Stephan Haggard on Google Exec's Visit to North Korea
Why Is Google’s Eric Schmidt Going to North Korea?
01/07/2013
Bruce Einhorn,
Bloomberg Businessweek
It’s official: Google (GOOG) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will be spending a few days in North Korea. Schmidt and former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson took off from Beijing on Jan. 7 for Pyongyang. The nine-person delegation will have a private, four-day visit, but there’s no additional information about whom they’ll be seeing and what they’ll be doing in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the land that the official North Korean website calls “the genuine workers’ state in which all the people are completely liberated from exploitation and oppression.”
A place so great might be hard to leave. But assuming Schmidt and Richardson can bear to depart a place where “the workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals are the true masters of their destiny,” we’ll know more on Jan. 10, when the group is scheduled to be back in China and, and according to Richardson’s office, the former diplomat will have a news conference.
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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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