QUOTE
North Korea Rejects China Model Spurning Furs in Test
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...id=a0ytn5hucZ30
Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The closing of Kim Yong Gu’s fur clothing factory in North Korea may be the beginning of the end for the communist country’s only cross-border business center with the South, the last symbol of reconciliation between the former wartime foes.
As the North makes documentaries about leader Kim Jong Il following reports he has terminal cancer, businessman Kim pulled out after his managers were stranded in a government protest of military drills by the U.S. and the South. Other manufacturers may follow because of demands they quadruple factory wages and pay 31 times more for land leases, according to Lee Im Dong, who heads a group representing companies at the park in Gaeseong.
South Korean companies at the complex employ more than 40,000 North Koreans and helped increase trade between the countries to a record $1.8 billion last year from $222 million in 1998. The dispute may mark the end of the North’s experiment with a Chinese-style market economy, said Derek Scissors, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center in Washington.
“This is North Korea’s way of saying, ‘We looked at the Chinese economic model, and now we’re rejecting that,’” he said. “This would be the last nail in the coffin of the direction they were going.”
China’s former leader Deng Xiaoping started opening its economy to the West in 1977 while maintaining the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. The country’s economy grew 82 times from 1978 to 2008......
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...id=a0ytn5hucZ30
Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The closing of Kim Yong Gu’s fur clothing factory in North Korea may be the beginning of the end for the communist country’s only cross-border business center with the South, the last symbol of reconciliation between the former wartime foes.
As the North makes documentaries about leader Kim Jong Il following reports he has terminal cancer, businessman Kim pulled out after his managers were stranded in a government protest of military drills by the U.S. and the South. Other manufacturers may follow because of demands they quadruple factory wages and pay 31 times more for land leases, according to Lee Im Dong, who heads a group representing companies at the park in Gaeseong.
South Korean companies at the complex employ more than 40,000 North Koreans and helped increase trade between the countries to a record $1.8 billion last year from $222 million in 1998. The dispute may mark the end of the North’s experiment with a Chinese-style market economy, said Derek Scissors, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center in Washington.
“This is North Korea’s way of saying, ‘We looked at the Chinese economic model, and now we’re rejecting that,’” he said. “This would be the last nail in the coffin of the direction they were going.”
China’s former leader Deng Xiaoping started opening its economy to the West in 1977 while maintaining the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. The country’s economy grew 82 times from 1978 to 2008......
