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The latest issue of DPRK Business Monthly is now available for complimentary download. The regular magazine looks at current international, domestic, and peninsular affairs concerning North Korea while also offering commentary and tourism information on the country.

In recent international news, the PRC company Autobase, China’s largest car wash manufacturer doing US$1 million-worth of business a month, installed its latest-model car wash facility, the Tepo-UTO Tunnel Car Wash Machine, in the DPRK capital of Pyongyang in November 2011.

In other news, sixty prayer shawls will soon arrive in North Korea to warm the body and spirit of those with tuberculosis and hepatitis. Hubbard United Methodist Church members, of Park Rapids, Minnesota, have been at the core of operations, but the shawls are a non-denominational effort, Genell Poitras providing the impetus.

Genell Poitras is the wife of Dr. Ed Poitras, a Yale Divinity School graduate who arrived in South Korea just after the war had ended in 1953 to conduct missionary work. The opportunity to travel to North Korea arose for Genell in 2010 when she accompanied a delegation sponsored by the Christian Friends of Korea. CFK originated in 1995, during a period of famine caused by floods and inclement weather in North Korea. Since then, the CFK focus has shifted to treating and eradicating tuberculosis. Working under the auspices of the DPRK’s Ministry of Public Health, the group provides medicine, medical equipment, blankets and food supplements. In partnership with Stanford University, CFK has equipped a lab in the capital city of Pyongyang to assist in the identification and treatment of tuberculosis.

In peninsular affairs, North Korea has appealed to the South Korea for a restoration of the agreements entered into by the two sides that had started to channel extensive investments from the South into the North and provide the South with much-needed mineral wealth.

The request was conveyed in the first official interaction with visitors from the South since the death of the North’s leader, Kim Jong Il.

In the last years of Kim Jong Il North Korea had shown interest in attracting foreign investment. It opened a couple of special economic zones along the border with China. Despite worsening ties with the South, it did not close the Kaesong joint industrial park on that border. It also agreed in principle to let a pipeline pass through its territory so Russia could sell natural gas to South Korea.
In domestic news, the traditional New Year editorial published jointly by the DPRK’s three leading newspapers this year (January 1, 2012) stressed the legitimacy of the new leadership, with the words “Kim Jong Un equals our great leader Kim Jong Il.” It mentioned Kim Jong Un 16 times.

South Korea’s state-run Korea Institute for National Unification commented that the editorial’s message is “Expect no policy changes.” Moreover, unlike the editorials in 2010 and 2011, this year’s had no soothing words for the South Korean government, instead blasting Lee Myung-bak and his “band of traitors,” so a breakthrough in North-South relations this year is most unlikely.

To read further about these topics, and much more, please download the complimentary DPRK Business Monthly PDF on the Asia Briefing Bookstore.

DPRK Business Monthly is produced by North Korea expert Paul White