Posts Tagged ‘north korea’
[LINK] “Are Kaesong curtains drawn for good?”
Aidan Foster-Carter‘s Asia Times article makes the point that the extreme rhetoric used by the North Korean government against the South has the effect of shutting down possibilities for inter-Korean concord and cooperation. What incentive does the South have to cooperate with such a North? And how would the North, absent involvement with the South, avoid envelopment by China?
Fortunately, North Korea as yet lacks any such capacity, so this all had a staged and cartoonish character. That did not make it any less unsettling. Though little remarked, there may be a parallel here with last spring’s vicious and highly personalized propaganda campaign against South Korea’s then President Lee Myung-bak, including vile cartoons of him as a rat being bloodily done to death in a variety of ways. We covered this here in detail at the time.
These cartoons can no longer be found on KCNA, but Jeffrey Lewis has usefully preserved some for posterity. One comment there is worth quoting for its wider resonance: “How do you negotiate with a government that presents propaganda posters showing your president’s gory dismemberment?”
This year’s campaign lacked the cartoons’ visual nastiness and personal animus, but was no less extreme in its language. Quoting this in extenso would be tedious. Any reader – except in South Korea; will President Park end this needless ban? – has only to turn to KCNA.kp, which helpfully files its main diatribes under the telling sidebar “DPRK in All-Out Action Against Enemies,” and scroll back over the past two months. Of late they have toned this down, but only slightly.
As recently as May 10, party daily Rodong Sinmun could still write: “The DPRK remains steadfast in its attitude to meet any challenge of the hostile forces for aggression through an all-out action based on nuclear deterrent of justice, bring earlier the day of the final victory in the great war for national reunification (emphasis added) and guarantee the prosperity of a reunified country and the independent dignity of the nation for all ages.”
Leaving aside the bizarre idea of nuclear “all-out action” as a way to “guarantee prosperity” – guarantee poverty, more like – taken literally what can this mean except that North Korea would welcome a “unification” achieved by the nuclear defeat (as if!) of South Korea, with all the catastrophic material and human loss of innocent lives that would entail? Or if they don’t really mean it, why do they say it? To adapt the question above, how can you talk usefully to a regime which purports to gleefully contemplate nuking you into submission?
[BRIEF NOTE] Thoughts on the Kaesong Industrial Region and brittle North Korea
The New York Times‘s Choe Sang-Hung reported that North Korea has begun to close down operations in the Kaesong Industrial Region, a North Korean special economic zone on the frontier with the South that was supposed to be the test-bed for inter-Korean cooperation (South Korean capital and technology, North Korean labour).
North Korea said Monday that it was withdrawing all of its 53,000 workers from the industrial park it runs with South Korea, suggesting that the North was seeking to portray itself as willing to subordinate financial gains to political and military priorities as it increased tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea “will temporarily suspend the operations in the zone and examine the issue of whether it will allow its existence or close it,” the country’s official Korean Central News Agency quoted a North Korean official as saying after visiting the factory complex on Monday. The official, Kim Yang-gon, a secretary of the Central Committee of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, said the final decision would depend on the South Korean government’s attitude, making it clear that North Korea was using the project’s future to pressure the South for political concessions.
The complex, in the North Korean border town of Kaesong, operated for eight years despite continuing political and military tensions, including the North Korean artillery attack on a South Korean island two and a half years ago and the cutoff of all other trade ties after the sinking of a South Korean warship in 2010. South Koreans had hoped that the North’s growing dependence on the complex as an important source of hard currency would provide South Korea with leverage on the North’s recalcitrant leadership. South Korea also thought that it could be used as a possible buffer should there be military conflict.
But the North was angered after its threat this month to close the complex was met with skepticism from some news media analysts who said the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, would not want to risk losing the cash. On Monday, North Korea said it “gets few economic benefits from the zone while the South side largely benefits from it.”
