Search Results for: sunshine lite

February 24, 2016

Yonhap: Chinese company stops buying North Korean coal

In what could be the latest financial hit to Pyongyang, Yonhap reports that an important Chinese customer has stopped buying coal from North Korea: A Chinese company in the northeastern border city of Dandong has been ordered by China’s commerce ministry to halt its coal trade with North Korea starting next month, according to a state-run Chinese newspaper Wednesday. Citing an unnamed Chinese businessman who operates a coal business with North Korea, the state-run Global Times newspaper said the order...

Categories China/NK Economics
February 15, 2016

The rebirth of an alliance: The U.S., South Korea & Japan are finally getting North Korea policy right

As you and I both know, I spend a lot of keystrokes here kvetching about the lax enforcement of sanctions against North Korea, but I’ve also written that diplomacy is essential to making sanctions work. Now, for the first time I can recall, the U.S., South Korea, and Japan are coordinating their policies as allies should. They’ve coordinated their defense responses to the North’s missile test, their calls for tougher U.N. sanctions, their strategies to strengthen sanctions enforcement, and their recruitment of new...

Categories Diplomacy/Kaesong/Sanctions/Sunshine
February 5, 2016

Obama’s weakness and Xi Jinping’s bullying are about to start a nuclear arms race in Asia

Next Wednesday, the full Senate will vote on, and almost certainly pass, the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, an almost unprecedented bipartisan vote of no confidence against a sitting president’s foreign policy. If the bill becomes law, it will legislate the biggest shift in our North Korea policy in more than two decades. Meanwhile, our Asian allies are holding another, quieter vote of no confidence on our North Korea policy. During the power vacuum of the Obama years,...

Categories Proliferation/WMD
October 21, 2015

Ban Ki-Moon on N. Korea: U.N. must “hold perpetrators of crimes accountable” (updated)

The U.S., the EU, South Korea, and other “like-minded” governments are renewing their push for a U.N. Security Council resolution to refer “the highest official responsible” for Pyongyang’s crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court. South Korea, the U.S., Britain and Japan have launched fresh efforts to adopt a similar resolution this year, the high-level source at the U.N. told Yonhap News Agency on condition of anonymity, adding the countries have been drafting a resolution since last weekend. The new...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Human Rights/Sanctions
October 13, 2015

The more North Korea trades, the more it reforms, right? Wrong.

Yesterday, I questioned the premises of economic engagement with Pyongyang — that Pyongyang is socialist, that trade is capitalism, that capitalism inexorably erodes socialism, and that capitalism (least of all, state capitalism) is inherently liberal and peaceful. I argued that Pyongyang adopted state capitalism decades ago, and that it has grown steadily more menacing and repressive ever since. It feigns socialism to feed our false hopes of reform and arguments against sanctions, to tempt investors, to recruit apologists who embrace its socialist pretenses, and to justify the...

Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Censorship/Class Warfare/Engagement
October 12, 2015

The Myth of North Korean Socialism: How Pyongyang’s Profiteers Fooled the World

Over this long weekend, I’ve been reading Brian R. Myers’s new book, “North Korea’s Juche Myth,” a copy of which Prof. Myers was kind enough to send. Myers argues that juche, that cryptic ideology reporters often mention but never explain, is a sham ideology that is both overblown and seldom understood, by foreigners as well as North Koreans. Very roughly translated, juche means that man must be the master of his own destiny (in contrast to North Korea’s reality, in...

Categories Class Warfare/Engagement/Propaganda/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy
October 7, 2015

Sens. Gardner, Rubio & Risch to introduce new North Korea sanctions bill (updated)

The new bill was revealed in this column by Josh Rogin, and includes a link to the full text. The bill, which still has no number, will be the Senate’s second version of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, following the introduction by Senators Menendez and Graham of S. 1747 in July. Both bills follow the lead of Ed Royce and Elliot Engel, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who introduced H.R. 757 in January. H.R. 757,...

Categories Anju Links/Sanctions
June 8, 2015

Guerrilla Engagement: A strategy for regime replacement and reconstruction in North Korea

~ 1 ~ One day, either this President or the next one will awaken to the realization that the regime in Pyongyang is collapsing, and that he has just inherited the costliest, messiest, and riskiest nation-building project since the Marshall Plan. The collapse of North Korea will present South Korea – and by extension, its principal treaty ally, the United States – with a nation-building challenge unlike any in recent history. After all, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria all had some...

Categories Capitalism/Reconstruction/Regime Change/Resistance/Subversion
December 23, 2014

White House considers sanctions, psyops, and cyber responses to N. Korea

Because I’ve begun to develop a certain sense of when interesting events are about to get much more interesting, yesterday morning, I decided to check the web site of KCNA, North Korea’s official “news” service. The site did not load, but it has always been slow to load. Then, news sites began to report that North Korea’s internet access had gone down, and that the White House wasn’t denying that it had a hand in this. This morning, kcna.kp loaded...

