Day: April 4, 2024

In North Korea, carrying a bag with a strap on your shoulder can get you in trouble – because that’s the way they do it in the capitalist South. 

Instead, true socialists carry bags on their back or in one hand, people are told, sources in the reclusive country said.

It’s the latest example of authorities controlling even the personal details of North Koreans’ lives.

Women are told they can’t wear shorts, people are punished for using loan words from English, which they may have learned from South Korean TV dramas that get smuggled into the country on thumb drives, and couples getting married are strongly discouraged from holding wedding banquets or even clinking wine glasses at the reception.

Most of these no-nos come under the draconian Rejection of Reactionary Thought and Culture Law, which aims to root out an invasion of so-called capitalist behavior. 

Bag violators can have their bags confiscated, be kicked out of school or even sent to labor centers for daring to tote their loot close to their hips, sources say.

“A patrol organized by the Socialist Patriotic Youth League cracked down on a college student who wore a bag on their side at the main gate of Hamhung Medical University,” a resident of the eastern province of South Hamgyong told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “This is the first case of a crackdown on college students for how they carry bags.”

He said that the crackdown will continue until April 15, the Day of the Sun, a major holiday in North Korea that commemorates the life of leader Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, national founder Kim Il Sung.

Fashion item

Bags are one of the few ways that North Korean youths can express their individuality.

Prior to the 1990s, the government provided all school supplies, including backpacks for students. 

This ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Aid from Moscow dried up, ruining North Korea’s centrally planned economy and throwing the country into the “Arduous March,” which is what North Koreans call the 1994-1998 famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Since then, it fell on the students to provide their own bags, which have become a fashion item of sorts.

To counter this tendency, authorities supplied backpacks to students in elementary, middle and high schools this year but were not able to provide backpacks to all incoming college and university students because of production shortages. 

So the crackdown instead puts the burden on the students to appear uniform.

But young people are influenced by South Korean TV shows and movies, which are illegal for them to watch.

“College students prefer to wear shoulder bags with long straps on their side because they often watch South Korean TV shows,” a resident of the western province of South Pyongan told RFA on condition of anonymity for personal safety.

She said that the administration at Pyongsong University of Education and Teachers Training College announced at the school’s opening ceremony that from now on, anyone carrying a bag on their side would be punished for spreading the culture of the South Korean “puppets,” a demeaning term for its southern neighbor that alludes to its close ties with the United States.

Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

Rebel groups targeted the junta’s military headquarters and air base in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw with 29 drones on Thursday in a rare attack on the military regime’s stronghold, according to the shadow National Unity Government, or NUG.

Anti-junta armed groups aligned with the NUG are increasingly turning to low-cost drones in a bid to level the playing field in their conflict with the military, which seized power in a February 2021 coup d’etat. 

The military regularly conducts airstrikes with fighter jets and uses heavy artillery to target rebel positions, often with deadly consequences for civilians.

The NUG’s Ministry of Defense said in a statement that at around 9 a.m. on Thursday, the anti-junta Shar Htoo Waw’s Kloud Drone Team and a unit of the People’s Defense Force, or PDF, jointly attacked Naypyidaw’s military headquarters with 16 “kamikaze” drones, designed to carry explosives and detonate on impact.

Simultaneously, the ministry said, Shar Htoo Waw’s Lethal Prop Weapon Team and another PDF unit attacked the Aye Lar Airbase with 13 of the same drones. Aye Lar Airbase is used by both military and commercial aircraft.

The NUG – made up of former civilian government leaders ousted in the coup – said preliminary reports indicated “there were casualties,” without specifying further.

Rudimentary drones

In a statement, Shar Htoo Waw’s Kloud Drone Team said it carried out the attacks in collaboration with the anti-junta Power of Ababil group and Regiment 3502’s Orion Drone Team of the PDF in Bago region’s Taungoo city.

It said the military headquarters, Aye Lar Airbase and junta chief Senior Gen.l Min Aung Hlaing’s residence were its targets.

The statement, posted to Facebook, included photos of what it said were the drones used in the attacks. 

The fixed-wing drones in the images appear relatively basic, with small motorized propellers on each wing, hand painted camouflage, and rudimentary aerodynamics. In one picture, the drones have small metallic boxes atop their fuselages as they sit, lined up on the banks of a small tributary.

The Mizzima news agency cited an anonymous PDF representative in a report as saying that the attacks were carried out “according to the instructions of the Special Operations Department of the [NUG] Ministry of Defense.”

