I’ve just shot off a voluminous bolt of Tweets on the subject, but thought I might wax on the plus-140-characters side of things here on S.V. regards recent activity in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China, snug up against the North Korean border. Do you suppose we will learn anything new with the […]
The North Korean ambassador emerged in Beijing today to give a press conference at the DPRK Embassy, reprising themes from yesterday’s DPRK Foreign Ministry announcement of a desired peace treaty with the United States (an announcement reported here from one Xinhua’s stalwart guys in Pyongyang, Gao Haorong). The ambassador noted that North Korea’s “goal has […]
My apologies for the paucity of recent posts, friends. The author of this blog has been smashing through the Chinese borderlands with North Korea, pen in hand, laden with a camera, now borne aloft on new experiences. In the aftermath of this journey, there are scores of things I would like to say about North […]
Just prior to the tolling of the bells that marked the turning of the year, I was fortunate to have an essay published in South China Morning Post on the subject of China’s leadership and the evolution of their attitudes toward North Korea. Written with two excellent co-authors (Roger Cavazos of Nautilus Insitute and Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga of […]
The following is a cross-post from SinoNK.com. And King Tubby (a regular commenter on both this site and David Bandurski’s essential China Media Project) points out a new Los Angeles Times article that deals with the matter of North Korean capitalism from a different angle. Along the frontier between North Korea’s North Hamgyong province and […]
If you’re feeling a bit wonky, I just posted a somewhat comprehensive survey of the border security environment in the PRC’s Yanbian Korean Automous Prefecture at SinoNK.com. It seems that no Chinese delegations can get into the DPRK along the northern border, but, according to DailyNK, they are sending wreathes in as gifts.
About an hour ago at noon Pyongyang time, Korean Central News Agency reported that Kim Jong Il had died yesterday morning in his train “from overwork.” A Chinese reporter, Zhao Shuguang [赵曙光], who described in earlier reports the North Korea leader’s desire to make it to age 70 in the year 2012, and who has […]
Peripheries are everything in the study of China, because they are so dangerous. Whether social peripheries or geographical, those who dwell on the margins — so tangibly aware of the possibilities of flight or of wresting away control from the guardians of order — pose a challenge to hegemonic structures. When the social and geographical […]
In the tradition of City Lights Books and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “I Am Waiting,” I am working very slowly on a process and I am working on re-acquiring the previously acquired and I am working on the counter-offense, the protracted war, and the Kishi-inspired-insurgency that never ended and I am working on my fingernails badged by […]
The story of illegal drug distribution across the North Korean border and into China is now being told with a bit of flair in the pages of Newsweek. As regular readers of this blog will know, I find fieldwork in the Chinese borderlands with North Korea always to be an exciting process. Exciting though it […]