Categories Cyberwar/Propaganda/Sanctions/Subversion
November 20, 2014

China’s bridge to nowhere?

The AP’s Pyongyang Bureau Chief reports that as China completes a $350 million bridge across the Yalu River from Dandong to Sinuiju, and weeks after its announced opening date, the North Korean side is largely an unfinished abutment. Now, it is beginning to look like Beijing has built a bridge to nowhere. An Associated Press Television News crew in September saw nothing but a dirt ramp at the North Korean end of the bridge, surrounded by open fields. No immigration or customs...

Categories Capitalism/China & Korea
September 3, 2014

What if the capitalist North Korea is just as bad as the communist North Korea?

There are many reasons why the Sunshine Policy failed, most of them rooted in the character of the men who rule in Pyongyang, and in the character of the men in Seoul who conceived and executed it. And in that conception, the flaw that was obvious to some of us from the very beginning was that Sunshine — and its surviving derivatives — invested its monotheistic faith in economic reform, yet in practice (and to a large extent, in theory,...

Categories Capitalism/Engagement/NK Economics/Sunshine
February 24, 2014

Open Sources, February 24, 2014

~  1  ~ THE NORTH KOREAN GOVERNMENT has finally gotten around to dismissing the U.N. Commission of Inquiry Report with some classic KCNA prose that (sadly) fails to deploy either “madcap” or “brigandish” for this special occasion: The Commission was set up highhandedly at the meeting of the Council last year by the U.S. and its satellite forces out of inveterate repugnance towards the DPRK. The DPRK, therefore, has never recognized its existence as it is no more than a...

Categories Anju Links
February 12, 2014

Open Sources, February 12, 2014

~  1  ~ HERE COMES THE PARK DOCTRINE: The government plans to announce a set of guidelines on the Park Geun-hye administration’s national security policies next month to better publicize her handling of national security issues, an official said Tuesday. [….] He said the guidelines may also delve into Park’s global push for the unification of South and North Koreas and lay out in details each policy step of Park’s so-called Korea Peninsula Trust Process, aimed at denuclearizing North Korea....

Categories Anju Links
February 6, 2014

In South Korea, a political realignment

When President Park speaks of reunification as a “jackpot,” she is seizing an issue that the left had “owned” for at least a dozen years. Ten years ago, the left could draw crowds of candle-carrying thirty-somethings to swoon about reunification, at least in the abstract. The dream was qualified, complicated, and hopelessly unrealistic, but it intoxicated them. The DMZ would have become a “peace park,”* the disputed waters of the Yellow Sea would have become a “peace zone,” and both...

Categories Censorship/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
February 5, 2014

Can Park Geun-Hye prepare Korea, and the world, for reunification?

Yesterday, Yonhap reported that an unusual billboard had appeared in Times Square in New York: “Korean Unification would be an immeasurable BONANZA for any nations with interests in the Korean Peninsula.” To most of the Americans who read it, the billboard will seem odd, but Korea-watchers will recall when Korean-Americans took out similar ads in the United States, about things that matter much less. Beneath the paywall, we learn that “[t]he ad was set up by Han Tae-gyuk, a 66-year-old Korean-American man, at his own expense,”...

Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Reconstruction/Regime Change/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea
January 30, 2014

An unlikely convergence of views

What a difference the last six weeks have made. Since the December purge of Jang Song Thaek, the consensus about North Korea’s ruler has moved from “undecided” to “negative.” Maybe I should have said “strongly negative.” It’s rare that I make this observation, but for once, I believe that this can be said of the prevailing views in all five of the cities where it matters most — in Beijing, Washington, Seoul, Pyongyang, and Chongjin. In each case, this is...

Categories Kim Jong Un
August 23, 2013

Open Sources, Aug. 23, 2013

NOW THAT EVERYONE HAS SUDDENLY DISCOVERED THAT North Korea has a meth problem, I thought I’d link this five-year-old post and let you read (or reread) what OFK readers read way back when. (There’s plenty more where that came from if you put “meth” or “heroin” in the search window.) This is a perfect example of why we need sources like the Daily NK so badly.  They are the first harbingers of emerging social, economic, and political trends that will have important...

Categories Anju Links
February 5, 2013

Mansourov praises Kim Jong Un’s “surprisingly good” domestic policies, sees “hope in the air.”

Writing at 38 North, the last fantasyland of Sunshine’s remaining advocates, Alexandre Mansourov argues that “Kim Jong Un’s domestic policy record” so far has been “surprisingly good.” But, by the time 2012 came to a close, one could detect hope in the air, and new positive expectations about the future. There was also plenty of public thirst for new information and foreign experiences, and an especially surprising amount of joy and enthusiasm on the streets of Pyongyang, now illuminated by jumbotrons,...

Categories Fiskings