"Continuous stream of traffic"
"One of the most underrated realities about North Korea is its very dynamic relationship with China, and the amount of information that flows across that border. Students; business people; it's a continuous stream of traffic," says Steven Linton, an American aid worker in North Korea. With that traffic come thousands of DVDs, CDs, cellular telephones, used computers and videotapes -- many of them from China and South Korea. Many Koreans in China make a living by setting up satellite TVs at their homes to receive South Korean media. Then, they burn CDs and DVDs of the programs and sell them to North Koreans for a profit. These media are so prevalent inside North Korea now that knowledge about South Korea has become commonplace, says Yoo Ho-yeol, a professor at Korea University in Seoul. Yoo regularly talks to students and refugees from North Korea.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127836840
When North Korea Falls
The furor over Kim Jong-il's missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea's catastrophic collapse. How the regime ends could determine the balance of power in Asia for decades. American military officers talk of the Kim Family Regime. Kim Jong-il learned a lesson from the fall of the Ceausescu Family Regime: Take complete control of the military. The KFR now rules through the army. Kim Jong-il's father established a link in the North Korean mind between the Kim Family Regime and the Choson Dynasty, which ruled the Korean peninsula for 500 years, beginning in the late fourteenth century.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2006/10/when-north-korea-falls/5228/
A Nation of Racist Dwarfs
Kim Jong-il's regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought. We should regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia. The regime cannot rule by terror alone, and now all it has left is its race-based military ideology. The North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.
