DPRK Imposes State Prices on Markets

By Jung Kwon Ho, DailyNK (2010-02-05)

Shenyang, China — The North Korean authorities finally released fixed prices for 100 items across the country at 3 P.M. on Thursday. A Daily NK source inside North Korea revealed the news today in a telephone conversation, saying, “The authorities announced state-designated prices for 100 items in a notice posted at the entrance to markets on Thursday afternoon.

Alongside the message came a warning, “If traders fail to sell goods at the stated prices, goods will be confiscated.” The price list includes those for rice and corn. By implication, the selling of food has now been officially sanctioned in the market.

If the listed prices are enforced, however, confusion and anger are absolutely inevitable, because the gap between the newly-posted prices and real jangmadang prices is enormous.

For example, the latest real rice price in the jangmadang is 350 won per kilo, while corn is selling for 180 won; however the state-designated prices are 240 won and 130 won respectively. The jangmadang price of pork is around 300 won more expensive than its state-designated price.

Inevitably, therefore, traders’ increasingly wily attempts to circumvent the unrealistic demands of the state are continuing apace, “For now,” the source explained, “traders are pretending to sell for the released prices, but in reality they are selling for the existing jangmadang prices.”

According to the state price list, rice is 240 won per kilo; corn is 130 won; pork is 700 won; soy beans are 160 won; oil is 600 won; a kilogram of apples is 250 won; and a single egg is 21 won. Meanwhile, a toothbrush is 25 won; bars of soap, tubes of toothpaste and laundry soap are all 50 won; sneakers are 500 won; toilet paper is 50 won; a notebook comes in various sizes between 25 and 55 won; lighters are 70 won; shoes are 1,300 won; a flashlight is 500 won and a single battery 100 won. Children’s clothes are 1,500 won; children’s winter clothes are 5,000 won; and finally socks are listed as 350 won a pair…

DPRK SCHOLAR ADMITS CURRENCY REFORM GOAL WAS EXPANDED PUBLIC FINANCES

IFES (NK Brief No.10-01-29-1)

The director of DPRK Institute of Social Sciences has publically stated that the shocking currency reforms announced last November were aimed at filling the state’s public finance coffers.

In an interview for the Choson Sinbo, a newspaper distributed by the pro-North ‘General Association of Korean Residents in Japan,’ director Kim Cheol Jun revealed, “[last year’s] currency exchange program in [North Korea] was effectively carried out…through the currency exchange, socialist economic management principles could be better realized and a public finance foundation was prepared on which leaping advancements in the lives of the people will be achieved.”

Many experts in South Korea and abroad had speculated that the North’s objective in revamping its currency was to boost public coffers, but this was the first time that anyone from North Korea had publicly alluded to such goal. Director Kim stated that last year was a year ‘carved into history’ as the year in which the nation was turned around toward the realization of the goals set for 2012, noting that new seeds had been developed to boost crop yields, and that double- and triple-cropping as well as improved potato and bean crops had been accomplished.

Director Kim also stated that a decisive turn-around had been made in resolving food shortage problems, noting the successful development of Lyosell as one example of improved production in North Korea. Lyosell is a silk-like material made from wood pulp transformed into cellulose, and is softer and more hygroscopic than cotton, yet almost as strong as polyester.

Director Kim added that last year also saw the completion of the Yeoungwon Powerplant, the Yeaseong River No. 1 Youth Powerplant, and the Keumya River Powerplant, as well as the installation of Computer Numerical Control (CNC) systems in the Taean Heavy Machinery Complex, the Cheollima Steel Complex, and the Hyecheong Construction Machinery Factory…

See the full text of IFES (NK Brief No.10-01-29-1) here…

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Public shaming expected for North Korean official

ABC Radio Australia (February 4, 2010)

Presenter: Bill Bainbridge
Speakers: Dr Bronwen Dalton, Korea specialist, University of Technology Sydney; Chun Hae-sung, South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman; Erica Kang, director, International Network for Good Friends

A senior North Korean finance official has been sacked, after overseeing the country’s disastrous currency revaluation. Under a decree issued last November, old banknotes were swapped for new ones, at a rate of 100 to one. But the amount which could be exchanged was restricted, effectively wiping out many people’s savings and causing widespread anger. South Korea’s intelligence agency says the senior official in charge, Pak Nam-Ki, has been absent from public activities since early January. It’s been reported the official will be put on trial amid a wave of recriminations over the policy.

