North Korean Economy Watch

In football, North Korea won the under-17 women’s football World Cup yesterday with a come-from-behind 2-1 win over the United States in Auckland, New Zealand.

According to a New Zealand sports web site:

The Koreans fell behind after two minutes to a freak own goal from a throw-in, but drew level through Kim Un Hyang with 13 minutes of regular time remaining.

Jang Hyon-Sun netted the winner in the second period of extra time, seven minutes away from a penalty shoot-out.

North Korea now boast both age-group women’s World Cup titles, having taken the under-20 version in Russia two years ago.

In film, the Daily NK reports that the popularity of South Korean films is giving way to American, Thai, and Chinese films:

In North Korea, the fervor of the South Korean Waves is on the wane; Korean dramas, which have spearheaded the spread of South Korean culture and progress since 2000, are no longer generating huge interest among North Korean citizens. The prevailing response of the citizens has been “I have seen enough” and “I have had my fill.”

A source form North Hamkyung Province said in a phone conversation with the Daily NK on the 2nd, “Nowadays, a Thai movie, “Ong-Bak (2003), Muay Thai Warrior,” is immensely popular among the younger generation. Chinese or American movies have become more popular than South Korean movies.”

The source added, “When South Korean dramas were first popular, adoration, curiosity, new storylines and exotic scenes generated a wave of interest, but people seemed to have had their fill.”

“Previously, Chinese people would bring back South Korean films when (North Korean) people requested DVDs, but now, and they mostly bring American or Chinese martial arts movies. According to smugglers working along the border, South Korean DVDs cannot be found in the homes of the Chinese.”

He evaluated thus, “More than anything, we like clarity and accuracy, but South Korean movies tend to be ambiguous. It frustrates me that they take and twist around words when the reality of the situation is clear.”

Gwon Myung Chul (pseudonym), who visited his relatives in China at the end of October, noted, “In Pyongyang, people can mostly acquire South Korean songs. With the rising popularity of South Korean songs, CDs containing these songs have come out, but they did not generate much interest.”

Gwon explained, “Recent Korean songs have not resonated with us emotionally and they have been difficult to understand. I don’t know what the people there (in the South) think, but rap or Pansori (traditional Korean narrative songs) are really difficult to listen to.”

He observed that “South Korean songs were better in the past” and listed off the Korean songs which he could sing, such as Noh Sa Yeon’s ‘Meeting’ and Kim Jong Hwan’s ‘For Love.’

Read the full article here:
South Korean Movies Not Popular Anymore in North Korea
Daily NK
Lee Sung Jin
11/4/2008

Individuals and organizations who smuggle radios into the DPRK, whether for personal gain or for altruistic reasons, do not to attract attention to themselves.  This makes it difficult to determine just how many foreign-made radios can be operated, and by whom, in the DPRK.

This week, however, Christian broadcaster Trans World Radio announced that it will distribute 3,400 radios in the DPRK this year alone:

International Christian broadcaster Trans World Radio (TWR) confirmed Friday, November 7, that it has secretly distributed thousands of radio receivers in North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated Communist nations. 

“TWR already delivered 3,100 radio’s in recent months and the plan is to increase that number to 3,400 by the end of this year,”  said TWR-Netherlands from its headquarters in the Dutch town of Barneveld. “Radio is the only way for North Koreans to hear the Gospel.  However receivers sold in the country are only tuned to the state-run network,” TWR added.

TWR said it has set up a transmitter in the region to reach the people of North Korea with Christian programming and encourage underground churches. “Most Christians in North Korea are not able to share their faith with other believers openly, and are forced to worship in secret.”?

Who knows how many of these radios will end up in actual use, but this is just one organization in one year.  Is it plausible to believe that over 10,000 radios are smuggled into the DPRK in a year? Are there reasons to doubt or qualify these numbers?  Why would they announce this if it was true?

Source:
Christian Broadcaster Smuggles Radio’s To North Korea   
Bos News Life
Eric Leijenaar
11/7/2008

Sometimes the headlines write themselves.

According to the Union of Catholic Asian News (excerpt):

For the first time in almost 60 years, a Catholic priest will stay in North Korea, and look after the welfare of local workers.

Franciscan Father Paul Kim Kwon-soon says he will stay in Pyongyang, probably beginning in late November, and serve as a “social worker” for factory workers in the first joint North-South business venture.

Returning to South Korea from a visit, Father Kim told UCA News on Nov. 4 that North Korea is allowing him to run a newly built welfare center in Pyongyang that houses a soup kitchen, a free clinic and a public bath, even though “they know I am a Catholic priest.” As a visitor, he will have to renew his visa every two months.

