Word: yang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sincerity alone won't be enough to get the new zone off the ground. Sinuiju is short of everything an economic hub needs to operate, including decent roads, commercial transport and proper water facilities. Yang intends to woo international banks to finance infrastructure projects. Similar funding has been sought in the past without much success. In the mid-1990s, Pyongyang tried to lure capital to North Korea's Rajin-Sonbong free trade zone, which also has its own legal code, but little has been developed. In a black box of a state where assessing political risk is like reading chicken...
...Sinuiju gambit, however, is aimed at one of the country's few allies: China. The tightly controlled border crossing at Sinuiju will be thrown open to Chinese labor and business?which Yang's appointment is meant to entice. China offers not just investment capital. The country and its rising class of entrepreneurs can conceivably teach North Korea how to turn a crumbling communist state into an economic dynamo. After all, Beijing two decades ago launched free-trade zones to lure foreign investment as a prelude to transforming the whole country into a market economy...
...chose as his principal change-agent a mainland Chinese businessman with Dutch citizenship is, in itself, an acknowledgment that the North Koreans can't reform themselves. No less a figure than Kim Yong Nam, the second-most powerful man in North Korea, handed over the zone's authority to Yang in a ceremony last week, while other top comrades watched sullenly from armchairs. Yang, sporting a Kim Jong Il badge pinned next to the alligator on his Lacoste golf shirt, insists the new zone is a sincere effort. "General Kim wants to open a window to the world," he told...
...Yang insists that won't happen. His zone will succeed where others haven't, he declares, because it isn't North Korea. "There is no economic relationship between North Korea and the new region," he says. As chief executive, he is responsible for appointing a 15-member council?half of them non-Koreans?to draw up the new regulations for the zone. After two or three years, the council will supposedly be elected by the zone's residents. In a sign of just how desperate North Korea is for this venture to work, the central government has also agreed...
...Then again, Sinuiju's chief executive has credibility issues of his own. Yang, who says he has small agriculture-related holdings in North Korea, was told by government officials during a January business trip to Pyongyang that Kim had hand-picked him to run the SAR. On the mainland, Yang's fortune is rooted in an orchid seedling business he built into Euro-Asia Agricultural (Holdings) Co., which is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. A hardy perennial himself, Yang was orphaned at five, graduated from China's naval academy and, after winning a scholarship to study...