Search Results for: "Great Confiscation"

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 18, 2010

18 March 2010

A few days ago, I mentioned that North Korea was raising the rent at foreign embassies. I wondered at the time whether that would violate the Vienna Convention, but I don’t see how this comports with Articles 31 and 35: North Korea is also cracking down on the flow of information within foreign missions and agencies. The North rejected a request by a UN agency to use the Internet to send documents to UN headquarters. When diplomats make international phone...

Categories Anju Links
March 16, 2010

North Korea, Human Rights, and Diplomacy: When Hell Freezes Over

A series of bleak new reports shows that after more than a decade of attempts by the United States and South Korea to liberalize North Korea though aid and engagement, life is as cheap as ever between the Yalu and the Imjin. The system is less closed than it once was, although this is mostly the result of the fraying of the regime’s control over its borders, economy, and the flow of information. Yet these changes have occurred in defiance...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights
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 6, 2010

6 March 2010

So I wasn’t able to make it to Korus House to see the Venerable Pomnyun speak, but the Hankroyeh, of all places, cites him as saying that two thousand people have starved to death in North Korea since The Great Confiscation. I’m tempted to fall back on ordinarily reliable maxim that everything the Hanky publishes is false just because it’s published in the Hanky, but in this case, it’s slightly more complicated than that. First, it’s likely that that many...

Categories Anju Links
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 22, 2010

Kremlinology Updates

Will the failure of The Great Confiscation set back Kim Jong-Eun’s “succession?”___________________ Kim Jong Il’s sister, Kim Kyong-Hui, is the reported beneficiary of a power shift in North Korea. That makes sense from a certain logical perspective: the regime needs a “bridge figure” to maintain the magic of Kim Il Sung’s dynastic bloodline, and Kim Jong-Eun just isn’t looking very ready to be that figure.___________________ But behind the scenes, my guess is that Jang Song Thaek will end up in...

Categories Kremlinology
February 18, 2010

17 February 2010

Two must-read articles in Foreign Policy by my friend Professor Sung Yoon Lee, on the topics of Kim Jong Il’s mortality and how to manage North Korea’s reconstruction. I don’t agree with all of the ideas, but they’re well worth reading. I wish I had time to analyze them in more depth, but I haven’t had time to so much as skim them myself yet.____________________________________ Been meaning to link this one for a few days — Kushibo notes that President...

Categories Anju Links
February 17, 2010

“They are all bastards, and Kim Jong-Il should die soon.”

Via Open News, we learn that mandatory adulation on Kim Jong Il’s birthday isn’t quite unanimous: Based on the interviews from four regions of North Korea- North Hamkyung Province, Yanggang Province, South PyongAn Province, and Nampo city- between February 2 and 4, North Koreans are expressing their discontentment about Kim Jong-Il and his son Kim Jong-Eun. The expression of discontentment differs from region to region, however. Citizens near the border do not hesitate to express their discontentment, while citizens in...

Categories Resistance
February 16, 2010

Kim Jong Il Death Watch: Birthday Edition

The AP’s newest report on Kim Jong Il’s health appears to add some confirmation to what Open Radio has reported recently — that Kim Jong Il’s is going through kidneys like Kennedys go through livers: Depressed and chronically ill, Kim relies on rare, costly and sometimes outlawed remedies such as rhino’s horn and the bile of bear gall bladder, one South Korean official told The Associated Press. Another intelligence expert said North Koreans have gone twice to Beijing since 2008...

Categories Kim Jong Il
February 16, 2010

China Will Give Kim Jong Il $10 Billion, Violating the Spirit and Letter of U.N. Security Council Resolutions It Voted For

[Update: More here, at the Daily NK] Consistent with reports I’d linked previously, China is now offering a financially beleaguered Kim Jong Il a massive bailout, in obvious retaliation for America’s assistance in helping Taiwan to defend itself against the Chicom missiles aimed at its cities, and likely also as a way to bail Kim Jong Il out after the self-inflicted catastrophe of The Great Confiscation. China’s decision factors in the assumption that America lacks the spine to respond by...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Sanctions
February 12, 2010

Alejandro Cao de Benós Interview – Part 3

This week, Cao informs us how he maintained his porcine figure even as he watched North Koreans starve to death all around him, and explains that The Great Confiscation was designed to foil widespread foreign counterfeiting of the North Korean won, for which there would seem to be as much incentive as inventing imitation tofu. Cao also says that the food situation in North Korea these days is just peachy, which is rather remarkable statement, given that not even Kim...

Categories Interviews/Useful Idiocy
February 10, 2010

North Korean Harvest Output Declines Again

Reports of short harvests have been perennial in North Korea since 1993, but the worst of the famine probably ended in 2000. Some credit the end of the famine to international food aid, but North Korea’s own restrictions on international food aid have kept most of it out since late 2005. That year, I predicted — wrongly — that the result would be another famine. Although the regime’s severe cutback on food aid certainly must have caused hardship for many...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
February 8, 2010

Will North Korea’s Failure to Control Markets Mean the End of the Regime?

Reuters has a long round-up on the failure of the Great Confiscation, with this being the bottom line: “The collapse of the market system brought about by the currency revaluation produced rare civil uprisings. But the violence appears to have been sporadic and should fade as long as the North allows market activity to return.” Marcus Noland, catching up on the latest reports for the BBC, wonders if the failure of the Great Confiscation has damaged Kim Jong-Eun’s succession prospects....

Categories NK Economics/Regime Change
February 3, 2010

We Demand a Sacrifice! North Korea Purges Economic Official

[Update: Kushibo notes that North Korea has started lifting market restrictions. Rice prices and exchange rates have begun to stabilize. The confiscation is done, but does this mean the regime is backing down? That would mean that change is irreversible, and that the regime has just surrendered much of its control over the economy. And just to thank Kushibo for re-posting his comment after I stupidly deleted it, I’ll recommend you read his post on the sacking of Pak Nam-Ki....

Categories NK Economics
February 2, 2010

Daily NK: Angry North Koreans Attacking, Killing Secret Police

The Daily NK is reporting on “an explosion in the number of casualties resulting from popular resentment” of the series of draconian economic diktats I call The Great Confiscation. These include the cancellation and reissue of the currency, which wiped out the savings of millions of people overnight; the ban on foreign currency; and the closure of markets — first in Pyongyang, and if rumors are accurate, in Chongjin and Hamhung this spring. Via Curtis, we have North Korean confirmation...

Categories Resistance
January 30, 2010

Brian Myers Will Do Book Event in D.C.

I may have to find the time to attend this: Brian Myers is coming to The Wilson Center to discuss his new book. I’m going to withhold judgment until I read it. Myers has written much great work about North Korea, the state’s wierd pathology, and the problems with viewing it as merely a Stalinist state, but the thing is, the Great Confiscation looks awfully Stalinist to me, and I’m not yet persuaded why North Korea can’t be both racist...

Categories Books & Films/Racism
January 10, 2010

10 January 2010: Value of North Korean Won Continues to Plummet

MORE REPORTS OF DRASTIC FOOD PRICE INFLATION in the North: Prices probably also vary dramatically between regions. The series of diktats I’ve called The Great Confiscation has the potential to become the grimmest and most unnecessary humanitarian tragedy since the Arduous March, but unlike the 1990’s, North Koreans know more about life on Earth, and there are no more obedient subjects left outside Pyongyang who’d just die passively. The question isn’t whether North Koreans will resist; it’s is whether the...

Categories Anju Links