Category: China

Apparent Kim Jong Un assassination suspects arrested

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At least two suspects who attempted to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were arrested, according to unconfirmed reports in the country.

The suspects had been reportedly arrested at the China border near the Tumen River as they were preparing a hit on Kim in the city of Hoeryong in North Hamgyong Province, Radio Free Asia reported Thursday.

A source in the North who spoke to Japanese news service Asia Press on the condition of anonymity said he had heard the “terrorists” had not yet crossed the Tumen, which separates North Korea from China, when North Korean border guards crossed the border to arrest them. The source went on to say the suspects were transferred to the State Security Department, and that the border guards were given rewards – including a chance to become members of the Korean Workers’ Party.

One of the suspects is allegedly a North Korean defector from the South, but the other one or more were Chinese nationals.

Japanese journalist Jiro Ishimaru, founder of Asia Press, said it is likely a rumor that was manufactured by the state to bolster support for the party ahead of its Seventh Congress in Maya congress that is to be held for the first time in more than three decades.

[UPI]

Kim Jong Un’s North Korean nuclear capabilities and economy

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Back in 2013, Kim Jong Un publicly outlined his policy of byungjin — which roughly translates to “simultaneous” — as in developing nuclear capabilities and the economy at the same time. But this creates a contradiction for a poor country of 25 million with a small economy: Developing nuclear weaponry undermines economic development.

North Korea needs foreign investment and knows it. Its nuclear test and missile launches have brought a new round of United Nations sanctions and reinforced its status as a pariah state. China, which has protected North Korea in the past, supported the sanctions. Who’s going to do deals with the North now?

“It might have looked plausible to [Kim] that he could have it both ways, as he watched the China-North Korea relationship deepen at the end of his father’s era,” Haggard says. “… Even as trade was falling off with the rest of the world, he still had Kaesong and he still had the Chinese. But that’s why this sanctions move is different.”

While survival may be the top priority, the North Korean leadership seems concerned at some level with the outside world. “The North Korean side knows it suffers from a very serious credibility deficit in its public engagements with the world, and is changing to meet the information management challenges of the current era,” says Christopher Green, a regional researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

[NPR]

China restricts trade with North Korea over nuclear tests

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China on Tuesday banned most imports of North Korean coal and iron ore, the country’s main exports, in a significant increase in pressure on the North under U.N. sanctions against its nuclear and missile tests. China buys an estimated two-thirds of impoverished North Korea’s exports, making Beijing’s cooperation essential for trade penalties approved by the U.N. Security Council last month to succeed.

In a sign of growing frustration with its ally, China signed onto Security Council sanctions last month that include mandatory inspections of cargo bound to and from North Korea. The council called on all countries to “redouble their efforts” to enforce the sanctions.

The latest Chinese restrictions ban most imports of North Korean coal, iron ore, gold, titanium, vanadium and rare earths — a key revenue source for the mineral-rich North. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimated North Korea’s 2013 exports at $4.4 billion, with 65 percent of that going to China and the bulk of it made up of mineral sales.

The announcement also banned sales of jet fuel to North Korea but said aircraft would be allowed to refuel during flights to China.

Chinese leaders are reluctant to lean too hard on North Korea for fear the collapse of Kim’s government could set off a flood of refugees and possibly lead to U.S. and South Korean troops being stationed in the North near China’s border.

 [AP]

China’s Xi to push Obama next week on North Korea talks

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China is North Korea’s sole major ally but it strongly disapproves of its nuclear program and was angered by its fourth nuclear test in January and a subsequent rocket launch.

Now it seems, Chinese President Xi Jinping will push President Barack Obama next week to resume talks on the North Korean nuclear issue, a senior diplomat said on Thursday.

Xi and Obama will have their first meeting this year on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit in Washington next week, and will talk about North Korea.

China has been calling for a resumption of so-called six-party talks between the two Koreas, China, the United States, Japan and Russia aimed at curbing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Russia has also urged Pyongyang to return to negotiations. Numerous efforts to restart the talks have failed since they collapsed following the last round in 2008.

