Search Results for: frag

December 11, 2009

Great Confiscation Updates

A DAY AFTER I excoriated the New York Times for its awful North Korea coverage (well, it is …) their Ideas blog links and recommends my New Ledger post about the Ajumma Rebellion. I prefer to think they’re trying to appease me. =================== NORTH KOREA SANCTIONS ITSELF: So, exactly how much of a North Korean economy is still left if you suddenly and arbitrarily confiscate private savings and eradicate private markets? South Korea’s Hankyoreh newspaper quoted sources in China’s border...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
December 9, 2009

More Violence Reported in N. Korea

The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Ramstad, picking up on reports of the Ajumma Rebellion and fresh reports from Open Radio, writes: New reports emerged Tuesday of protests and deadly violence in North Korea as the country’s authoritarian regime over the past week seized most of its citizens’ money and savings via a new-currency issue. Open Radio for North Korea, a Seoul-based shortwave radio station that broadcasts news to the North, said police killed two men in Pyongsong, a market center...

Categories Resistance
December 4, 2009

Great Confiscation Updates

Via the Daily NK and the North Korean-affiliated Chosun Sinbo, we can now see the new North Korean currency that will replace the hard-earned savings of millions of desperate people. Guess whose face is on the bill. You’ll be amazed. More here. Personally, I think the coins look like Japanese Yen. The Daily NK reports that the situation in North Korea continues to be chaotic and relays fragmentary reports of murders, suicides, and isolated outbreaks of dissent. The circulation of...

Categories Inside NK/NK Economics
October 30, 2009

Kim Jong Eun: On Again?

According to the Daily NK, the succession propaganda has resumed. In the long run, however, I agree with the assessment of North Korean defector Kim Kwang Jin, who spoke at the Brookings Institution this week: he doesn’t have the cred to pull it off: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – North Korean efforts to install one of ailing leader Kim Jong-il’s sons as a hereditary successor are likely to fail, a senior defector from the communist country said on Tuesday. Kim Kwang-jin, a...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology
September 6, 2009

Americans Do Not Admire China, and This Is Why

I was immediately suspicious yesterday when I heard that some ChiCom mouthpiece rag had claimed that the Chinese flag would fly on the South Lawn of the White House later this month. Here is China Daily’s report: The national flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will be hoisted at the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on September 20, media reported Sunday. Chinese associations in the United States [read: Commie puppet fifth column] had applied to...

Categories China/China & Korea/Refugees/Uncategorized
August 30, 2009

Daily NK Reports Uprisings in Labor Camps, Factory

Recently, the North Korean regime decided that its emaciated slaves hadn’t worked hard enough and declared a “150-day battle,” sending more of them to labor in the countryside and in the factories. The “battle,” however, appears to have taken a turn the authorities didn’t anticipate, according to an exile organization called North Korean Intellectuals Solidarity: It reported, “In a provincial labor-training camp located in Dongheung-district, Hamheung, South Hamkyung Province, a camp inspector, who was also a manager in the Department...

Categories Resistance/The Camps
August 27, 2009

Preventing Another “Three Kingdoms” Era

In The National Interest, Michael Green, the NSC’s primary Asia advisor during President Bush’s first term outlines a series of scary stages that he thinks are approaching rapidly as Kim Jong Il withers away and North Korea dies with him. The lines of fracture in such an opaque regime are extremely difficult to predict, of course, but most of Green’s analysis makes sense to me. First, Green says the current regime can’t be stabilized in the long term, and that...

Categories Kremlinology/Reconstruction/Regime Change
June 29, 2009

WaPo on China’s Trade with North Korea, and Its Rulers’ Darkest Fears

China, which the unmitigated chutzpah we’ve come to expect of it, reassures us that it is “deeply committed” to the enforcement of UNSCR 1874.  Today, Blaine Harden of the Washington Post reports the facts that shatter that mendacious claim.  In a new report, he provides fresh evidence of China’s economic colonization of North Korea, which fits neatly with its agenda of undermining U.N. sanctions against the North.  It’s a must-read, but here’s a money quote: As U.N. sanctions mount and...