According to Father Kim, the three-story welfare center he will manage is within the factory premises and will provide the workers with services such as medical checkups, meals and haircuts. It will have the capacity to offer free meals to up to 1,500 workers a day.

“I can say that the center will be a turning point in the humanitarian aid to the North,” the priest noted. “We only could send aid materials” in the past, he pointed out, whereas he can now bring aid materials to the North and provide direct service.

Saebyol General agreed last February to establish the center after three years of “great efforts” on the part of his Order of Friars Minor, Father Kim explained.

During the four-day visit to the North, Bishop Lazzaro You Heung-sik of Daejeon presided at the opening ceremony of the center on Oct. 30, the priest reported.

On Nov. 1 Bishop You, former president of Caritas Corea, the Korean bishops’ social service organization, celebrated a Mass at Changchung Church, the only Catholic church in North Korea, to thank God for opening the center. About 50 South Korean Catholics including eight priests and four Religious took part. No North Korean Catholics attended.

Father Michael Lee Chang-jun, secretary of Caritas Corea, accompanied Bishop You. He told UCA News on Nov. 5 that he wished “the center could provide its service not only for the workers, but other North Korean people in the neighborhood.”

Cecilia Lee Seung-jung, North Korea program manager for Caritas Internationalis, the worldwide confederation of Caritas organizations, earlier called the agreement on the center a significant development. She pointed out that inter-Korean exchanges have been limited since the current government in Seoul assumed office last February.

Records of South Korea’s Unification Ministry show aid to North Korea from the South Korean government and civil groups amounting to US$63.6 million from January to September 2008, while in 2007 it totaled US$304.6 million.

According to Church sources, North Korea maintains that 3,000 Catholics in North Korea practice their faith at “home worship places” across the country, with no residing priest or nun. Between 1949 and 1950 all priests and nuns who remained in the North were executed or disappeared.

It is very interesting that the mission will be operated out of a South/North joint venture company rather than North Korea’s Changchung Cathedral in eastern Pyongyang.  There are countless reasons why concerned parties believe this to be a superior arrangement.

To learn more about Pyongyang’s new hemp factory, click here.

To read the full story mentioned ablove, click below:
Catholic Priest To Work In North For Social Welfare
Union of Catholic Asian News
11/6/2008

UPDATE 2: Hany Farid, professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and author of a June Scientific American article on detecting fake images, argues the photos could be legit in a recent article in Scientific American:

“The BBC pointed to, I think, three or four things that they thought were indicative of tampering. And in the full-resolution image you can see that they’re completely wrong.” (Farid reviewed the photograph at the request of the Associated Press.)

One alleged manipulation was between the shadow cast by Kim’s legs and the shadows cast by the soldiers flanking him—a discrepancy that Farid says can be resolved by accounting for a curvature of the background surface. “If you look closely at the back baseboard, which all the men are standing at, it’s actually curved,” he says. “So what [the news agencies] are assuming is that that backboard is straight. If that backboard is straight and there’s only one light source, they’re right, it’s hard to explain that difference in the shadow.”

But assuming a curvature, the men would naturally cast different shadows. Farid calculates that only a few inches of background difference would suffice: “the sun is at such a grazing angle, so small differences make huge variations in the length of the shadow.”

The BBC also pointed to “apparently mismatched pixels” around Kim’s legs. But Farid says that the BBC “did this thing that is very dangerous, which is they zoom and they say, ‘Oh look, it’s a splice line around his feet,'” indicating that the leader may have been edited in. The problem with such an approach, he says, “is that’s all JPEG compression artifacts, and if you actually do the same thing to anyone else’s feet you see exactly the same artifacts.” Image compression uses a sort of digital shorthand to reduce the size of the files, throwing out certain nuances in favor of approximations that can be somewhat choppy. “What that means is there’s a quite a bit of color artifacts when you zoom in like that. So you completely expect those types of thing.”

“Quantitatively, I ran a number of forensics tools, and there’s no cloning, there’s no color-filtering artifacts, the lighting is completely consistent, you can explain the shadows,” Farid says. “The image was edited, as all images are, because they all get cropped and contrast-enhanced, but other than that, there was just no signs of tampering anywhere.” 

UPDATE 1: In the comments, Neil points to the KFA explanation for the vanishing black line—that it is a “white board” which serves as a place marker where KJI is supposed to stand.  See photos here, here, and here.  This claim, however, does not address the “shadow” and “pixel” evidence. 

According to the Straits Times (Singapore):

Seoul’s main spy agency, the National Intelligence Service (NIS), said yesterday that it believed the latest North Korean photo was real.

