Mick Hartley

According to this report, a local radio station is claiming that the new North Korean won has plummeted in value against the Chinese yuan:

The Seoul-based Open Radio for North Korea (ORNK), citing unidentified sources along the Sino-North Korean border, said that merchants were exchanging one yuan for 1,000 new North Korean won as of late last month, plummeting from the 50 won traded for every yuan on Dec. 3, right after Pyongyang introduced the new currency.

That's a dramatic collapse: the ruin of North Korean merchants (such as they are) has been astonishingly rapid.

The ORNK speculated that the reason for the new currency's weakness may be Pyongyang's decision to not allow foreign currency to circulate in the market.

"The official proclamation to ban foreign currency use was made on Dec. 28, but there have been rumors circulating after the currency reform took place, causing the new won to depreciate against Chinese money," the radio station report said.

It said that with Pyongyang unlikely to allow the use of foreign money as a medium of exchange or to bolster its new currency, it may be hard to determine when the value of the new won will stop falling.

Previous posts on the new currency here, here, here, here, and here.

In other DPRK news Frank Langfitt (via) reviews Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, about the widespread (and little known) famine in the 90s:

In 1997, I traveled to Dandong, a Chinese city just across the Yalu River from North Korea, to try to get some sense of the famine gripping the Stalinist nation. North Korea is sealed off from most of the outside world. American journalists are rarely granted visas and all visits are carefully monitored, so I had to rely on the accounts of Chinese truckers who drove into the country to trade food for scrap metal.

One trucker had a gash on his forehead from his latest trip. He told me a teenage boy had hit him with a rock as a crowd leapt on his truck, cut through inch-thick ropes, and made off with 30 bags of flour. Other Chinese traders described children so weak they didn't have the strength to climb onto the trucks to steal.

The famine was brought on by several factors, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea's main benefactor, and a wildly inefficient socialist economy. By 1998, 600,000 to two million North Koreans had died of starvation….

The book focuses on six people, among them a university student, a teacher, a doctor, and a thief. In the famine's early years, most still blindly trust the regime. Given North Korea's wretched conditions – the per capita income was $719 in 1995 – that seems crazy. But the government's control is total, from cradle to grave. Indoctrination begins in 14-hour-a-day, state-run child care centers, and all media – from billboards to movies – deify the leadership.

"Who could possibly resist?" Demick writes.

As food begins to vanish, people drape nets from balconies to catch sparrows or grind up pine-tree bark to replace flour. The kindergarten class of Mi-ran, a teacher, goes from 50 to 15 as the students lose the energy to attend – or die. Death becomes a routine, public affair. Mi-ran settles down to sleep in a public park and notices an emaciated young man curled up around a tree.

He's dead.

People haul him away in an oxcart.

In a chapter entitled, "The Good Die First," Demick points out that those who lie, cheat, and steal for food survive, while those who follow the regime's edicts – don't buy food on the black market – are among the first to die.

Couldn't happen now, of course: there's no market left, black or otherwise.