The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, named for an old Uighur name for Xinjiang, is a shadowy group that operates largely out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and is devoted to expelling the Chinese Communist Party from northwestern China. Barbara Demick Read Quote
A South Korean teenager, 18-year-old male, is about five inches taller than his North Korean counterpart. And there are many soldiers who are only about 4’6″. The height requirement is supposed to be 4’9″. That’s the size of my 12-year-old son. Barbara Demick Read Quote
It’s frightening to think about more sanctions. When I’ve met North Koreans in China, they’ve said to me, ‘You have no idea how difficult our lives are. We live like dogs.’ They wake up in the morning wondering what they’re going to eat for dinner. Barbara Demick Read Quote
Kim Jong Un came in as a fresh face, so I think there’s a great disappointment that he’s playing the same game as his father. Barbara Demick Read Quote
North Korea’s whole idea is to create a crisis to solve a crisis. They’re so poor and they’re so desperate that they realize that this bombastic rhetoric can drive the South Korean stock market down and get the U.S. in a tizzy. And it’s a game they’ve been playing for many, many years. Barbara Demick Read Quote
The anti-Japanese resistance was as familiar a theme in North Korean cinema as cowboys and Indians was in early Hollywood. Barbara Demick Read Quote
The North Korean landscape is strikingly beautiful in places. It could be said to resemble America’s Pacific Northwest – but substantially drained of color. Barbara Demick Read Quote
By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days. Barbara Demick Read Quote
North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin. Barbara Demick Read Quote
