Download or read book Capitalist in North Korea written by Felix Abt and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-28 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Business in North Korea: a paradoxical and fascinating situation is interpreted by a true insider. In 2002, the Swiss power company ABB appointed Felix Abt its country director for North Korea. The Swiss Entrepreneur lived and worked in North Korea for seven years, one of the few foreign businessmen there. After the experience, Abt felt compelled to write A Capitalist in North Korea to describe the multifaceted society he encountered. North Korea, at the time, was heavily sanctioned by the UN which made it extremely difficult to do business. Yet he discovered that it was a place where plastic surgery and South Korean TV dramas were wildly popular and where he rarely needed to walk more than a block to grab a quick hamburger. He was closely monitored and once faced accusations of spying, yet he learned that young North Koreans are hopeful--signing up for business courses in anticipation of a brighter, more open, future. In A Capitalist in North Korea, Abt shares these and many other unusual facts and insights about one of the world's most secretive nations.
Download or read book The Capitalist Unconscious written by Hyun Ok Park and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unification of North and South Korea is widely considered an unresolved and volatile matter for the global order, but this book argues capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. As Hyun Ok Park demonstrates, rather than territorial integration and family union, the capitalist unconscious drives the current unification, imagining the capitalist integration of the Korean peninsula and the Korean diaspora as a new democratic moment. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research in South Korea and China, The Capitalist Unconscious shows how the hegemonic democratic politics of the post-Cold War era (reparation, peace, and human rights) have consigned the rights of migrant laborers—protagonists of transnational Korea—to identity politics, constitutionalism, and cosmopolitanism. Park reveals the riveting capitalist logic of these politics, which underpins legal and policy debates, social activism, and media spectacle. While rethinking the historical trajectory of Cold War industrialism and its subsequent liberal path, this book also probes memories of such key events as the North Korean and Chinese revolutions, which are integral to migrants' reckoning with capitalist allures and communal possibilities. Casting capitalist democracy within an innovative framework of historical repetition, Park elucidates the form and content of the capitalist unconscious at different historical moments and dissolves the modern opposition among socialism, democracy, and dictatorship. The Capitalist Unconscious astutely explores the neoliberal present's past and introduces a compelling approach to the question of history and contemporaneity.
Download or read book North Korea s Women led Grassroots Capitalism written by Bronwen Dalton and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Korea is in the throes of economic and social, if not political, transition. These changes have a pronounced gender dimension: the crisis of the command economy and the gradual emergence of an informal market economy, where, remarkably, the vast majority of North Korea’s traders and merchants are women. This book examines the complex relationship between gender roles and economic and social changes in North Korea. The book, based on extensive original research, provides rich details of this development, considers how women’s roles in North Korea have developed over time and highlights how women are driving change in other areas of North Korean life too, including family relationships, women’s sexuality and reproductive issues and women’s cultural identity.
Download or read book The Real North Korea written by Andrei Lankov and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state. Based on vast expertise, this book reveals how average North Koreans live, how their leaders rule, and how both survive
Download or read book North Korea South Korea written by John Feffer and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2003-09-20 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Korean peninsula, divided for more than fifty years, is stuck in a time warp. Millions of troops face one another along the Demilitarized Zone separating communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea. In the early 1990s and again in 2002-2003, the United States and its allies have gone to the brink of war with North Korea. Misinterpretations and misunderstandings are fueling the crisis. "There is no country of comparable significance concerning which so many people are ignorant," American anthropologist Cornelius Osgood said of Korea some time ago. This ignorance may soon have fatal consequences. North Korea, South Korea is a short, accessible book about the history and political complexites of the Korean peninsula, one that explores practical alternatives to the current US policy: alternatives that build on the remarkable and historic path of reconciliation that North and South embarked on in the 1990s and that point the way to eventual reunification.
Download or read book North Korea in the New World Order written by Kevin Magill and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers several perspectives on the contemporary position of North Korea. It examines, in the context of the post-Cold War order, US, European Union and British foreign policy to North Korea, and North Korean responses. It investigates the tensions that could develop in North Korean state and society as the country faces an increasingly market-oriented capitalist world and identifies the historical, political and ideological foundations of North Korean society and culture. The book is the work of a multidisciplinary team of scholars from Britain and the United States who work in the fields of anthropology, economics, history, international relations, social geography and sociology, most of whom have conducted first-hand research in North Korea. The book also contains contributions from policy-makers who have helped to form western policy towards North Korea.