‘The possibility of Mr Kim’s photo being forged seems very low,’ said an NIS spokesman, refusing to elaborate.

The South’s unification ministry spokesman Kim Ho Nyoun also said he had no evidence to suggest that the photo had been forged.

ORIGINAL POST: In an attempt to quell speculation that Kim Jong il is suffering from poor health, the North Korean government has released a series of photographs showing the Dear Leader is fit and in control. 

Unfortunately, in true North Korean fashion, the level of competence on display has merely increased speculation that “something is rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark.”

Case1:

Image 1: October 11, KCNA television broadcast of Kim Jong il inspecting a military unit.  Although this effort was likely aimed at quieting rumors among a domestic audience, internationally it met skepticism because Kim is wearing his “summer” clothes and the foliage in the background is too green for the season.  As a result many concluded that this footage was shot before August 2008.

Case 2:

Image 2: November 2, KCNA announces Kim Jong il talks to officials at a stadium where he watched a soccer match between military teams Mankyongbong and Jebi.  KCNA did not state expressly the date the picture was taken.

Although the background and clothing seem to indicate the correct season, I was skeptical of this photo because of previous research I had done on Kim’s penchant for football—he doesn’t seem to have one.  If this story was true, it would be the second match Kim has attended since 1996—the first also being after he allegedly suffered health problems.

The authors of several web pages, however, paid closer attention to the photograph itself and noticed a strange lack of shadows, indicating that the photo was doctored.  

Case 3:

Image 3: November 5, Korea News Service in Tokyo shows Kim Jong Il posing with officers and soldiers with the (north) Korean People’s Army Unit 2200.

The BBC, however, reports that this photo is also doctored:

Quoting from the article:

The image, released on Wednesday, appeared to show Mr Kim in good health while inspecting two military units.

But an analysis by the UK’s Times newspaper highlighted incongruities around the leader’s legs, and the BBC found what look like mismatched pixels.

In the photo, the shadow cast by Mr Kim’s calves runs in a different direction to the shadow cast by the soldiers on either side of him, the Times pointed out. In addition, a black line running along the stand on which the soldiers are positioned mysteriously vanishes on either side of Mr Kim – suggesting his picture may have been superimposed onto the image.

Such a suspicion was reinforced when a BBC designer examined a close-up, and discovered apparently mismatched pixels to the right of Mr Kim’s legs.

[Accordng to Aiden Foster-Carter,] North Korean authorities will now face renewed pressure to prove Mr Kim is alive and not incapacitated.

“If they want to stop speculation, they have to produce him – as long as they don’t, we will still wonder.”

Read more in the following articles:
‘Fake photo’ revives Kim rumours
BBC
11/7/2008

Kim Jong Il: digital trickery or an amazing recovery from a stroke?
Times of London
Richard Lloyd Parry
11/7/2008

Did North Korea fake photos of Kim Jong-il?
Scientific American
11/10/2008
John Matson

Nick Bonner, head of Koryo Tours and producer of three DPRK documentaries, will be in Washington Wednesday for a screening of his most recent film, Crossing the Line, at John’ s Hopkins University.  (NkeconWatch: I will be attending and I hope to see you there)

Event details:
Wednesday, October 29th at 6:00pm
Opening Reception at 5:30pm
Kenney Auditorium at Johns Hopkins University
1740 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20036

Click here to register

You may order a copy of the film here

About the film
In 1962, a U.S. soldier guarding the DMZ deserted his unit, walked across the most heavily fortified border on earth and defected to North Korea. Crossing the Line, a documentary directed by Daniel Gordon and co-produced by Nicholas Bonner, goes inside North Korea to tell James Joseph Dresnok’s story for the first time. Allowed unprecedented access by North Korean authorities, the filmmakers reveal the full story of his defection, as well as the political intrigue and personal passions that have kept him behind the Cold War’s last frontier ever since.

According to Yonhap:

North Korea has begun to more harshly censor South Korean newspapers subscribed to by firms operating in the inter-Korean Kaesong industrial complex, apparently to prevent workers there from reading reports on their leader Kim Jong-il’s health, officials said Monday.

“The North began to allow South Korean dailies to pass through customs only after cutting out articles critical of the country as of Oct. 20,” a Unification Ministry official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

About 30 copies of nine different papers cross the inter-Korean border every day for delivery to the Kaesong Industrial District Management Committee in the complex, a civilian administrative body of South Korean firms there, according to the official.

The North is strictly enforcing customs regulations barring the entry of overseas publications critical of Pyongyang, the official said.

