Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...about 150 Chinese companies are doing business there. "Once the political situation stabilizes and medium-size enterprises begin to discover North Korea, it will have a dramatic impact," says Alexandre Mansourov, a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu and a former Soviet diplomat in Pyongyang. "I don't see why North Korea should be an exception to the economic miracle in which every country around China is benefiting from Chinese economic growth...
North Korea is already benefiting--a little. In 2005, the Chinese trading company Tianjin Digital invested $650,000 to open a joint-venture bicycle plant in Pyongyang. "The conditions are really favorable," says Tianjin manager Liang Tongjun, whose company was granted a 20-year monopoly on bicycle manufacturing in the North. A month after the factory opened, the Dear Leader himself paid a visit...
Roger Barrett, founder of the Beijing-based Korea Business Consultants and one of the few Westerners to regularly do business in Pyongyang, says the North seems eager to court new investment. "The D.P.R.K. government is very keen to demonstrate that joint ventures are welcomed," he says. Barrett, who has been facilitating business deals in the North for more than a decade, compares the country's current condition to that of South Korea's before it emerged from military rule to become one of the world's export powerhouses. "You start to see how North Korea can move along in similar...
...Beijing in late September, North Korea agreed to dismantle all its nuclear facilities and disclose the scope of its nuclear program by the end of the year in exchange for 950,000 tons of fuel oil or the equivalent in economic aid. And at this month's summit in Pyongyang between Kim and South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun, the two nations agreed to pursue a formal peace treaty to officially end the Korean War and made broad, if vague, plans for increased economic cooperation...
...there are no certainties on the Korean peninsula. Should Pyongyang renege on its promise to dismantle its nuclear program, crippling U.S. sanctions will almost certainly continue. And South Korean presidential elections in December could usher in a new government with a less conciliatory stance toward its deadbeat neighbor. To see just how far North Korea still has to go, you need only visit the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge linking the booming Chinese metropolis of Dandong with the sooty failed economic zone of Sinuiju. Commerce between the two nations is limited to a trickle of trucks on the bridge's single...