No ordinary day in news from North Korea!
Pyongyang, July 24 (KCNA) — The DPRK has an election for deputies to the provincial (municipal), city (district) and county people’s assemblies on Sunday.
Streets are garbed in festive attire and decorated with national flags, red banners, placards and posters calling for consolidating the people’s power.
Polls are crowded by people in their best clothes.
They are waiting for the election to begin, some of them finding out their names in voters’ lists and others dancing to the tune of drums and gongs.
Art troupes at all levels are joining them in livening up the atmosphere of election.
Reflected in their faces is a firm determination to, through the election, demonstrate the might of the Korean people closely rallied around the Workers’ Party of Korea and the advantages of Korean socialism and glorify the hundred-year history of Kim Il Sung’s Korea.
The election begins at 9 a.m.
Why do I want to include the full text of the above dispatch in my fall semester China syllabi? The appearance of spontenaeity, the promptness, the clamor, the predetermined result — oh, these totalitarian fragments are thing which anyone engaged with vigor in the entreprise of teaching must truly enjoy, no?
In other interesting dispatches from North Korea, apart from the fact that China’s Tibet policy has come up more than a few times as a point in support of the PRC, don’t miss this promotion in the Rodong Sinmun of the Rajin border trade zone, which occurs, rather interestingly, in the context of tales of Kim Il Sung rendering aid to desperate Chinese comrades in Manchuria in the 1930s.
As I’m in Chengdu at present, no tweets are forthcoming, but feel free to follow my Weibo feed along with various PSBs and a few very intelligent people from the Nordic International Management Insitute in Chengdu — formidable!
Adam Cathcart 