Daily Kor no more

Well, for a few days at least. I'm traveling through a part of America where wifi is not available, and trawling for news using this iPhone would take five times as long.

So pretend you're in North Korea, where the absence of a comprehensive source of reliable news would be normal.

Things will be back to normal in a few days, or next week at the latest.

This succinct email was sent from my iPhone.

Daily Kor for December 27, 2009

It's late. I'm tired. I'm driving to Nevada tomorrow. Write your own stinkin' color commentary.

1. South Korean consortium reportedly wins $40 billion deal to build nuclear power plants in United Arab Emirates (Reuters via WaPo, Bloomberg)
2. Korean-American Christian human rights activist who crossed into North Korean detained by authorities (AFP)
3. Thailand may seek UN sanctions over North Korean weapons seizure (RIA Novosti)
4. National Assembly speaker says he will step down if ruling and opposition parties cannot strike a budget deal for 2010 by the end of 2009 (Yonhap, Korea Herald)
5. UN Development Program to restart operations in North Korea in February (Yonhap, Korea Herald)
6. South Korean government plans to raise amount of biodiesel in Diesel fuel (Yonhap)
7. Incheon International Airport steps up security procedures in response to attempted terrorist downing of plane arriving in Detroit (Yonhap)
8. South Korean national soccer team slated to play an African team in football friendly (Korea Times)
9. Attempted coup in North Korea fails when military officers, weakened by hunger and weighed down by medals, are unable to stand (Yonhap)

Loose change for December 27, 2009

 North Korea news and stuff 

• The Los Angeles Times has its own focus on Robert Park, the Christian Korean-American who crossed into North Korea to protest human rights.  
• The San Francisco Chronicle does a review of Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy. 

 Other Korea-related stuff 

• South Korean imports of American beef remain sluggish.
• GM Daewoo is said to be the heart of General Motors' subcompact operations. 
• The Joongang Daily does a focus on a beloved educator in P'aju.
• The Joongang Daily tells the story of a Korea-born child of Bangladeshi ethnicity who fears being deported as an illegal.
• One year later, the newly imposed law school system seems to be a success.
• The Korea Times presents the top ten national and international stories of the year.

 Miscellany 

• In a follow-up to this story, Orange County church youth group leader Timothy Han has been sentenced to ninety days in the slammer for having sex with an underage parishioner (in the church parking lot). 

WaPo on North Korean reaction to Kim Jong-il's effort to wipe out wealth

From the Washington Post:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il moved early this month to wipe out much of the wealth earned in the past decade in his country's private markets. As part of a surprise currency revaluation, the government sharply restricted the amount of old bills that could be traded for new and made it illegal for citizens to have more than $40 worth of local currency.

It was an unexplained decision -- the kind of command that for more than six decades has been obeyed without question in North Korea. But this time, in a highly unusual challenge to Kim's near-absolute authority, the markets and the people who depend on them pushed back.

Grass-roots anger and a reported riot in an eastern coastal city pressured the government to amend its confiscatory policy. Exchange limits have been eased, allowing individuals to possess more cash.

The currency episode reveals new constraints on Kim's power and may signal a fundamental change in the operation of what is often called the world's most repressive state. The change is driven by private markets that now feed and employ half the country's 23.5 million people, and appear to have grown too big and too important to be crushed, even by a leader who loathes them.

The currency episode seems far from over, and there have been indications that Kim still has the stomach for using deadly force.

There have been public executions and reinforcements have been dispatched to the Chinese border to stop possible mass defections, according to reports in Seoul-based newspapers and aid groups with informants in the North.

Still, analysts say there has also been evidence of unexpected shifts in the limits of Kim's authority.

"The private markets have created a new power elite," said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "They pay bribes to bureaucrats in Kim's government, and they are a threat that is not going away."

The threat comes at a time of transition in North Korea. Kim Jong Il, 67, suffered a stroke last year. While he appears to have recovered, at least enough to maintain control, he has begun a murky process of handing power over to a third generation, in the person of his youngest son, Kim Jong Eun, 26.

The Kim family dynasty built and presides over a totalitarian state that has lasted more than six decades, far longer than its mentors, Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China. It is the only such state to have survived the death of the leader around whom a cult of personality had been built. Kim Jong Il assumed power in 1994, after the death of his father, Kim Il Sung, the state's founding dictator.

It was an exceedingly bumpy transition: Famine killed a million people, the state-run economy imploded and private markets began an inexorable spread across the country. Still, it was a transition that had been in the works for more than a decade and was elaborately rolled out to the North Korean people, unlike the current succession.

"It would seem to an outsider that much less care has been taken to ensure a smooth dynastic transition this time around," said Nicholas Eberstadt, author of several books on North Korea.

