China promises road for every village

English.news.cn   2015-12-04 22:45:40

LANZHOU, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- China will try to connect every village with an asphalt or concrete road by 2019, as part of a campaign to reduce rural poverty, Minister of Transport Yang Chuantang said on Friday.

China still has 28,000 poverty-stricken villages that lack access to asphalt or concrete roads. They are mostly located in mountainous areas where road construction remains difficult, Yang said at a conference in northwest China's Gansu Province on poverty reduction.

He said transportation would be a "vanguard commander" and lay foundations for the poverty reduction campaign.

China has 70 million rural residents officially classified as poor. It has pledged to lift them out of of poverty by 2020.

China has invested heavily to improve transportation in underdeveloped areas, making access easier to 42,000 villages by opening bus services, renovating ports and building bridges over the past five years, according to Yang.

Would a destabilized Korean Peninsula mean a China-U.S war? - Expert Survey By Rob York

The week that was: Five North Korea articles you don't want to miss To ensure you never miss out on the best NK News content, we highlight the top five most-read features and interviews of the week

Kim Jong Un may be easing reign of terror over elites By John G. Grisafi In recent months, there have been numerous cases of North Korean elites reemerging after months of absence from public view. For several of these officials, there is evidence to suggest they were undergoing reeducation and even punishment due to some infraction or shortcoming. These examples may be evidence of a shift in Kim Jong Un’s method of disciplining senior officials and exerting his supreme authority over regime elites. This trend itself may be a sign that Kim and the rest of the core leadership now feel more secure and stable as the rulers of North Korea. Throughout much of Kim Jong Un’s reign thus far, he has become known for a “reign of terror” in which many senior elites and even his own uncle, Jang Song Thaek, have been executed in violent purges intended to remove potentially disloyal or rival elements from the regime. As of July, Kim reportedly has had around 70 senior officials executed since coming to power in December 2011 (not including deaths, by execution or otherwise, of average North Korean citizens). But lately Kim appears to have largely shifted from conducting purges by execution to using punishment by labor and reeducation over the course of several months to discipline senior officials (again, this is separate from the regime’s handling of average citizens).  Click here to read the full article at NK News

North Korean victims of North Korean kidnappings By Dr. Andrei Lankov On November 24, 1959 the Muscovites who were walking in the center of the Soviet capital, near the world famous Moscow Conservatory, bore witness to a rather unusual scene. Around 2 p.m. a group of menacing-looking Asian men attacked an Asian youngster. A short but violent fight followed, with exchanges in a language nobody understood, but sometimes the young man was loudly asking for help in Russian. Soon, though, he was overwhelmed by the attackers, who unceremoniously pushed him into a car with diplomatic plates, which promptly sped away. The KGB learned about the event in no time (it was 1959 Moscow, after all), and soon a KGB officer, Colonel Lebedev, made a phone call to the Foreign Ministry to notify the diplomats that a major complication had just happened. North Korean agents had managed to locate and forcefully kidnap Yi Sang Gu, a post-graduate student at the Moscow School of Music, who had applied for asylum in the Soviet Union and sent a letter very critical of Kim’s regime to the Korean Supreme People’s Assembly. By the time of his abduction Yi Sang Gu’s application was being considered, so the violent attack was a major violation of international law.  Click here for the full article at NK News

Would a destabilized Korean Peninsula mean a China-U.S war? - Expert Survey By Rob York Observers of the Korean Peninsula broadly agree that China guards its interests there very closely, opposing North Korean moves that raise tensions but avoiding moves that might cause regime collapse. If it did collapse, though, and the northern half of the peninsula needed to be secured, how would China react? More importantly, how would China and the U.S. – whose South Korean allies would look to unite the peninsula under their control – react to one another in such a scenario? Would it be the Yalu River in 1950 all over again? Chinese experts say no. For them, the conflict between the U.S. and China is, perhaps ironically, restricted to times of peace, as the U.S. prods Beijing to be more proactive in addressing the North and Beijing resists, focused as it is on its economy. However, the North’s continuing proliferation in the face of U.S. sanctions and Chinese discouraging is gradually leading to a condition the Chinese have been dreading: South Korea’s deployment of U.S. THAAD missile defenses in defiance of Beijing’s wishes. In NK News latest expert survey, such a deployment was identified as increasingly likely. Click here for the full article at NK News

