Stephen Haggard on North Korea's Harsh Pressures Toward Women
Women Facing Harsh New Pressures in North Korea
06/25/2012
Mark McDonald,
International Herald Tribune
HONG KONG — As the world’s youngest dictator, Kim Jong-un has gotten off to a remarkable start in North Korea.
He has reneged on a deal with the United States for a quarter-million tons of food aid, threatened South Korea with fiery annihilation — nothing new there, really — and embarrassed his principal patron, China.
Most surprising of all this, writes my colleague Jane Perlez, is “how Mr. Kim has thumbed his nose at China, whose economic largess keeps the government afloat.” When a senior Chinese diplomat went to North Korea and warned Mr. Kim against a ballistic missile test, Jane says, “the new leader went ahead anyway.”
Mr. Kim, not yet 30, seems to have deftly consolidated his hold on state power since his father’s death in December. He appears fully in command of the political, military and diplomatic levers.
And some of his regime’s first policy moves in the economic sphere “were focused on re-enforcing controls” from the central government, according to a new paper by Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland for the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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Stephan Haggard is the director of the Korea-Pacific Program at IR/PS, where he specializes in the Korean economy. In 2011 Haggard published Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea with co-author Marcus Noland, with whom he had previously authored Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform. Dr. Haggard writes the "North Korea: Witness to Transformation" blog at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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