That North Korea could dodge sanctions and import luxury goods from the outside world has much to do with its domestic demand. North Korea now has its own “1 percent” and the tiny circle of elite families clusters around the capital, which is dubbed “Pyonghattan.” The rich kids there like to be seen as cosmopolitan, looking stylish, going to the gym, showing off their bodies, sipping drinks that cost between $4-$8, while an ordinary North Korean makes around $20 a month. Before Beijing decided to tighten sanctions on their country, many North Koreans travelled to China and armed themselves with shopping lists, buying what couldn’t be bought in Pyongyang.
In recent months Western researchers had been sifting through troves of North Korean Internet data, looking for activity related to missile launches or malicious cyber activity. They were surprised by what they found. The elites have unfettered access to the Internet and are like the rest of the world in their digital habits. They use their smartphones to check Gmail, call up their Facebook accounts and browse for goods at Amazon and the Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba etc.
It remains to be seen whether this "1 percent" would help open up the country in the long run.
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Has it not occurred to anyone that the USA's Korea Free Trade Agreement could also be a roundabout means for North Korea to flout the sanctions? After all, how many imports are actually of Chinese origin but pretend to be Korean to benefit from zero duties? Send North Korean goods to China and transship them to South Korea. Probably happens all the time...There's no practicable way to oversee that everything we permit to enter our commerce from Korea is truly of Korean origin.
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There is another country that possesses nuclear weapons and tests the missiles to deliver them. And unlike North Korea it doesn't just make threats, it actually bombs other sovereign nations and slaughters & mass-murders untold numbers of innocent civilians in the process. When is the international community going to asses severe penalties & sanctions against this belligerent renegade nation, the United States of America.
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