BAINBRIDGE: It was part of Pak Nam-Ki’s job to keep the planned currency revaluation completely secret. But just before the decree was made official some well connected North Koreans engaged in a frenzy of currency exchange designed to pre-empt the loss in value of their savings. Bronwen Dalton, of the University of Technology Sydney, says that may be why the man responsible for implementing the policy has now fallen out of favour. Alternatively, she says, it may be designed to calm public fury over the policy.

DALTON: There’s been a great deal of social unrest following the currency revaluation and also the ban on the use of foreign currency and the redenomination-revaluation effectively wiped out many people’s savings.

BAINBRIDGE: The development has South Korea worried over the prospect of more unrest and division in the unstable north. Chun Hae-sung is a spokesman for the South Korean Unification Ministry.

CHUN: The South Korean government has a very deep interest in North Korea’s situation after the currency reform, and we are currently examining the situation thoroughly. However, we believe it is a little early to make an exact judgment about the result.

BAINBRIDGE: But it’s clear the policy has sparked rampant inflation and food shortages. Seoul-based human rights organisation Good Friends says prices of many staple foods like rice and corn are doubling on a weekly basis. Erica Kang the director of the International Network for Good Friends.

KANG: Because of very, very high inflation on goods and especially on food people are unable to access any food, and particularly there aren’t any markets, the real market activity going on, even if there is food it’s very, very hard to access it because it’s very dear indeed.

BAINBRIDGE: Bronwen Dalton says while the state once provided an alternative to markets it can no longer afford to supply its people with basic foods leaving ordinary North Koreans with few options.

DALTON: The latest reports are that 80 per cent of household income and at least half the calories of North Koreans now come from the market system and by banning the market system and wiping out savings you’ve effectively removed access to food for millions and millions of people.

BAINBRIDGE: Despite the dire situation the United Nation’s World Food Programme is struggling to raise relief funds for the North. Major donors — including South Korea and the United States — refused to help in protest at its second nuclear test in May last year. By the end of 2009 the WFP had only reached 18 percent of its target of 492 million dollars in relief funds for the communist North. Nonetheless Bronwen Dalton says the regime is determined to crack down on the presence of private markets.

DALTON: While we’ve seen countries like Vietnam and China experiment with a market economy, North Korea, I think correctly, sees the spread market relations as a real challenge to the capacity of the regime to continue. It’s simply too rigid a system to allow any independent economic activity. Even the slightest of independent decision making which involves movement of people and goods challenges the incredibly tight grip the regime to date has had on daily life.

BAINBRIDGE: Dr Dalton says food market have been forced to go underground and can only continue to operate by bribing officials to turn a blind eye. As for the hapless Mr Pak – she says he could well be heading for a public humiliation to pay for regime’s failed policy.

DALTON: The strategy might be to unite the public dissatisfaction with the move by uniting against this one figurehead and hopefully unloading the discontent upon that person – many hours of televised trials and humiliations.

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A Nation of Racist Dwarfs

By Christopher Hitchens (Slate Magazine Feb. 1, 2010)

Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial “minder” whom I’ll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world’s most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he’d heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction. Not for Mr. Chae the charm of the ethnic mosaic, but rather a rigid and unpolluted uniformity.

I was struck at the time by how matter-of-factly he said this, as if he took it for granted that I would find it uncontroversial. And I did briefly wonder whether this form of totalitarianism, too (because nothing is more “total” than racist nationalism), was part of the pitch made to its subjects by the North Korean state. But I was preoccupied, as are most of the country’s few visitors, by the more imposing and exotic forms of totalitarianism on offer: by the giant mausoleums and parades that seemed to fuse classical Stalinism with a contorted form of the deferential, patriarchal Confucian ethos.

Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire wrote that those trying to master a new language always begin by translating it back into the tongue th ey already know. And I was limiting myself (and ill-serving my readers) in using the pre-existing imagery of Stalinism and Eastern deference. I have recently donned the bifocals provided by B.R. Myers in his electrifying new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, and I understand now that I got the picture either upside down or inside out. The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent “Constitution,” “ratified” last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian “military first” mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that.