Junta claims it shot down drones

The junta said in a statement posted to its information ministry’s official Telegram channel that its air defenses had shot down four “fixed-wings” flying east of Naypyidaw International Airport and three which were intercepted in the southeast of Zeyar Thiri township.

The junta said its forces were able to seize 13 drones, four of which were later destroyed because they were carrying explosive devices.

Photos included in the post show at least nine damaged drones that appear similar to those included in the Kloud Team’s statement. One photo shows a destroyed drone with electronic wiring exposed.

The junta statement claimed that there were no casualties or damage to buildings resulting from the attack. It made no mention of the Kloud Team’s claim that it had targeted Ming Aung Hlaing’s house.

Failure to reach targets

Residents living near the military headquarters and Aye Lar Airbase told RFA Burmese that they were unaware of the attacks. They said they heard no explosions or any noticeable increase in security around the facilities.

News outlet Myanmar Now quoted a civilian witness to the attack as saying that the drones were unable to reach their intended targets and had “landed at the edge of the airport runway.”

Its report cited residents as saying that Naypyidaw International Airport was temporarily closed after the attacks.

Myanmar Now said that Kloud Team’s Lethal Props Squad used drones to drop bombs on Aye Lar Airbase in September.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

Landmines left over from Cambodia’s civil war half a century ago still injure or kill some 50 people a year – a sharp decrease from several years ago but still a worrisome issue for farmers and rural residents in the country’s western provinces.

There were about 100 casualties a year from landmines and unexploded ordnance during the decade that began in 2010, according to Heng Ratana, director general of the Cambodian Mine Action Center, or CMAC. 

That number has dropped by half over the last three years, but challenges remain in provinces that border Thailand that haven’t been cleared, partly because mines were laid in remote areas years ago that aren’t accessible by road, he told Radio Free Asia

“In some of these areas, people won’t know there are landmines until they see them with their own eyes or step on them,” Heng Ratana said.

Thursday marked International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action, and the government’s Cambodia Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority, or CMAA, held a ceremony at a ceremony in Siem Reap.

Cambodia is one of the most heavily mined territories in the world, with millions of landmines and unexploded ordnance that have killed more than 60,000 people since 1970. It has more than 530 square kilometers (204 square miles) that still need to be cleared of mines and ordnance, according to the CMAA.

Left over from war

The bombs and mines are left over from U.S. forces during the Vietnam war, but also include Chinese and Russian mines from the Khmer Rouge era in the 1970s and the Cambodian civil war of the 1980s.

Over the last 30 years, CMAC and other NGOs have found and destroyed more than 4 million landmines and unexploded ordnance. Among them are more than 1.1 million anti-personnel mines, more than 26,000 anti-tank mines and more than 3 million unexploded ordnance.

Most recently, a child was killed when a landmine exploded on March 17 in Oddar Meanchey province’s Anlong Veng district. Two other children were wounded, including the injured 4-year-old son of Beep Mab.

“The area was a Khmer Rouge rebel base and has never been de-mined,” he told RFA. “One boy, a 10-year-old, went to pick up mines from a stream near the foot of Dangrek Mountain and played with them.” 

‘Still so many mines’

Ly Thuch, the CMAA’s first vice president, restated Cambodia’s goal of finding and removing all mines and unexploded ordnance by 2025. 

But that objective seems unlikely to Beep Mab. In his commune, farmers consistently come across mines while plowing their field, he said. 

“At the foot of the mountain, it is alarming because there are still so many mines left,” he said.

Thursday’s CMAA ceremony was attended by officials from a dozen foreign embassies and other international organizations. The enormous effort to demine Cambodia since the early 1990s has largely been funded by foreign donors.

In November, Cambodia will host in Siem Reap an international conference of signatories to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, also known as the Ottawa Convention.

Ly Thuch said in November that Cambodia will use the conference, which has been held every five years since it became international law in 1999, to refocus the world’s attention on humanitarian assistance to victims.

“Cambodia looks forward to sharing its experience,” he said. “Siem Reap, once marred by the presence of these insidious devices, has now thrived after the successful clearance of landmines. 

“Today, millions of people from all over the world visit the magnificent Angkor Wat temple complex, which stands as a testament to the transformative power of mine clearance.”

Increasing casualties in Myanmar

The Mine Ban Convention, signed by 164 countries, prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines. 

But the United States, China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Myanmar are not signatories to the treaty.

In 2023, civilian casualties resulting from landmines and unexploded ordnance nearly tripled compared to 2022 in Myanmar, which has seen intense fighting between the military junta, ethnic armed organizations and local militias since a 2021 coup d’etat.

