Comments on: How digital technology helps get news from North Korea

By: Lawrence

Lawrence — Thu, 26 May 2011 16:48:37 +0000

This is pretty much what the locals told me on the train from Shinjuku via Dandong in 2009. If you speak Chinese, you can have a conversation with quite a few Korean guides. They were quite open about watching Chinese drama and TV, especially in the SEZ. Chinese TV plays a fair amount of South Korean period drama, so thats obviously popular.

The more privileged talked about playing on PS3, and had computers that were up to date – Call of Duty 3 (whatever the latest one was in 2009) was quite popular in DPRK – one of our guides raved about playing it for hours.

Most were pretty open that DPRK wasn’t perfect, but they did believe that what they were doing was right.

By: Stefan Hammond

Stefan Hammond — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 03:54:58 +0000

As editor of Computerworld Hong Kong (an IDG licensee), we picked up this story and ran it in our daily feed. I feel Martyn Williams is doing unprecedented journalism on North Korea, which is why we’ve run his stories in our magazine and online since 2002. I’m delighted to see this story and applaud Mr Ishimaru and the journalists brave enough to get real information out of the country.

My hope is that when regime change happens in NK, they will take the advice China has been giving them for years and establish Special Economic Zones: SEZs proved invaluable in bringing China into the world economy, and while NK has a harder road to travel, the veil is slowly lifting.

Watch this space.