Consider: Even in the days of communism, there were reports from Eastern Bloc and Cuban diplomats about the paranoid character of the system (which had no concept of deterrence and told its own people that it had signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in bad faith) and also about its intense hatred of foreigners. A black Cuban diplomat was almost lynched when he tried to show his family the sights of Pyongyang. North Korean women who return pregnant from China—the regime’s main ally and protector—are forced to submit to abortions. Wall post ers and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters. (The illustrations in this book are an education in themselves.) The United States and its partners make up in aid for the huge shortfall in North Korea’s food production, but there is not a hint of acknowledgement of this by the authorities, who tell their captive subjects that the bags of grain stenciled with the Stars and Stripes are tribute paid by a frightened America to the Dear Leader.

Myers also points out that many of the slogans employed and displayed by the North Korean state are borrowed directly—this really does count as some kind of irony—from the kamikaze ideology of Japanese imperialism. Every child is told every day of the wonderful possibility of death by immolation in the service of the motherland and taught not to fear the idea of war, not even a nuclear one.

The regime cannot rule by terror alone, and now all it has left is its race-based military ideology. Small wonder that each “negotiation” with it is more humiliating than the previous one. As Myers points out, we cannot expect it to bargain away its very raison d’etre.

All of us who scrutinize North Korean affairs are preoccupied with one question. Do these slaves really love their chains? The conundrum has several obscene corollaries. The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with the lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that—to judge by the standard of care and nutrition in the “wider” society—must be a living hell excusable only by the brevity of its duration. But race arrogance and nationalist hysteria are powerful cements for the most odious systems, as Europeans and Americans have good reason to remember. Even in South Korea there are those who feel the Kim Jong-il regime, under which they themselves could not live for a single day, to be somehow more “auth entically” Korean.

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.

But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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Nimble Agencies Sneak News Out of North Korea

By CHOE SANG-HUN, The New York Times, (24 January 2010)

Daily NK is one of six news outlets that have emerged in recent years specializing in collecting information from North Korea. These Web sites or newsletters hire North Korean defectors and cultivate sources inside a country shrouded in a near-total news blackout.

While North Korea shutters itself from the outside — it blocks the Internet, jams foreign radio broadcasts and monitors international calls — it releases propaganda-filled dispatches through the government’s mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency.

But, thanks to Daily NK and the other services, it is also possible now for outsiders to read a dizzying array of “heard-in-North Korea” reports, many on topics off limits for public discussion in the North, like the health of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il.

The reports are sketchy at best, covering small pockets of North Korea society. Many prove wrong, contradict each other or remain unconfirmed. But they have also produced important scoops, like the currency devaluation and a recent outbreak of swine flu in North Korea. The mainstream media in South Korea now regularly quote these cottage-industry news services.

“Technology made this possible,” said Sohn Kwang-joo, the chief editor of Daily NK. “We infiltrate the wall of North Korea with cellphones.”

[...] In the past year, the quality of the information these news services provide has improved as they have hired more North Korean intellectuals and former officials who defected to the South and still have friends in elite circles in the North, said Ha Tae-keung, a former student activist who runs Open Radio for North Korea and a Web site.

“These officials provide news because they feel uncertain about the future of their regime and want to have a link with the outside world, or because of their friendship with the defectors working for us, or because of money,” said Mr. Ha, who also goes by his English name, Young Howard.

All these news outlets pay their informants. Mr. Ha pays a bonus for significant scoops. Daily NK and Open Radio each have 15 staff members, some of them defectors, and receive U.S. congressional funding through the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as support from other public and private sources.

Recently, they have been receiving tips from North Koreans about corrupt officials.

“The fact that news comes out through civic groups like ours means that North Korean society is changing fast,” said Pomnyun Sumin, a Buddhist monk and chairman of Good Friends, a relief group based in Seoul whose newsletter broke the swine flu story last month.

Some informants have become so adept with technology that they send text-messages, audio files and photos to Seoul by cell phone, said Kim Heung-gwang, a former North Korean computer scientist who heads North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, a group of defectors that runs a news Web site.

Bringing news out of North Korea is risky. Mr. Kim said that one of his informants was stopped last May while trying to smuggle out a video in a small camera hidden in a cosmetics bottle. She is believed to have killed herself in police detention, he said.

See the full text of the article here…

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See the most recent report by Daily NK on the street fights in North Korea here… (Sensational!)

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Nick Bonner: Australia is Barring North Korean Artists

By John M. Glionna, LA Times (December 11, 2009)

Five painters had been commissioned to produce works for the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art show in Queensland. Their paintings will be there, but they won’t.

Reporting from Seoul – Nick Bonner has a cautionary tale about propaganda, censorship and North Korea. But it’s not what you think, he says.