A report from the United Nations Children’s Fund released on Wednesday said there were 1,052 deaths and injuries across Myanmar in 2023. There were 390 casualties from landmines the previous year, the report said.

People in conflict-affected areas are at greater risk of fatalities due to their lack of knowledge about landmines, the report said, citing several mine awareness organizations. 

A political analyst and former military officer said that both the military junta and the local People’s Defense Forces have been laying mines over the last few years. 

“Of course, both sides are doing it,” he said, requesting anonymity for security reasons. “However, it is the PDFs whom I hold accountable, particularly for their lack of discipline and disregard for safety protocols concerning landmine usage.”

RFA was unable to reach junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun to ask for his comment on the report on Thursday.

RFA Burmese contributed to this report. Translated by Sum Sok Ry. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen arrived in the Chinese city of Guangzhou on Thursday for a five-day visit that comes amid a growing dispute over a program to stimulate China’s flagging economy that American officials say could hinder U.S. growth.

Yellen last week accused China of “flooding” markets for renewable energy production by heavily subsidizing things like electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and solar panels as Beijing seeks to turn around economic woes by boosting production of export goods.

American officials say the cut-price Chinese exports threaten to kill competing industries in other countries before they get off the ground, but China’s government has dismissed those concerns as protectionist and accused the United States of using similar subsidies itself.

During the trip, Yellen, who was also chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 2010 to 2014, will travel to Beijing to meet Chinese Central Bank Governor Pan Gongsheng, Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng and former Vice Premier Liu He, a key economic advisor to President Xi Jinping.

Yellen plans to “make clear the global economic consequences of Chinese industrial overcapacity undercutting manufacturers in the U.S. and firms around the world,” a Treasury official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity according to pre-set rules.

But it’s unclear how receptive Chinese officials will be. 

Beijing has already largely dismissed the concerns raised by Yellen as hypocritical, pointing to the Biden administration’s tax-breaks tied to electric cars, which exclude many Chinese-made vehicles.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Wednesday that China welcomed Yellen’s trip as a chance to “properly handle differences” and “build up consensus.” But he also rejected complaints about China’s subsidization of emerging and green-energy industries.

Speaking at a daily press briefing, Wang questioned “whether it is ‘excess production capacity’ that the U.S. is truly concerned about,” or if the United States was just upset its businesses were losing out in competition to China due to the “international division of labor.” 

“As for who is engaged in non-market practices, the fact is there for all to see,” he said. “The U.S. side has adopted a string of measures to suppress China’s trade and technology development. This is not ‘de-risking,’ but creating risks. These are typical non-market practices.”

Mushroom for improvement

It’s Yellen’s second trip to China in a year, with the U.S. Treasury secretary having traveled there in July last year amid the early days of the rapprochement between China and the United States.

During that visit, Yellen told CNN after returning, she mistakenly ate hallucinogenic mushrooms, which she called “delicious,” at a chain restaurant in Yunnan province called Yi Zuo Yi Wang, or “In and Out.”

“If the mushrooms are cooked properly, which I’m sure they were at this very good restaurant … they have no impact,” Yellen, who is 77, said. “None of us felt any ill effects from having eaten them.”

Potential psychedelics are less likely to feature on the visit this time, but after nearly a year of warmer ties between Washington and Beijing, the trip does come as cracks are starting to reappear in the relationship between the world’s two biggest economies. 

Beijing, for instance, has raised its strong concerns about a White House-backed bill currently before Congress that would allow the U.S. president to ban popular social media platform TikTok in America if its Chinese parent company ByteDance does not sell the app.

Xi even directly raised his concerns about the bill during a rare phone call with U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday, according to John Kirby, spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council.

“Xi raised the issue and President Biden responded,” Kirby said when asked how TikTok came up during the call between the leaders.

Biden told Xi, he said, that “this was not about a ban on TikTok [but] … about divestiture – that this was about preserving the data security of the American people and our own national security interest.”

Diplomacy

Yellen’s visit to China also comes ahead of next Thursday’s high-profile visit to the United States by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, which is being billed by the White House as the first trilateral meeting of the three countries.

The trio this week announced joint naval drills in the South China Sea amid an ongoing dispute between the Philippines and China over the sea’s Second Thomas Shoal, which belongs to the Philippines under international law but is part of a vast territorial claim by Beijing.

A delegation of U.S. lawmakers led by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, also recently arrived back from a trip to meet officials in the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea.

Shaheen said on Thursday the trip allowed the lawmakers to see first-hand the “threats” from China to other countries with claims to the South China Sea, as Chinese coast guard vessels fired water cannons at Philippine vessels trying to resupply a naval station.

