Word: koreans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chinese border in the north of the country, boasts a central market that teems with consumer goods: sacks of rice and corn, boxes of apples, bananas and tangerines. On wooden tables under makeshift awnings, merchants peddle not just pork and fish but also Japanese televisions and VCRs, South Korean cosmetics, fashionable sportswear from China and illegal sex videotapes from western countries. If you know whom to talk to, you can even purchase a home, an outrageous capitalist sin in a country where private property is ideological anathema. "You can buy anything and everything in the market," says Park, a trader...
Outside Pyongyang and a few big cities where the élite still live on government rations, the majority of North Koreans in urban centers get almost everything from officially sanctioned markets. "This is exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union in 1989," before it collapsed, says Leonid Petrov, a North Korea expert at the Academy of Korean Studies south of Seoul. "Nobody believes in the old socialist ideology anymore--they believe in money...
...that citizens with new access to radios and VCRs are learning that their miserable status is not inevitable. "Now people's minds are more open," says Park, the television trader. "They are all demanding better living standards." Dragging a color TV from China to sell in a Korean market may not be the way that revolutions normally start. But such flickers of enterprise may yet light a fire that could consume the regime. --By Donald Macintyre/ Seoul
...self-defense." Though the bulletin ended years of speculation about the general state of Kim's nuclear-weapons program, the declaration was actually two blows in one: Pyongyang also announced it was pulling out of joint talks with the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and South Korea to keep the Korean peninsula nuclear-free. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, hoping to play down the news, called the announcement "unfortunate...
...escalate, especially considering North Korea's substantial conventional arsenal--even anti-Kim hard-liners acknowledge that diplomacy remains the most palatable option. Kim repeated his demand last week for bilateral negotiations with Washington, a prospect the Administration rejects out of hand. The U.S. still hopes to confront the North Koreans in a multilateral setting, and the linchpin of that strategy is China. Bush has long believed that Beijing has the most to gain and lose on the Korean peninsula and would quietly pressure Pyongyang to give up its nuclear ambitions. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Beijing has been...