Search Results for: border crackdown

September 19, 2017

Organized crime enters North Korea’s markets

From the perspective of North Korea’s poor, the era of Kim Jong-un has been a time of increasing state control over information and borders, but also a time when the state has taken a relatively (by North Korean standards, anyway) laissez-faire approach to market trade. There are exceptions, of course, including crackdowns on South Korean imports and on the Chinese mobile phones that could have made cross-border trade so much more efficient, but the general trend is for State Security Department...

Categories Capitalism
June 7, 2017

North Korean man stabs, nearly kills Ministry of State Security officer

The Daily NK is reporting another case of a North Korean citizen attacking and nearly killing an officer of the dreaded Ministry of State Security (MSS), the agency that runs most of North Korea’s political prison camps, possibly over official corruption. It has been reported that an [sic] Ministry of State Security agent working as a surveillance patrol officer at the No. 10 guard post in Hoeryong City, North Hamgyong Province, was stabbed by a knife-wielding assailant while on duty....

Categories Resistance
January 9, 2017

Is this what a North Korean malaise speech looks like?

Readers know that I’ve been critical of those who cherry-pick words out of North Korean dictators’ rambling New Year speeches to find evidence to support their arguments. Having made the sacrifice of actually reading this one (full text below the jump), I would not characterize it as profoundly different from the same old crap North Korean dictators have told their subjects year after year. No, it was not quite a North Korean “malaise speech,” but it was filled with clear...

Categories Kim Jong Un
November 22, 2016

China breaks N. Korea sanctions it says won’t work because it’s afraid they’ll work

In yesterday’s post, I linked to reports suggesting that China’s failure to agree on the terms of a new U.N. sanctions resolution responding to North Korea’s latest nuclear test may be motivated by a desire to wait out the end of President Obama’s administration. This theory would only make sense if China figures it can get better terms from President Trump next year, but my post pointed to evidence of the opposite of this — that what we know so...

Categories China/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Politics
November 4, 2016

China’s real-name cell phone registration rules could further isolate North Koreans

North Koreans’ most important link to the outside world, signals from Chinese cell phone networks that reach over the border inside North Korea, may soon be cut off. China is starting to enforce real-name registration requirements designed to crack down on scams and harassment, and North Koreans could be hardest hit. North Koreans with relatives outside the country depend on Chinese mobile phone networks to communicate internationally, as the state’s networks are limited to calls made within the country. China’s...

Categories Subversion
November 3, 2016

The new North Korea engagement is about life after Kim Jong-un

By now, most sensible people have discarded the faddish illusions of 2012 that Kim Jong-un would be the Swiss-educated reformer they’ve been waiting for. Mainstream opinion is migrating to the view that the world would be a safer and happier place without Kim Jong-un, although one seldom hears these sentiments developed as concrete ideas. The practical obstacles to achieving them are obvious. How can we influence change in the world’s most isolated and terrorized society? How would our ally (and...

Categories Propaganda/Regime Change/Subversion
October 6, 2016

How the next President can confront the North Korean threat

Just over two years ago, I wrote about the conflict between Americans’ apparent impulse for a more passive foreign policy and their strong disapproval of what that policy looks like in practice. In other words, Americans’ views on foreign policy are seldom as simplistic as they seem to be. Strong majorities favored going into Iraq and Afghanistan, strong majorities wanted out of both by 2008, and by 2016, strong majorities disfavor the policies of those who would allow them to...

Categories Geopolitics
October 3, 2016

H.R. 6281, banning N. Korea from SWIFT, would be a powerful sanctions upgrade

Via Yonhap, we learned last week that Rep. Matt Salmon (R, Ariz.), the Chairman of the House Asia-Pacific Subcommittee, has introduced a bill to cut North Korea off from the “specialized financial messaging services” that banks use to send wire transfer orders around the world. The industry leader for financial messaging is SWIFT, whose headquarters is in Brussels, but which also has operations in Geneva and Manassas, Virginia. If you don’t know what SWIFT does and why it matters, I’ll...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law
September 26, 2016

China just sent 30 N. Koreans back to a slow death in Kim Jong-un’s gulag

While the world is rightly focused on China’s (non-)compliance with a series of U.N. sanctions resolutions it voted for, the world must not forget that China is also in flagrant violation of the Refugee Convention when it sends people fleeing persecution back to North Korea, without affording them any opportunity to claim asylum or meet with representatives of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. And after all these years, China certainly knows damn well what happens to the men, women,...

