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Category: Censorship

March 19, 2008

“Most of the film had to be kept secret for the past years.”

So says the director of a new South Korean film about a North Korean orphan living secretly in China. “Crossing,” a story directed by Kim Tae-gyun and starring Korean TV star Cha In-pyo, depicts an 8,000 km arduous and lonely journey made by an 11-year-old North Korean boy in search of his coal-miner father who ended up defecting to South Korea. [….] “I had to be very cautious in making this film because of the political sensitivity of the defector...

Categories Censorship/Refugees
March 18, 2008

Rule of Law or Rule By Law?

The Hanky has the vapors over President Lee’s plans to let the police use a bit more force against violent protestors. The plans include detailed rules on the use of force, and plans to arrest people who engage in violence and cross police lines. To this, the Hanky reacts with hyperbolic charges of a return to dictatorship: President Lee seemed to have been encouraging the police when he said, “If foreign television programs show the nation’s unlawful, violent demonstrators wielding...

Categories Censorship/Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society
September 1, 2007

Shot for Watching ‘Winter Sonata’

“There have been two or three reports of public executions of North Korean young people in major cities including Chungjin, as punishment for having illegally copied and distributed South Korean visual material,” said Kang Chul Hwan, vice-chairman of the Seoul-based Committee for the Democratization of North Korea. “It is not an overstatement to say that the Kim Jong Il regime is waging war on the South Korean TV drama,” he said, adding that the North Korean authorities have intensified surveillance...

Categories Censorship/Human Rights/Inside NK
July 27, 2007

Watching You

I wanted to alk-tay about ina-Chay, but as it turns out, they’re listening to everything we say here.  China’s intelligence services are gearing up for next year’s Beijing Olympics, gathering information on foreigners who might mount protests and spoil the nation’s moment in the spotlight. Government spy agencies and think tanks are compiling lists of potentially troublesome foreign organizations, looking beyond the human rights groups long critical of Beijing, security experts and a consultant familiar with the effort said. They...

Categories Censorship/China
July 11, 2007

China Attacks Dissent in America and It Expands Its Power to Intimidate the Neighbors

Strategy Page says they are, and that the FBI is so busy looking for terror cells that China can get away with it: In the past year, many copies of the Epoch Times have been stolen and destroyed, and editorial staff have been physically attacked by men who appear to be Chinese. Editorial offices have also been attacked, often at night, to make it look like a burglary. China has also been putting pressure on Chinese language newspapers in the...

Categories Censorship/China/NK Military/U.S. Military/Washington Views
January 29, 2007

Dastardly Chinese Try to Claim Paektusan!

Update:   Yup — called it. The netizens’ charge of  the ChiCom lines was repulsed,  and the South  Korean government leads the  panicky flight … like 1951 all over again.  North Korea, whose physical boundaries are at the center of the dispute  (more), is no doubt preparing its latest draft North-South statement on Tokdo.  So what do the Chinese know that we don’t? ========================= It’s pretty thin gruel if you read the report, but on the other hand, China is in a...

Categories Censorship/China & Korea/History
January 26, 2007

Kim Jong Il, Defender of Free Speech

North Korea said on Friday the South Korean government was violating the public’s basic right to information by blocking access to Web sites sympathetic to the North. South Korea has denied access to more than 30 Web sites that it has designated “pro-North Korea” since 2004, including the North’s official KCNA news agency’s Web service and sites operated outside. “This is a fascist action against democracy and human rights as it infringes upon the South Koreans’ freedom of speech and...

Categories Censorship/Deprogramming
January 15, 2007

The China Veto

[Updated below]   For those who still doubt that the South Korean government would bow to another government’s sensitivities to cancel an artistic performance — witness the debate and denial over the censorship of “Yoduk Story” — I suppose we can now put those doubts to rest. On January 7, several major South Korean media published editorials that criticized the Korean government for kowtowing to the Chinese communist regime by canceling the New Tang Dynasty’s (NTDTV) New Year Spectacular in...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Censorship/China & Korea/Korean Law/Korean Society/U.S. & Korea
January 7, 2007

Gerry Bevers, Tokdo, and the Heckler’s Veto

Kind words about your thoughts mean all the more when they come from someone like Kevin Kim, a/k/a The Big Hominid. Kevin, who reads and writes in fluent French, speaks fluent Korean, and creates art and books that people pay real money for, is what people call a “renaissance man.” He’s even created photoshop icons for pretty much every k-blog but this one…. Kevin links to what he calls my “awesome … ranticle” (thanks!) on the Marmot thread about the...