The British filmmaker and art dealer had helped commission five North Korean painters to produce works for an Australian art exhibit, inviting them to come and talk about their craft and inspiration.

This week brought a last-minute catch, a tableau where politics overshadowed art. But it didn’t come from one of the world’s most-repressed societies. Instead, Australia denied entry visas for the artists, calling their work a product of North Korea’s propaganda machine.

Now Bonner is forced to display the paintings without the painters. And he accuses Australia of censorship. “This is a government telling its art patrons what artists they can learn from. If that’s not censorship, I don’t know what is,” the Beijing-based entrepreneur said. “How could they be so naive, so paranoid, so bureaucratic?”

The Australian Foreign Ministry says the visa ban is part of its response to North Korea’s efforts to develop missiles and nuclear weapons. To make an exception in this case, it says, would have sent an inappropriate message to North Korea.

“The artists concerned are from a studio that operates under the guidance of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il,” a spokesman said in a statement. “The studio reportedly produces almost all of the official artworks in North Korea, including works that clearly constitute propaganda aimed at glorifying and supporting the North Korean regime.”

Australia froze relations with the communist nation in 2002. Kim’s government last year closed its embassy in Canberra, the Australian capital, citing financial reasons.

North Korea walks a delicate and seemingly contradictory cultural and political line, courting international sanctions and isolation with its weapons programs but occasionally reaching out to the world. The New York Philharmonic was invited last year to perform in North Korea, which has also joined international competitions in gymnastics and soccer.

Pyongyang watchers on the Korean peninsula were divided Thursday on Australia’s decision. “Australia joined the U.N. sanctions against North Korea, which include regulations on people. But it seems an overly political way to handle cultural and artistic activities,” said Lee Woo-young, professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, the South Korean capital.

But Lim Soon-hee, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, said the artists’ visit could have been a windfall for North Korean propaganda. “Art and cultural policies in North Korea are tools for political propaganda and idolization of [late leader] Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, rather than pure, nonpolitical schemes,” he said.

Bonner, who has made several documentary films in North Korea, in 2006 commissioned the Mansudae Art Studio to produce 15 pieces dealing with industrial landscapes for showing at the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in South Brisbane, Australia. The display, which will be up through April, features the works of 100 artists in 25 nations.

Though he acknowledged that North Korea’s art studios are government-run, as are most organized activities in the country, he said that doesn’t mean that all the works produced there are political. Mansudae, which houses 1,000 artists, has produced work for several exhibits in Italy, according to the studio’s website.

Bonner encouraged the artists to avoid the socialist realism style typical of most communist propaganda. “We didn’t want works that glorified workers, but something more understandable to Australians — their humility,” he said.

Still, for many of the artists the assignment was a stretch. Finally, a painter showed Bonner a photograph of a blue-collar worker smoking a cigarette. “He said, ‘Is this what you mean?’ and we said, ‘Yes!’ It was a real breakthrough,” Bonner said.

He said the completed works — including sketches and portraits in oil paint and ink — express ideas that are groundbreaking for the North Korean artists, such as a painting that shows the smoky fires of an industrial foundry.

“I’ve let them down,” Bonner said of the artists. “I promised them an opportunity to explain their work. They paint beautifully; that’s why they were invited. For them to speak to other artists and patrons from a foreign land would have been a real breakthrough.”

Bonner said the project was never intended to be political. “But the Australian government has managed to turn it into that,” he said. “It’s bloody frightening when a government steps in to overrule an art gallery. That’s just wrong.”
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Australian MP has a Rainbow Vision of North Korea

by MARK DAVIS (Sydney Morning Herald, December 15, 2009)

He is in danger of becoming known as the Member for Pyongyang.

Following a taxpayer-funded visit to the North Korean capital, the Queensland federal Liberal MP Michael Johnson wants Australia to engage with Pyongyang’s regime just as Richard Nixon opened relations with communist China in the 1970s.

He concedes that North Korea is ”one of the darkest places on the face of the planet” but says Australia’s policy of condemning the regime has failed, and he has called on the Federal Government to open an embassy in Pyongyang.

In a report tabled in Parliament, Mr Johnson, the MP for Ryan, says his vision is to lead a delegation of young Australian students, sports players, musicians or academics back to Pyongyang.

”This would be a form of third-track diplomacy that could reignite the bilateral ties and see Australia begin a diplomatic process of connecting with key stakeholders in the North Korean regime.

