Inside North Korea’s Theocracy

Inside North Korea’s Theocracy
Author: Ra Jong-yil
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2019-05-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1438473737

Offers biographical accounts of several of North Korea’s leaders to illuminate the inner workings of its government. First published in Korean in 2016, Inside North Korea’s Theocracy offers a fascinating and rare look at the lives of several of the regime’s key leaders. Its primary focus is Jang Song-thaek, a talented and reform-minded member of the political ruling class who was executed in 2013. Jang was the son-in-law of North Korean founder, Kim Il-sung; brother-in-law of its second leader, Kim Jong-il; and uncle to its current leader, Kim Jong-un. The author traces Jang’s life from his youth as a brilliant student in Pyongyang to his eventual marriage to Kim Kyong-hui and his rising power as a businessman to, ultimately, his untimely death. In addition to biographical sketches of Jang, his wife, and brother-in-law, Ra Jong-yil provides first-hand impressions of life in North Korea and illuminates the inner workings of its government. “If one could read only a single book to thoroughly understand the nature of the North Korean political system, the Kim family dynasty, and the forces that have combined in creating a unique authoritarian regime marked by deep and worsening structural flaws, Ra Jong-yil’s pathbreaking study of Jang Song-thaek is such a book. A preeminent watcher of North Korea coupled with top-level national security policy experiences, Ra presents a chilling and compelling story.” — Chung Min Lee, Senior Fellow and Director of the Korean Security Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace “…a rich biography of Mr. Jang, the most prominent victim of the purges his young nephew has conducted since assuming power in 2011.” — New York Times, on the Korean edition

Inside North Korea’s Theocracy

Inside North Korea’s Theocracy
Author: Ra Jong-yil
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2019-05-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1438473745

First published in Korean in 2016, Inside North Korea's Theocracy offers a fascinating and rare look at the lives of several of the regime's key leaders. Its primary focus is Jang Song-thaek, a talented and reform-minded member of the political ruling class who was executed in 2013. Jang was the son-in-law of North Korean founder, Kim Il-sung; brother-in-law of its second leader, Kim Jong-il; and uncle to its current leader, Kim Jong-un. The author traces Jang's life from his youth as a brilliant student in Pyongyang to his eventual marriage to Kim Kyong-hui and his rising power as a businessman to, ultimately, his untimely death. In addition to biographical sketches of Jang, his wife, and brother-in-law, Ra Jong-yil provides first-hand impressions of life in North Korea and illuminates the inner workings of its government.

Inside the Red Box

Inside the Red Box
Author: Patrick McEachern
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2010-12-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231526806

North Korea's institutional politics defy traditional political models, making the country's actions seem surprising or confusing when, in fact, they often conform to the regime's own logic. Drawing on recent materials, such as North Korean speeches, commentaries, and articles, Patrick McEachern, a specialist on North Korean affairs, reveals how the state's political institutions debate policy and inform and execute strategic-level decisions. Many scholars dismiss Kim Jong-Il's regime as a "one-man dictatorship," calling him the "last totalitarian leader," but McEachern identifies three major institutions that help maintain regime continuity: the cabinet, the military, and the party. These groups hold different institutional policy platforms and debate high-level policy options both before and after Kim and his senior leadership make their final call. This method of rule may challenge expectations, but North Korea does not follow a classically totalitarian, personalistic, or corporatist model. Rather than being monolithic, McEachern argues, the regime, emerging from the crises of the 1990s, rules differently today than it did under Kim's father, Kim Il Sung. The son is less powerful and pits institutions against one another in a strategy of divide and rule. His leadership is fundamentally different: it is "post-totalitarian." Authority may be centralized, but power remains diffuse. McEachern maps this process in great detail, supplying vital perspective on North Korea's reactive policy choices, which continue to bewilder the West.

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader
Author: Bradley K. Martin
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 912
Release: 2006-01-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780312323226

Bradley K. Martin presents an analysis of North Korea and the extraordinary family that runs it.

