Category: East Asia

North Korea is toning down its annual candy giveaway to children this year ahead of leader Kim Jong Un’s Jan. 8 birthday, handing out less candy and snacks than in previous years – and to fewer children, residents in the country told Radio Free Asia. The quality of candy is also lower, they said. Meanwhile, adults were buying their annual New Year’s “present” from the state: wall calendars that came with a variety of illustrations, including rockets and images of plump children. The calendars, marking the important dates for “Juche 113” –  also known as 2024 – were once free, but now must be purchased. Gifts of sweets to children on or around the birthday of the country’s leader has been a tradition in North Korea dating back to the reign of national founder Kim Il Sung – Kim Jong Un’s grandfather – and continued during the rule of his father Kim Jong Il. But this year the government is limiting the gift to kids aged 6 or younger. The government began distributing this year’s candy gift on Dec. 31, a resident of the northeastern province of North Hamgyong told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons. But children will likely be disappointed because they are getting less this year, and the quality has declined, he said. “The number of recipients who qualify for the gifts also decreased significantly,” he said. “Starting this year, elementary school students [and anyone older] are excluded from receiving confectionery gifts.” The gift package this year consists of hard candy, packaged snacks like chips or sweet breads, bean powder coated candy, and other select items, he said.  The government has not overtly said that the candies are for Kim Jong Un’s birthday, however. But residents assume that must be the reason, because they remember that under the rule of the previous leaders, children received candy ahead of their birthdays, the resident said. Self-reliance With the changing of the year from Juche 112 to Juche 113, adults are also “given” paper calendars from the state, which they must purchase. “Juche,” is North Korea’s founding philosophy of self-reliance, and the Juche era is said to have begun with the birth of Kim Il Sung in 1912.  RFA reported in 2022 that pandemic concerns had resulted in people having to pay for their own annual calendar gift, and those who could pay more received better quality calendars. That trend is continuing into this year, but the people have several versions of the official calendar they can buy, with themes centered around missiles, the cult of personality, the military, education, and tourism, another North Hamgyong resident told RFA on condition of anonymity for personal safety. The missile calendar is titled “The Status of the Juche Powerhouse,” he said, while the calendar about soldiers and marines is called, ”Let’s Destroy the U.S. Imperialist Invaders, the Bitter Enemies of the Korean People.” A North Korean wall calendar for the year ‘Juche 113’ or 2024. Residents were “gifted” calendars like these, this year, though they had to be purchased. (RFA) The tourism-themed calendar seemed tone deaf though, because it pictures a lifestyle that most North Koreans can not even dream of, he said. “How many people in North Korea can enjoy sightseeing and eating at restaurants on a boat like in the calendar?” he said. “Furthermore, there are students who cannot go to school because they are starving, and there are all these chubby students featured in the [education] calendar.” The calendars are printed on low-quality paper this year due to a paper shortage, and even then there are different versions of varying cost, a resident of North Pyongan province in the northwest told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely. “A multipage calendar costs 5,000 won (59 U.S. cents), and a single page calendar [displaying the entire year] costs 500 won (6 cents),” she said. “Well-off residents purchase the multipage calendars and there is a high demand for calendars featuring pictures of flowers and souvenirs.” She said that the militaristic calendars were less popular because they feature missiles, soldiers or scenes from the 1950-53 Korean War, which North Korea calls the “Great Fatherland Liberation War.”  The overly militaristic themes are a turnoff for some, but the resident said that people will always find reasons to complain.  “Last year’s calendar featured a picture of a young child holding a milk cup, but milk is a luxury for most people.” she said. Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

