Holy Evil Axis Batman! North Korea (or the DPRK as the lads of Chosun like to refer to themselves) is going to start a Special Administrative Region, modeled on the special status that Hong Kong and Macau have in China. And guess who's gonna run the thing? Nope, no Koreans. It will be a Hong Kong businessman of Dutch birth. A DBC (or HBC) if you will. So dude, you mean if I had a $900 million company, I could run a city in North Korea? Damn, we Chinese be running everything.

At Fudan, last semester, there were 4 students from North Korea. It definitely created an interesting dynamic. Our class consisted of:

4 North Koreans (all men)
3 South Koreans (all women)
2 Americans
4 Japanese
1 Thai
1 Indonesian
1 German

Considering how backward NK is, it's not surprising that Pyongyang only sent men over. I was told that the only NK women allowed to go abroad, were all studying in some university on Shandong Province (perhaps, not coincidentally, the birthplace of Confucius, father of East Asia's neuroses....) What is weird was that there weren't South Korean men in our class, even though there were a ton in the program. I think I heard that none of the classes with North Koreans had South Korean men. South Korean men are obligated to serve 2 years in the military, primarily to protect the country from the Communist threat. I don't know if it was a request from Pyongyang or Seoul to lessen the contact between these students. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a mutual feeling. Yet apparently, there's no threat from the women. (which may be true. i don't think any of my South Korean female classmates were fantasizing about hooking up with a mysterious North Korean.

But back to having an Overseas Chinese run the North Korean S.A.R. at Sinuiju. It seems that North Korea's relation to the PRC is much like how Korea traditionally served as a tributary state of China's. It seems that Kim Jong-Il's model is China. It struck me that whenever the North Korean kids were asked about their country: it's society, customs, attitudes, beliefs, etc. The answer was invariably, "It's much like China." Yet how about this story in the Times about forced abortions in NK prisons. These prisons mainly held people who were caught living illegally in China. The guards would say stuff like:

"The guards would scream at us: `You are carrying Chinese sperm, from foreign countries. We Koreans are one people, how dare you bring this foreign sperm here,' " Miss Lee, the vocational student, recalled. "Most of the fathers were Chinese." The New York Times (June 10, 2002).

Hmm...not that friendly anymore, huh...