As with many of the repressive government’s aggressive moves, closing the factory park would harm North Koreans. It is the biggest employer in Kaesong, the North’s third-largest city. It generates $90 million a year in wages for the North Koreans employed there, and shutting it down would affect the lives of 200,000 to 300,000 people in the area, South Korean analysts estimate.
Mr. Kim “is not accountable to his people, and thereby can afford to raise tension almost indefinitely at a great cost to his own people,” said Lee Sung-yoon, a North Korea specialist at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He recalled that the government did not change its policy even after a famine killed an estimated 10 percent of the North Korean population in the mid-1990s.
Taken from the Wikimedia Commons, here, this map shows the borders and locations of the Kaesong Industrial Region of North Korea. Note that immediately to the southeast of the Kaesong Industrial Region is greater Seoul, the megalopolis that is home to half of South Korea’s population and likely produces an even larger share of South Korea’s total economic output. Alastair Gale’s Wall Street Journal post “Kaesong Closure Would Hurt on Both Sides of the Border” makes the point that the closure of the zone would hurt the South’s economy to an extent.
Mr. Kim, who asked that his full name not be used, is a manager for a sportswear company in Seoul that outsources around 20% of its production to Kaesong, a jointly run industrial park 10 kilometers, or about 6 miles, inside the North. His company employs 950 North Koreans there and he says it is very happy with their work.
“The skill and labor intensity of workers at Kaesong is far better than we could get in China or Vietnam. They’re disciplined, hard workers and of course language is no problem,” he said.
North Korea’s move Wednesday to block the entry of South Korean managers and delivery staff to the complex has raised the prospect that it might go further and shutter the plant.
“That would be a big problem,” Mr. Kim said. Moving production to South Korea would be possible, but labor costs would be much higher. North Korean staff at the Kaesong plant earn $100-$105 a month according to South Korea’s Unification Ministry, less than one-tenth the wage for average factory workers in South Korea.
A sudden closure could also mean lost inventory and raw materials. Mr. Kim’s delivery trucks were unable to bring out products worth around 200 million won ($178,600) on Wednesday.
The North’s economy, though, would suffer much more. South Korea can survive outsourcing its low-end industrial jobs to China and Vietnam, but who could replace South Korea? (China seems disinterested in the task.) Gale makes the point that Kim is worried about the fate of the tens of thousands of North Korean workers who won’t have access to income from relatively well-paying jobs. The overall impact on the North Korean economy and on the living standards of North Koreans, the consensus seems to be, will be strongly negative. Inasmuch as maximizing economic output and living standards isn’t the primary concern of the North Korean state, that may not be much of a deterrent.
If the Kaesong Industrial Region (and the now-closed Mount Kumgang Tourist Region on the eastern end of the inter-Korean border) had managed to survive, then the chances for some kind of managed North Korean transition to a more functional state would have been that much greater. Without any inter-Korean economic cooperation, the chances of something going badly awry rise that much more. In the meanwhile, the economic gap between the two Koreas continues to grow, even as the South gets used to life without a northern hinterland. At what point might the South stop caring about a North associated only with costs, not benefits?
[LINK] “It’s time to end the Korean War”
Thomas Walkom’s Toronto Star op-ed, pointed out by Facebook’s John, makes an interesting argument. What think you? The argument that the armistice intended to be temporary has been violated by both sides, the South with the presence of nuclear-armed American troops and the North via its various attacks, makes some sense. The noxious quality of the North Korean government and its actions, though, makes the idea of signing a peace treaty with the DPRK and expecting the DPRK to live up to it implausuible.
The armistice called for negotiations to begin within three months on a comprehensive political settlement for the peninsula.
And it called for all foreign troops — UN and Chinese — to be eventually withdrawn.
The Chinese did withdraw, as did the Canadians, British and most other UN forces. But the Americans, at the behest of the South Korean government they had set up, stayed. They are still there.
