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SinoNK is one of a handful of sites—like Curtis Melvin’s North Korea Economy Watch and Michael Madden’s North Korea Leadership Watch—that we find ourselves visiting repeatedly. A central insight of SinoNK is that China is not Beijing and that the border provinces have a distinctive and underappreciated role in China-DPRK relations. It is not only [...]
Official Chinese statements about the nuclear test are so bland and formulaic that analysts are reduced to parsing non-official sources that may or may not reflect actual policy. Given that China’s policy intellectuals have pretty wide latitude these days, these exercises can easily result in faulty inference or worse: wishful thinking. Scanning the commentary is [...]
When I visited Rason in 1997, I was struck by how fresh the air and how beautiful the night skies were. Given the dearth of outdoor recreational opportunities in northeast Asia, I mused that maybe the North Koreans might be better off in the long-run by preserving the wilderness rather than by developing an industrial park. [...]
The US is not the only country in the midst of a presidential election. In an earlier post, I reprinted some snippets of Ahn Cheol-soo’s musings on North Korea taken from his book. Opposition rival Moon Jae-in has made a major policy speech on North Korea; Karin Lee at the National Committee on North Korea [...]
South Koreans sometimes label Chinese investment in North Korea as “economic colonialism.” I normally discount these concerns as slightly paranoiac but a series a press reports from last week are starting to make even me wonder. First, multiple stories appeared in the Chinese and South Korean press describing an agreement between the China Overseas Investment [...]
As regular readers will know, we track the goings on at Mt. Kumgang and Rason fairly closely. Yonhap is reporting Chinese military involvement in both projects. According to unnamed sources, “Paekho Trading Corporation, the key trading unit of the military, is believed to be the de facto operator” of the Kumgang resort, although two agencies [...]
Yesterday, we played the optimist, looking at some reasons why the regime’s push to revive export processing zones might yield some fruit. But we have also been following an investment dispute between North Korea and a large Chinese private firm that shows the ongoing credibility problems the country faces; our summary can be found here [...]
My colleague Marc Noland has been tracking the progress of Rajin/Rason for 20 years, so you can imagine a certain fatigue and world-weariness setting in. In a post earlier in the year, he quoted an assessment he had done with Gordon Flake over 15 years ago that barely needed editing to reflect current realities. Now [...]
Last week, Marc Noland posted on Jang Song Thaek’s China visit, and noted the effort to institutionalize cooperation around the two special economic zones. Although it clearly had higher political purpose, the trip was nominally made to attend the third meeting of the China-DPRK Joint Steering Committee on Cooperation in Development and Management of the [...]
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 [...]
