Category: China

North Korea’s cautious experiment with economic zone Hwanggumphyong

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Hwanggumphyong was launched with great fanfare in 2011 by Jang Song-thaek, the uncle of North Korea’s new ruler, with a pledge of tax breaks and repatriation of dividends, hoping to emulate a formula that has worked for economic zones the world over.

But for the moment, it remains little more than a small, boggy island.

The 14 km2 Hwanggumphyong island is one of four economic zones that were designed to be a magnet for Chinese capital and manufacturing. It lies on the Yalu river, across from the bustling Chinese border city of Dandong and one of the few areas where North Korea allows its citizens contact with the outside world.

Chinese investors are showing little appetite for North Korea, whose economy is worse off than it was 20 years ago from a combination of sanctions over its nuclear weapons ambitions, famine and mismanagement.

Many analysts say the North Korean leadership is terrified that reforms could weaken its iron grip on the state and it has repeatedly baulked at any sweeping changes, ignoring pressure from China, its only real ally, to emerge from a self-imposed cocoon.

China’s leverage is limited and its fear that North Korea could collapse appears to make it willing, albeit begrudgingly, to support the government of leader Kim Jong-un.

-Reuters

North Korea relaxing strict rules to cater to Chinese tourists

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Although the North Korean government is known for being paranoid about foreign visitors, it has recently adopted a softer attitude toward Chinese tourists. Chinese tourism has proven one of North Korea’s best sources of foreign currency to help offset losses after United Nations sanctions from 2009 shut down opportunities for the country to earn hard cash. Some 60,000 to 70,000 Chinese tourists visited last year, up from an estimated 40,000 visitors in 2010.

The totalitarian regime has also been modernizing its infrastructure to lure Chinese visitors.The waiting time for group visa processing has been shortened from weeks to 24-hours in China’s border city of Dandong. And at the border, North Korean customs didn’t even bother to check these group tourists’ passports.

Rules for tourists’ photo taking have also been relaxed. In order to satisfy their visitors’ curiosities, the North Korean government has revised its original rules banning foreigners from taking photos from coaches. Security guards that were sometimes planted at the end of tourist coaches have also been removed. The new rule is that photo taking in Pyongyang is allowed, including spontaneously inviting locals to take photos together.

Still, Chinese tourists are not easy to deal with in North Koreans’ eyes, even though the two countries are supposed to be “as close as lips and teeth.” North Korean tour guides, who were used to taking national security as their priorities, now try their best to ensure their guests not leave with negative impression. However, once Chinese tourists enter the “Hermit Kingdom”, North Korean tour guides have to repeatedly urge them to keep their voices down and stick to group activities – these tour guides are obligated to take responsibility for their clients’ behavior. Even so, Chinese tourists usually fail to cooperate.

What must really irritate North Koreans is Chinese tourists’ arrogance with their wealth. In a recent visit with a Chinese tour group, three college students in their early 20s lured North Korean children to take photos with them in downtown Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung Square with candy. At night, these three Chinese college students further tested their minder’s patience by sneaking out of Pyongyang’s Yanggakdo hotel, wondering around in downtown Pyongyang and eventually dining in a Korean barbecue restaurant. On their way back, they talked three North Koreans into giving them rides to Yanggakdo hotel for 20 yuan (about US$3.20). At the end, one of them convinced one of the North Koreans to sell his Kim Il-sung badge to him, and the hotel’s security guards showed up out of nowhere to kick the North Korean to the ground when they were bargaining. In North Korea, losing a badge of the dear leaders could severely jeopardize lives of North Koreans.

Chinese tourists are now allowed to travel to North Korea from China’s border cities, including Liaoning province’s Dandong and Shenyang, as well as Jilin province’s Yanji and Tumen. From here, they can reach Pyongyang, Hoeryong, Chongjin and Rason.

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German theaters to screen movie on North Korean political prison camp

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A movie about a former North Korean political prisoner will be screened in theaters in Berlin and nine other German cities on November 8.

Director Marc Wiese’s “Camp 14 ― Total Control Zone” is about the dramatic life of Shin Dong-hyuk, who was born in a political prison camp, according to the documentary film company.

Shin remained in the camp for 24 years before escaping over electrified fences and making his way to China. He settled in South Korea in 2006.

“Our sole purpose was to follow the rules of the work camp and then die,” Shin said in a synopsis. “Sometimes people tried to escape, driven by fear of starving or being beaten, but they were publicly executed and became the object of hate for those of us who were left behind.” Shin has said inmates were subjected to torture, hard labor and arbitrary execution.