[Reuters]

China’s thinking on North Korea

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The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, lauded China last week for joining Washington in what is probably the toughest response North Korea has faced in twenty years. But such praise may well have been premature. Last week, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Beijing opposed any unilateral punishments against North Korea.

The grim reality is that Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un decided that North Korea must have nuclear weapons, and that China has thus far decided that, as far as Beijing is concerned, the benefits of that program outweigh the costs.

China has made many pledges on North Korean sanctions in the past, but has always failed to honor them and to systematically enforce its commitments. China may be keeping the regime afloat through its provision of economic and military resources—better after all to feed North Koreans in North Korea than risk a massive refugee exodus into China if the regime collapses—and can rationally justify this as a good investment on these grounds.

Front and center on the cost side of the ledger is Beijing’s concern that North Korea’s nuclear tests, missile tests, saber rattling and occasional limited uses of force will cause South Korea and Japan to develop their own nuclear weapons to deal with the menace that Pyongyang represents. This is the outcome that China above all seeks to avoid.

Short of this, but still deeply problematic, is that North Korea’s provocations push Seoul and Tokyo deeper into Washington’s embrace. For a country bent on, at minimum, increasing the costs of U.S. influence in East Asia and/or impeding U.S. activity in its littoral seas through anti-access and area denial capabilities and actively expanding its influence and territory, improving Washington’s security relationship with Japan and South Korea is the last thing Beijing wants.

Beijing has thus far decided that the benefits of a nuclear North Korea outweigh these costs. But as Pyongyang pushes closer to its ultimate goal of being able to target the mainland United States with strategic nuclear missiles, these calculations will become harder.

[The National Interest]

The rise and fall of Jang Song-thaek, son-in-law of the North Korean theocracy – Part 3

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Jang Song-thaek wrested the lucrative right of exporting coal to China from the military and gave it to his administrative department. He purged his rivals. Mr. Jang’s campaign for more influence was apparently aimed at pushing for the kind of economic overhaul that China has introduced, Mr. Ra wrote. But he underestimated how unpalatable the idea was to Kim Jong-un, whose totalitarian rule would be undermined by such reform.

In 2013, Kim Jong-un, after hearing complaints about Mr. Jang’s expansion of power, ordered his department to relinquish the management of a fishing farm and a condensed milk factory. But officials loyal Jang, blocked those who arrived to carry out Kim’s orders from entering their premises. It was probably the last straw for Kim, still unsure about himself and extremely sensitive about any challenge to his supposedly monolithic leadership. Meanwhile, Mr. Jang’s enemies in the secret police were eager to go after him.

When announcing his execution, North Korea said Mr. Jang, “human scum worse than a dog,” had betrayed the Kim family by plotting to overthrow the younger Mr. Kim, using economic collapse as a pretext, and to rule the country himself as premier and “reformer.”

Jang Song-thaek’s name was then expurgated from all official records in North Korea.

[New York Times]

Life in North Korea 100 times worse than China

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After defecting from North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee spent 10 difficult years in China, but those years also revealed she had been lied to her entire life in North Korea.

“For someone who was brainwashed so severely, …I was mesmerized by seeing development, cities.” It took a while to accept that the economic situation in North Korea was 100 times worse than in China. … Lee gradually learned to accept the shocking truth: “Life in North Korea is the worst life”.

Lee also began to appreciate the basic human rights and freedoms that had been denied to her. Being able to move around China without having to get a travel certificate was a revelation. “I could go wherever I wanted if I had money to pay for the ticket, that’s huge,” she said.

Gradually she realized what freedom really meant: “I don’t have to hide to watch China TV, I don’t have to cover the window, I can have the sound loud, I can listen to music loudly. I realized I had lived in a virtual prison [in North Korea].”

Eighteen years later, she thinks more North Koreans understand that they are not living in paradise and that there are problems with the economy, even if the conditions are not as bad as the days of the big famine in the 1990s.

