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 […]
In the endeavor to put some meat on the bones of the Chinese side of the Robert Park story (e.g., What was Park doing in Yanbian and what was the Chinese police response?), a recent commenter on this site pointed my attention to the website of the Yanbian Public Security Bureau. Sure, its posts about […]
Well, North Korea may be on fire, but the wise Chinese Communist Party has apparently decided that releasing the news in the PRC would disturb social harmony. Or otherwise interfere with its evolving master narrative on North Korea. As Professor Jonathan Pollack reminds us, the PRC narrative now includes sticks as well as carrots, and […]
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 […]
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 […]
I found this French film, apparently shot in spring 2010, to be better than most treatments of the North Korean tourist experience. Among other things, a young North Korean “rapper” is encountered in an amusement park (at 12:31), North Korean rallies are accompanied by music by Philip Glass, and the piece benefits from the use […]
Thus reports China Daily, stating that radiation has been found in the water in Fuyuan county [抚远县], which is China’s easternmost point in the northeastern most province, very close to the Russian frontier. On March 22, the PRC Environmental Protection Agency [环境保护部/Huanjing baohu bu ] had reported no evidence of Fukushima radiation in Heilongjiang province. […]
Regarding the Korean peninsula, the Chinese media strategy of the past several days has been, perhaps, a bit opaque. But yesterday, clarity arrived! The Huanqiu Shibao of December 23 makes rather evident the goal of the recent PRC encouragement of North Korea: just stop the nonsense and make some money. In other words, the narrative […]
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 […]
In case you hadn’t heard, two North Korean assassins were recently apprehended in South Korea on a mission to kill Hwang Jang Yop, the grizzled 87-year-old architect of the juche philosophy who defected — via Beijing — to Seoul in 1997. This assassination attempt is kind of a big deal because — apart from the […]
