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In this blog, we report on developments in and around North Korea, including the broader security setting and political, economic, and social change in the country.
Back in 2008, Russia and North Korea reached agreement on an ambitious rail project that has largely flown underneath the media radar; you have to go to sources like Railway Gazette and Curtis Melvyn’s North Korea Economy Watch to track the story. It now appears that the project is reaching completion and that freight could [...]
North Korea’s recent diplomatic efforts to engage are not faring too well. To take them in order, the regime first undercut the Abe administration by broadcasting evidence of the exploratory Iijima visit; that faux pas will complicate relations with Japan for as long as Abe is in office, which could be a while. The visit [...]
While the Korean Friendship Association is usually only useful as a target for mocking, we have to give a tip of the hat to the USA branch of the KFA for this discovery. While perusing the KFA USA YouTube page for the latest and greatest in Juche propaganda, I came across a set of videos [...]
Daily NK reported Friday on an unfortunate development involving discharged DPRK soldiers in Yanggang Province. Apparently, approximately 1,000 discharged soldiers have been dispatched to the “10.18 Cooperative Farm” in Baekam County. The process of dispatching soldiers to work on state projects after 10 years of military service is common. The problem in Yanggang appears to [...]
In an earlier post, we contained our cynicism and saw the North’s offer of bilateral talks—however opportunistically timed to the Obama-Xi summit—as a good sign. The offer fell well short of the Chinese demands during the Choe Ryung Hae visit that North Korea do something serious with respect to the nuclear issue. But at least [...]
Given that North Korea is so bizarre, we see no reason why writers of fiction shouldn’t have their shot at offering insight. We confess we couldn’t get through Adam Johnson’s highly-regarded Orphan Master’s Son; something about the internal life of the North Korean agents just struck us as wrong. But his GQ feature on Kim [...]
No sooner had the Central Committee Plenum rolled out the “byungjin” line of developing both nuclear weapons and the economy than signals were sent that the regime was serious. In a story in April DailyNK quoted a spokesperson for the General Department of Atomic Energy that “all nuclear facilities at Yongbyon including the uranium enrichment [...]
You know how it is when you are the first to recognize a cool band and then everyone else jumps on the bandwagon? Pretty soon they’re dating models and going into rehab and appearing on cheesy TV shows and they aren’t cool anymore. Here we review some recent stories–all dealing with finance–where we we were [...]
Following is a brief read-out from the three major American and Chinese press briefings on the summit: the remarks by the two presidents themselves and more detailed press briefings by Thomas Donilon and State Councilor Yang Jiechi (as reported in Xinhua). It is clear that North Korea is being portrayed as an area of consensus: [...]
We’ve talked about Koryo Tours and other North Korea tour providers in the past, but mostly to discuss the tours they provide or other issues related to North Korean tourism. Koryo Tours has now produced something only tangentially related to North Korean tourism and old school video game lovers of the Atari and NES era owe a [...]