“At least they know they are not the best country, they are not the happiest human beings, they are not living in paradise and they know there are economic problems, nearly 50 per cent know that,” she said.

“But the Kim dynasty’s power is too big, they can’t say that or they will be sent to a political prison camp. Who can risk that?” They also risk the lives of three generations of their family. “They are fully aware that they are not only killing themselves.”

[News.com.au]

Russia and China attempt to rein in North Korea

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Russia and China have urged North Korea to halt ballistic-missile tests and return to talks on its nuclear program. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi issued the appeal following talks in Moscow on March 11.

The two met a day after North Korea defied the United Nations by firing two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea.

Just prior to the joint Russian-Chinese statement, North Korean official media said leader Kim Jong Un had watched a ballistic-missile test launch and ordered the country to improve its nuclear attack capability by conducting more tests.

[AP]

North Koreans have “nothing to envy”?!

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As a 17-year-old, Hyeonseo Lee’s childhood home in North Korea overlooked the border with China. Each night as North Korea plunged into darkness because of electricity shortages, she could see the twinkling lights across the border, a consistent puzzle without an answer.

“I think that because of the environment I grew up in … it raised a lot of questions, especially living on the border with China,” she told news.com.au. While Lee had been raised to believe that North Korea was the best country on the planet and even grew up singing the song Nothing to Envy, she gradually she started to think, “their life (in China) looks superior”.

“In the daytime I saw people die on the street, there were a lot of beggars on the street in my hometown,” she said. Lee saw her first execution at just seven years of age, and was shocked when she learned that people around her were dying of starvation.

Because her hometown was so close to the border, Lee’s home was able to receive Chinese television signals and this also raised questions. “It was illegal to watch … but I did my best to watch, it completely transformed my thought at the time.”

Lee decided to see for herself what life in China was like and made the dangerous journey across the frozen Yalu River, which separated the two countries. She also had the help of a border guard. At the time she innocently thought she would just make a quick visit and then return.

“But the moment I crossed the border, everything changed, after that moment, I couldn’t go back,” she said. Complications with the North Korean security police meant she was forced to live with relatives in China as an illegal immigrant.

She lived in fear that she would be discovered and sent back to North Korea, where torture for defectors was normal. At one point Lee was interrogated by police but they released her because her Chinese speaking skills convinced them that she was not North Korean.

[News.com.au]

UN Security Council approves new sanctions on North Korea

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The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved new sanctions on North Korea on Wednesday, in response to a recent nuclear test and rocket launch that violated U.N. resolutions on the country’s military activities. The new sanctions require, among other things, inspection of all cargo heading in and out of North Korea, a ban on the sale of valuable minerals by North Korea and a blockade on the sale or supply of jet fuel to the isolated nation.

The newly announced sanctions are tougher than previous resolutions targeting North Korea — part of a trend, NPR’s Elise Hu reports from Seoul, of incrementally tougher penalties placed on North Korea.

In an interview on All Things Considered last week, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Powers called the package of sanctions “nearly unprecedented in many respects” and “the toughest sanctions resolution that has been put forward in more than two decades.”

But as Elise told Morning Edition, the sanctions announced Wednesday aren’t expected to have a large impact on the lives of everyday North Koreans, thanks to the intervention of North Korea’s biggest ally. “China has been stern about saying that any new sanctions shouldn’t trigger a humanitarian disaster. So this set of sanctions is designed not to disrupt the general North Korean economy, which is based primarily on China and North Korea and their economic cooperation,” Elise says.

“The sanctions also don’t target one of North Korea’s big sources of hard currency, and that’s North Koreans who work overseas. So in general these are intended to weaken Pyongyang’s weapons systems and the elite members of the regime.”

China’s cooperation was pivotal to approving Wednesday’s new sanctions: disagreement between Beijing and Washington had prevented the Security Council from announcing new restrictions on North Korea back in January. Now, Elise says, “even China seems to be sort of running out of patience with North Korea and its young leader.”

[NPR]