“The threatening maneuvers [and] the militarization of the islands in the South China Sea are all motivators to continue the cooperation that we have with the countries in the region,” Shaheen said, summarizing the take-aways of the seven lawmakers after the trip.

“It has significant impacts on not just the potential for mistakes, militarily, that could be misinterpreted and set off a conflict,” she said, “but also in terms of trade and commerce, and the ability to safely navigate those waters and allow trade to move around the world.”

Also on the trip was Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a Democrat from New York, Democratic senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Mark Kelly of Arizona and Michael Bennet of Colorado, and Republican senators Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Roger Marshall of Kansas.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

China has been developing a range of ways to respond to sanctions from Western countries, and its response to potential sanctions from Group of Seven, or G7, nations in the event of an escalation of tensions in the Taiwan Strait could put hundreds of billions of exports to its economy at risk, according to a new report.

But analysts also warned that Beijing would also pay a heavy price if it deployed its own “economic statecraft” to counter economic sanctions from the United States and its allies in the event of escalation actions against democratic Taiwan that stopped short of an actual invasion.

“We assess that in a moderate scenario where U.S. exports to China are curtailed, more than $79 billion worth of U.S. goods and services exports (such as automobiles and tourism) would be at risk,” analysts at the Rhodium Group and the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center concluded in the report, titled “How China could respond to U.S. sanctions in a Taiwan crisis.”

“In a higher-escalation scenario involving G7-wide sanctions against China, around $358 billion in G7 goods exports to China could be at risk from the combination of G7 sanctions and Chinese countermeasures,” the authors warned, adding that the G7 depends on more than US$477 billion goods from China that could be affected by export restrictions.

Meanwhile, at least US$460 billion in G7 assets would be at immediate risk both from G7 economic sanctions and any retaliatory measures by Beijing.

China, however, would face “high economic and reputational costs” from such retaliation, the report said, adding that some 100 million Chinese jobs depend on foreign demand, with 45 million dependent on demand from G7 countries.

It said China will likely seek to divide the G7 nations in the event of “escalatory” action like a shipping blockade against Taiwan.

Tariffs to be key part

Charlie Vest, associate director of Rhodium Group’s corporate advisory team, said tariffs would be a key part of any Chinese economic sanctions in the event of such a crisis.

“The most likely things that are going to get targeted are things where China has a strong presence in the manufacture of these goods to the global economy, [such as] vehicle batteries, neodymium magnets that go into wind turbines, these sorts of things,” Vest told an online seminar discussing the contents of the report.

“When we think about this work, we are not imagining an all-out war with China over the Taiwan Strait: We’re imagining something that’s escalatory [rather than] any sort of serious wartime scenario,” he said.

“We are thinking about economic statecraft that China has used against trading partners in the past.”

Josh Lipsky, senior director of the GeoEconomics Center at the Atlantic Council, said China has already started building an international banking payments system that would enable it to skirt around financial sanctions imposed by the United States.

“The issue to think about is wholesale cross-border digital currency and that’s the mBridge project … between the UAE, Thailand, the People’s Bank of China and Hong Kong Monetary Authority,” Lipsky said.

These are “cross-border bank transactions that don’t touch the dollar and settle near-instantly,” he said. “If you think about it from … a [U.S.] Treasury perspective … suddenly I may lose purview on the way I enforce sanctions going forward.”

China has much to lose

Zongyuan Zoe Liu, Maurice R. Greenberg fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said China has much to lose from an economic sanctions war over Taiwan.

“The Chinese economy is very much dependent on international trade and commerce,” Liu told the seminar, citing China’s trade surplus of more than US$800 billion.

“It is going to be extremely devastating for the Chinese economy,” she said. “If we think … how much employment, how many jobs those numbers are supporting … this is going to become a social social stability challenge.”

Liu said Chinese-owned ports globally could get pulled into enforcing Chinese trade sanctions internationally.

“Perhaps in a low escalatory scenario the ports that are operated by China or majority owned by China could potentially become a point of denial [for] foreign trade,” she said.

Liu said China has long seen financial security as part of its current focus on national security.

“People talk a lot about how important President Xi Jinping is in terms of emphasizing financial security as part of his whole comprehensive framework for national security, but actually he’s not the first president or the first general secretary in China to emphasize national security,” she said.

“A lot of this actually goes back all the way to the Asian financial crisis and [China’s] weakening by the Asian financial crisis when president Jiang Zemin himself emphasized in 1997 that without financial stability China would not have [a] framework for development.”

“Since then, Chinese scholars as well as policy makers started to emphasize the importance of national security as an indispensable part of national security.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.