In violation of the armistice, the U.S. arbitrarily set the maritime boundary between the two Koreas. Between 1958 and 1991, the U.S. armed its forces in South Korea with nuclear weapons, another violation.
So when Pyongyang says, as it did this week, that the terms of that armistice have been breached by the UN side, it is not entirely inaccurate.
To assign blame for the standoff on the Korean peninsula is a mug’s game. Most historians agree that the Northern troops did invade the South in 1950. But they also agree that both North and South had been conducting raids into one another’s territory during the months before.
During the war, both sides committed unspeakable atrocities. Both lost hundreds of thousands of civilians although, thanks to UN bombing raids, the North lost markedly more.
The North has been a dictatorship since its inception. The South, while a military dictatorship for most of the post-war period, embraced democracy in 1987.
The UN side may have broken the armistice by keeping U.S. troops in the South. But the North broke the ceasefire in even more outrageous ways — from its assassination forays to its 2010 shelling of South Korean civilians.
[DM] “On North Korea becoming a place where people are from”
I’ve a post up at Demography Matters wherein I argue that while South Korea is becoming a place people are moving to, North Korea’s fate in the 21st century is to be the place (country, region, whatever) where people around the world will be from.
Writing in The New Republic, Keith Richburg examined the origins of the Chinese alliance of North Korea in the nostalgia of the Korean war the two countries shared. Of note is the fact that this historic solidarity is irrelevant to younger generations of Chinese, as it may be for North Korea itself.
Officially, the Chinese foreign ministry expressed “firm opposition” to the nuclear test 100 kilometers from China’s border and made a show of calling in North Korea’s ambassador to register its displeasure. The state-run media also piled on, with the nationalistic Global Times newspaper—owned by the Communist Party’s main mouthpiece People’s Daily—calling the test “unwise and regrettable,” even while blaming Pyongyang’s “insecurity” on hostility from the United States.
But it was via social media, particularly weibo, or Chinese Twitter, that average Chinese citizens have been blasting their government for continuing to embrace a dangerous, mercurial and hermetic regime that seems to have little concern with international norms. “Surely the root cause is that for decades the DPRK has been ruled by a succession of evil unbalanced dictators,” one Internet user wrote, posting comments immediately after the Global Times editorial. What was amazing is not the sentiment—but that the Communist-owned paper allowed the comment to remain on its site.
Other online comments were even harsher. “Kim Jong-un slapped China on the face by having a nuclear test at our front door, during the Chinese New Year” said one weibo user named Liu Weiwei. “China has spent so much money every year to raise this ungrateful wolf.” Hu Xijin, the chief editor of Global Times, wrote on his personal weibo account; “I hope the government will firmly oppose this action, instead of just paying lip service. The friendship between China and North Korea is important, but China should not be kidnapped by the North Korean regime.”
But why is the Chinese public at pains to suggest that the “friendship” with North Korea is important at all? This is indeed where something gets lost in translation. Where Westerners simply see North Korea as an impoverished and unpredictable country, Chinese see it as a neighbor with which it became bonded through the trauma of war. The defining moment of the relationship came in October, 1950, when Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong sent more than a hundred thousand People’s Liberation Army troops swarming across the Yalu River, where they overran advancing United Nations and American troops. They engaged in some of the bloodiest battles of the Korean War, which is still referred to in that part of China as “the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid North Korea.” The bonds forged in that war persist to this day—though they are attenuating with age.
[LINK] “China calls for talks after North Korean threat”
The Los Angeles Times‘ article describing the reaction of China to the latest North Korean threats hints at the possibility that China might take concrete action against its neighbour, if only to try to prevent the destabilization of China’s Korean frontier.
With North Korea openly threatening the United States with nuclear weapons, China called Thursday for a new round of diplomacy and appears to be growing increasingly frustrated with its longtime ally.
Beijing’s calls for intervention come amid a torrent of belligerent language from Pyongyang, angered by a United Nations resolution earlier in the week expanding sanctions over its missile and nuclear program.