Download or read book Witness to Transformation written by Stephan Haggard and published by Peterson Institute. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Human rights and the protection of refugees is not a concern of left or right, or of the US only; it is an issue of importance to all Koreans, and indeed all countries. Haggard and Noland provide compelling evidence of the ongoing transformation of North Korean society and offer thoughtful proposals as to how the outside world might facilitate peaceful evolution."--Yoon Young-kwan, former Foreign Minister, Rob Moo-byun government --Book Jacket
Download or read book North Korea written by Hazel Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a historically founded, empirical study of social and economic transformation wrought by 'marketisation from below' in North Korea.
Download or read book The Hidden People of North Korea written by Ralph C. Hassig and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique book provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of life in North Korea today. Drawing on decades of insider knowledge and experience, noted experts Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh explore a world few outsiders can imagine. In vivid detail, the authors describe how the secretive and authoritarian government of Kim Jong-il shapes every aspect of its citizens' lives, how the command socialist economy has utterly failed, and how ordinary individuals struggle to survive through small-scale capitalism. North Koreans remain hungry and oppressed, yet the outside world is slowly filtering in, and the book concludes by urging the United States to flood North Korea with information so that its people can make decisions based on truth rather than their dictator's ubiquitous propaganda.
Download or read book The North Korean Economy written by Nicholas Eberstadt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viewed from afar, North Korea may appear bizarre, or positively irrational. But as Nicholas Eberstadt demonstrates in this meticulously researched volume, there is a grim coherence to North Korea's political economy, and a ruthless logic undergirding it--one that unreservedly subordinates economic welfare to augmentation of political power. Thus, paradoxically, even as official policies and practices consign the DPRK economy to a perilous realm between crisis and catastrophe, the country's leadership maintains unchallenged domestic control and has actually managed to increase its international influence.Through painstaking collection of hard-to-uncover data and careful analysis, Eberstadt provides a quantitative tableau of North Korea's terrible failure in its economic race against South Korea; its stubborn adherence to policies all but guaranteed to stifle growth and undermine economic performance; and the longstanding official effort to ignore, or mitigate, pressures for economic reform.Eberstadt is skeptical of optimistic accounts from South Korea and elsewhere suggesting that the North Korean leadership is interested in resolving the current nuclear impasse, and getting on with the business of reform and development. So long as Pyongyang's rulers entertain the ambition of reunifying the Korean peninsula on its own terms, Eberstadt argues, economic reforms worthy of the name will be subversive of state authority--and vigilantly resisted by Pyongyang's rulers. This authoritative volume has received widespread attention from Asian specialists, well as those concerned with nuclear proliferation and world peace, and international relations professionals in general.
Download or read book Two Koreas in Development written by Byoung-Lo Philo Kim and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The startling revolutions of recent years have had as great an impact on Northeast Asia as on Eastern Europe. Gorbachev's cautious withdrawal of support for North Korea and his establishment of ties with South Korea have created a need for a new research agenda exploring how communism and capitalism in Asia can be successfully restructured or redirected in a new world order. Focused on systemic issues, this book is the first study to attempt a comprehensive analysis of social and economic development in modem Korea as a whole. As a homogeneous nation artificially divided by the competing ideologies of the Cold War, Korea provides a unique laboratory for comparing divergent development processes undertaken by conflicting social systems. Current theories of Third World development have advocated either capitalist models of modernization or have called for the establishment of self-reliant socialist economies cut off from the world capitalist system. While capitalist South Korea has consistently outperformed Communist North Korea since the mid-1970s, development has not yet brought a fully evolved West-em-style democracy in its wake. "Self-reliant" North Korea achieved successful growth during its first fifteen years, but has since been faced with numerous structural limitations on sustained development, including severe restrictions on political freedom and civil liberties. In the author's view, the experience of the two Koreas suggests that the solution to underdevelopment must be based on the realization that exclusionary theories need modification in the light of special historical and sociological circumstances peculiar to individual nations. This volume offers a valuable interpretation of modem Korean history and constitutes an important contribution to the comparative study of capitalism and communism in practice. It will be of particular interest to specialists in international relations and comparative political systems.
