DPRK Nuclear Safety: China’s Paramount Concern on the Frontier?
Chico Harlan, the Washington Post correspondent in Seoul, spent some time this past November in a “nuclear ghost town” on the northeast coast of Japan. (A narrated video of his journey is available here, well worth the short advertisment that precedes it.) On January 6, Harlan reported on how rumors in Seoul of a North […]
Historical Allegories and Revolutionary Credentials: Jang Song Taek
Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jang Song Taek, prevalent in the ongoing discussions about who is wielding power in North Korea, now appears to be building up something of the beginnings of a personality cult himself, or at least, has succeeded in having public recognition of his role in today’s DPRK. The evidence for this assertion […]
Ambassador Liu Reappears, or, Why Opera Matters
It is a working assumption here at Sino-NK that the Chinese Embassy has been decidedly on “the outs” with the North Korean leadership in the immediate aftermath of Kim Jong Il’s death. The strife over the mysterious deaths of seven Chinese businessmen/tourists in late November 2011, along with the Embassy’s public implication that Kim’s death […]
China’s Naval Maneuvering in the Pacific
Midway through the first act of John Adam’s Nixon in China, the eponymous statesman enters into a rare lyricism to evoke the historical resonances of his journey to China, island-hopping across the Pacific via Hawaii and Guam: On our flight over from Shanghai the countryside Looked drab and grey… “We came in peace for all […]
Poetry from Pyongyang // 平壤诗歌
Rodong Sinmun yesterday carried a number of foreign language items, as well as a plug (in Korean) for foreign language education in the DPRK. A positive sign? At the very least, an opportunity for two English-language students at Kim Il Sung University to get an important translation on their respective resumes of a collectively-composed poem, […]
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