Archive for February, 2012:

Opportunity for Engagement and Reform: An Interview with Dr. Park Young-jun

By | February 18, 2012

The speed with which facts, currencies, ideas and rumors flow through and weave around the Korean peninsula has clearly accellerated in the information age.  Students in Pyongyang trace (if vaguely) the spread of revolution in Syria; a grainy drone strike over remote Pakistan makes the paper in Sinuiju;  a village 25 miles from the Chinese border […]

Think-Tank Watch

By | February 17, 2012

Steven Denney is editor-in-chief  of PEAR, Yonsei University’s graduate journal, a leading voice at the Political Cartel (East Asia) blog, and a master’s student in Global Studies at Yonsei University. In the “week in review” for February 13 through February 17, 2012, Denney, Think-Tank Analyst for SinoNK.com, compiles a list of recent articles on North Korea and Sino-North Korean relations. […]

North Korean Elites: Implications for Commercial Activities with China

By | February 16, 2012

At an early point in his sprawling 2100+ page memoir With the Century, Kim Il Sung initiates a line of discussion of which we are sure to see more in the coming years: praise for patriotic Korean capitalist-nationalist-revolutionaries.  Recollecting his youth in Pyongyang (“a city of shacks, made of cardboard boxes and four-by-fours”), Kim turns […]

Statues and Empty Bowls: Notes on North Korean Iconography and Prospects for European and Chinese Aid

By | February 16, 2012

Fireworks and Empty Bowls: Notes on North Korean Iconography and Prospects for European and Chinese Aid   by Adam Cathcart As expected, today’s 70th birthday commemorations for Kim Jong Il find the deceased leader at the burning revolutionary center of North Korean media.  And his son, having teased foreign observers (and, presumably, tickled the curiosity […]