PYONGYANG WATCH
Stop fief: Was Sinuiju thought through?
By Aidan Foster-Carter

It's not what you'd call subtle. Certainly not tactful, nor in good taste after September 11. Hardly great art, either. The crudely drawn poster, its style taken from war comics, shows what is unmistakably the Capitol building in Washington, crumbling under an onslaught of fierce red rockets. A tattered and torn Stars and Stripes flutters helplessly. Just in case we still don't get it, the caption, in big chunky Korean letters, screams: "If someone starts a war of invasion, we'll crush the American bastards first!"

This charming little piece hangs on the wall of a shoe factory in Sinuiju, North Korea. And doubtless in many another grim workplace, to keep the popular masses seething with patriotic hatred. But Sinuiju was where an Associated Press photographer snapped it recently. This grey northwestern border city, across the Yalu river from China's bustling Dandong, is the newest of many surprises Kim Jong-il has sprung lately.

This time the Dear Leader has a sidekick. Yang Bin sounds like quite a character. Not yet 40, an ex-officer in the Chinese navy, in the 1980s Yang fled to Holland where he got asylum, an education, and Dutch citizenship. Later he came home, and built a Shenyang-based orchid and property empire that has made him one of China's richest men. He doesn't dispute Forbes' estimate of a net worth of around $900 million.

Clearly not a man to duck a challenge, Yang now has a country to run, kind of. On September 19, North Korea announced Sinuiju would be a Special Administrative Region (SAR). Five days later Yang Bin was sworn in as its first governor, and lost no time in telling the world that pretty much anything goes. The present inhabitants, for a start: they'll all have to move out, to make way for half a million of the brightest and best, and not just North Koreans, either.

Foreigners are welcome, and will even be a majority on the SAR's legislative council. The police will be foreign too. So will the money: dollars, yuan, whatever you've got. No border duties, no capital controls. Yang promises "a completely private and free capitalist society". How the legislative council will check Yang's boundless ambitions is just one of many mysteries. Not content with expelling the population (really free, huh?), he doesn't care for the buildings either: "I plan to demolish everything." Only historic monuments will be spared - including, no doubt, the statutory statue of Kim Il-sung that looms over the town, floodlit by night. (Those naughty locals had a go at that, a while ago: someone stole the copper cable for scrap, plunging the Great Leader into gloom. The culprit was shot.)

What's more, this all starts right now. Visa-free entry from last Monday, promised a breezy Yang. So of course, assorted intrepid hacks from South Korea and Japan swarmed to Dandong to be first into the new free North Korea.

And did they get in? Nope - because China wouldn't even let them out. Clearly Yang hadn't bothered to square all this with Beijing, with whom he isn't exactly best buddies anyhow. China has probed him for tax evasion; while on the very day Sinuiju was declared, a rather better known SAR, Hong Kong, banned trading in his Euro-Asia Holdings for a week after suspicious shifts in its share price. But Yang's new job doesn't mean he plans to drop the old one. How, he asked rhetorically, can he give up his own child just because he now has a new daughter-in-law in the family?

That patriarchal metaphor seems apt for a deal which suggests a feudal fief more than free enterprise. Transparent appointment procedures? Er, not exactly. Yang is frank: "It was Kim Jong-il's idea. They didn't seek anyone else." In the past two years Yang's flower power expanded from its Shenyang base into North Korea, and he caught the Dear Leader's eye. The pair have been plotting this since January.

What was it that appealed? The white socks? The high-roller gambling in the foreigners-only basement casino at Pyongyang's Yanggak-do Hotel? The personal jet parked at Sunan airport? Or that $900 million? Whatever, this choice says a lot about Kim Jong-il's judgment. Yang may have flair and drive, but he seems to be making this up as he goes along. He doesn't even have an office in Sinuiju yet. The Korea Times quoted a vexed Chinese official: "Yang Bin cannot be a reliable person to shoot from the hip."

And where does this leave other fiefs? In similarly feudal manner, the Dear Leader once gave Kaesong - Korea's ancient capital, just north of the Demilitarized Zone - to the Hyundai group founder, the late Chung Ju-yung, as a reward for his pioneering tourism ventures. (Actually he tried to offer him Sinuiju, but Chung wasn't having it: too far from South Korea.) Kaesong is a plum site, a potential Shenzhen if and when the border opens; but then North-South ties were frozen, so a bare site it remains. Now the start of work for real on cross-border road and rail links has put Kaesong back on the agenda - or had, until suddenly Sinuiju came out of left field. How many new investment zones can North Korea take, all at once? Has Kim Jong-il had cold feet, and decided it's safer to open towards China than to Seoul?

For a state that remains nominally a bastion of central planning, this doesn't exactly sound like joined-up government. On Thursday, US Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly flies into Pyongyang for the first proper US-DPRK talks of the Bush administration. He's in need of credible assurances that all this axis of evil stuff is a regrettable misperception; or at least that it's over now, Kim Jong-il is a man of peace, and his massive arsenal is up for negotiation. When Associated Press (luckier than most) slipped into Sinuiju, they found that most people didn't even know about Yang Bin and his plans to evict them.

But dear oh dear, couldn't Pyongyang have got on the phone and told them to lose that poster, fast, and for good?

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