The movie follows the March publication of “Escape from Camp 14,” a book on Shin’s experiences by American journalist Blaine Harden.

 

Cell phone use in North Korea

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While North Korea has launched an unprecedented multi-agency campaign to crack down on illegal cell phones along the country’s border with China, a source in North Hamgyong province said that reliance on the illegal phones was so widespread that it would be difficult to eliminate the practice.

“No matter how tough the crackdown measures get, there is a limit,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “You cannot watch the entire border area to catch a single cell phone user.”

The number of illegal Chinese phones used in North Korea –where the official cell phone network has over a million subscribers– is unknown, but sources from the country say they are widely used in border towns, particularly by cross-border traders who rely on them to do business in China.

Some border residents have made a business of lending illegal cell phones to others to make calls to friends or relatives in China, South, Korea, Japan, and other countries.

North Korea’s official domestic mobile phone service was first launched in the capital Pyongyang in 2002, but banned two years later after a phone was used to trigger a deadly explosion at a northern train station.

Since launching a 3G cell phone service in a surprise deal with Egyptian company Orascom in 2008, the official network – which allows only handsets provided by North Korea’s Koryolink – has expanded coverage to about one fifth of the country’s territory.

Defectors go ahead with leaflet launch to North Korea from the South

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South Korean activists floated balloons carrying tens of thousands of anti-Pyongyang leaflets into North Korea on Monday, eluding police who had disrupted an earlier launch attempt due to threats from North Korea.

South Korean police, citing security concerns, had sent hundreds of officers Monday to seal off roads and prevent the activists and other people from gathering at an announced launch site near the border. Before taking action, the South Korean government had implored activists to stop their campaign, but had cited freedom of speech in not making further attempts to intervene. Residents in the area were also asked to evacuate to underground facilities, according to local official Kim Jin-a.

North Korean defectors living in South Korea and activists prepare a balloon containing anti-Pyongyang leaflets, in Ganghwa, about 37 miles west of Seoul on October 22.

Some of the activists, mostly North Korean defectors, simply moved to another site near the border that was not guarded by police and carried out the launch of the balloons.

South Korean activists have in the past sent leaflets across the border, and North Korea has issued similar threats to attack without following through. But this time South Korea detected that North Korea had uncovered artillery muzzle covers and deployed troops to artillery positions in possible preparation for an attack. Yonhap cited no source for the information.

The activists said they floated balloons carrying about 120,000 leaflets critical of North Korea’s young leader Kim Jong Un and his country’s alleged human rights abuses. They said they wanted to let North Korean people know the true nature of their country.

“We could not delay our plans to send anti-North Korea leaflets because it is our love toward our northern brothers,” the activists wrote in a statement posted on the website of Seoul-based Free North Korea Radio, one of civic organizations involved in the leafleting.

On Monday, the top U.S. envoy on North Korea urged Pyongyang to stop issuing destabilizing threats. “It is grossly disproportionate to have threatened to respond to balloons with bombs,” Glyn Davies told reporters in Beijing after meeting with Chinese officials.

China, the North’s main ally and biggest aid source, welcomed South Korean efforts to quash the balloon-flying and urged all parties to exercise restraint.

Crackdown on cell phones along North Korean border

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North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has launched an unprecedented multi-agency campaign to crack down on illegal cell phones along the country’s border with China by tracking signals and sending security forces to nab the callers, according to sources in the area.

The move is aimed at closing off one of the few connections to the outside world from isolated North Korea. In areas close to the country’s northern border with China, North Koreans using phones smuggled in from the neighboring country can connect to Chinese cell phone towers to make outside calls.

But since the beginning of October, authorities have tightened restrictions on the phones and begun using radio monitoring stations to spot illegal cell phone signals, according to a source in North Hamgyong province. Once a signal is detected, a search force is immediately dispatched to the area to nab the culprit, the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In addition to radio monitoring stations, military bases and the national police department’s special task forces are involved in the crackdown effort, the source said. “They are mobilizing even the posts of the Worker-Peasant Red Guards,” the country’s civilian defense force, the source said.

Previous curbs on illegal cell phones had not involved so many agencies or such a sophisticated method of detecting signals and finding callers, but did significantly reduce the number of people illegally crossing the river border into China.

