log.johnnywon.com
near daily merriment served satirically by johnny won. say hello!
Posts tagged “North Korea”
“Population Is Growing, but Aging; ‘Million-Man Army’ Has Fewer Than 700,000 People”
This is North Korea.
Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies, a North Korean design firm.
“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”
Life After Kim | Foreign Policy
Basically:
- US causes stability
- US withdrawal upsets the region’s balance of power.
“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.”
“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.”
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 bottom line: Don’t look “foreign.” This may seem odd from a man whose name is often linked with a love of foreign films, foreign actresses, and foreign hairdos. Or from a country whose new 5,000-won bill shows founding leader Kim Il-Sung in a Western suit. But it was the sight of a female sales clerk with a “foreign” hairdo spurred Kim Jong-il’s mournful query : “Is she really our own Korean woman? Why is she giving up our own traditional beauty and choosing to model bad foreign habits of the capitalist?”
The buzz in Pyongyang: get a haircut / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com
Previously »