What do the people closest to power really think about the system they serve? That’s perhaps one of the most important questions one could ask about North Korea, still one of the world’s least understood countries. Today, we’re joined by Jieun Baek, author of Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest…
North Korea is the most tightly controlled country in the world. It is ruled by the Kim family and their control over the country’s 26 million citizens depends on the loyalty of elites of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP)—the communist party that has brutally enforced the Kims’ hold on power since the aftermath of the…
North Korea has survived wars, sanctions, and isolation—to the point where it now seems that the continuation of the Kim dynasty, and a starkly divided Korea, is assured. But history is filled with events where some change might have drastically altered how a country’s development might have gone. North Korea is no different, at least…
Doha, a North Korean spymaster, is found stabbed in an alley in Oxford. Doha tells his mentee–another North Korean spy named Yohan—to go to the Oxford Soju Club, a restaurant in the British college town. That starts a dance between three different Koreans: Yohan; Jihoon, the South Korean owner of the Soju Club; and Yunah,…
Sequels seldom seem as good as the works from which they spring. Many seem to repeat the originals, simply going over the same ground in a similar way. Such is thankfully not the case with Fyodor Tertitskiy’s new book, Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea, his sequel to last year’s Accidental Tyrant: The…
A number of books in English have given us histories of Korean emigration to the United States and Canada, but the story of those who left Korea for Japan in the decades of Japanese imperial rule is relatively unknown. Sayaka Chatani, a professor of history at the National University of Singapore, writes in this book…
A new book offers what many readers will find surprising insights into the circulation of texts in the Cold War among three neighbouring countries at odds with one another: North Korea, South Korea, and Japan.
It’s customary to begin writing on North Korea by acknowledging how difficult it is to get reliable information from such a secretive and tightly-controlled regime in such a highly politicized context. Though an undoubtedly repressive regime, in an information vacuum misinformation can spread, such as the easily-disproved but persistent misconception that all North Korean citizens…
The Kims, of North Korea, are perhaps the 21st century’s most successful family dictatorship—if only due to sheer longevity, having run North Korea for the almost eight decades since the country’s post-war founding. Kim Il-sung led North Korea for over half that time, from its founding in 1948 to Kim’s death in 1994.
Fyodor Tertitskiy, a young and prolific academic specialist on North Korean affairs working in Seoul, has written a biography of the first North Korean leader that is both highly readable and extensively researched.
Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for US troops to arrive, which started almost three years of US military occupation. By the end of the occupation, Korea was permanently divided into North and South, with Seoul set on an authoritarian path that would persist for…
In 1946, Kornel Chang’s Korean grandparents fled south from Pyongyang across the border at the 38th parallel, leaving the zone under Soviet military occupation for the one occupied by the US military. Years later, his family left South Korea for the United States. This book is born of conversations heard by Chang growing up in…
Millennials: The word conjures the tired cliches of internet ragebait: avocado toast and participation trophies. For a long time, millennials were a stereotype of feckless, tech-addicted youth, yet the oldest of us are now in our early 40s. But what of millennials in North Korea? Here, stereotypes of a coddled generation do not apply, and…
North Korea is, to this day, still one of the world’s most mysterious countries. What little we know about daily life in the country comes from defectors or foreigners who’ve spent time there—some of whom have been on this show. But both camps present narrow, if not slanted, views of what life is like in…
Washington officials have long found Pyongyang a bedeviling problem. Much of their frustration has come from a lack of information on a country that Donald Gregg—a Korea expert who served in Seoul as US ambassador and before then as chief of the CIA station there—called Washington’s “longest-running intelligence failure”. Without information, as Gregg argued in…