The latest escalation came Thursday when Pyongyang lashed out at the United States, which it called the “archenemy of the Korean people.’’
“We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are targeted at the United States,” North Korea’s National Defense Commission said in a statement released by the official news service.
“Settling accounts with the U.S. needs to be done with force, not with words,” it said.
[. . .]
Frustrated with its longtime ally, China took a surprising step against North Korea on Tuesday by voting in favor of the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the rocket launch.
For years, Beijing has been encouraging North Korea to follow Chinese-style economic reforms, loosening the controls on its tightly controlled economy.
From 2003 to 2007, China led the six-nation talks — which included the United States, Japan, South Korea and Russia as well as North Korea — on the nuclear program. Analysts believe, however, it is unlikely that North Korea will return to negotiations, even under strong pressure from Beijing.
For the Chinese, Snyder said, calls for multiparty talks are seen more as a “crisis management mechanism, so they can rest easy there will not be any escalation.”
[LINK] “North Korea a culture of warriors”
An interesting Asia Times article by one Tatiana Gabroussenko makes the case that North Korean popular culture over the past sixty years has diverged strongly from the south, with the hard-edged militarism and lack of sentimentality cultivated by the north strongly contrasting with the South’s norms.
A comparison of North and South Korean paradigms demonstrates that the major rupture between two halves of a once homogeneous culture which has been occurring over the last 60 years lies not in their respective attitudes to communism. In many aspects, purely communist messages of North Korean discourse are congruent with communal values of patriarchal Korea and may be quite appealing to a regular South Korean.
What in fact differentiates the North Korean spiritual world from the South Korean one is it’s radical departure from civil traditions of the Confucian learned gentlemen, which traditionally despise brute force and military violence.
North Korean ideology has significantly redefined Korea’s past, present and future. When depicting traditional Korea, North Korean media tend to downplay its Confucian legacy and falsely represent old Korea as an essentially martial state. According to a popular ideological myth, obligatory military service allegedly enjoyed such a high prestige in old Korea that it was widely considered a kind of initiation process for young men, without passing of which they were not allowed to marry.
[. . .]
A consistent injection of this idea into generations cannot pass without consequences. Warriors who are trained to fight against named enemies, the South Korean president among them, will search for their battlefield and are likely eventually to find it.
Meanwhile, South Korean upbringing is rapidly moving towards the opposite direction. On the one hand, it largely continues Confucian traditions of the prevalence of intellectual development over the body. On the other hand, this Confucian legacy has been augmented by the educational trend of contemporary Western democracies, with their emphasis on pacifism, tolerance and leniency to human weaknesses.
One of the recent mantras of South Korean pedagogy is curbing children’s aggression and discouraging violent games and toys. A range of parental books on the shelves of the largest Seoul bookshop, Kyobomungo, calls on South Korean fathers to refrain from any aggression, both physical and verbal, when dealing with their children and to inspire their offspring to do the same at schools and playgrounds.
[. . .]
In a prosperous, humane and caring world of South Korean children, everyday violence is hidden from the public eye; this is a world with an increasing number of vegans, animal shelters, and a thriving pet industry. For a young South Korean child today, a rabbit, for instance, is associated with a fluffy toy or a cute domestic companion. In the harsh reality of North Korean children, rabbits are domestic animals that are valued for their skin, meat and fur.
Nation-wide campaigns encourage North Korean kindergarteners to raise rabbits and children “to make food and clothes for the brave uncle soldiers of the Korean People’s Army”.
Are South Koreans prepared to deal with their brothers in the North?
The popularity of the ideal of reunification in South Korea has been dropping for some time, driven substantially on the economic and financial costs of reunification. If South Koreans come to feel that they don’t share that many cultural traits in common with North Koreans–if, in fact, the emerging norms of South Korean culture are held in contempt by North Koreans–what incentive, exactly, to South Koreans have to reunify? What is there to reunify at all? I wonder.
