Cross-border Business Ties

Encroaching Devastation: Chris Green On Rice, Markets, and the Yuanization of North Korea

By | January 07, 2012

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 […]

Watching Rason

By | December 28, 2011

There should be a great many more posts here about Rason, the northeasternmost port in North Korea which has been the object of such massive amounts of Chinese largesse and great-power fantasy, but for the time being, this essay by the folks at Chosun Exchange (via The Diplomat, HT @nepotism) provides a wonderful and credible primer.

A Yanji Sketch, and Notes on the Dandong Leadership

By | December 25, 2011

Along the frontier between North Korea’s North Hamgyong province and the PRC’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Region, journalists, according to Chosun Ilbo, have been encountered problems with Chinese police. Not so for Jeremy Page of the Wall Street Journal, who files a report which, amid all the other often completely baseless bloviating about rumors in Pyongyang, […]

Surveying the Security Environment on China’s North Korean Frontier

By | December 22, 2011

Since the death of Kim Jong Il, very little reporting has been done from or about Yanbian, the Korean Autonomous Prefecture on the border with the DPRK’s poorest and most restive province, North Hamgyong.  This post is an initial effort to fill the gap. Yanbian in the “Social Management” Discourse — Jin Yongmo [金永默], the Party […]

Via China, a Capitalist Restoration in the DPRK? A Marxist Perspective

By | December 20, 2011

Excerpting an entire chunk below of John Peterson’s work, which itself quotes at length a certain Minnesota reporter, in a worthy essay on Marxist.com: [begin quote] Capitalist Restoration? Capitalism has succeeded in prying open nearly the entire world. In an epoch of economic crisis and dog-eat-dog competition, every possible inch of market real estate will […]