Search Results for: kaesong

No, not really. It’s just the latest from socialist wingnut and former Dennis Kucinich groupie Christine Ahn. Remember her? The International Herald Tribune’s bio failed to note Ms. Ahn’s associations with the anti-American, pro-Pyongyang Korea Solidarity Committee. SAN FRANCISCO The Bush administration is drawing up plans to further tighten the noose around North Korea by barring financial firms investing in Pyongyang from conducting business in the United States. Washington is moving fast to capitalize on Pyongyang’s alleged counterfeit dealings, but...

A recent study has shown that the US has been gaining favor in the hearts of Korean university students over the last 3 years; while feelings about China have chilled somewhat. The study was done by a Japanese group, although I’m not sure just how that fact alters the context (motive to depress the anti-Korean backlash in Japan?). The study was done at five universities and surveyed just under 900 students. Only one, Yonsei, appears to have been a major...

It’s really no cause for alarm. Every Korean election year, the political parties’ festering grudges and tribal feuds, catalyzed by ambition, render the entire Korean political party system unstable. Parties shatter into mercurial gobs, collide, and reform. It has certain advantages over our system, in which party positions tend to ossify for decades. In Korea, the instability of parties means more cutthroat competition in the marketplace of ideas. Guess whose throat is next. The last thing a lame duck needs...

I know that being discredited must be par for the course for Cheong Woon Sik, but what’s your reaction to the fact that both the South Korean NIS and the government of China agree that the North Koreans are counterfeiting U.S. currency? I presume Japan agrees as well; both Tokyo and Beijing support the U.S. position that North Korean counterfeiting is a separate issue from nuclear disarmament talks. Did you not get the memo, or does your faith require a...

Some interesting stats on South Korea’s protection payments to the North: Recently publicized material by the South Korean Unification Ministry revealed that a total of 340.6 billion won ($324.3 million) was spent on inter Korean cooperation projects from January until November this year, ranging from supporting the North Korean national soccer team to sending fertilizer aid to the North. Less than half of this amount was for fertilizer and rice. A total of 157.3 billion won was spent on fertilizer...

U.S. President George W. Bush had his first meeting with Jay Lefkowitz since the special envoy for human rights in North Korea was appointed in August, the White House said Wednesday. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said ahead of the meeting it would provide an opportunity for the president to talk about human rights in the North, one of Bush’s “priority policies. [Link.] Meanwhile, the White House named undocumented Ethiopian cab driver Teklemikal Haile Georgistu as the head of the...

It is now settled law that nothing good escapes the mouth of Chung Dong-Young, South Korea’s most consistent appeaser of Kim Jong Il (described here as the North’s Minister for Southern Affairs). On Monday, December 5th, Chung addressed the question of North Korea’s counterfeiting of U.S. currency, and had this to say: Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said Monday, “Non-nuclear complaints by the United States against North Korea should be solved by bilateral talks between the two parties. As the six-party...

In what has to be the most disappointing story about Korean politics I’ve seen all year, a new group that calls itself The New Right National Alliance has formed in Seoul. As you may have noted from previous posts, I had been looking forward to a realignment of political forces in Korea that might offer the voters something better than the choices the voters have now: Old Right, with its authoritarian history, authoritarian instincts that continue to this very day,...

I don’t mean “blind” in a perjorative way; I use the term to signify the studied opacity and manipulation that are so evident from visitor accounts to the country. This post, more than anything else, is about the difficulty of measuring economic and political trends in the North, and how the biases of the writer and those he speaks with can quickly lead from three small and different datasets to three wildly different conclusions. The course of North Korean society,...

Of the three correspondents, Andrei Lankov, writing in the Korea Times, has the greatest depth of experience. Lankov focuses on the aspect of North Korea’s reforms–unstoppable if you believe Brooke and abortive if you believe Macintyre–that interests me most, the psychological impact on the North Korean people. Lankov finds that materially, things have changed not at all or gone backwards, but that psychologically, North Koreans are much more open than in the past. He begins near his alma mater, Kim...

I am ready to pronounce a partial reversal of my view on North Korea’s Arirang Festival. For the little trifle that the North Korean regime hoped to earn from curious westerners or sympathetic South Koreans, they certainly did not expect to turn a profit. The real motives were domestic consumption and foreign propaganda–to show the world that North Korea is unified, stable, happy, and dangerous to any foe. If that was the motive, the resulting coverage fell dramatically short of...

I am ready to pronounce a partial reversal of my view on North Korea’s Arirang Festival. For the little trifle that the North Korean regime hoped to earn from curious westerners or sympathetic South Koreans, they certainly did not expect to turn a profit. The real motives were domestic consumption and foreign propaganda–to show the world that North Korea is unified, stable, happy, and dangerous to any foe. If that was the motive, the resulting coverage fell dramatically short of...

OFK friend Don Kirk has a new piece in the Christian Science Monitor, in which he reports on his latest visit to the North, beginning with a non-visit to the Kaesong Industrial Complex: The tour bus stops on a bridge amid fallow fields, and the North Korean guide points to a cluster of small factories nearly a mile away. “That’s the Kaesong industrial zone,” says Choe Kyong Jin, an official in this historic city several miles north of the line...

Kaesong Update: The U.S. is keeping duties on Korean stainless steel cookware, but dropping them for Taiwan. I wonder why.