A possibly tougher China defers North Korean leader’s trip

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China quietly deferred a request by North Korea for its young leader to visit last month because the Chinese leadership was preoccupied with its once-in-a-decade leadership change and a host of other distractions, two independent sources said.

The move also suggests that China, North Korea’s main food and oil supplier, may be seeking an assurance from the isolated state that it drops its nuclear ambitions, one source said, after it ignored warnings from Beijing not to go ahead with a rocket launch in April.

Kim Jong-un’s desire to visit China in September was relayed by his powerful uncle, Jang Song-thaek, when the latter met Chinese leaders on a visit to Beijing in August.

But China discreetly put off the request, which was never publicized.

“Kim Jong-un wanted to come but it was not a convenient time,” a source familiar with China’s foreign policy said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who died in December, made six visits to China from 2004 to 2011.

Escape from a North Korean concentration camp

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–A brief account byYong Kim, who escaped from a political prison camp in North Korea and after living as a refugee in China, 1 year later arrived safely in South Korea, via Mongolia

On September 28, I made a miraculous escape from [my concentration] camp of death on a coal train. I passed through various North Korean provinces, finally crossing the Tumen River in December [escaping into] China. I wandered in Yanji not knowing where to go in the strange Chinese land.

The sad fate of North Koreans in China as a poor homeless race came home to me. The women are sold for rape and forced into prostitution by Chinese and Korean-Chinese. Some women try to go back to North Korea with the money they earned to feed their families, only to be caught and imprisoned in police detention centers.

Pregnant women often suffer the most, as officers would kill the fetuses while in the womb by kicking the women’s belly. In the market in Yanji, you see North Korean children whose fingers have been cut off for stealing food.

There is a pecuniary reward for every North Korean defector captured, and the Korean-Chinese go all out searching for North Koreans in hiding, to hand them over to the Chinese police. The arrested North Koreans are strung together with a wire that is pierced through their noses. And in groups of fifty, these people are deported.

Chronicling the escape from North Korea

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Christianity Today features a review of Melanie Kirkpatrick’s new book, excerpts following:

In Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad (Encounter), Hudson Institute senior fellow Melanie Kirkpatrick labors … to set the record straight on survivors who have fled North Korea. She tells a story of bravery, luck, disappointment, and death; of Christian activists and money-hungry brokers united behind a simple Mosaic invocation: Let my people go.

Until the mid-1990s, there wasn’t much to be gained by rushing the 880-mile border with China. With borders sealed and news of the outside world scarce, few ordinary North Koreans escaped. But when a crippling famine struck and a sudden Chinese prosperity beckoned, the trickle of refugees swelled to nearly half a million, its path smoothed by a relaxation of restrictive internal policies. Freedom, religious or otherwise, never entered their political vocabulary. Most fled simply out of hunger.

Yet North Korea receives less international attention than other failed states. It does not have the status of an “Asian Darfur.” Nor is the degradation of its people widely understood, even among South Koreans or Korean Americans.

Culpability for this apathy and ignorance, argues Kirkpatrick, belongs at least partly to South Korean presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, whose “Sunshine” policy (1998-2008) muted official criticisms of the Pyongyang regime in an effort to build good will. Activists and aid workers now call this period the “Lost Decade.”

Chinese intransigence makes the situation still worse. In contravention of international law, it remains official Chinese policy to hand North Korean refugees back to North Korea, where they face torture, incarceration, and possibly death.

Here is a rare book that puts human faces on the numbers, a lamentation over policies and duplicities that have haunted a people terribly divided.

 

China North Korean ties as close as lips and teeth

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Prior to his death, Kim Jong Il visited China to introduce his heir apparent, Kim Jong Un, to Chinese senior leaders. And as he had done many times, Kim Jong Il also asked for continued economic and military aid and political support.

China-North Korean ties are so close they are frequently described “as close as lips and teeth.” The the two neighbors were Korean War allies.

Of all the regional powers, Beijing has the greatest potential leverage over Pyongyang. China supplies at least 80% of North Korea’s oil and significant amounts of food, fertilizer and military aid. The two Communist neighbors have frequent political, military and party-to-party exchanges.

Former CNN correspondent, Mike Chinoy, a veteran Korea-watcher who has visited North Korea several times, said: “The Chinese have made it extremely clear that they are not going to let Korea go down the drain. They are going to do whatever they need to do to prop it up.”

Foremost in Beijing’s mind, North Korea serves as a buffer, keeping the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea away from the Chinese border.