Search Results for: kaesong

June 3, 2009

Kaesong Death Watch: Fleeing for the Exits

South Korean companies are packing up their equipment and leaving Kaesong while they still can. Even by the Hanky’s low standards, this is an exceptionally dishonest bit of spin.  The reporter tries to place the blame for the exodus on President Lee for joining the PSI, while making only cryptic references to the events that brought that decision about.  But it’s the glaring omissions that are the most striking:  the Hanky makes no mention at all of North Korea blocking...

Categories Media Criticism/NK Economics/Sunshine
May 27, 2009

S. Korea Studies Plans to Protect Its Citizens in Kaesong

HOW ABOUT, ‘STAY OUT OF KAESONG?’: A senior South Korean government official said when North Korea banned South Korean traffic to the industrial park late last year, the government began working out measures in preparation for the possibility of the industrial park’s closure. “Since last Friday when the North declared all incumbent regulations and contracts regarding the Kaesong Industrial Complex null and void, we’ve been mapping out concrete measures in preparation for various scenarios concerning the North’s possible close-down of...

Categories Sunshine
May 17, 2009

Kaesong: Dead or Just Pining?

[Updated below] The headline is pretty much what I’d predicted three years ago: “North Korea announces nullification of all ‘Kaesong agreements,’” and that’s from the Hanky: North Korea’s military leadership has made statements hinting they would demand a withdrawal of businesses from Kaesong, but this is the first time the Bureau has brought up the possibility. In this notification, North Korea said, “We announce the nullification of all Kaesong Industrial Complex agreements made between the two Koreas which gave preference...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics/Sunshine
April 28, 2009

Kaesong Death Watch

There’s enough bile circulating in my veins as it is, so it’s a burden lifted to read reports like this, via G.I. Korea, and have the confidence that the behavior will be terminated and deterred in due course. These days, Kaesong isn’t shipping much merchandise, but a lot of karma is about to arrive on some manufacturers’ loading docks. Exhibit A: Amid North Korean demands to increase “wages” for Kaesong workers — the workers themselves probably see little or any...

Categories NK Economics/Sunshine
April 1, 2009

South Korean Man Still Held at Kaesong

That South Korean man arrested at Kaesong continues to be held incommunicado. It’s staggering that South Korea would invest so much economic and political capital on something as poorly thought through as Kaesong. I didn’t have time to find an estimated total cost for the entire Kaesong fiasco, but this UPI report puts the cost of Kaesong’s recent expansion alone at $2.5 billion, just a small portion of more than $11 billion committed by Roh Moo Hyun to upgrade North...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics
March 16, 2009

Kaesong Managers Become Hostages, OFK Blogger Fails to Suppress Schadenfreude

[Update: North Korea lets them out. It’s not clear whether the border is fully reopened, but either way, no sane foreign business would invest in Kaesong now. And just in case all of this wasn’t strange enough, South Korean “academics” see North Korea cutting off one of its own main sources of hard cash and conclude that it’s South Korea that’s in a bind. Hey! I had just been thinking that what an economically strapped economy really needs most is...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics
December 15, 2008

Kaesong Worker Defects

So, I was wondering, just how popular is the Workers’ Paradise among its hand-picked proletariat, that is, those able to pass the best family history, background, and loyalty screening the government of North Korea can manage? Not very, evidently: A North Korean defector who escaped from an inter-Korean industrial complex in the border city of Kaesong where she was employed remains in a third country, a South Korean activist here said Wednesday. The 27-year-old woman, whose identity was withheld for...

Categories Deprogramming/NK Economics
December 9, 2008

S. Korean Firms to Demand Compensation for Kaesong Losses

Why do I do this every day, you ask? (Again with those straw-man questions I plant in your heads.) I do it because of stories like this. South Korean firms that lost big on the Kaesong bubble are demanding compensation from, or possibly suing, the government. So would the government in the caption — where it says “defendant” — be the government that actually shut down their operations in breach of all of the written understandings and for no legally...

Categories Uncategorized
December 1, 2008

N. Korea Expels Half of the South Koreans from Kaesong.

North Korea has allowed 880 South Korean people to stay in the inter-Korean industrial complex in the border city of Kaesong, far less than expected by the South, South Korea’s Unification Ministry spokesman said Monday. North Korea verbally informed South Korea of its decision Sunday night, Kim Ho Nyoun told a press briefing. [Kyodo] You say that like it’s a bad thing. Updates: The better media reporting on this subject probes two questions: (a) how will this affect Kaesong and...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics
November 16, 2008

Arbeit Macht Nichts: The End of Kaesong?