A partly anonymous team of journalists and historians is setting up an archive of uncensored historical material to allow the Chinese people to “reclaim their history” from the ruling Communist Party’s official narrative, according to its founder. The China Unofficial Archive, founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former China correspondent Ian Johnson, is “dedicated to making accessible the key documents, films, blogs, and publications of a movement of Chinese people seeking to reclaim their country’s history” since the Communists took over in 1949. It includes books, films and documentary records from key points in China’s recent history, including the Great Famine of the late 1950s to early 1960s under late supreme leader Mao Zedong, memoirs of the political turmoil of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and former Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong’s personal account of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. “We believe that public domain books, magazines, and films should be widely available, and that there is an inherent value in making different voices heard,” the bilingual Archive’s About section reads. The non-profit archive was co-created and is co-maintained by Chinese journalist Jiang Xue and others “who prefer to remain anonymous,” it says. Johnson, whose recent book “Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future” portrays the same people his archive hopes to serve, told Radio Free Asia in a recent interview he hopes that more Chinese people will gain access to materials through the archive that are unavailable in China due to government censorship. “I noticed talking to a lot of people that … although there’s a lot more information possible to share in China, like people emailing PDFs and that sort of thing … it was sometimes difficult to find more information,” Johnson said. “Somebody might send you a book about a topic, but it would be difficult to find other books on the topic or other authors on the topic.” Providing access Currently, the archive has a backlog of around 175 films that are currently being digitized that have yet to appear on the site, which Johnson said is around “75% or 80%” focused on people still living under censorship, with the remainder aimed at non-Chinese overseas. Johnson had the idea to set up a “clearing house” for useful historical research material for those who lack access to big research libraries in major universities like Harvard. “My primary goal was to help people who are doing this kind of research to simply have access to existing materials, all the books and the documentary films, etc,” he said. Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former China correspondent, is the founder of the China Unofficial Archive. (Cai Yaozheng) Johnson was careful to note that he doesn’t endorse any of the material on his site as better or more truthful than any other material. “We have chosen these titles because we think that they’re useful and important,” he said. “But we aren’t saying necessarily that we agree with everything written by this author or that sort of thing, so in that sense, it is a bit like a library.” “We think there’s maybe an inherent value in a better flow of information,” he said, adding that the website aims to serve the needs of ordinary people and “citizen historians.” The site is unlikely to be accessible to internet users behind the Great Firewall of government censorship in China unless they employ special tools to get around government blocks and filters. “That’s to be expected,” Johnson said. “We’re looking to reach the people who are trying to research and, and write their country’s history.” “The raw numbers of people is small, but I think they can also be influential people in the long run,” he said. ‘Just the beginning’ The archive has plans to keep on adding new resources from what Johnson termed “a huge amount of potential material.” “What we’ve put on the site right now is just the beginning,” he said.  Not everything is eligible, either. Johnson and his team will steer clear of posting any book that is currently still on sale, although they plan to post an entry signposting readers to publishers and bookstores in the case of some publications. Books that are still readily available in libraries around the world are unlikely to get a spot, whether they’re on sale or not. But books that are out of print, or whose publishers have been shut down, or have been banned from sale will be made available, according to Johnson. “We don’t want to hurt [anyone’s] ability to earn a living,” he said. Even with that content ruled out, there is plenty of new material being published by what Johnson described as “an amazing explosion” of citizen historians in the past two decades in China. “Sometimes in Hong Kong, sometimes just as a PDF, sometimes they make a film and put it on YouTube or some other place like that,” he said. “I don’t think many people, certainly outside of China, realize how much has been done about that.” “It’s remarkable that it’s primarily written by Chinese people inside China under often difficult conditions and without the benefits of being a professor at a big university and a budget and graduate students to help you do all the dirty work, right?” “These are people often working on their own and under quite difficult circumstances,” Johnson said. “And so I thought it was an important trend that needed some highlighting and in this way by putting it all together.” “It shows the scope of this movement.” Edited by Luisetta Mudie and Malcolm Foster.

North Koreans walking around in public holding their cell phones are getting in trouble with the police, residents there told Radio Free Asia. But it isn’t clear if it’s an effort to guard state secrets, as the government claims, or simply an excuse for police to shake down people for bribes. Or both. North Korea introduced the State Secrets Protection Law in February to prevent photos and videos – especially those of propaganda lecture materials – from finding their way out of the country. The country remains blocked off from the global internet, making it hard for most people to send any kind of information outside the country through their phones.  But people living along the border with China do sometimes use smuggled Chinese phones to access the Chinese cellular network, and can transmit photos and videos that way. Now it appears that authorities are trying to stop people from taking any photos that would reveal anything at all about life in the isolated country. Police in plain clothes patrol the marketplaces and stop people walking around with their cellphones in their hands, a resident of South Pyongan province, north of the capital Pyongyang, told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “Recently, when police see people walking around in the marketplace with cell phones in their hands, they stop them and check their phones,” he said, adding that it isn’t possible to know how many police are observing a particular location, since they are not wearing uniforms. Excuse for extortion? Previously, when police would stop to check people’s electronic devices, the goal was to find contraband media, such as TV shows or movies from South Korea. But now they are simply looking for pictures, the resident said.  “The crackdowns on cell phones involve searching for photos and videos of the marketplace among the photos in the phone,” he said.  A man looks at his mobile phone as he waits to cross a street in Pyongyang, North Korea, Feb. 18, 2017. (Ed Jones/AFP) If such a photo were to be found, there is a possibility that the phone owner could be accused of spying and trying to sell secret information to South Korea, and imprisoned. “As the police randomly crack down on cell phones, market merchants say it is a tactic to extort money ahead of the end of the year,” he said. Police are more privileged than the civilian population, but just like the average citizen, the salary from their government-assigned job is nowhere near enough to make a living. Most families must run side businesses selling goods or services in the local market to support themselves.  Police, however, can catch people doing questionable or illegal activities and accept a bribe to look the other way. So it is possible that the increased scrutiny is a way to collect some cash before year-end, the residents said. In the city of Sinuiju, on the border with China in North Pyongan province, police have been on the lookout for phones near the train station and at the marketplace all December, a resident there told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely. “Residents who were caught [with their phones] say it is ridiculous because the police said … they want to check whether they are taking pictures of their surroundings,” he said.  “The police threaten them, saying that preventing people from taking ‘internal photos’ with cell phones … is merely upholding the State Secrets Protection Law.”  But many people aren’t buying the police officers’ explanations, the North Pyongan resident said.  “[They say] authorities are creating anxiety by cracking down on cell phone owners as leakers of national secrets,” he said. “But the scenes around the market and the station are not national secrets.” Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.