It is not known exactly what types of articles have been censored by the North, but officials say the measure could be related to recent reports that Kim is ailing.

South Koreans are forbidden to carry the newspapers when they leave the office, but some have received warnings from North Korean authorities for violating the rule, according to the Unification Ministry official.

Read the full article here:
N. Korea intensifies control of S. Korean dailies sent to Kaesong
Yonhap
Shim Sun-ah
10/27/2008

A recent traveler to the DPRK managed to get a picture of the inside of a DPRK passport—sadly not the biographical page, but interesting nonetheless:

From GPI:

For many entrepreneurs, North-Korea is a relatively unknown trade destination. For this reason, from 28 September to 4 October 2008, a Dutch economic delegation investigated the business climate in this country. You may download a short report of this unique mission here.  Because of its success, another mission will be organised in 2009.
  
The participants noticed trade and investments in several fields, including textile and garments, shipbuilding, agribusiness, logistics, mining, animation and Information Technology. The findings of the mission will be presented at the seminar “Doing business with North-Korea”, which will take place in The Hague in spring 2009. A videofilm about the tour will be shown as well.
  
If you are interested in business opportunities in North-Korea, or in joining a seminar or trade mission, please contact us for further details. It is also possible for us to give presentations at business seminars abroad, in order to present the findings of the Dutch mission in more detail.
 
With best regards,
Paul Tjia (sr. consultant ‘offshore sourcing’)
GPI Consultancy, P.O. Box 26151, 3002
ED Rotterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail: paul@gpic.nl
tel: +31-10-4254172 
fax: +31-10-4254317
Website: www.gpic.nl
report_dutch_trade_mission_to_north_korea.pdf

This week the Wall Street Journal did a pretty thorough review of the North – South Korean “height gap” after John McCain mentioned it in a presidential debate.  Here is a hefty quote from the post (well worth reading here):

…Several checked and (here, here, and here) found studies supporting his claim of a height gap, though the gap’s size depends on which South Koreans and North Koreans you’re measuring. The researchers behind these studies told me that McCain’s statement is true of younger Koreans, but not of adults. (A McCain campaign spokesman didn’t respond to my request for the source of the claim.)

One study of North Korean refugees compared to South Koreans of the same age found that South Korean young men were 2.3 inches taller than their North Korean counterparts, while the gap among young women was 2.6 inches. Meanwhile, among non-refugee boys and girls living in both countries between the ages of one and a half and six and a half, a separate study found that the height gap was around three inches (varying slightly by age and gender); between six and a half and seven and a half, the height gap was 4.9 inches for girls and five inches for boys.

The height gap is so age-dependent for two reasons, researchers told me: People of different ages experience peak growth at different times, and at different times the discrepancies between the two Koreas in nutrition, health and overall well-being may differ. Also, adults who were undernourished as children may catch up slightly later.

“Adults were raised 20 to 50 years ago — thus, you proxy the environmental impact in the past, so it does not really make sense comparing different time periods,” Daniel Schwekendiek, author of the study of child heights, said.

Schwekendiek, an economist at Germany’s University of Tuebingen, was a postdoc student of Sunyoung Pak, a biological anthropologist at Seoul National University who conducted the refugee study. Pak said it’s unclear whether refugees are a representative sample of the North Korean population, though she did point out that the older people she studied, born in the 1930s, were taller than their southern-born counterparts, suggesting that there has been a growing height gap, as North Korean height growth stagnated. (People, like other mammals, tend to be heavier and taller at greater latitudes, Pak said.)

Schwekendiek’s samples were randomly selected — in North Korea, by the United Nations in 10 of 12 provinces, to investigate malnutrition, and in wealthier, healthier South Korea, by the Korean Research Institute of Standards and Sciences, on behalf of industries that wanted to produce goods that fit children.

Both researchers said height is a useful measure of well-being because North Koreans and South Koreans share genetic ancestry, and also because height numbers are more reliable and objective than economic stats coming out of Pyongyang. “As height and weight are measured physically, this leaves less room for political manipulation compared to conventional health and human welfare indicators,” Schwekendiek said.

Wall Street Journal
The Numbers Guy
The Korean Height Gap
10/15/2008

The North Korean children’s cartoon “Yon-pil-po-lan” (link here and below) is a great example of the role that sate-controlled media plays in the socialist system: regime enhancement.  In this cartoon, a young pioneer dreams of using his school supplies to fight off the “Mi-jae (Miguk jugukjui)”—or “American imperialist”. 

The cartoon itself made me laugh because I have a feeling that the actual state of the DPRK’s military technology is probably not far off from that shown in this cartoon!