Cross-border Business Ties
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 […]
Liaoning Expressways, the Global Times, and China as a Great Power in the North Korean Media: KCNA File No. 5
Northeast China, and Liaoning in particular, has its own unique set of problems: environmental pollution, rates of unemployment and corruption that are higher than the national average, and the occasional violation of its eastern boundary by border guards with guns or North Korean fighter jets. But Liaoning — being more solidly Han, and much closer […]
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop—Recent Activity on the Sino-DPRK border
As was discussed in-depth nearly precisely a year ago on One Free Korea, the North Korean border with China tends to be a place where memory goes to die. That is to say, when it comes to news reports about the border, a tabula rasa among readers is commonly assumed. Whenever the DPRK’s malignancy needs […]
Sunday Reads, Chinese Audibles
– This rather slight yet nevertheless astonishing shift in emphasis on nothing less than Kim Jong Il’s last on-site inspection: the supermarket visited on December 15 was in fact a joint venture with China. A blockade on this particular fact had existed since the Dear Leader’s death, with nothing less than a CCTV crew going […]
Encroaching Devastation: Chris Green On Rice, Markets, and the Yuanization of North Korea
Encroaching Devastation: On Rice, Markets, and the Yuanization of North Korea by Christopher Green Christopher Green is Manager of International Affairs for Daily NK and writer of Destination Pyongyang, based in Seoul. Propaganda is only useful to a certain extent. For one thing –as the people of North Korea have long been aware and as […]