North Korea's Hidden Revolution

North Korea's Hidden Revolution
Author: Jieun Baek
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2016-11-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300224478

“A crisp, dramatic examination of how technology and human ingenuity are undermining North Korea’s secretive dictatorship.”—Kirkus Reviews One of the least understood countries in the world, North Korea has long been known for its repressive regime. Yet it is far from being an impenetrable black box. Media flows covertly into the country, and fault lines are appearing in the government’s sealed informational borders. Drawing on deeply personal interviews with North Korean defectors from all walks of life, ranging from propaganda artists to diplomats, Jieun Baek tells the story of North Korea’s information underground—the network of citizens who take extraordinary risks by circulating illicit content such as foreign films, television shows, soap operas, books, and encyclopedias. By fostering an awareness of life outside North Korea and enhancing cultural knowledge, the materials these citizens disseminate are affecting the social and political consciousness of a people, as well as their everyday lives. “A fine primer on the country, based on extensive interviews with defectors.”—Times Literary Supplement “A fascinating book.”—The New York Times “[A] timely and cogent book.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “A fascinating and intelligent overview of the ways that information is liberating North Koreans’ minds.”—Robert S. Boynton, author of The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project “A fascinating, important, and vivid account of how unofficial information is increasingly seeping into the North and chipping away at the regime’s myths—and hence its control of North Korean society.”—Sue Mi Terry, former CIA analyst and senior research scholar at the Weatherhead East Asia Institute, Columbia University

Language and Truth in North Korea

Language and Truth in North Korea
Author: Sonia Ryang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2021-05-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0824886283

In this innovative and persuasive volume, Sonia Ryang offers new ways to think about North Korea and how truth emerges over decades from within a dominant discourse. It explores four discrete yet mutually related domains of discourse: North Korea’s literary purge of the 1950s–1960s; its state-initiated linguistic reforms of the 1960s–1980s; stories from a people’s chronicle, more than one hundred volumes in length, documenting interactions with the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung; and the multivolume memoirs of the Great Leader himself, published in the 1990s. These texts are heterogeneous in terms of authorship, style, purpose, and genre, and many have never before been explored in Anglophone studies of North Korea. All have contributed to consolidating a North Korean regime of truth, bringing into existence a set of assumptions and shared understandings that have been regarded as true over the last half century. Basing her work on a study of these linguistic and discursive domains, Ryang explores the ways in which power, truth, and self are indissolubly connected by function as well as efficacy and how language plays a key role in sustaining their validity. The Kim Il Sung era, from 1945 to Kim’s death in 1994, forms the basis of the book, but the way truth emerged and was sustained during these decades provide important insight into how we can comprehend North Korea today. Rather than view the country as an ideological entity in order to expose its falsehood, so to speak, thinking critically about what it sees as true yields a far more productive outcome for scholarly analysis as well as general understanding. Language and Truth in North Korea will find a ready audience among those interested in North Korea from a wide variety of disciplines, including the social sciences, history, philosophy, and theology.

TCR Singles 28-1 North Korean Theocracy

TCR Singles 28-1 North Korean Theocracy
Author: Will Fitzhugh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 28
Release: 2017-08-29
Genre:
ISBN: 9781975923938

TCR Singles Contains one featured essay from a previous issue of The Concord Review (TCR). TCR contains essays from a unique international journal of exemplary history research papers by secondary students of history.This issue features:"North Korean Theocracy" was written by Ana Mariella Mundaca while attending Sidwell Friends School in Washington, District of Columbia

Nothing to Envy

Nothing to Envy
Author: Barbara Demick
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2010-09-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0385523912

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a “tour de force of meticulous reporting” (The New York Review of Books) FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD WINNER OF WINNERS AWARD In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded, and an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life. She takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors, and through meticulous and sensitive reporting we see her subjects fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we witness their profound, life-altering disillusionment with the government and their realization that, rather than providing them with lives of abundance, their country has betrayed them. Praise for Nothing to Envy “Provocative . . . offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”—The New York Times “Deeply moving . . . The personal stories are related with novelistic detail.”—The Wall Street Journal “A tour de force of meticulous reporting.”—The New York Review of Books “Excellent . . . humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad.”—San Francisco Chronicle “The narrow boundaries of our knowledge have expanded radically with the publication of Nothing to Envy. . . . Elegantly structured and written, [it] is a groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction.”—John Delury, Slate “At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Korean-American Relations

Korean-American Relations
Author: Yur-Bok Lee
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780791440254

Built upon the highly successful volume One Hundred Years of Korean-American Relations, 1882-1982, this book describes Korea's importance to the United States and the development of the current relationship. The ramifications of this relationship are evident by the facts that South Korea now constitutes America's seventh largest trading partner and 37,000 American troops remain stationed there on alert. North Korea, however, continues to harbor a deep resentment of the United States and its southern neighbor and maintains the fifth largest standing army in the world, situated just north of the world's most fortified demarcation line at the 38th parallel.

Chaekgeori

Chaekgeori
Author: Byungmo Chung
Publisher: Suny Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2017-05-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781438468112

The first major exhibition in the United States of chaekgeori painting, including on view for the first time many screens from private collections and various Korean institutions.