High-level inter-Korean talks? Low expectations By Aidan Foster-Carter As NK News readers will know, North and South Korea have finally agreed to hold their long-promised high-level talks on December 11 in the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC). Excited? Me neither. Ever the optimist, I wish I could hope. But in all honesty, there is a whole raft of reasons not to expect much from this event. In no particular order, here are eight of them: 1. Poor precedent. First up, can we be sure the meeting will even take place? Probably it will, but you never know. Twice in recent years, planned inter-Korean meetings have either been called off, as in 2013 (see point #5, below), or never been held despite an agreement to do so. As last year, when talks which the two sides had agreed would follow the North’s troika visit to the Incheon Asian Games’ closing ceremony in October 2014 simply never materialized. 2. Time taken. What took them so long? Three months have now passed since August 25’s six-point inter-Korean accord. That defused a fortnight of worrying tensions, even if (as I wrote here at the time) opinions varied as to who won and what the whole spat really proved. Click here for the full article at NK News

Without more flights, North Korea tourism industry will stagnate By Gareth Johnson Spring Airlines, a budget flight operator based out of Shanghai Pudong airport, is believed to be in the process of opening a new route from Shanghai to Pyongyang. From February 2016 it could offer as many as four flights per week – which would make it the third player in the North Korean aviation market (the others being state monolith Air Koryo, which runs scheduled flights from Beijing, Shenyang and Vladivostok, and Air China which runs two per week from Beijing). Now, those of us in the travel industry have learned take such grand announcements with a large pinch of salt. All too often, after the fanfare has died down, the plans amount to nothing. But in this case, we really have to hope this comes to pass – North Korea has pretty much reached capacity for tourism. Without new routes into the country, tourism in the DPRK is likely to stagnate. This year, two genuinely momentous occasions for the aviation industry in North Korea occurred: First, the Pyongyang Sunan International Airport was transformed into a modern international airport and, second, North Korea opened its second international airport at Wonsan.

The remaking of Africa by China

Whilst the UK, Europe, and the Americans are stepping up their massively expensive war on....someone in the Middle East, although no one is sure exactly who...and for how long...or why...but that doesn't matter...China's President Xi is setting up a trillion dollar fund for Africa, paying off Africa's loans owed to Europe, the USA and the IMF, and setting up massive infrastructure, highways, high speed railways, airports, schools, hospitals etc...thus creating the next extension of the One Belt One Road initiative (The Old Silk Road, except a thousand times bigger and more lasting) linking China culturally, economically, interdependently, and directly to all countries from China to Europe and ...now Africa. Well done Mr Xi. Peace and development provide a better life and a better business for everyone.
Next comes South America rising on China's broad shoulders.
The US, UK Europe all had the money and the years to do this but never bothered. Now they don't have the money...spent too much basically upon wars that couldn't be won and that everyone lost.

Cairns today, fishing, & comparative apartment prices etc

It's a very hot blinding day here today, maybe 33 degrees Celsius, 80% humidity,2pm now...I went fishing early this morning before sunrise, with squid and pilchards for bait, but as soon as the sun came shattering-jangling silver across the deep jade sea you could feel the heat instantly rising, and coming in to shore, riding the breeze, much like a form of nausea.

The Coral Sea is really hotting up early this year. El Nino, that wild boy, is rising early and is highly likely to cause a lot of mischief here.

Whilst fishing,I almost caught a stingray, which was good because I didn't want to catch him, and I'm sure he didn't want to be caught. Almost was good enough for both of us predators.

The apartment here, as I mentioned before, is very good and the coolest place I've ever lived in in Cairns due to the central atria...so air is always rising up about 40 ft from the cool and shaded underground car park, up past the front door. Excellent design for the tropics, and we don't get the afternoon sun at all, which is the real killer.

To cool down a house here, even with a fully insulated roof and whirly-birds on top, can take about an hour...but this apartment takes about 5 minutes. The buildings are a modern Chinese design and altogether hold about 140 apartments. There's 6 buildings in the grounds and they go up about 4 floors above the car parks. Very similar to thousands of new apartment blocks we saw in Xiamen in China, except they went up about 30 floors.

Interestingly, apartment prices here in Cairns are pretty much exactly the same as something similar in Xiamen...a Chinese provincial city. 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, modern fancy stuff...similar lay-out..and about 12 sq metres. The overall size of the apartments is very similar...the main difference is that in the Chinese apartments the floors are marble and the fixtures and the heavy doors are all very good teak and oak wood.

