Search Results for: Lankov

Mystery Solved: Not that the speculation excited me much, but Kim Jong Il is in southern China. Frequent brief disappearances are de rigeur for this particular despot. The predictable triumph of exuberance over experience is the reporting that this time, he’s touring factories and learning about economic reform! Some people have been holding in that lungful of smoke for almost nine years now. The truth is that this horse has been led to that water before. . . .

Andrew Natsios, the author of The Great North Korean Famine and the only senior U.S. official who likely understands the true nature and urgency of the food situation in the North, is leaving his post as Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He does so at an ominous moment, just as the famine threatens to return. WASHINGTON, Dec 2 (Reuters) – Andrew Natsios, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, will leave his post for...

I don’t mean “blind” in a perjorative way; I use the term to signify the studied opacity and manipulation that are so evident from visitor accounts to the country. This post, more than anything else, is about the difficulty of measuring economic and political trends in the North, and how the biases of the writer and those he speaks with can quickly lead from three small and different datasets to three wildly different conclusions. The course of North Korean society,...

Next is Time’s Donald Macintyre of Time Asia, who writes perhaps the best piece to emerge from North Korea’s propaganda disaster known as Arirang. I still don’t have time to give this piece the justice it deserves, but will give you the best grafs and urge you to read the rest on your own. His impressions of the cross-border trade couldn’t be more different when approached from the direction of Pyongyang: Our group, Western journalists granted a rare visit to...

Of the three correspondents, Andrei Lankov, writing in the Korea Times, has the greatest depth of experience. Lankov focuses on the aspect of North Korea’s reforms–unstoppable if you believe Brooke and abortive if you believe Macintyre–that interests me most, the psychological impact on the North Korean people. Lankov finds that materially, things have changed not at all or gone backwards, but that psychologically, North Koreans are much more open than in the past. He begins near his alma mater, Kim...

This article on YaleGlobal is a very good, hard-hitting analysis of what’s happening with food aid in North Korea, despite one significant error. It’s partially premised on North Korea’s alleged willingness to accept South Korean-recommended agricultural reforms, despite Andrei Lankov’s recent reports that North Korea is doing just the opposite. Still, passages like this one redeem the entire article with their clarity and honesty: By limiting the source of food assistance to China and South Korea, a more reliable partner...

When it comes to North Korea, food aid is not our weapon. It’s already North Korea’s weapon. Our goal should be to feed as many innocent people as we possibly can, with or without the North Korean government’s cooperation. The distribution of food is the most important human rights issue of all. I’ve been tracking the reports of a return of famine conditions closely this year, but it wasn’t until several days about that I became convinced that North Korea...

Sympathetic observers have been telling us for years that the dissolution of the Public Distribution System North Korea once used to feed its people represented an irreversible step toward economic reform. I’ve tended to believe the view of Andrei Lankov and Andrew Natsios, which is that the PDS essentially began to come apart under North Korea’s economic stress began to take its toll in the years after 1991, when the USSR collapsed. Now, Professor Lankov informs us that North Korea...

Update: The Marmot has much more insight on this by directly tracing the MacArthur/three-day-orgy story to a North Korean textbook. Astonishingly, OhMyNews figured this out. Must read to believe. ________________ The U.S. media are also beginning to catch on to the MacArthur story and the blood-libels revisionist thinking that propels it. Let’s hope they’ll eventually get a better grip than this story in Newsweek online by B.J. Lee (HT to Occidentalism–which will be a new addition to my blogroll). Lee...

Welcome to the Carnival of the Revolutions edition for August 29th. Hosting next week’s edition (Sept. 5) will be Thinking-East; next up (Sept. 12) is Quid Nimis. Updates added, typos fixed. East Asia and the Pacific Rim Burma: Did the government’s army use chemical weapons against Karen rebels earlier this year? The Jubilee Campaign, a Christian human rights NGO, prints an editorial by Lord David Alton, a member of the British House of Lords. Publius reports on new rumors of...

Highly Recommended: The one modest blessing of being sick is that it gave me time to finish Gordon Cucullu’s book, Separated at Birth: How North Korea Became the Evil Twin. By now, I consider Gordon a personal friend, so I approach a critique of his work with some discomfort–and a need to disclaim that discomfort openly to readers who might mistake me for an objective reviewer. The real strength of Separated at Birth is its description of South Korea, not...