Categories Censorship/Japan & Korea/Korean Society
December 1, 2006

Full Court Press

Roh Moo Hyun is recruiting for a new cadre of proxy censors in his war against a critical press: Continuing his battles with the media, President Roh Moo-hyun sent an e-mail yesterday to about 500,000 government officials, encouraging them take action against any media they believe acted wrongly, including taking them to court. In principle, I’m not opposed to the government having some appropriate way to address its  grievances against inaccurate press coverage.  And this, friends, is not an appropriate...

Categories Censorship/Korean Politics/Miscellaneous
October 23, 2006

First Act, Last Laugh, Part 2

I have a message  for whomever tried to stop “Yoduk Story” from playing in Seoul:  read, weep, and know that you have failed. “Whomever,” according to producer Jung Sung-San and the daily Chosun Ilbo (which backed YS), is  someone  in the South Korean government.  Eventually, the South Korean government got around to denying this.  Personally, I wasn’t there.  All I can say is that the accusation is  consistent with other things the South Korean government has done to  cover for...

Categories Censorship/Human Rights/Korean Society
October 1, 2006

Everybody Riot!

This week, U.S. forces picked up or put down (I use the term in the veterinary sense) 20 members of an al-Qaeda cell in Baghdad.  It’s always unfortunate when terrorists choose to take shelter in civilian neighborhoods; worse yet when some inhabitants choose to shelter them, thus endangering their families and their neighbors.  As a consequence, a woman and child who didn’t have to die, died.  Observe the reaction of some: Angry men at the scene held up a color...

Categories Censorship/Terrorism/Iraq/Unintended Humor/WTF?
September 29, 2006

Thugwatch

Now, they’re intimidating the opposition press: Chosun Ilbo honorary chairman Bang Woo-young (78) was attacked by two men in broad daylight on his way home from the family graveyard in Uijeongbu. After an event commemorating the 22nd anniversary of the death of former Chosun Ilbo president Bang Eung-mo on Friday, his car stopped to enter a two-lane road ahead and two men in their 20s approached it and smashed the rear window with bricks. S’pose there will be any arrests? ...

Categories Censorship/Democracy/The Fifth Column
September 3, 2006

Breaking the Blockade

[Update: Andrei Lankov has a must-read piece on radio broadcasting in the Asia Times Online.] Where there is demand, there will be a supply, and the trickle of alternative information to North Korea, though small, shows signs of persistence and of having a receptive market. In addition to Radio Free NK and Open Radio for North Korea, there is now a Japan-based broadcaster, Shiokaze. The DailyNK interviews its director. Although their original focus is on sending messages to Japanese abductees,...

Categories Abductions/Activism/Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Japan & Korea/Reconstruction/Refugees/Resistance/Uncategorized
June 28, 2006

Getting What They Pay For

No, I don’t believe that a government gagging its own state-funded think tanks through the employee disciplinary process is a freedom of speech issue. Call this one a quality of speech issue. A government is an inherently political creature, and if it wants to exert political control over the publicly expressed views of its officials, then so be it. There’s always the private sector…. But you have to wonder exactly what a government is getting for its money if it...

Categories Censorship/Korean Politics
June 27, 2006

The Law of the Street

Look what happened yesterday when the Korean government tried to engage its citizens in public discourse on a Free Trade Agreement with the United States. The hearing, organized by the Trade Ministry, had just begun at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry building in central Seoul when the protesters interrupted a speech by Kim Jong-hoon, Korea’s chief negotiator, in its opening moments. Catcalls rained down on Mr. Kim, and several protesters approached the podium, scuffling with government officials who...

Categories Censorship/Democracy/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea
June 7, 2006

Yodok Story Coming to Washington

Confirmed by a reliable source: the U.S. debut for Yodok Story will be Wednesday, September 27th at the National Theater. There will be seven shows, through Sunday, and the plans (still not final) are to move to New York and the West Coast, probably L.A., after that. Freedom House and Sen. Sam Brownback both helped bring the production here. I had a chance to meet the director, very briefly, in April. My impression was that he’s physically very small, stylishly...

Categories Activism/Censorship/Human Rights/Korean Society