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In a post last month analyzing Kim Jong-un’s speech on land management, I quoted an earlier speech by Kim Jong-il in which he extolled the flattening the fields of Phyongan Province “into regular shapes like a checkerboard and in a sweeping manner” that would sever the connection between cultivators and traditional patterns of land tenure. [...]
Earlier this month Human Rights Watch issued a policy brief concerning forced and child labor in North Korea based on the testimonies of 65 refugees interviewed in Thailand and South Korea. The brief cites eyewitness testimonies of coerced labor, extreme punishments, and child labor, including child labor organized by teachers. The testimonies are consistent with [...]
Bahng Tae-Seop and his colleagues at SERI have put out their latest quarterly security report. Based on the views of 50 “experts” (I’m one of them so they can’t be too expert!) from South Korea, the US, China, Japan, and Russia, the survey generates evaluations of both current and prospective security developments on the peninsula in a variety [...]
A few news stories from the last week deserve highlighting. Despite the fact that the regime appears to be making nice at the moment, all suggest the ongoing pressures to simply contain North Korea. First, Yonhap (via Craig Scanlan’s Asia Security Watch site) broke the story of the arrest of two North Korean agents in [...]
Dispute settlement in North Korea is notoriously weak as we have documented in a series of papers based on surveys of Chinese and South Korean market participants (here, here, and here). However, the North Koreans have sent people abroad for legal training and specifically training in commercial dispute arbitration. A group in Sweden says that [...]
In Kim Jong-un’s recent speech on land management he bemoaned “developing underground resources at random or creating disorder in their development.” According to GoodFriends, the government is following through, “because some powerful government entities – e.g., security departments, law enforcement agencies, Prosecutor’s office and Armed Forces – had ownership but, in its judgment, failed to [...]
The heights of the North Korean famine occurred between 1994 and 1998. If you don’t have a calculator handy, that’s between 14 and 18 years from today. That’s an interesting number because the age when all able-bodied North Korean males must serve in the military begins at 16-17 years of age. North Korean youths beginning [...]
As many of you know growing attention is being paid around the world to the deplorable human rights situation in North Korea. Well, the North Koreans apparently have felt obligated to respond, and rather than address the issue, have adopted “the best defense is a good offense” approach, releasing a white paper on South (or [...]
An occupational hazard of trying to follow the North Korean food economy is a perverse variant of the cry wolf syndrome. In the original “cry wolf” folk tales, the townspeople come to discount the warnings because they don’t materialize—until they do. In the perverse variant, the warnings are always true but the audience simply gets [...]
Most of the food consumed in North Korea is produced locally and as a consequence weather has a considerable impact on food availability. Yet the importance of weather can be exaggerated, and has sometimes been used politically, as means to sidestep concerns about North Korean policy and instead move directly to attributing food shortages to [...]
