Cross-border Business Ties
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 […]
Spreading Meth across the Chinese-North Korean Border
People and goods can and will always penetrate borders, even the ostensibly tightly-sealed DPRK boundary. In this essay, Jende Huang, Sino-NK’s Border Security Analyst, offers his take on the illicit drug trade between North Korea and China.While the laobaixing — represented, at least, by the taxi drivers in Tumen — know the problem exists, so […]
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