Mind you, Xiamen prices are going up a dependable 10% every year, but ours are kind of, well, not going up at all really. Such is the fate of the West I think for a long time to come. I think it will be 2025 before the deep cost ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis are addressed, let alone resolved. Big corrections take at least two and sometimes three decades.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there because we bought the place to live in, not as an investment, and it's lovely and cool indeed. Our neighbours are mostly Chinese...many bought when we did, when the prices bottomed out $100,000 below cost.

I'd still like a house...somewhere to put a big dog and a meth lab etc as some of the house-neighbours here do. Mind you, if terrorists were smart, they'd just bomb a suburban meth lab in Cairns. The connective trigger- explosions as they all went up would take the city off the world map entirely....a ring of vicious poisonous fire spreading all the way through Manunda, Manoora, Bayview heights, Earlville, Edmonton, Brinsmead, Whitfield, and deeply into Edge Hill, all the way to the Botanic Gardens and up the Red Arrow track.

I'd like either a retired greyhound or a poodle...but not a small poodle...rather the full-sized big black hunting poodle...taller than a German Shepherd. All poodles are pretty smart, it's just that the full sized proper ones aren't so fucking psychotic or needful...because they are a real, proper dog...and quite well balanced of mind and disposition. Retired Greyhounds are good too, especially in apartments. They've done all their running and suffering for many years and just want to chill out.

My favourite dog remains the Egyptian/African Basenji but they would be really unhappy here unless they were jumping the fence and off in search of prey and bursting with their wondrous genetic wander-lust. I used to be a bit like that. My imaginary dog remains Phil, the Basenji, and he features in the one-day-to-be-finished quite short book, a ghost story, I'm going to spend some time editing over Christmas.

I hope we all have a good Christmas and don't allow our reasonably decent young men and women to kill remarkably innocent foreign men women and children; and harm themselves profoundly, although not as profoundly as their harm their victims... in Syria or Iraq. That would be my Christmas Wish...to let the Middle East work out the problems of the Middle East without us OR ANYONE ELSE involved AT ALL.
I reckon I should run this world...it'd be a lot better.
For me...although I probably wouldn't want to be you in that scenario.

Do North Koreans gamble?

Do North Koreans gamble?

North Koreans like to pass the time playing cards, often because there's not much else to do

Je Son Lee 

November 25th, 2015

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Every week we ask a North Korean your questions, giving you the chance to learn more about the country we know so little about.

This week’s question is:

Do North Koreans like to gamble?

Yes, we do gamble in North Korea – at least some people do. Card games such as Go–Stop (which is played in Korea and Japan) and billiards are the most commonly played games. Personally, I’ve heard of people in my hometown who forfeited their houses or ended up in jail as a consequence of their gambling addiction. But obviously I wasn’t there gambling along with these people, so I can’t tell you how people in North Korea gamble in exact detail. But the rules for how people gamble with cards were the same as when I played cards with them for fun.

Since there isn’t an overflowing number of entertainment facilities or amenities in North Korea, playing cards came in handy

Even when they’re not exactly gambling, both grownups and children like to play cards in North Korea for fun. I can’t be 100 percent certain about other areas of North Korea, but playing cards was the most popular form of entertainment in my hometown. Since there isn’t an overflowing number of entertainment facilities or amenities in North Korea, playing cards came in handy. It was common for North Koreans to play cards with their relatives on holidays and weekends.

(By the way, one thing I’ve noticed after moving to South Korea was that they use different term for card games. South Koreans have adopted the English term “card game” into their language. But we used to call it joo-pay in North Korea.)

There isn’t just one kind of card game in North Korea. There are multiple kinds and ways to play them. But the most popular and widely played card game was sasaki. After the cards are shuffled and distributed among the players, whoever has three hearts begins and the game progresses in a clockwise direction. Each player is given 13 cards at the beginning of the game and whoever gets rid of all 13 first wins.

HIGH STAKES

The rules of North Korean card games aren’t complicated at all. Anyone can learn to play cards very easily in North Korea. But the competition gets fierce once people bet money on the game. People will do their best to win money and not lose it. That’s what makes the game more intense and attractive, after all. For this reason, both men and women loved to play cards in my hometown. On New Year’s, Chuseok and other holiday weekends, grownups play cards during lunch and dinner. The person who wins the most points need not pay while the others pay for food and drinks. The one who finishes second pays the least and the person with the fewest points pays the most.

Then, you may wonder, “How much money do North Koreans bet on their card games?” When people play cards for fun and entertainment at home, it is usually petty money such as 100 won per each point earned. But when you’re talking about gambling – for real – they bet 1,000-10,000 won per point. While in North Korea, I heard that some people blew all of their money gambling. But I haven’t met anyone like that in person.

