(Source: Yahoo News)
Key GOP Lawmaker: Go after North Korea with sanctions and short-wave radio
WASHINGTON — House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R.-Calif., called Wednesday for tough new sanctions on Chinese banks that do business with North Korea. Royce also said the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang has been losing its totalitarian grip on a population increasingly getting information from short-wave radio and contraband South Korean movies.
Royce said in an interview with Yahoo News on Sirius XM POTUS Channel 124 that he had met with a top North Korean defector who played up the impact of communications from the outside world as a way to pressure the government of Kim Jong Un.
“He told me that the one thing really shaking the resolve of people across North Korea is the information that’s coming in on two short-wave [radio stations] run by defectors,” Royce said. “They’re telling people what’s really going on in North Korea and in the outside world.”
The defector, Royce recalled, said, “You should help amp that up and get that all across the country.”
Voice of America and Radio Free Asia — descendants of Cold War-era information warfare — currently broadcast 10 hours per day of short- and medium-wave radio into North Korea, according to a congressional aide. And Congress doubled their Korean-language programming for the year ending Oct. 1 to $6 million, where it will stay for the next fiscal year, the aide said.[…]
The US will have sanctioned the whole world soon.
Does Ed Royce R-Calif. (sic) have any audience research data to support his contention? How many Chinese-made SW receivers capable of receiving US, S. Korean, and Japanese broadcasts have been sent to N. Korea? N. Korea sure isn’t getting Sony or Sangean radios. I’m calling foul. The primary mode of US-S. Korean propaganda into N.Korea is nothing more than data on smuggled memory media. Most of this is simple minded TV shows. N. Korea looses.
For audience research this was a question that often came up before 1991 with the Soviet Union. It wasn’t until after the USSR fell that they discovered the audience for the BBC and VOA Russian language services was around 30 million a week.
While all radios sold in the DPRK are fixed to only state broadcasting frequencies. Dandong located in China’s Liaoning province is the only city in China that borders North Korea and faces Sinujiu. Every month hundreds of Chinese made radio are smuggled across the border into the DPRK. These aren’t Tecsun or Degan. But other local brand very cheap shortwave radios. These are radios that are sold in China, but not in first tier cities like Beijing or Shanghai, but sold in third tier cites like Guiyang and Panjin.
Locally in China they cost around 90CNY (around 15USD). On the North Korean side smugglers sell these radios for as much as 45USD,.
In areas like Sinujiu, DPRK and some other along the border. Mobile phones started to be smuggled around 10 years ago. In many of towns, villages and cities that are close to the border with China. It’s very easy to pick up a mobile tower from China.
USB data sticks with South Korean drama, k-pop and movies is mostly smuggled into Pyongyang and areas around the city where media players, laptops, computers are more common.