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One of the stories that we have been following is the development of the mining sector in North Korea. Yonhap is now reporting that according to the Seoul-based North Korea Resource Institute (NKRI), North Korea has nearly $10 trillion in underground minerals. As Scott Bruce points out in a recent piece, there are both financial [...]
This week and next, we follow up on some earlier posts on Republican foreign policy, starting with the platform today and then looking at the major policy speeches by Senator McCain and former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice. There is a debate about whether party platforms matter. They are clearly not serious policy documents. No [...]
We have a vested interest in what we call “sanctions technology.” Although we are skeptical about whether sanctions work in the way expected, there are multiple motives for deploying them, including making it more difficult to proliferate or launder cash earned from illicit activities. Several weeks ago, we posted on the fascinating Senate HSBC report, [...]
Changyong Choi and Jesse Lecy have published a fascinating paper, “A Semantic Network Analysis of Changes in North Korea’s Economic Policy” in the journal Governance. In it they subject the titles of all 1,558 articles published in the Journal of Economic Research (Kyongje Yongu) between 1986 and 2009 to semantic network analysis. They interpret the [...]
Several weeks ago, we outlined what we knew–but mostly what we didn’t know–about the purported reforms. One theme is that we should not expect a straightforward or linear process; rather, reforms in one area might be coupled simultaneously with control measures or ongoing conflicts over implementation. Here, we provide some more background and details on [...]
North Korea has a lot of guns and a lot of folks with military training who know how to use them. Apart from stories of gun-toting robbers, smugglers, and soldiers misusing firearms to forcibly shake down farmers or others, there are occasional entertaining reports such as the one reported by GoodFriends a few years back of the [...]
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any weirder… A Loyal Reader sent me an Amazon.com link to “Pyongyang #*$%: Deep Inside North Korea” by Mhari Yi. (I can’t even write out the title—this is a family-oriented blog, after all.) I’m not sure which surprised me more: that Amazon was selling porn (my sheltered life) [...]
South Korea will elect a new president in December. One interesting figure on the South Korean political scene is Ahn Cheol-soo, who despite having never held public office, would be an instantly credible candidate were he to declare. As such, his views onNorth Korea are of interest. Ahn recently released a book, “Ahn Chul-soo’s Thoughts,” [...]
Mickey Mouse sanctions: When we last checked, House International Relations Committee chair Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl) was fulminating over alleged sanctions busting by the perfidious bureaucrats over at WIPO. The UN agency after initially indicating that it would cooperate with US government investigators, rejected a request by the State Department to conduct an independent probe, [...]
So maybe Hu Jintao did not literally say “if you build it, we will come,” (I doubt that he’s a fan of either baseball or Kevin Costner) but it would seem reasonable to assume a certain degree of Chinese frustration with North Korea’s reluctance to embrace economic reform, and a willingness to support such a process [...]