Analysts in South Korea and the United States say there is little evidence that Kim Jong Eun has been groomed for power -- or that he is equipped to deal with the regime-rotting challenge presented by the growth of private markets and the rise of a bribe-paying entrepreneurial class.

In the view of several outside experts, this month's currency revaluation was a preemptive strike against the markets by Kim Jong Il, an aging leader who is worried about succession and trying to buy time.

"This was one of the strongest measures he could take," said Cho Young-key, a professor of North Korea studies at Korea University in Seoul. "Kim is thinking that if he can't control the markets now, in the future it will get even harder, and then he will be handing power to the son."

Stripping wealth from merchants is consistent with Kim Jong Il's long-held abhorrence of capitalist reform. His government regards it as "honey-coated poison" that can lead to regime change and catastrophe, according to the Rodong Sinmun, the party newspaper in Pyongyang.

"It is important to decisively frustrate capitalist and non-socialist elements in their bud," said the newspaper.

Closing the marketplace
Kim's government in the past two years has closed some large markets, shifted Chinese-made goods to state-run shops and ordered that only middle-aged and older women can sell goods in open-air markets, to try to limit the number of North Koreans who abandon government jobs for the private sector.

But capitalism seems to have already taken root. U.N. officials estimate that half the calories consumed in North Korea come from food bought in private markets, and that nearly 80 percent of household income derives from buying and selling in the markets, according to a study last year in the Seoul Journal of Economics.

Private markets are flooding the country with electronics from China and elsewhere.

Cheap radios, televisions, MP3 devices, DVD players, video cameras and cellphones are seeping into a semi-feudal society, where a trusted elite lives in the capital Pyongyang. Surrounding the elite is a suspect peasantry that is poor, stunted by hunger and spied upon by layers of state security.

In the past year, the elites in Pyongyang have been granted authorized access to mobile phones -- the number is soon expected to reach 120,000. In the border regions with China, unauthorized mobile phone use has also increased among the trading classes. And unlike most of the mobile phones in Pyongyang, the illegal phones are set up to make international calls.

Chinese telecom companies have built relay towers near the border, providing strong mobile signals in many nearby North Korean towns, according to the Chosun Ilbo, a Seoul-based daily.

Those phones have become a new source of real-time reporting to the outside world on events inside North Korea, as networks of informants call in news to Web sites such as the Seoul-based Daily NK and the Buddhist aid group Good Friends.

Good Friends reported last week that security forces in the northeastern town city of Chongjin executed a citizen after he burned a large pile of old currency. He was apparently worried that police enforcing currency laws would investigate him to find out how he had gotten rich, the group said.

Affordable electronics are also cracking open the government's decades-old seal on incoming information. Imported radios -- and televisions in border areas -- are enabling a substantial proportion of the North Korean populations to tune in to Chinese and South Korean stations, as well as to Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, according to an unpublished survey of newly arrived defectors in South Korea. It found that two-thirds of them listened regularly to foreign broadcasts.

I'll comment on this later.

"Million foreigner march" at The Sonagi Consortium

Adeel shares some thoughts and opinions on the 외국인백만시대 ("One Million Foreigner Era").

I want to be the first to coin the phrase: The OMF Era. Ha ha!

Follow THIS LINK for the post by Adeel.

Follow THIS LINK to write for The Sonagi Consortium.

Daily Kor for December 26, 2009

Another quick-and-dirty edition. It is, after all, a holiday over here in America. It's that wonderful day where family comes together and rips open presents, not that day where people wear funny hats and eat ice cream cakes.

1. At least 17 people are killed in India after collapse of bridge constructed by Hyundai Engineering and local firm (AFP)
• Hyundai plans to sue Gammon India over collapse (Yonhap)
2. ROK President Lee Myungbak travels to United Arab Emirates in push to win major nuclear power plant construction contract (Reuters, WSJ)
3. Korean-American human rights activist crosses into North Korea carrying God's message (links here)
4. Citing negative influence on future-oriented relations, ROK foreign minister summons Japan's ambassador to South Korea to protest Tokyo's new education guidelines regarding Japanese territorial disputes (Xinhua)
5. Ukraine denies links to plane full of North Korean arms forced down in Thailand (RIA Novosti)
6. Korean national soccer team coach believes Ahn Junghwan will play in World Cup (ESPN)
7. American arrested for assault in London in tragic misinterpretation of Boxing Day (Reuters)

Bringing God's love to North Korea

This is the story from Reuters, in its entirety:

A U.S. human rights activist trying to raise global attention about the suffering of the North Korean people has crossed into the reclusive state, other activists and South Korean media said on Saturday.

There has been no comment from North Korea, which usually arrests foreign border crossers on site, or from U.S. officials.

Activists told Reuters that Robert Park, 28, had crossed into North Korea from China on Friday, while South Korea's Yonhap news agency and the Kukmin Ilbo newspaper quoted activists who went with him to the border as saying he had crossed at a sparsely patrolled point near the northeast border city of Hoeryong.