Categories Refugees
August 23, 2016

Amid surge in elite defections, China raises bounties on North Korean refugees

The State Department, which refuses to re-designate North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism despite all of the recent and well-documented cases of Pyongyang sending its agents to kidnap and kill refugees, emigres, and activists — and amid reports that it is sending more hit-men now — is calling on governments around the world to protect North Korean refugees. That’s good, I suppose. “We urge all countries to cooperate in the protection of North Korean refugees and asylum seekers within...

Categories Defectors/Refugees
August 10, 2016

Are Kim Jong-un’s apologists in U.N. aid agencies doing North Koreans more harm than good?

With a government in control, it is impossible to reach those who are powerless without paying the powerful, and paying the President and the government will make them less interested in listening to their people. Instead of having to raise money through taxation and deliver services in return, they can instead use their people to extract money from donors. They can enrich themselves by keeping their population poor; such aid is an instrument of inequality. – Nobel Prize winning economist...

Categories Famine & Food Aid
August 9, 2016

North Korean NCO kills wife, daughter of his company commander (updated)

Via the Daily NK and Yonhap, we have yet another report of fratricidal violence, corruption, and indiscipline among North Korea’s border guards, except this time, the fratricidal intent was redirected at the mother and daughter of an army officer. The incident occurred at the end of July in the Kanggu District of Hyesan City, where the sergeant major’s unit – the 25th Border Security Brigade – was stationed, a source from Ryanggang Province told Daily NK on August 7. “In...

Categories Border Control/NK Military
July 12, 2016

Prisoners of the People: N. Korea’s guerrilla society has political implications (updated)

Over the last year, I’ve become convinced that if technology can break the electronic barriers between North Korea and the Outer Earth, it would be possible to keep the broken promises of the Sunshine Policy by bypassing Pyongyang and engaging directly with the North Korean people. Governments, churches, and NGOs could harness markets, smuggling networks, and private agriculture to help North Koreans feed the hungry, heal the sick, share information and ideas, begin to rebuild their broken civil society, and...

Categories Capitalism/Health & Disease/Resistance/Subversion
June 14, 2016

North Koreans find leaks in Kim Jong-un’s information blockade

Until 2011, the erosion of North Korea’s border control and the infiltration of foreign ideas may have been the only hopeful trends in a country where just about all of the news is bad. When Kim Jong-un came to power, however, he launched an all–out effort to seal North Korea’s leaky border with China. Most of the evidence tells us that that effort has had considerable success. It cut the flow of refugees from North to South Korea in half, and (with...

Categories Border Control/Subversion
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...

Categories Capitalism/Class Warfare/Resistance
April 4, 2016

North Korea: Let the (information) war begin (updated).

It’s still much too early to say that the new campaign to cut off the hard currency that sustains His Corpulency’s misrule will result in either behavior modification or the termination of that misrule, but we continue to see signs that are consistent with Pyongyang feeling the pressure from sanctions. One of these is its exceptional belligerency of late — exceptional even by North Korean standards. Not a week goes by without news of North Korea violating U.N. sanctions by...

Categories Propaganda/Subversion
March 23, 2016

North Korean diplomats behaving badly

If you’re a North Korean diplomat, a good general rule is that all publicity is bad publicity. Over the last two weeks, North Koreans, most of them diplomats or former diplomats, have attracted much publicity of the kind they couldn’t have wanted. The Chinese government reports that “a North Korean consular official” killed two Chinese citizens while driving home drunk in Dandong last month. The North Korean diplomat was on his way home from an “event celebrating North Korea’s launch...

Categories Diplomacy/Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions
December 8, 2015

Inter-Korean phone calls can keep the promises of the Sunshine Policy

Twenty years of state-to-state engagement between North and South Korea have not lived up to Kim Dae-Jung’s promises. Pyongyang has taken Seoul’s money, nuked up, and periodically attacked South Korea for good measure. Rather than reforming, it has invested heavily in sealing its borders. Pyongyang sustains itself on foreign hard currency, even as it cuts off the flow of people, goods, and information to its underprivileged classes. It knows that if it fails to do this, members of those classes...

Categories Appeasement/Border Control/Capitalism/Engagement/Refugees/Sunshine