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Category: NK Economics

April 28, 2010

“Collective Spirit” Update

The Chosun Ilbo reports that despite international sanctions, Kim Jong Il still manages to import ample quantities of rice and infant formula add “between $200 and $300 million every year” to his personal slush fund: With the money, North Korea would be able to import between 400,000 to 600,000 tons of rice, which would be enough to cover half the country’s food shortage of 1 million tons of rice per year. What? Since when isn’t cognac food anymore? Isn’t it...

Categories Kim Jong Il/NK Economics/Sanctions
April 23, 2010

Absolute Must-See: Video of Onsung Market, Before and After The Great Confiscation

I knew Onsung was a shit hole, but wow. Just, wow. Watch it here — English subtitles and all — and read about it in the New York Times. Don’t miss the corrupt officials shaking down the merchants, or the South Korean Red Cross aid for sale. We’ve seen other video showing American aid being sold, too, as well as previous reports of South Korean food aid being confiscated and diverted for military use. Could individual corrupt officials be responsible...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
April 20, 2010

Andrei Lankov on Ajumma Power

Picking up the theme of North Korea’s indefatigable ajummas, Andrei Lankov writes in the Wall Street Journal: A joke making the rounds in Pyongyang goes: “What do a husband and a pet dog have in common?” Answer: “Neither works nor earns money, but both are cute, stay at home and can scare away burglars.” I’ve often thought that one of the most destructive consequences of socialism is the destruction it wreaks on families. That is especially so in Korean society,...

Categories Korean Society/NK Economics
April 14, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch

The Wall Street Journal has two must-read op-eds on the decline of North Korea’s capacity to control the flow of food, money, and information within its territory. Marcus Noland, sounding very much like Kushibo, sees a “tipping point” after The Great Confiscation: Once broken, the economy may prove difficult to repair. Prices for goods such as rice, corn and the dollar rose 6,000% or more after the reform. And while prices have come down from their peak as the government...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics/Subversion
April 10, 2010

Of Fools and Their Money, Pt. 3: Thoughts on the End of Kumgang

North Korea has announced that it will make good on its threat to confiscate the South Korean property at the Kumgang tourist project. In a statement on Thursday, the North’s Guidance Bureau for Comprehensive Development of Scenic Spots, which is in charge of the tourism, said it is seizing a meeting hall for separated families built by the South Korean government, and a cultural hall, a hot spring spa, and a duty-free shop owned by the Korea Tourism Organization, as...

Categories NK Economics/Sunshine
April 5, 2010

North Korea Reaffirms Plans to Close Markets

If you’ve read a spate of recent reports and op-eds in places like the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal recently, you might have acquired the impression that The Great Confiscation was a fiasco that caused panic, chaos, and an unprecedented swelling of discontent. The North Korean government wants you to know that all of this is all a brigandish, flunkeyist fabrication: ”In the early days immediately after the currency change, market prices were not fixed, so markets were...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
April 5, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch

Writing in Foreign Policy, Marcus Noland writes about discontent and dissent in North Korea, and the impact of The Great Confiscation as a catalyst for it. The surveys’ results suggest that the regime’s discomfort might be well founded. Countries such as North Korea, where people routinely hide their true opinions, are prone to sudden, explosive political mobilizations like the ones that swept Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1980s. Those mobilizations happen when nascent expressions of discontent cascade —...

Categories NK Economics/Propaganda/Regime Change/Subversion
March 24, 2010

Fear and Loathing Across the Tumen, Part 2

Two new reports today describe the accelerating outing of dissent in North Korea. The first, from the Washington Post’s Blaine Harden, cites this new study by Marcus Noland based on surveys of refugees from 2008, this study by the International Crisis Group, which I’d previously blogged, and more recent reports since The Great Confiscation: There is mounting evidence that Kim Jong Il is losing the propaganda war inside North Korea, with more than half the population now listening to foreign...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
March 23, 2010

Fear and Loathing Across the Tumen, Part 1

The Times of London sent correspondent Jane Macartney to China’s border with North Korea and found that the refugees there are reporting a rapidly deteriorating food situation, deepening discontent with the regime, and more willingness than ever to express that discontent openly. The editors of the Times are shocked enough by the report to write these cogent words in an editorial: Of all the atrocities of modern history, famine is the least commemorated. It is an agonising mass death sentence...