”It is my bold and optimistic view that there will be a re-unification of the two Koreas in the next quarter century. Should this eventuate it is my fervent hope that Australia will have been front and centre in the diplomatic statecraft that produced this realignment in the global geopolitical landscape.”

Mr Johnson was in Pyongyang in April and met local officials including the foreign vice-minister Kim Yong-il. He was in Pyongyang for the regime’s celebrations on the 97th anniversary of the birth of the late president Kim Il-sung and visited Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where Kim’s embalmed remains lie in state.

His visit came at the height of tensions between Pyongyang and Western powers following North Korea’s launch of a long-range missile on April 5. He was in the country when the UN Security Council condemned the launch and the regime retaliated by announcing the resumption of its nuclear weapons program.

Mr Johnson told the Herald he did not accept that his visit could have provided succour to the regime. ”That is always the argument, but I think they don’t need any legitimacy from anybody. We have got to change the whole paradigm of our thinking. One is more likely to make progress by engaging a foe than by exclusively and consistently condemning them.

”I don’t want to take away for a moment from the fact that this is an evil regime, but we have got to ask ourselves: ‘Do we want them to be an evil regime for another 50 years?”’ He labelled his approach ”the rainbow policy”. ”We have got to crack some of the walls and shine some light in.”

Mr Johnson said the only other sitting federal MP to have visited North Korea was the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who had gone there while in Opposition. ”There has been no interest whatsoever from him in relation to my trip,” Mr [Johnson] said.

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“South of the Border”

South of the Border (Kukgyongui Namjjok) (2006, 109 min)

Directed by Ahn Pan-seok, the film is the first to deal with the lives
of North Korean defectors in Seoul. The film revolves around Kim Sun-ho (played by Cha Seung-won), who defected to the South with his family, while leaving his girlfriend Yon-hwa behind after promising to bring her to Seoul as soon as possible. In Seoul, he tries to save money to help her escape from the North, but one day, hears that Yon-hwa has
married another man. He becomes hopelessly depressed but later tries to find a way to adapt himself to life in the South…

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AvistaZ Asian Movies. Kim Seon-ho, a horn player, is leading a happy middle-class life, along with his elderly but active parents and the married sister’s family. He enjoys an occasional stroll on the neighborhood riverbank and a dish of cold buckwheat noodles. Recently Seon-ho has fallen head over heels for the beautiful museum guide Young-hwa (Jo Yi-jin, The Aggressives), a girl as “fresh and clean as a swig of dongchimi (cold radish kimchi juice made without red pepper).” When his father (Song Jae-ho) takes up a correspondence with his presumed-to-be-dead grandfather, however, things begin to unravel. You see, Seon-ho is a North Korean. And the grandfather, whom the family thought was an honored Communist hero, has been living in South Korea all these years. Threatened with exposure, Seon-ho’s family decides to risk their lives and seek asylum south of the border.

How far South Korean movies about the North-South division have evolved since The Spy (1997) and Shiri (1999) may be seen in the fact that the story of “Over the Border”, with only a few details changed, would make sense in almost any national context where illegal immigration and acculturation are serious social issues. Mexicans in the United States or Moroccans in France would certainly resonate with the Kim family’s experience, their befuddlement, desperation and courage in their efforts to create new identities in a familiar yet strange land, and their sorrow resulting from the inevitable choices they make in order to survive. Considering the reality that more than one thousand “escapees” have settled down in South Korea, some of whom can even make phone calls to North Korea via satellite relay, it is perhaps not surprising that Southerners increasingly look upon the Northerners amidst them as just another group of immigrants.

The greatest strength of TV producer An Pan-seok’s debut film is its almost anthropological approach to the everyday lives of North Koreans and Northerner exiles in South Korea. The painstaking recreation of communal restaurants and concert halls with their opulent but hollow-looking interior design, and an apartment house with its warm-colored but borderline cheesy wallpapers are stunning in their verisimilitude and naturalism: equally impressive are the detailed descriptions of housing facilities and relocation programs for Northerner exiles.

Cha Seung-won, eschewing the comic images familiar from his earlier pictures, is so convincing in portraying Seon-ho’s naive, trusting nature that I basically forgot throughout the movie that, if he were to mingle with North Koreans in real life, Cha would stick out like Gandalf among a bunch of Hobbits. Jo Yi-jin is indeed fresh and clean in her role: for me, like a gush of wind from the mountain top, carrying a fragrance of young pine needles. As a counter-point to Jo’s youth and wide-eyed vivaciousness, the veteran actress Shim Hye-jin (Out to the World, Acacia) delivers an excellent supporting performance as a mature, tough owner of fried chicken restaurant who befriends Seon-ho.

