Essays
Collapsist Narratives and State Strength: Reading The Interview through Han Sorya’s Jackals
Han Sorya’s conception of Americans as “jackals” is a wartime description of an enemy but one that never went away–in a sense like the war itself. In this essay, David Fields surveys the strength of North Korean state narratives, folding in a very famous Korean War short story and a certain controversial Hollywood film.
Hagiography of the Kims & the Childhood of Saints: Kim Il-sung
In this essay Christopher Richardson explores the childhood hagiography of Kim Il-sung, “the master narrative from which all others derive,” and in so doing locates the origins of regime durability and state legitimacy.
Mountains and Seas of Gold: 2015 New Year’s Message
Robert Winstanley-Chesters returns to Sino-NK with his thoughts on Kim Jong-un’s 2015 New Year’s Address from a developmental and narrative point of view, going past – way, way past – debatable calls for inter-Korean rapprochement to look at the developmental sloughs and sumps therein concealed.
Over the Line: How Representative Was Yang Junfeng’s FT Article of Chinese Academic Opinion on North Korea?
Prompted by the 2013 dismissal of Deng Yuwen from his post at the Central Party School’s Study Times journal and the publication of an op-ed in the English-language Financial Times advocating China’s abandonment of North Korea, Sino-NK investigates how the Party responded and what ordinary academics really think about Sino-DPRK relations in China today.
Command and Conquer: The Co-option of Market Forces in the DPRK
Marketization in North Korea does more to maintain the regime than undermine it, argues Park Hyeong-jung of KINU. In the latest in a series of review essays covering key elements of contemporary North Korean economic history, Christopher Green reviews Park’s “Towards a Political Analysis of Markets in North Korea.”
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