Download or read book The Cleanest Race written by B.R. Myers and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding North Korea through its propaganda What do the North Koreans really believe? How do they see themselves and the world around them? Here B.R. Myers, a North Korea analyst and a contributing editor of The Atlantic, presents the first full-length study of the North Korean worldview. Drawing on extensive research into the regime’s domestic propaganda, including films, romance novels and other artifacts of the personality cult, Myers analyzes each of the country’s official myths in turn—from the notion of Koreans’ unique moral purity, to the myth of an America quaking in terror of “the Iron General.” In a concise but groundbreaking historical section, Myers also traces the origins of this official culture back to the Japanese fascist thought in which North Korea’s first ideologues were schooled. What emerges is a regime completely unlike the West’s perception of it. This is neither a bastion of Stalinism nor a Confucian patriarchy, but a paranoid nationalist, “military-first” state on the far right of the ideological spectrum. Since popular support for the North Korean regime now derives almost exclusively from pride in North Korean military might, Pyongyang can neither be cajoled nor bullied into giving up its nuclear program. The implications for US foreign policy—which has hitherto treated North Korea as the last outpost of the Cold War—are as obvious as they are troubling. With North Korea now calling for a “blood reckoning” with the “Yankee jackals,” Myers’s unprecedented analysis could not be more timely.
Download or read book Unveiling the North Korean Economy written by Byung-Yeon Kim and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-27 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Korea is one of the most closed and secretive societies in the world. Despite a high level of interest from the outside world, we have very little detailed information about how the country functions economically. In this valuable book for both the academic and policy-making circles, Byung-Yeon Kim offers the most comprehensive and systematic analysis of the present day North Korean economy in the context of economic systems and transition economics. It addresses what is really happening in the North Korean economy, why it has previously failed, and how the country can make the transition to a market economy. It takes advantage not only of carefully reconstructed macro data but also rich, new data at the micro level, such as quantitative surveys of North Korean refugees settled in South Korea, and the surveys of Chinese companies that interact heavily with North Korea.
Download or read book Making Capitalism written by Roger L. Janelli and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995-03-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pathbreaking work extends the boundaries of contemporary anthropological research by presenting in one cohesive, meticulously researched work: an original theoretical perspective on the relationships between the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of a large modern business organization; the first anthropological work on South Korean management and its white-collar workers, in a case study of one of South Korea's "big four" conglomerates; and an innovative delineation of how modern business practices are enmeshed in past and present, structure and agency, and local and international systems." "Based largely on the author's nine months of participant-observation in the offices of one of South Korea's largest conglomerates (with annual sales of about $15 billion and approximately 80,000 employees), the book is also enriched by the author's previous fieldwork in rural Korea, where many of the conglomerate's white-collar personnel spent their formative years. These vantage points are used to explore constructions of "traditional" Korean culture and transformations of cultural knowledge prompted by new political-economic conditions, and how both inform practices prevailing in the large conglomerates - and ultimately shape South Korea's capitalism." "The work focuses on South Korea's new middle class. It explains how office workers' identities and often contradictory interests present them with choices between alternative interpretations and actions affecting both themselves and their conglomerates. Much attention is paid to ideological and more coercive means of controlling white-collar employees, to subordinates' strategies of resistance, and to ways in which cultural understandings and moral claims inform the assessment and pursuit of material advantage.
Download or read book North Korea s Market Economy Society from Below written by Chae-jin Sŏ and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nothing to Envy written by Barbara Demick and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a “tour de force of meticulous reporting” (The New York Review of Books), with a new afterword that revisits these stories—and North Korea more broadly—in 2022, in the wake of the pandemic NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded, and an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life. She takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors, and through meticulous and sensitive reporting we see her subjects fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we witness their profound, life-altering disillusionment with the government and their realization that, rather than providing them with lives of abundance, their country has betrayed them. Praise for Nothing to Envy “Provocative . . . offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”—The New York Times “Deeply moving . . . The personal stories are related with novelistic detail.”—The Wall Street Journal “A tour de force of meticulous reporting.”—The New York Review of Books “Excellent . . . humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad.”—San Francisco Chronicle “The narrow boundaries of our knowledge have expanded radically with the publication of Nothing to Envy. . . . Elegantly structured and written, [it] is a groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction.”—John Delury, Slate “At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
Download or read book North Korean Foreign Policy written by Yongho Kim and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2010-12-16 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Threat does not inherently matter unless it is perceived, and, on the other hand, anything that is perceived as threat matters, whether or not the threat rings true. North Korean Foreign Policy: Security Dilemma and Succession, by Yongho Kim, posits security dilemma and political succession as the two main factors that North Korea perceives as threat, and that these external and domestic threats constitute Pyongyang's provocative foreign policy. North Korean Foreign Policy suggests that an effective policy for countries relating to North Korea, whether dovish or hawkish, should deal directly with Kim Jong-il's political survival, and not with Pyongyang's failed economy.
