A personal shopper for a dictator.
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North Korea
“Population Is Growing, but Aging; ‘Million-Man Army’ Has Fewer Than 700,000 People”
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North Korea
This is North Korea.
Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies, a North Korean design firm.
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North Korea
“Over the past century, the Korean Peninsula has undergone two fundamental geopolitical shifts. From 1905 to 1910, Japan, after displacing Russia from the contest for control over Korea by war, imposed a protectorate status over the Korean monarchy in 1905 and absorbed the entire Korean Peninsula as its colony in 1910. Then, in 1945, Korea was partitioned and became engulfed in war five years later. In both cases, action or inaction by U.S. leaders was a key driver”
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“The one exception to the lack of long-term thinking may be China. Its commercial interests in North Korea are only growing, as it eyes mineral rights and access to ports on the Sea of Japan. China’s political imperative is for a stable North Korea. Andrei Lankov, a perceptive watcher of North Korea at Kookmin University in Seoul, raises the possibility of China attempting to avert collapse by installing a hard authoritarian, pro-growth regime in North Korea, something along the lines of China’s. Perhaps a third-generation Kim might even be made the impotent figurehead, like Emperor Hirohito after the war, but the power would lie elsewhere.”
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“One October evening, when the students had gone camping and stayed up late, Moon Sung-il, a 14-year-old North Korean, brought tears to the South Koreans’ eyes when he recounted his two-and-a-half-year flight with other defectors that took him through China, Myanmar and a refugee camp in Bangkok. But he stunned them when he said that none of this was as daunting as a South Korean classroom. “I could hardly understand anything the teacher said,” he said. “My classmates, who were all a year or two younger than I was, taunted me as a ‘poor soup-eater from the North.’ I fought them with my fists.”
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