Monthly Archives: December 2012

On agricultural reform in North Korea

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North Korea has long relied on socialized agriculture, placing several families on a common piece of land to farm for the state.  The result has been malnutrition and even starvation.

Reforms reportedly have been adopted to reduce the number of families per plot, and establish a production quota above which farmers can keep the excess. The objective however may not be greater freedom but reordered regulation.

There are indications that the regime is manipulating prices in an attempt to eliminate private markets and seizing privately farmed plots of land for collective use.

Open Radio for North Korea reported that “North Korean citizens, who experienced the similar situation in 2002, are preparing for Kim Jong-un’s New Economic Management System.  To prepare for the prices skyrocketing, they are hoarding Chinese money, and prices and the exchange rate keep rising.”

 

North Koreans ready for liberalization and change?

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The North Korean people appear ready for change.  Certainly ever fewer believe DPRK mythology that they live in a world of plenty compared to an impoverished South Korea.

Refugees who have experienced life in China and regime elites spread information about the outside world.  DVDs of Chinese and South Korean television programs circulate; some observers describe a “mania” for South Korean culture.  A million North Koreans own cell phones.  Famine forced many people into the black market to survive.

The regime is aware of the risks of liberalization and has embarked upon what author Scott Thomas Bruce called “the ‘mosquito net’ strategy, meaning that Pyongyang will allow foreign investment … while blocking potentially harmful news and culture from the outside world.”  This strategy is risky, since the multi-headed genie cannot easily be put back into the bottle.

Indeed, the regime has tightened border enforcement along the Yalu and enhanced punishment of would-be refugees, targeting their families as well.

Nevertheless, Kim Jong Un’s rhetoric may raise expectations without yielding results, setting the stage for further unrest.

Forbes

 

South Korea one of the world’s great success stories

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Sixty years ago, South Korea was an economic wasteland. Today, it is not only the world’s 11th largest economy, but also a vibrant democracy and an emerging cultural force.

Daniel Tudor, the Korea correspondent for the Economist, suggests “South Koreans have written the most unlikely and impressive story of nation-building of the last century.”

Korea has one of the lowest levels of welfare spending in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is due to Korea having been a developmental, high-growth country where things were sacrificed to barrel ahead. It was a matter of growth above all else.

If you go back to the 1950s and the early 1960s, Korea was really one of the poorest places in the world. People didn’t expect it to survive, and many people expected North Korea to take it over eventually. An adviser to former South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee said, “We were the poorest, most impossible country on the planet.”

For South Korea to have gone from this sort of messed-up, disorderly, broke country into a wealthy democracy — it would have been impossible to imagine. But the Korean people have done it.

Thanks in part to its neighbors though, South Korea is all too often overlooked. Korea probably gets overshadowed by China, Japan and North Korea. China is a massive growth story. Japan is famous as a cultural powerhouse. North Korea is just famous for being a pretty extreme dictatorship. By comparison, South Korea struggles to stand out.

And to South Koreans who are 20 years old, they don’t know much about North Korea, they don’t know anybody from North Korea, and they can’t go there, so it is simply not a reference point for them.

 

Satellite photo of North Korea at night

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In this image from Sept. 24, 2012 provided by NASA, the Korean Peninsula is seen at night from a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite.

City lights at night are a fairly reliable indicator of where people live. But this isn’t always the case, and the Korean Peninsula shows why.

As of July 2012, South Korea’s population was estimated at roughly 49 million people, and North Korea’s population was estimated at about half that number. But where South Korea is gleaming with city lights, North Korea has hardly any lights at all, just a faint glimmer around Pyongyang.

The wide-area image shows the Korean Peninsula, parts of China and Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the Sea of Japan.

Photo: NASA / AP

Born and raised in a North Korean prison camp

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A brutal North Korean prison camp was all that Shin Dong-hyuk knew for the first 23 years of his life. CNN journalist Anderson Cooper, after interviewing him, said, “Shin Dong-hyuk isn’t just somebody who was sent to a concentration camp. This is somebody who was born into a concentration camp. And for the majority of his life up until he was probably 22 or 23, had no idea that there was another kind of way to exist.”

Anderson Cooper: Growing up, did you ever think about escaping?

Shin Dong-hyuk: That never crossed my mind.

Anderson Cooper: It never crossed your mind?

Shin Dong-hyuk: No. Never. What I thought was that the society outside the camp would be similar to that inside the camp.

Anderson Cooper: You thought everybody lived in a prison camp like this?

Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.

Anderson Cooper: Did anybody ever explain to you why you were in a camp?

Shin Dong-hyuk: No. Never. Because I was born there I just thought that those people who carry guns were born to carry guns. And prisoners like me were born as prisoners.

Anderson Cooper: Did you know America existed?

Shin Dong-hyuk: Not at all.

Anderson Cooper: Did you know that the world was round?

Shin Dong-hyuk: I had no idea if it was round or square.

Read transcript of full interview with Shin Dong-hyuk

 

North Korean Survivor Shin Dong-Hyuk

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Little is known about the prison camps of North Korea where it is estimated that 200,000 are imprisoned. Many are born in the camps and generations of families are imprisoned because one of their relatives has been detained.

Shin Dong-Hyuk is one such case. He was born 26 years ago in Camp 14 in Pyeongan province, known as a ‘complete control district’, where the only sentence is life.

For most of his life all he knew was the camp, working 12 to 15-hour days mining coal, building dams or sewing military uniforms. If inmates were not executed they were killed in work-related accidents or died of an illness usually triggered by hunger.

In his own words Shin Dong-hyuk tells us about life inside one of North Korea’s notorious political prison camps, how he was tortured and how he was forced to watch his mother’s and brother’s execution.

But after the execution of his mother and brother, Shin Dong-Hyuk decided to try and escape. No one born into a North Korean prison camp has ever escaped before.

Shin escaped from the camp, leaving his father behind, in 2005. Now, he lives a new life in South Korea having discarded his original name Shin In Keun. A message to his father

Watch Anderson Cooper interview with Shin Dong-Hyuk