Download or read book The Coming Fall of North Korea written by Young Sop Ahn Phd and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2019-07-07 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of the Kim Jong-un regime of North Korea is imminent. The Kim regime will fall in five years due to its own nukes. The Kim dynasty's nuclear development has continued for more than six decades. North Korea is estimated to have over 60 nuclear weapons today. The international community has continued the effort to denuclearize North Korea and to open up the world's most isolated country to the outside world. The Kim dynasty regime believes nuclear weapons to threaten the international community and to create fear among its populace are the only means to ensure his security. But it is sadly mistaken. Kim Jong-un' fake offers to denuclearize North Korea as shown in the US-North Korea summits in 2018 and 2019 will continue as Kim aims to gain economic and other benefits from the United States and its allies. However, the familiar North Korean tricks will no longer work. Washington will keep tightening economic and other sanctions on North Korea. Donald Trump's surprise encounter with Kim Jong-un at the DMZ on June 30, 2019, was nothing but a symbolic gesture with no substance. China, North Korea's lifeline, is showing signs of discarding the Kim Jong-un regime. China is kicking the old, wrong perception that North Korea serves as a buffer against US presence in East Asia. China's bond with North Korea is worsening Beijing's international reputation. Kim Jong-un, mocked as "Kim Fatty the Third" among the Chinese, has become a serious political liability to the Xi Jinping government. China will seek a regime change in North Korea. It prefers to see a Vietnam-type, nuclear-free government in North Korea. A sweeping popular uprising of starving North Koreans has also been simmering. Emerging technologies may take actions to end the Kim dynasty even earlier than the international pressure and Chinese actions against the Kim regime. Technologies to remove global troublemakers are making unremitting progress. For example, invisible, undetectable, tiny AI-based drones loaded with the genetic information about global mischief-makers could be deployed to eliminate them in any place in the next five years. Still, the Kim Jong-un regime can survive if it decides to move in the right direction. International society has advised that North Korea pursue Vietnam-style economic success. The economic prosperity of Vietnam has been possible since Hanoi had no nuclear weapons and could thus be a friend to the United States. Kim Jong-un's move to recast his reclusive country is the only remaining option for his survival. Kim doesn't need to be afraid of the "Big Lies," including the formation of North Korea as a "big Lie" state in 1948 and the Kim dynasty referred to in North Korea as the Mount Paektu Bloodline as a fabrication of history, to be known to his people. All communist countries have their own dirty history on par with North Korea's. For instance, communist China has been called an "Empire of Lies." The falsehood of the Mount Paektu Bloodline matters little to North Koreans. What matters most to them, starving and undernourished, is the bread-and-butter issue. Kim Jong-un should realize that his days are numbered anyway. If Kim ditches his nuclear arsenal, and launches economic reforms to make North Korea a second Vietnam, he will be able to establish himself as a heroic national leader who deserves international acclaim. The Kim Jong-un regime is now at the crossroads between prosperity and collapse. [About the author] Young Sop Ahn, the author of "Ten Megatrends Changing Our Lives," is a global thinker. Ahn was a visiting scholar at MIT and a graduate student associate at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs before he joined the faculty of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy of the ROK government. Educated at MIT, Harvard, and Seoul National University (SNU), Ahn holds two PhDs in international political economy and information science from MIT and SNU, respectively. Email: [email protected]
Download or read book Preparing for the Possibility of a North Korean Collapse written by Bruce W. Bennett and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A North Korean government collapse would have serious consequences in North Korea and beyond. At the very least, a collapse would reduce the already scarce food and essential goods available to the population, in part due to hoarding and increasing costs. This could lead to a humanitarian disaster. Factions emerging after a collapse could plunge the country into civil war that spills over into neighboring countries. Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) could be used and even proliferated. This report examines ways of controlling and mitigating the consequences, recognizing that the Republic of Korea (ROK) and its U.S. ally will almost certainly need to intervene militarily in the North, likely seeking Korean unification as the ultimate outcome. But such an intervention requires serious preparation. North Koreans must be convinced that they will be treated well and could actually have better lives after unification. The allies need to prepare to deliver humanitarian aid in the North, stop conflict, demilitarize the North Korean military and security services over time, and secure and eventually eliminate North Korean WMD. Potential Chinese intervention must be addressed, ideally leading to cooperation with ROK and U.S. forces. Plans are needed for liberating North Korean political prisons before the guards execute the prisoners. Property rights need to be addressed. The ROK must sustain its military capabilities despite major reductions in force size due to very low birthrates. And ROK reluctance to broadly address North Korean collapse must be overcome so that plans in these areas can move forward.
