Cross-border Business Ties
“Friendship Prices”: Understanding Chinese-North Korean Energy Trade
The deepening of ties between China and other parts of the developing world in recent years has been met a great deal of hyperbole. Just as many onlookers describe China’s growing stake in Africa as “neo-colonial” (charges described and refuted in North Korean media) Chinese investments in the DPRK have also accrued a predatory stigma. But as […]
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop—Recent Activity on the Sino-DPRK Border (Part 2)
Does the North Korean National Security Agency roam the Manchurian frontier to retrieve defectors? Chinese and Korean troops and security personnel crisscrossed the Sino-Korean border with great ease during the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War, but the pretext then was much more extreme: armies of threatening enemy soldiers existed, not handfuls of refugees. […]
North Korean Elites: Implications for Commercial Activities with China
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 […]
Evaluation of the Development Plan for Hwanggumpyong Island and Wihwa Island
It would now be hard to find a single serious analyst who believes that Chinese aid is not central to keeping the DPRK afloat. But despite the huge influx of Chinese capital into North Korea, many Chinese investors continue to harbor serious doubts about the reliability of investments in North Korea. In this essay, Alan […]
“War Criminal” 365 Days a Year: On the Purported Cell Phone Ban in the DPRK
David Matthew, Analyst and Technology Editor for SinoNK.com, is pursuing a Master’s degree in Public Policy at Edinburgh University in the UK with a focus on security, trade, and technology in the Asia-Pacific. His essay at The Diplomat’s “ASEAN Beat”, taking on the subject of recent US-Singapore alignments, was also published today. — Editor-in-Chief ‘War Criminal’ 365 […]
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