Park was quoted by activists who went with the border as shouting when he went across: "I am an American citizen. I am bringing God's love. God loves you."

The activists asked not to be named due to security concerns.

Park told to Reuters in Seoul earlier this week that he saw it as his duty as a Christian to make the journey and did not want the U.S. government to try to free him.

"I don't want President Obama to come and pay to get me out. But I want the North Korean people to be free," Park said on Wednesday before departing for China.

"Until the concentration camps are liberated, I do not want to come out. If I have to die with them, I will. (For) these innocent men, women and children, as Christians, we need to take the cross for them. The cross means that we sacrifice our lives for the redemption of others," he said.

Western governments and human rights activists say North Korea maintains a network of political prisons to crush the possibility of dissent where brutality is the norm and deaths are commonplace.

The North uses unlawful and arbitrary killings and stages public executions to intimidate the masses, critics say. They say it prevents free speech, controls all media and crushes nascent attempts at reform by executing or imprisoning those who oppose the state.

Park, a Korean-American, has joined various campaigns calling on North Korea to improve its rights record and said he would carry a message calling for leader Kim Jong-il to step down, the closure of prison camps and compensation paid to victims.

Park said he wanted to be arrested in order to pressure governments including the United States, South Korea and Japan to address the suffering of the North Korean people.

"Through the media and through sacrifice we are looking for the global leaders to be forced to give an account. There is no excuse," he said.

Earlier this year, former U.S. President Bill Clinton made a high-profile journey to North Korea to win the release of two U.S. journalists who were held by the state for about four months for suspected illegal entry.

The journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, of U.S. media outlet Current TV, were arrested in March working on a story near the border between North Korea and China.

The two said they crossed into the North by accident and were taken into custody in China by North Korean guards who chased them back across the border.

UPDATE:
Yonhap also has the story. So does AP.

I originally posted this story in its entirety from Reuters, without any comment. I don't know what to make of such people. On the one hand, they do draw attention to the plight of the people in North Korea, but on the other hand, they seem to only bring crack downs on the areas where they managed to cross over.

This comes at a time when the public in North Korea is on edge over the currency revaluation, and the authorities may be highly sensitive to the influence of outsiders. In the end, is this bringing harm to the people it is intended to help?

Daily Kor for December 25, 2009: Peacekeeping on Earth, bad will beyond the Tumen

I dozed off while tracking Santa via NORAD, so this is me getting up the next morning to finish the news report I should have done about seven or eight hours ago. Nothing has actually changed: Japanese textbooks are still removing the claim to Tokto but speaking euphemistically about territorial claims (which, to be fair, includes things other than Tokto). A step in the right direction for good relations, I suppose. And other stuff, too, but none of it really comes together for a Yuletide theme.

1. In absence of direct mention of Tokto but a general description that Japanese students understand territorial problems, Seoul reiterates its position that there is no territorial dispute with Tokyo (Xinhua)
2. Crew of plane carrying tons of North Korean weapons detained for at least twelve more days (ABC, WSJ, AP via WaPo)
3. National Assembly passes bill allowing for quick deployment of ROK troops for UN peacekeeping operations (Korea Times)
4. Korea Institute for Defense Analyses believes North Korea could conduct a third nuclear test (AP via WaPo, Yonhap)
5. South Korea is considering a cap-and-trade scheme to control greenhouse gases (Yonhap)
6. North Korean authorities detain "obese, jocular" deer herder crossing Tuman River (Yonhap)

• Finnish embassy in Pyongyang demands to see prisoner (AFP)
• Confiscated goods include DVDs, MP3 players, and extensive list of contacts (AP via WaPo)
• KCNA releases Dear Leader's favorite venison recipes (Xinhua)

Loose change for December 25, 2009

 North Korea news and stuff 

•  The Chosun Ilbo has a piece on Kristine Kwok of the South China Morning Post and the experiences and difficulties she and other Western journalists faced in North Korea when she accompanied PRC Premier Wen Jiabao to Pyongyang.
• North Korea's ceremonial head, Supreme People's Assembly President Kim Yongnam, reportedly told visiting American business leaders about how threatened North Korea feels from its neighbors.
• Kim Jong-il nearly doubled the number of "field guidance" trips this year, from 90 in 2008 to 156 in 2009. 
• This story suggests the United States will pursue a "Ukrainian solution" to denuclearizing North Korea.