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 Every Falling Star written by Sungju Lee and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written for a young audience, this intense memoir explores the harsh realities of life on the streets in contemporary North Korea. Every Falling Star is the memoir of Sungju Lee, who at the age of twelve was forced to live on the streets of North Korea and fend for himself. To survive, Sungju creates a gang and lives by thieving, fighting, begging, and stealing rides on cargo trains. Sungju richly recreates his scabrous story, depicting what it was like for a boy alone to create a new family with his gang, “his brothers,” to daily be hungry and to fear arrest, imprisonment, and even execution. This riveting memoir allows young readers to learn about other cultures where freedoms they take for granted do not exist.
Download or read book The North Korean Revolution 1945 1950 written by Charles K. Armstrong and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Korea, despite a shattered economy and a populace suffering from widespread hunger, has outlived repeated forecasts of its imminent demise. Charles K. Armstrong contends that a major source of North Korea's strength and resiliency, as well as of its flaws and shortcomings, lies in the poorly understood origins of its system of government. He examines the genesis of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely studied example of a communist state and as part of modern Korean history.North Korea is one of the last redoubts of "unreformed" Marxism-Leninism in the world. Yet it is not a Soviet satellite in the East European manner, nor is its government the result of a local revolution, as in Cuba and Vietnam. Instead, the DPRK represents a unique "indigenization" of Soviet Stalinism, Armstrong finds. The system that formed under the umbrella of the Soviet occupation quickly developed into a nationalist regime as programs initiated from above merged with distinctive local conditions. Armstrong's account is based on long-classified documents captured by U.S. forces during the Korean War. This enormous archive of over 1.6 million pages provides unprecedented insight into the making of the Pyongyang regime and fuels the author's argument that the North Korean state is likely to remain viable for some years to come.
Download or read book Inside North Korea s Theocracy written by Ra Jong-yil and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in Korean in 2016, Inside North Korea's Theocracy offers a fascinating and rare look at the lives of several of the regime's key leaders. Its primary focus is Jang Song-thaek, a talented and reform-minded member of the political ruling class who was executed in 2013. Jang was the son-in-law of North Korean founder, Kim Il-sung; brother-in-law of its second leader, Kim Jong-il; and uncle to its current leader, Kim Jong-un. The author traces Jang's life from his youth as a brilliant student in Pyongyang to his eventual marriage to Kim Kyong-hui and his rising power as a businessman to, ultimately, his untimely death. In addition to biographical sketches of Jang, his wife, and brother-in-law, Ra Jong-yil provides first-hand impressions of life in North Korea and illuminates the inner workings of its government.
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 The North Korean Economy written by Catherine Cavanaugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 346 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 North Korea s Hidden Revolution written by Jieun Baek and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A crisp, dramatic examination of how technology and human ingenuity are undermining North Korea’s secretive dictatorship.”—Kirkus Reviews One of the least understood countries in the world, North Korea has long been known for its repressive regime. Yet it is far from being an impenetrable black box. Media flows covertly into the country, and fault lines are appearing in the government’s sealed informational borders. Drawing on deeply personal interviews with North Korean defectors from all walks of life, ranging from propaganda artists to diplomats, Jieun Baek tells the story of North Korea’s information underground—the network of citizens who take extraordinary risks by circulating illicit content such as foreign films, television shows, soap operas, books, and encyclopedias. By fostering an awareness of life outside North Korea and enhancing cultural knowledge, the materials these citizens disseminate are affecting the social and political consciousness of a people, as well as their everyday lives. “A fine primer on the country, based on extensive interviews with defectors.”—Times Literary Supplement “A fascinating book.”—The New York Times “[A] timely and cogent book.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “A fascinating and intelligent overview of the ways that information is liberating North Koreans’ minds.”—Robert S. Boynton, author of The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project “A fascinating, important, and vivid account of how unofficial information is increasingly seeping into the North and chipping away at the regime’s myths—and hence its control of North Korean society.”—Sue Mi Terry, former CIA analyst and senior research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asia Institute, Columbia University
Download or read book The Coming Collapse of China written by Gordon G. Chang and published by Random House. This book was released on 2001-09-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China is hot. The world sees a glorious future for this sleeping giant, three times larger than the United States, predicting it will blossom into the world's biggest economy by 2010. According to Chang, however, a Chinese-American lawyer and China specialist, the People's Republic is a paper dragon. Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao's death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society. Beijing's cautious reforms have left the country stuck midway between communism and capitalism, Chang writes. With its impending World Trade Organization membership, for the first time China will be forced to open itself to foreign competition, which will shake the country to its foundations. Economic failure will be followed by government collapse. Covering subjects from party politics to the Falun Gong to the government's insupportable position on Taiwan, Chang presents a thorough and very chilling overview of China's present and not-so-distant future.