Categories NK Economics/Refugees/Resistance
March 22, 2010

This Kumgang Nonsense, Explained

What is the meaning of North Korea’s sudden spate of demands that South Korea resume tours at Mt. Kumgang, which ended with the 2008 killing of one of the tourists? Most likely, that the sanctions are working, that China’s bailout isn’t expected to arrive in time, and that Kim Jong Il needs the money. Even for North Korea, this sounds a bit desperate: Accusing the south Korean puppet clique of making outcry, asserting the “incident of a tourist in Mt....

Categories NK Economics/North-South/Sunshine
March 19, 2010

North Korea Shoots Great Confiscation Scapegoat

I suppose this at least implicitly acknowledges that The Great Confiscation didn’t quite earn “widespread support” from “[a]n absolute majority of workers from laborers, farmers and office workers” after all: North Korea has executed a ruling party official blamed for a botched currency reform, in a desperate attempt to quell public unrest and stem negative impact on Pyongyang’s power succession, a news report said on Thursday. The execution by firing squad in Pyongyang last week of Pak Nam-ki, Labour Party...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology/NK Economics
March 15, 2010

Meet Roh Jeong-Ho: Ex-Millionaire, Symbol of a Failed Policy, and Asshole

Please allow me to introduce Roh Jeong-Ho, ex-millionaire, former role model for the Sunshine Policy, and asshole. How does one achieve such distinction in life? In Roh’s case, this way: Roh was once touted by the South Korean media as one of the young leaders in his early 30s who were expected to lead the post-unification era when he exported 44 km of barbed-wire fences to Rajin-Sonbong in 1995. North Korea had asked Roh to supply the fences to isolate...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics/Sunshine
March 12, 2010

North Korea Sanctions Itself

Reuters, citing a study by the Korea Development Institute (KDI), reports that “North Korea’s international trade dropped last year for the first time in more than a decade.” The report suggests that this was mostly the consequence of sanctions, but a closer look at the evidence it was The Great Confiscation that really brought trade across the Chinese border to a standstill by paralyzing the economy, markets, and trade, and banning the use of foreign currency in the final months...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
March 3, 2010

Great Confiscation Updates: So Much for That “Collective Spirit”

So much for that “collective spirit” Christine Ahn is so fond of talking about: In January and February at neighborhood meetings, participants from many regions spoke out and threw objects at the chiefs who said the currency reform has been successful and that people should show devotion to the party. Since the currency reform, many people have become homeless; and for that, they took their frustrations out on the neighborhood chiefs who are the mouth-piece of the government. Such incidents...

Categories Anju Links/NK Economics
February 25, 2010

The Victory of the Ajummas

Shortly after North Korea announced The Great Confiscation came The Ajumma Rebellion, an event that may prove to be one of the most significant in North Korean history. The historical perspective comes into focus as I read this analysis at the Daily NK, not so much of why The Great Confiscation failed, but why the regime even tried something so clearly predisposed to fail. It concludes with this: Decades after the leader promised “boiled rice and beef soup” to everyone...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
February 23, 2010

Great Confiscation Updates

More proof that times have changed in North Korea: in the 1990’s, Kim Jong Il allowed perhaps millions to starve and did next to nothing about it. This year, the regime is ordering the urgent distribution of rice rations to prevent starvation in the most vulnerable areas. Well, it’s a modest step in the right direction that the regime is actually trying to prevent starvation, even if, as the Daily NK suggests, that it’s because the regime is afraid of...

Categories NK Economics
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 11, 2010

North Korean Premier Apologizes for Great Confiscation

If absolute power is never having to say you’re sorry, what could this possibly mean? On Friday, Premier Kim Yong Il apologized for the aftermath in a meeting with government officials and local village leaders, the mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported, citing an unidentified source in North Korea. “Regarding the currency reform, I sincerely apologize as we pushed ahead with it without a sufficient preparation so that it caused a big pain to the people,” Kim read a statement during...

Categories Kremlinology/NK Economics/Resistance