It is not only adults that play cards. Oftentimes, students also play card games in North Korea. Schools in North Korea employ janitors, too. However, it is thought that one janitor cannot watch over the school by himself all day and all night. Therefore, students take turns in standing guard. As they watch over the security of their school from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. the next day, these students are to stay all night with their teachers. However, mind you, students are not obligated to do this against their will. Only those who volunteer take turns watching over the school. Most students volunteer to do so in order to have a sleepover with their classmates. There they play card games together during this “sleepover.” Since students don’t have enough money to gamble, whichever team loses the game pays for the snack.

Apart from card games, people also relished playing billiards and Go-Stop. I’ve noticed that South Koreans seem to play Go-Stop a lot during family gatherings at New Year’s and Chuseok. However, Go-Stop wasn’t as popular in North Korea. North Koreans didn’t seem to like the rules of Go-Stop. That’s why they played other kinds of card games. In South Korea, people with low income often play billiards. But only rich people play billiards in North Korea.

Rumors have reached the North Korean government that people were gambling at billiards. But so long as I know, they haven’t come up with any tactics or policies to control it. I guess there are some things even the North Korean government can’t control.

The above is the perspective of the author, and may not be representative of all North Korean defectors.

Got A Question?

Email it to ask@nknews.org with your name and city. We’ll be publishing the best ones.

Editing by Rob York and translation by Elizabeth Jae

Artwork by Catherine Salkeld

Japan considers THAAD deployment

Japan considers THAAD deployment to counter N.Korea

Defense Minister tells reporters Japan wants to study U.S. technology and equipment

Leo Byrne 

November 25th, 2015

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Japan is considering deploying the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to defend against possible attacks from North Korea, local media reported Tuesday.

Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani made the announcement during a state visit to Hawaii where he met with numerous high ranking U.S. military officials.

“We want to speed up our study of advanced activities and equipment of the United States,” Nakatani told reporters in comments carried by Japan’s Mainichi news outlet.

North Korean state media often mentions Japan, with threats and insults over potential defense agreements with the U.S. and South Korea a common theme.

“The Japanese reactionaries would be well advised to stop acting rashly, bearing in mind that reinvasion of Korea is entirely a final ruin,” an article from the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) entitled “Japanese Defense Minister’s Anti-DPRK Remarks under Fire” published earlier this month reads.

KCNA mentions of Japan over the last 60 days

The DPRK already has the capability to hit the Japanese mainland with its ballistic missiles, according toNK News intelligence director John Grisafi.

“(North Korean missiles) are definitely something Japan should take seriously. They likelihood of them ever being used or even how many North Korea could launch at Japan is questionable, but they would appear to have the capability to reach Japan with at least some of their missile designs and Japan should be capable of defending against them just in case.”

The installation of the missile defense systems has been controversial in neighboring South Korea, with China and the DPRK also criticizing the proposal at every turn.

Beijing views the plans as a U.S. cover for building defenses against Chinese missiles, despite the technical limitations of the THAAD systems.

On November 15 North Korea declared a no sail zone over its eastern sea, a move which many thought would be the precursor to a missile test. The restriction will be in place until December 7, an anonymous source told South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.

Featured Image: THAAD_2010_June_c by U.S. Missile Defense Agency on 2010-06-29 07:37:12

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leo Byrne

Leo Byrne is the Data and Analytic Director at NK News and is based in Seoul, South Korea. Follow him on twitter @LeoPByrne

Coming of Age in North Korea

N. Korean defectors start work as S.Korean civil servants​ North Korean defectors officially started work on Monday as 7th grade civil servants for the Ministry of Unification.  Visit NK News for more Incheon city invites N. Korean scholars to island conference The government of Incheon, South Korea has invited North Korean scholars to participate in an academic conference next year about Ganghwa Island.  Visit NK News for more Coming of age in North Korea, By Fyodor Tertitskiy The main task in life for an adult North Korean is joining the party. However, the irony is that people join it to not become a worker – and if one is fortunate, to avoid physical labor entirely.  Visit NK News for more A remedy for head-in-the-sand thinking on N.Korea, By Robert E. McCoy Robert E. McCoy argues in favour of thinking outside the box when it comes to inter-Korean relations, and more specifically, in favour of president Park Geun-hye's Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative (NAPCI). Visit NK News for more N. Korea conducts failed SLBM launch North Korea made a failed attempt to launch a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) in the East Sea (Sea of Japan) Saturday afternoon, a South Korean government source said.  Visit NK News for more

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