Word: koreanness
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...never been outside North Korea. From 2002 to 2007 he attended the Kim Il Sung military academy in Pyongyang. He's said to be about 5 ft. 9 in. (175 cm) tall, is overweight (nearly 200 lb., or 90 kg) and may suffer from diabetes, according to South Korean press reports...
...tension in Beijing's North Korea policy stems mainly from the fact that China prefers North Korea to exist, even in its impoverished and infuriating current form, as opposed to what it sees as the other possibility: a unified Korean peninsula that at minimum slouches toward the U.S., if it doesn't become an outright U.S. ally under Seoul's direction. Klingner says Beijing has feared a North Korean implosion for years, in the manner of East Germany, that would come with costs both economic (refugees coming across the Chinese border) as well as diplomatic (the loss of a buffer...
...will the world know if Beijing has had a change of heart relative to its neighbor? Diplomats and intelligence sources say the evidence will come in two phases. In April, after the missile launch, Beijing did not stand in the way when three North Korean companies were moved from a U.S. sanctions list to a U.N. sanctions list - meaning that all nations are obliged to cut off business ties to those companies. The breadth of the sanctions now is likely to be much wider: not only must Beijing not run interference for North Korea, diplomats say, it needs to actively...
...This would not be unprecedented. A few years ago, sources note, Chinese state-owned banks did actively enforce U.S. financial sanctions against the North - the only measures that plainly hurt the top North Korean leadership - precisely because not doing so would have cost them access to the U.S. and international capital markets. "Again, it was a cost-benefit choice for them, and in that case, it was clear the costs were much worse than the benefit of standing by Pyongyang," says a former U.S. intelligence official. Washington ultimately dropped those sanctions in lieu of a diplomatic effort to entice North...
That effort will now at least go into abeyance, if only because Pyongyang clearly has no interest in accepting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's invitation, issued this week, to return to the six-party talks. South Korean President Lee Myung Bak in Seoul flatly told President Obama earlier this week not to go back to simply trying to bribe the North out of its nuclear program. Japan is more or less in the same place. China, which could inflict considerable economic pain on Pyongyang by cutting off trade and fuel shipments, now must decide whether...