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Korea, Be a Stabliser for Asian Community!

Prof. Gavan McCormack, “Re-Constructing Asia” (Kyunghyang Shinmun, 07 Dec. 2009)

Much has changed in the Northeast Asian region in that space of two years. The US-centred, US-dominated world – the time of overwhelming US economic, cultural, and military weight on and in the world – fades before our eyes. Its moral credibility in particular has been eroded by aggressive wars, the practices of torture and indiscriminate killing, and the refusal to abide by the principles of international law. However, while in so many respects the US diminishes in importance, in strategic and military terms it remains paramount. The system of regional alliances linking Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines to the US as hub is anachronistic and only the absurd claim that North Korea is a major threat serves to keep it in place.

It we lift our eyes from the changes of the past two years or two decades, and fix them instead on the longue duree of centuries, the pattern is clear. The wave of Western imperialism that washed over Asia for roughly two centuries, based on Europe’s weapons and its primacy in the adoption of industrial capitalism, recedes steadily. The Asian share of global GDP, around half in 1820, is expected to recover to that same level within the next two decades. Asia today gradually resumes the global weight of pre-imperial times. A growing Asian autonomy and identity for itself is apparent. A consensus has steadily grown that security, environmental, and energy problems are shared, and ideological divisions have faded in significance.

But what shape will this new “Asia” take? While bureaucrats formulate pale versions of an expanded free trade zone or a Nato of the East, representative figures within civil society dream of an Asian community beyond the imperialism, war, and Cold War of the past 200 years and beyond the European global hegemony of the past 500, and they seek paths towards a post-capitalist order in harmony with the planet…

…The most recent community proposals have been the East Asian Summit (2005), Kevin Rudd’s (2008) for an “Asia Pacific Community” and Hatoyama Yukio’s (2009) for an “East Asia Community.” All tended to be APEC-like in their inclusiveness and vagueness, and both Japanese and Australian schemes bore the same marks as those of their former conservative forbears: a neo-liberal bent and the reservation of a special place for the US (even though Japan’s Foreign Minister initially denied that that would be the case with the Hatoyama project).

There are three problems with such proposals. First, something to which everybody belongs ceases to be a community. If the US must be part of an Asian community, must not China, Japan, and Korea also belong to NAFTA and the EU? When today Washington insists on getting “an invitation” to any “East Asian Community” (as Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell did in October), it displays its fear of challenge to its global hegemonism. Polite dissent is the appropriate response.

Secondly, good relations do not depend on shared identity, even less on dominance and subordination, but rather on difference and respect. An Asia that has a shared view of its identity and global role and can articulate it to the US would better serve global stability and peace and better share global responsibilities with the US than an Asia forever subordinate and divided. It would articulate its own interests, but that is what communities do.

Thirdly, a different approach to global economic and security concerns is necessary precisely because of the disastrous failures of US-centred neo-liberalism on the one hand and militarist hegemonism on the other. Asia needs to maintain a certain distance from the US in order to generate and project a different perspective and make a distinctive contribution to constructing a new global order…

…The civic, humanist energy that long radiated from its democratic revolution (undermining bureaucratic and statist agendas on all sides, not least to the North) pulses less vigorously. There are of course reasons for this, but it is up to Korean civil society now to regain its momentum and to commit itself again to the great tasks of community, value, and meaning. Korea has been, and I have no doubt will become once again, a pole-star pointing towards a future democratic, citizen-led Asian or East Asian community.

See the full text of this article here…

North Korea Launches a Banknote Reform

2point6billion.com Dec. 2 – North Korea has abruptly revalued its currency by a huge margin and restricted the amount of old money people can exchange for new bills prompting reports of rioting in its capital, Pyongyang.

The measures are intended to stomp out burgeoning black market trading by effectively wiping two zeroes off the value of North Korea’s currency, the won. The hermit state moved further to choke illegal currency trading by only allowing about 100,000 to 150,000 old won to be exchanged for the new notes. The new rules sent people desperate to exchange their won for the U.S. dollar and Chinese renminbi even at lower black market rates.

