Could China Shut Down North Korea?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2017
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Military tensions between the United States and North Korea seem to rise on an almost daily basis. But how important are economic factors in putting pressure on the North Korean state? Could China, with its close trading relationship, choose to shut down North Korea - putting pressure on the leadership there? The BBC's Danny Vincent travels to the border between China and North Korea to look at some of the trade passing between the two nations.
And Ed Butler talks to Korea Expert Aidan Foster-Carter and asks him whether China could shut down North Korea if it chose to do so?
Also, our veteran commentator Lucy Kellaway admits that she does not always learn from experience.
(Picture: A North Korean man standing at a border fence next to the Yalu river, opposite the Chinese border city of Dandong. Credit: JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:09.4 | Today, with military tensions rising over North Korea, we ask, |
| 0:13.7 | will tightening the economic ratchet make any difference to its people? |
| 0:24.7 | They are poor, they have no money, they don't have enough to eat. |
| 0:27.2 | I've been trading with them for 15 years. |
| 0:31.1 | In that 15 years, I haven't seen any development in that country. |
| 0:34.3 | Also in the program, after giving a public speech, |
| 0:37.8 | Lucy Kellerway discovers you're never too old to make mistakes. |
| 0:43.2 | I'd somehow told all the men that they were dim and all the women frumpy. |
| 0:46.1 | Mine was a tour de force of clangers. |
| 0:49.3 | All that to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:58.1 | Military tensions between the United States and North Korea seem to rise on an almost daily basis, don't they? |
| 1:04.1 | President Trump has sent warships to the region, sent bombers flying over the peninsula this week, |
| 1:08.4 | and is ready, we're told, to go to loan to deal with Pyongyang's nuclear threat. The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, for his part, is busily |
| 1:12.2 | testing missiles, which soon his country claims will be capable of reaching US targets with nuclear |
| 1:18.6 | warheads. There's even talk of preemptive strike if the US and its allies don't back off. |
| 1:25.0 | All pretty alarming stuff. Well, today we're looking at that, but specifically |
| 1:28.3 | at some of the economic factors at play within this developing military standoff. First, let's get a |
| 1:35.0 | picture of what life is like inside the Hermit Kingdom. Ji Yun Park escaped North Korea some nine |
| 1:42.5 | years ago. She now lives in the UK. She describes the political |
| 1:46.0 | indoctrination around the ruling Kim family that was part of her daily life growing up. |
| 1:53.1 | In North Korea, we always respected about the Kim families. So when I was young, I wake up early, and I cleaning the Kim family's pictures first, |
... |
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