The second of the twin pillars of the Sunshine Experiment, the Kaesong Industrial Project, may have gone to join the Kumgang Tourist Project on the ash heap of history this week with North Korea’s closure of the border between North and South.  With that closure, South Koreans inside the North Korean enclave have been served with their eviction notices.  The North Korean directive may yet prove to be a bluff, but it will still mean the end of Kaesong as...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics
August 7, 2008

North Korea Rejected Lefkowitz Visit to Kaesong; We Had to Hear It from the South Koreans

A few weeks ago, after Jay Lefkowitz, the Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, cancelled a visit to Kaesong, I speculated that the North Koreans felt free to just blow him off:  “One wonders whether the North Koreans, sensing how completely Lefkowitz has been marginalized in Washington, simply withdrew his permission to visit.”  And that turns about to be pretty much what happened: “We understand the North has refused to register the application by the special envoy,” South...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/NK Economics
February 4, 2008

Kaesong Workers Recoup Stolen Wages on the Black Market

With all the questions about how much pay  Kaesong workers actually collect, we’ve always  suspected that their earnings  must be  far  more than most of their North Korean neighbors.  For one thing, the workers are hand-picked loyalists; the regime  must want to keep them relatively content.   Yet no one really believed that the workers received the “official” wage of around $60 a month, after “voluntary” deductions and the bite of the inflated official exchange rate. I figured it was just...

Categories Human Trafficking/NK Economics
June 18, 2007

Lee Myung-Bak Proposes ‘Kaesong Archipelago’

Would you trust this man?  If you were one of those hoping that the next South  Korean election would be the end of our long international nightmare, you were mistaken: Former Seoul Mayor Lee Myung-bak, the front-running opposition presidential aspirant in December’s election, proposed Monday creating a “Manhattan-like” island near the border with North Korea and building an inter-Korean industrial park there to ease military tension. Dubbed “Na-deul,” which means a narrow waterway in Korean, the manmade island would be...

Categories Human Rights/NK Economics/Proliferation/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics/WMD
May 2, 2007

Anju Links for 2 May 2007: North Korea Denies Abducting Any S. Koreans, May Day in Kaesong, and North Koreans’ Growing Meth Problem

*   It has now been 18 days since North Korea violated all of  the denuclearization commitments to which it agreed last February.   I blame  Bill Richardson, who obviously must have said something tactless and belligerent while being led around the deck of the U.S.S. Pueblo.   It’s time for us to get serious about diplomacy and  offer some carrots.   How many of our soldiers’ lives is Catalina Island really worth?   How many times must the canonballs fly, Bill? *  ...

Categories Anju Links/Diplomacy/Drugs & N Korea/Geopolitics/Human Trafficking/Inside NK/Six-Party Talks
April 24, 2007

Kaesong, Kim Jong Il, and Killing the Goose

Update: South Korea may be reconsidering the expansion plans after all.The Kaesong Slave Labor Park may want to reconsider its expansion plans in light of the Daily NK’s new breakdown casting doubt on just how successful the existing venture really is. Of 23 businesses that were supposed to have started operations at Kaesong since 2005, 4 have abandoned their space reservations; 1 or 2 more are considering abandoning their reservations; 4 have placed their space reservations on hold; 6 or...

Categories Appeasement/Human Trafficking
February 5, 2007

Wobble Watch: Kaesong

In a one-hour meeting with Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung, U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow said that while it is unrealistic to recognize the goods made in the border city of Kaesong as South Korean, there is room left to negotiate within the proposed free trade agreement (FTA) between the two countries, Unification Ministry officials said. “Lee stressed that U.S. recognition of the goods produced in Kaesong as South Korean will contribute to bringing about a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula....

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Economics
January 11, 2007

Lefkowitz on Kaesong: ‘Material support for a rogue government, its nuclear ambitions, and its human rights atrocities.’

[Updates Below; and a big welcome to everyone coming in from Gateway Pundit.] Ambassador Jay Lefkowitz, the U.S. Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, has an excellent new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (thanks to a reader!) that will provoke an absolute Category 5 sh*tstorm between the United States and South Korea, and for the best of reasons. Without question, the State Department and the Administration have not always lived up the high ideals the Special Envoy...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Trafficking/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/WMD