Categories China/NK Economics/NK Military/Proliferation/WMD
June 20, 2009

Chosun Ilbo: Kim Jong Il’s Health Failing Rapidly

If he looks like Jagger in Vegas at 4 a.m., there might be a reason: The health of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is rapidly deteriorating, prompting the hasty decision to name his third son Jong-un as heir apparent, sources told the Chinese press. The Global News, a sister paper of the official People’s Daily, on Thursday quoted a foreign ambassador in Pyongyang as saying that Kim Jong-il’s fragile health made the situation in North Korea “very complicated.”  [….] A...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology
June 1, 2009

Updated: Summary of Ling-Lee family appearances on The Today Show (and CNN)

Updated: The family members of detained journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live tonight as part their efforts to further publicize the detention of the two reporters as their “trial” date in North Korea nears. While much of the show was a repeat of this morning’s interview on The Today Show in terms of public appeal from the family members, a few new revelations caught my attention: This was Euna Lee’s first assignment out of...

Categories Human Rights
May 26, 2009

And Now, the Fallout

Kim Jong Il has followed yesterday’s nuke test by firing two more short-range missiles, as a rudderless world tries to decide how to respond.  When you consider each of these developments, ask yourself whether Kim Jong Il could reasonably have anticipated that it would happen.  So far, everything I see happening fits within the range of Kim Jong Il’s calculation of “acceptable consequences.” FOR ONE THING, KIM JONG IL IS PROBABLY BETTING that John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi don’t possess...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Proliferation/WMD
May 21, 2009

Sunshine Death Watch

BUT WOULDN’T THAT BE NEEDLESSLY STRENUOUS?  South Korean conservatives call for their government to close down Kaesong before Kim Jong Il gets around to it.  Personally, I think things are going perfectly just as they are. THE GRAND NATIONALS ARE REALLY TWO PARTIES, to hear Andy Jackson describe Park Geun Hye’s efforts to keep her people out of President Lee’s government.  Fortunately for them, the left is even more fragmented and rudderless, because that and the fact of incumbency are...

Categories An Alliance?/Korean Politics/Sunshine
May 11, 2009

North Korean Isolation Creates Opening for Chinese Diplomacy

With all the drama going on so far this year concerning North Korea, there seems to be one thing missing: China. Whether this is a case of silent diplomacy that the rest of the world will never hear of or testimony to the fragility of the Mainland’s relationship with North Korea, I cannot say, but China’s influence on the DPRK has played a major role in how concerned powers have dealt with the Kim Jong Il regime in the past...

Categories China
April 17, 2009

Christopher Hill: Deep Kimchee for Iraq

Of the many things that will be written about North Korea this week, the least likely of these is, “Now there’s the kind of diplomacy we need more of.” Consider just the events of the last few days: the missile test itself, which may have hit closer to home than originally thought; the failure of the United Nations to enforce two of its violated resolutions; the broader failure of deterrence and counter-proliferation; and North Korea’s final repudiation of a February...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Terrorism/Iraq/U.S. Politics
March 26, 2009

Chris Hill Lies to Entire Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sam Brownback’s Finest Hour

[Updated below.] [A]s the current assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, [Christopher Hill] presided over negotiations with North Korea that deliberately minimized focus on the bleak human rights record of that country, ignored its nuclear proliferation, and had the practical effect of affirming its nuclear weapons capability. Hill also has a troubling hotdog tendency to play by his own rules, to the detriment of U.S. diplomacy…. Hill’s brand of cowboy diplomacy might be justified if it...

Categories Human Rights/Terrorism/Iraq/U.S. Politics
February 1, 2009

One Genocide that Wasn’t

[Welcome Gateway Pundit readers; Scroll down for updates] This site devotes most of its energy to bringing attention to a genocide that our news media, mostly for reasons not to their credit, generally fail to cover. Just for a moment, I’d like to pause to celebrate a genocide from which the world might just have been spared: Iraq on Saturday held its most peaceful election since the fall of Saddam. The vote to pick regional councils in 14 of the...

Categories Terrorism/Iraq
January 26, 2009

Eberstadt: What Went Wrong

So over the weekend, I finally had a chance to read Nicholas Eberstadt’s fine summary of the Bush Administration’s eight years of drift and indecision on North Korea (hat tip to Robert Koehler). It’s hard to pick a favorite passage, but this one certainly struck a chord: In the absence of a coherent policy, though, the imperative of “success” in talks with North Korea suddenly took on a life of its own for the Bush team. (After all, there was...

Categories Money Laundering/NK Economics/Washington Views
January 21, 2009

39.91 N, 127.55 E: Hamhung, Haunted City

In 1997, Washington Post correspondent Keith Richburg was allowed into the city of Hamhung, just inland from North Korea’s east coast, to try to find the truth behind fragmentary rumors of a famine inside the world’s most isolated country. Although Hamhung is North Korea’s second-largest city and a key industrial center, it was an isolated place with few foreign visitors, little commerce with the outside world, and at a great distance from any international border. This is what Hamhung looks...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Google Earth