 Other Korea-related stuff 

• The Chosun Ilbo has a piece describing helpful hints for enjoying onch'ŏn, or hot springs.
• High levels of certain bacteria make 23% of spring water sources unwise to drink.
• This gets trotted out from time to time, and the first time I heard it a couple years ago I was skeptical, but one of the most popular types of Christmas tree in the US is a fir tree originally from Korea.
• Providing free school lunches has become politicized in Kyŏnggido province, where the opposition is going for a populist approach of providing them to all fifth- and sixth-graders, but the ruling party is going for a practical approach of giving them only to poor students, but in all grades.
• For some reason the Korea Times has decided to do a "person in the news" focus on the late Cardinal Stephen Kim. Maybe because it's Christmas.
• With 1.3 million foreign residents in South Korea in 2010, the KT reports that multiculturalism is here to stay.
• Here's a look at various incarnations of Santa Claus around South Korea this year.
• What better time than when we celebrate the birth of history's most famous baby to discuss ways local governments are trying to boost the birth rate.

Honoring two men from the Tumen

The Defense Minister may have missed the ceremony marking the 18th anniversary of Kim Jong-il assuming control of the military, but in his stead we had the two soldiers who nabbed stupogants Laura Ling and Euna Lee at the frozen Tumen last March.

Reports the New York Times:

The two soldiers appeared in a North Korean state television program broadcast Thursday to mark the 18th anniversary of leader Kim Jong Il's assumption of command of the country's army, Yonhap reported. The program's anchor said Kim has given them an award for apprehending Ling and Lee and also gave them special leave, according to Yonhap.

The soldiers said that several people crossed the frozen Tumen River into North Korea on March 17 and took photos, Yonhap reported. They also said they overpowered them at gunpoint, believing they entered the North with hostile intent.

Son Yong Ho, one of the soldiers, said that he received a hero's welcome when he later arrived in his hometown, according to Yonhap.

Being forced to watch North Korean television would be someone's version of hell. If you think American Idol is bad, North Korean Idol is far worse.

Merry Christmas from California

Please pay no attention to the phallic palm trees in the background.

One of our dinosaurs is missing

The AFP is reporting that North Korea's Defense Minister has not been seen for almost a month.

Septuagenarian Vice Marshal Kim Yongchun has been absent from North Korea's publicity machine since the end of November (which would hurt his chance to become Grand Marshal and run parades). From the AFP:

Vice Marshal Kim Yong-Chun, 73, failed to attend a national meeting Wednesday to mark the 18th anniversary of leader Kim Jong-Il's assumption of the army's supreme command, Yonhap news agency said.

The ceremony in Pyongyang brought together senior party, army and government officials, as well as representatives of the public, according to Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency.
But Kim Yong-Chun was not seen on TV footage of the meeting and his name was absent when broadcasting stations reeled off a long list of participants.

It would be considered an astonishing act of defiance for an invitee to deliberately miss the highly symbolic event aimed at eulogising Kim Jong-Il's leadership, observers noted.

The vice marshal's last public appearance was reported on November 29. State media said he accompanied Kim Jong-Il on a visit to a military-run livestock farm.

Kim Yong-Chun is known to be suffering from severe diabetes which almost cost him his eyesight and hearing, Yonhap said.

I'm always interested in these things because I'm always trying to get a picture for how strong Kim Jong-il's position is. Did Vice Marshal Kim fall out of favor? (Though perhaps a bit speculative, the AFP article suggests that with their comment on such "an astonishing act of defiance.") If so, for what? Is this a chink in the armor?

Or is he sick and possibly dying? And if so, does this weaken KJI's position in any way, since his strength comes largely due to his relationship with the military?

Daily Kor for December 24, 2009

If Santa Claus can plan his escape from the North Pole, why not North Korean loggers working in Siberia? Meanwhile, we have yet another possible country destined to receive North Korea weapons: Sri Lanka. It might be easier to start making a list of countries not thought to be receiving them. Did I already say that? I'm tired. Too much Christmas shopping. Roads are bad in Southern California: Californians with their SUVs glued to their ass all competing for a handful of parking spaces. It'll all be over tomorrow (it's still the 23rd here). Merry Christmas, everyone!

1. South Korean authorities acknowledge that about one dozen North Korean loggers working in grim conditions in Russia have defected (Straits Times)
2. South Korean authorities clear way for both LG and Samsung to set up flat display plants in China (WSJ, Reuters)
3. Thai authorities now believe North Korean weapons shipment was headed for Sri Lanka (AP via WaPo)
4. Hyundai Motor union accepts wage deal (Reuters)
5. CJ O Shopping to buy 55.2% stake in ON* Media Corp, making it a dominant player in cable TV (Bloomberg, WSJ)
6. Justice Ministry vows tougher punishment for election law violators (Donga Ilbo)
• Government announces plans to step up scrutiny of government officials and heads of public corporations (Korea Herald)
7. Voice of America quotes a UN official who says that North Korea sold 3400 tons of weapons to Congolese insurgents (Chosun Ilbo)
8. North Pole announces end to policy of one-sided gift-giving; says children will continue to behave badly unless there is reciprocity and accountability (AP via NYT)