According to Daily NK, a dedicated North Korean online news site, the  maximum amount per household which could be exchanged in cash was changed to 150,000 won but a new decree now states that authorities will only permit people to exchange the rest of the money at 1,000:1 although the exchange rate is still 100:1.

North Koreans who kept cash on hand to help them survive lean months effectively saw their savings massively diminished. “As people rushed to swap money, commercial activities have virtually come to a standstill.” Good Neighbors, a Seoul-based relief agency, said in a statement. “The purpose of the reform is to kill private market activities that stoked anti-socialism.”

Another Day, Another Damaging Currency Decree

By Lee Sung Jin [Daily NK 2009-12-02]

Currency exchange finally started across North Korea at 8 o’clock this morning. The changeover is supposed to have been completed by the 6th, and from the next day the new denominations are due to enter circulation. There have been some delays to implementation of the exchange, including a delay to the day the new notes enter full circulation.

However, several inside sources have reported that every county branch of the Chosun (North Korea) Central Bank has now started exchanging old money. In the meantime, resident sentiment turned aggressive once the details of the proposed exchange became clear, and now the North Korean authorities have revised those details once again.

A source explained, “On December 1st at 10 A.M. an urgent meeting for cadres of Party and Administrative Committees was convened. As a result of that meeting, a new decree was released.” “The maximum amount per household which could be exchanged in cash was initially set at 100,000 won, but overnight it increased to 150,000 won, then subsequently a new decree was handed down.”

“According to the new decree, the exchange rate is still 100:1 for 100,000 won, but now the authorities will only permit people to exchange the rest of the money at 1,000:1.” As a result, if you take 200,000 won in cash to a bank, you get 1,100 won in new denomination bills. This emergency formula will do nothing other than destroy the fortunes of the people.

Another source reported that in the jangmadang practical trading had ceased, although rice was still on sale from traders dealing in the product from home. The price of a kilogram has apparently skyrocketed to 30,000 won in old denomination bills, a 15-fold increase.

Wealthy merchants generally do their business in Yuan or U.S. Dollars, so the harm to them is not so serious. At the other end of the scale, low end traders who live from day to day will not be hit too hard for the simple reason that they don’t have much cash. However, people in the middle classes who have tended to hoard paper cash at home are facing a fatal beating.

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North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966-2008

By Narushige Michishita

This book examines North Korea’s nuclear diplomacy over a long time period from the early 1960s, setting its dangerous brinkmanship in the wider context of North Korea’s military and diplomatic campaigns to achieve its political goals. It argues that the last four decades of military adventurism demonstrates Pyongyang’s consistent, calculated use of military tools to advance strategic objectives vis à vis its adversaries. It shows how recent behavior of the North Korean government is entirely consistent with its behavior over this longer period: the North Korean government’s conduct (rather than being haphazard or reactive) is rational – in the Clausewitzian sense of being ready to use force as an extension of diplomacy by other means.

The book goes on to demonstrate that North Korea’s “calculated adventurism” has come full circle: what we are seeing now is a modified repetition of earlier events – such as the Pueblo incident of 1968 and the nuclear and missile diplomacy of the 1990s. Using extensive interviews in the United States and South Korea, including those with defected North Korean government officials, alongside newly declassified firsthand material from U.S., South Korean, and former Communist-bloc archives, the book argues that whilst North Korea’s military-diplomatic campaigns have intensified, its policy objectives have become more conservative and are aimed at regime survival, normalization of relations with the United States and Japan, and obtaining economic aid.

Reviews

“In North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966-2008, Dr. Narushige Michishita provides a unique, refreshing and extremely well researched study of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) idiosyncratic military/political strategies and doctrines. . . . Dr. Michishita’s book is highly recommended to both the serious student of the DPRK and the general reader interested in gaining a better understanding of this dangerous and volatile nation.” -Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., author of The Armed Forces of North Korea and A History of Ballistic Missile Development in the DPRK

Table of Contents

Introduction 1: A History of North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns

2: Assaults along the Demilitarized Zone, 1966-1968

3: The Pueblo Incident, 1968

4: The West Sea Incident, 1973-76

5: The Axe Murder Incident, 1976

6: Nuclear Diplomacy, 1993-94

7: Missile Diplomacy, 1996-2000

8: Assaults on the Korean Armistice, 1993-2002

9: Nuclear Diplomacy, Round Two, 2002-Present

October 2009 | Hardback: 978-0-415-44943-4 £80/$130

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