Words matter. These are the best Barbara Demick Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
People have crossed the Himalayas in flip-flops seeking a blessing from the Dalai Lama.
If you look at satellite photographs of the Far East by night, you’ll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The Uighurs are a Turkic people more closely related to Uzbeks and Kazakhs than to Chinese.
As a reader, I’ve always been interested in dystopian novels like ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’.
The North Korean landscape is strikingly beautiful in places. It could be said to resemble America’s Pacific Northwest – but substantially drained of color.
Walking down the street with a portrait of the Dalai Lama will get one immediately arrested in most parts of China. Tiny medallions are routinely confiscated and destroyed.
In 2012, a five-year-old girl in Shandong province described to me how ten officials had chased her six-months-pregnant mother through the fields to prevent the birth of the family’s second child, a boy. She died during the procedure.
We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces – but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else.
When North Koreans cross the border into China, they are stunned to learn that the Chinese can afford to eat rice daily, sometimes for three meals daily.
North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.
In 1949, Mao Tse-tung’s Communists established the People’s Republic of China, and the following year, his People’s Liberation Army invaded central Tibet.
The cadence of life is slower in North Korea.
North Korea, under its thirtysomething Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, is no country for old men. The latest casualty in Kim’s ongoing purge of the senior military command was the defense minister, Hyon Yong-chol, who reportedly committed the classic old man’s offense of falling asleep in a meeting.
Gonpo Tso was born a princess. As a young woman, she dressed in fur-trimmed robes with fat ropes of coral beads strung around her neck. She lived in an adobe castle on the edge of the Tibetan plateau with a reception room large enough to accommodate the thousand Buddhist monks who once paid tribute to her father.
North Korea is probably the only country in the world deliberately kept out of the Internet.
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.
The anti-Japanese resistance was as familiar a theme in North Korean cinema as cowboys and Indians was in early Hollywood.
By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days.
Over the years, so many exceptions and amendments were made to China’s one-child policy that it was hard to pinpoint a moment to pronounce it dead.
By 2022, China is expected to cede the dubious distinction of being the world’s most populous nation to India, according to the population division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
Since 2009, 140 Tibetans have immolated themselves to protest Chinese policies that limit their freedom of movement, speech and religion, especially their right to venerate the Dalai Lama.
In 1995, the Chinese government picked a 6-year-old child to succeed the Panchen Lama, the second highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.
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.
China’s one-child policy was born in 1980, after years of less severe measures to discourage births. The Communist Party promised that the policy would be temporary.
