Less than two weeks after being punished with new UN sanctions, North Korea has sent its ceremonial head of state and two top economic officials to Singapore and Indonesia on a trip that appears aimed at drumming up outside investment.
North Korea Parliament Presidium President Kim Yong-nam arrived in Singapore on Friday for his first reported trip overseas since former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s death in December last year.
He traveled yesterday to Indonesia with two senior economic officials, according to North Korean state media.
Photo: EPA
Kim Yong-nam often represents Pyongyang abroad.
The weeklong visit comes on the heels of new UN sanctions imposed on North Korea for launching a long-range rocket last month in defiance of Security Council resolutions banning it from nuclear or ballistic missile activity. Pyongyang insists the launch was an attempt to launch a satellite into space.
Washington suspended an agreement to provide North Korea with food aid and the North could face more punishment if it follows the launch with an atomic test as it did in 2006 and 2009.
Even as it has risked punishment by developing missiles, Pyongyang has also focused, since 2009, on improving its economy by developing light industry, attracting foreign investment and expanding trade.
With ties remaining tense with Seoul, North Korea is looking elsewhere to build economic partnerships.
Singaporean entrepreneurs are already supplying the well-to-do in Pyongyang with everything from Heineken beer to Hello Kitty, and have introduced some locals to hamburgers, fried chicken and Belgian waffles.
North Korea is looking to diversify its trade, import natural resources and export consumer goods with Southeast Asia’s help.
Singapore offers an attractive model for attracting direct foreign investment, while resource-rich Indonesia could give pointers on how to make money from minerals, said Cho Bong-hyun, a research fellow at the IBK Economic Research Institute in Seoul.
Kim Yong-nam visited a food factory and an electronics manufacturer in Singapore on Saturday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
The North Koreans may also use the trip to Singapore to learn how to develop a successful growth model that does not threaten the political power structure, said Andray Abrahamian, executive director of Choson Exchange, a -Singapore-based nonprofit group that has provided business and legal training for about 200 young North Korean government officials and students.
“Singapore’s development trajectory has been attractive to a number of countries who are interested in maintaining political stability to manage rapid economic growth,” he said.
Trade and investment between North Korea and Southeast Asia have waxed and waned over the past 12 years.
From 2000 to 2006, trade with 11 Southeast Asian countries — including Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand — accounted for between 10 percent and 12 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade, but after Singapore and others pledged to enforce UN sanctions, trade with the region dropped to less than 2 percent in 2010, according to the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy in Seoul.
North Korea has sought to reverse that trend. In 2010, Singapore was North Korea’s sixth-largest trade partner, according to the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency in Seoul.
In recent years, the North has developed two special economic zones, in Rason in the northeast and Hwanggumphyong in the northwest, and is looking to Singapore for guidance, analysts said.
“Since the 1990s, North Korea has consistently said that it sees Singapore as a model for its special economic zones,” said Lim Soo-ho, a researcher at Samsung Economic Research Institute in Seoul.
Accompanying Kim Yong-nam is Ri Kwang-gun, who heads the North Korean Joint Venture and Investment Commission in charge of attracting foreign investment.
Pyongyang could also try to sell itself to manufacturers looking for cheap labor as well as boost exports of its consumer products, analysts said.
The other economic official in the delegation is North Korean Minister of Light Industry An Jong-su, KCNA said.
Meanwhile, South Korea is set to negotiate with China on a free trade agreement that could lift tariffs on products made in North Korea’s special economic zones, making investment in North Korea more favorable.
“North Korea has the cheapest labor in the world, less than half of China’s [rates],” Lim said. “Foreign investors can manufacture goods in North Korea and export them to China.”
Indonesia could provide guidance on how North Korea might exploit mineral resources that the North Korea Resources Institute in Seoul estimates are worth more than US$10 trillion, analysts said.
Indonesia has had strong ties with North Korea since 1964. In 1965, when late North Korean founder Kim Il-sung paid Indonesia a visit, then-Indonesia president Sukarno presented him with an orchid dubbed the Kimilsungia.
On Tuesday, North Korean and Indonesian officials signed an agreement to share news stories, photographs, video and TV footage, and eventually swap journalists, the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS