crews. You’ve probably also read reports speculating about why. This post will sift through dozens of those reports, discard the theories that the evidence refutes, and assemble the more plausible ones into a coherent explanation that the evidence supports. As it turns out, most of what you’ve read about North Korea’s ghost ships...

Capitalism/China & Korea/Class Warfare/Japan & Korea/Resistance

April 6, 2017

When North Korean agitprop backfires: A film about a peasant uprising is sowing dangerous ideas

What passes for a feel-good story in one of the world’s bleakest corners? Evidence that the seeds of class warfare are sprouting within a state that has fooled so many gullible leftists into believing that it’s a paradise of socialism. The Daily NK reports that an old agitprop film is inspiring exactly the kind of revolutionary consciousness that Kim Jong-un sees in his cognac-sodden nightmares. The film, “Im Kkoek Jung,” reminds North Koreans that their society has become the very thing the state’s propaganda...

Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Propaganda/Resistance/Subversion

March 21, 2017

North Korean security forces now asking politely for protection money

Yet more reports are validating that, since the recent ouster of State Security Minister Kim Won-hong for “human rights violations” and other reasons, something has changed (at least for now) in the way North Korea’s internal security forces are operating: Following orders from Kim Jong Un for the Ministry of State Security (MSS) to refrain from violating human rights, its personnel have begun to shy away from their characteristic extortionist behavior during their interactions with residents. This appears to be...

Class Warfare/Human Rights

March 3, 2017

Class struggle in North Korea

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” – Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto And yet, no place is...

Capitalism/Class Warfare

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...

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”...

Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

March 15, 2016

So far, sanctions are cutting off Pyongyang’s cash while sparing North Korea’s poor.

A month after the President signed the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act and two weeks after the U.N. Security Council approved Resolution 2270, enough information has emerged from North Korea to allow for a preliminary assessment of how the sanctions are affecting those they are meant to target, and those they are meant to spare. Sanctions have begun to hit their intended targets. The Daily NK reports that the donju, the well-connected traders who help finance Pyongyang’s priorities through trade with...

Border Control/Capitalism/Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

February 19, 2016

Aid agencies struggle to feed hungry kids as N. Korea cuts food imports to 10-year low

Wasn’t it only Groundhog Day when the U.N. released $8 million in emergency aid to “enable life-saving assistance for more than 2.2 million people” in North Korea who are the “most vulnerable and at risk of malnutrition?” Wasn’t it just last month when UNICEF warned that “25,000 children in North Korea require immediate treatment for malnutrition after a drought cut food production by a fifth and the government reduced rations?” North Korea’s overall food imports from neighboring China fell by a quarter...

Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid

February 18, 2016

What the U.N.’s new North Korea sanctions resolution should (and should not) do.

Yonhap reports that the U.S. and China have made progress toward an agreement on a draft U.N. Security Council resolution. Although we’ve seen few hints about exactly what sanctions China is willing to sign up for — much less enforce — China is paying lip service to the notion that North Korea must pay a “necessary price” for its behavior. Has Xi Jinping relented in his unprecedented stubbornness, or was it always China’s plan to relent after stalling us, in the hope that...

China & Korea/Class Warfare/Diplomacy/Sanctions

February 9, 2016

NYT: How China helped N. Korea buy ski lift cable cars, and break U.N. sanctions

Yesterday, I posted about hunger in North Korea, the fact that Kim Jong-un is spending the nation’s lunch money on missiles and ski resorts, and the importance of helping the North Korean people make that connection though a comprehensive information operations strategy. The New York Times has bolstered the evidence of North Korean and Chinese culpability for this tragedy with a detailed report on North Korea’s purchase of the equipment for its ski resort through China. Previously, NK News revealed that the...

China & Korea/Class Warfare/Luxury Goods

February 8, 2016

Rice, peace & freedom: It’s time we told the N. Korean people the truth about why they’re hungry.

It is fitting that Groundhog Day was a busy day in North Korea. On the same day that Pyongyang announced that it would test a long-range missile, the U.N. released $8 million from its emergency aid fund “to assist [the] most vulnerable women and children” in North Korea. Bangkok, 2 February 2016) United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 29 January 2016 released US$ 8 million from the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) for severely underfunded aid operations in the...

Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Missiles

December 14, 2015

North Korea: Dispatches from a class struggle

When you devote so substantial a part of your life to a topic as depressing as the humanitarian situation in North Korea, you have to find your rewards where you can. One small polemic reward of watching North Korea is observing it as a laboratory for Marxist dialectics and theories of class struggle as the country’s rich grow richer, and the poor are trapped in poverty. We begin our examination, appropriately, with the most plausible analysis of North Korea’s food situation...

Capitalism/Class Warfare

November 10, 2015

North Koreans need food & medicine, not Guus Hiddink’s “futsal” stadium

South Koreans remember Dutch soccer coach Guus Hiddink as the man who led their team to a successful performance in the 2002 World Cup. But when the history of a united Korea is written, North Koreans are likely to remember him less fondly. Hiddink has just returned from Pyongyang, where he signed a deal to help Kim Jong-Un build yet another expensive leisure facility that falls low on the average North Korean’s hierarchy of needs — a new “futsal” stadium:...

Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Sports

October 13, 2015

The more North Korea trades, the more it reforms, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I questioned the premises of economic engagement with Pyongyang — that Pyongyang is socialist, that trade is capitalism, that capitalism inexorably erodes socialism, and that capitalism (least of all, state capitalism) is inherently liberal and peaceful. I argued that Pyongyang adopted state capitalism decades ago, and that it has grown steadily more menacing and repressive ever since. It feigns socialism to feed our false hopes of reform and arguments against sanctions, to tempt investors, to recruit apologists who embrace its socialist pretenses, and to justify the...

Border Control/Capitalism/Censorship/Class Warfare/Engagement

October 12, 2015

The Myth of North Korean Socialism: How Pyongyang’s Profiteers Fooled the World

Over this long weekend, I’ve been reading Brian R. Myers’s new book, “North Korea’s Juche Myth,” a copy of which Prof. Myers was kind enough to send. Myers argues that juche, that cryptic ideology reporters often mention but never explain, is a sham ideology that is both overblown and seldom understood, by foreigners as well as North Koreans. Very roughly translated, juche means that man must be the master of his own destiny (in contrast to North Korea’s reality, in...

Class Warfare/Engagement/Propaganda/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy

February 25, 2015

Kim Jong Un seeks friends and funds abroad as he isolates his people.

In the three years that he has been in power, His Porcine Majesty has found plenty of time for Dennis Rodman, but none for meetings with foreign leaders. Suddenly, in the last two months, he has flirted with (1) a summit with South Korean leader Park Geun-Hye, (2) inviting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Pyongyang, (3) and a visit to Vladimir Putin in Moscow in May. His central bank even “committed itself to implementing the action plan of ‘international...

Capitalism/China & Korea/Class Warfare/Diplomacy/Russia & Korea/Sanctions

December 10, 2014

I wonder how Air Koryo serves them their macadamia nuts (answer: very carefully)

Not only are the sons and daughters of North Korea’s highest-ranked elite wielding influence outside the sphere of leader Kim Jong Un – they are also displaying it in public, a news outlet run by a high-profile defector said Tuesday. The people mentioned in the report have access to external trade and foreign currency and many officials bring money to secure an audience with them. They appear untouchable by law, the report said, even though political factions can be gravely...