Download or read book Becoming Kim Jong Un written by Jung H. Pak and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking account of the rise of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un—from his nuclear ambitions to his summits with President Donald J. Trump—by a leading American expert “Shrewdly sheds light on the world’s most recognizable mysterious leader, his life and what’s really going on behind the curtain.”—Newsweek When Kim Jong Un became the leader of North Korea following his father's death in 2011, predictions about his imminent fall were rife. North Korea was isolated, poor, unable to feed its people, and clinging to its nuclear program for legitimacy. Surely this twentysomething with a bizarre haircut and no leadership experience would soon be usurped by his elders. Instead, the opposite happened. Now in his midthirties, Kim Jong Un has solidified his grip on his country and brought the United States and the region to the brink of war. Still, we know so little about him—or how he rules. Enter former CIA analyst Jung Pak, whose brilliant Brookings Institution essay “The Education of Kim Jong Un” cemented her status as the go-to authority on the calculating young leader. From the beginning of Kim’s reign, Pak has been at the forefront of shaping U.S. policy on North Korea and providing strategic assessments for leadership at the highest levels in the government. Now, in this masterly book, she traces and explains Kim’s ascent on the world stage, from his brutal power-consolidating purges to his abrupt pivot toward diplomatic engagement that led to his historic—and still poorly understood—summits with President Trump. She also sheds light on how a top intelligence analyst assesses thorny national security problems: avoiding biases, questioning assumptions, and identifying risks as well as opportunities. In piecing together Kim’s wholly unique life, Pak argues that his personality, perceptions, and preferences are underestimated by Washington policy wonks, who assume he sees the world as they do. As the North Korean nuclear threat grows, Becoming Kim Jong Un gives readers the first authoritative, behind-the-scenes look at Kim’s character and motivations, creating an insightful biography of the enigmatic man who could rule the hermit kingdom for decades—and has already left an indelible imprint on world history.
Download or read book The Education of Kim Jong Un written by Jung H. Pak and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Korea's opaqueness combined with its military capabilities make the country and its leader dangerous wild cards in the international community. Brookings Senior Fellow Jung H. Pak, who led the U.S. intelligence community's analysis on Korean issues, tells the story of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's upbringing, provides insight on his decision-making, and makes recommendations on how to thwart Kim's ambitions. In her deep analysis of the personality of the North Korean leader, Pak makes clearer the reasoning behind the way he governs and conducts his foreign affairs.
Download or read book The Impossible State written by Victor Cha and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Impossible State, seasoned international-policy expert and lauded scholar Victor Cha pulls back the curtain on provocative, isolationist North Korea, providing our best look yet at its history and the rise of the Kim family dynasty and the obsessive personality cult that empowers them. Cha illuminates the repressive regime’s complex economy and culture, its appalling record of human rights abuses, and its belligerent relationship with the United States, and analyzes the regime’s major security issues—from the seemingly endless war with its southern neighbor to its frightening nuclear ambitions—all in light of the destabilizing effects of Kim Jong-il’s death and the transition of power to his unpredictable heir. Ultimately, this engagingly written, authoritative, and highly accessible history warns of a regime that might be closer to its end than many might think—a political collapse for which America and its allies may be woefully unprepared.
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 2017-06-08 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, systematic analysis of the North Korean economy, exposing its hidden workings through quantitative data analysis and surveys.
Download or read book The End of North Korea written by Nick Eberstadt and published by American Enterprise Institute. This book was released on 1999 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prolonging North Korea's life may actually increase the costs and the dangers of its inevitable demise.
Download or read book Inside North Korea s Theocracy written by Ra Jong-yil and published by Suny Press. This book was released on 2019-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers biographical accounts of several of North Korea's leaders to illuminate the inner workings of its government.
Download or read book Losing South Korea written by Gordon G. Chang and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would happen if the maniacal tyranny in Pyongyang took over the vibrant democracy of South Korea? Today, there is a real possibility that the destitute North Korean regime will soon dominate its thriving southern neighbor, with help from the government in Seoul itself. More than any South Korean president before him, Moon Jae-in is intent on achieving Korean union, even if it’s done on Pyongyang’s terms. To that end, he has been making South Korea compatible with the totalitarian North, and distinctly less free. He is also removing defenses to infiltration and invasion and taking steps to end his country’s only real guarantee of security, the alliance with the United States. If Moon’s policy results in handing Kim Jong Un a “final victory” and South Korea falls to despotism, America will lose the anchor of its western defense perimeter, and the free world will be at risk.
