China does not view North Koreans who are staying in its territory as refugees and routinely deports them to North Korea. However, in the early 21st century, there have been some cases in which China has allowed North Koreans to leave China instead of sending them back to North Korea. This thesis examines how China’s North Korean refugee policy has changed over the last two decades and whether international factors have influenced this policy. The results suggest that in the 1990’s China gave priority to the repatriation agreement with North Korea. However, in the 2000’s from its own experience with a number of foreign embassy intrusions by North Koreans, China has learned that the issue has potential for creating diplomatic problems with other countries. To avoid this conflict, China has tactically allowed North Koreans who have gained global attention to leave China, but otherwise still adheres its traditional deportation policy.

Trafficking women for sexual abuse has been a serious concern worldwide, particularly over the last two decades. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated that illicit profits of human trafficking may be as high as $32 billion. However, the international media community has scarcely focused on North Korean women defectors and victims of human trafficking, despite the severity of the issue. More than two million North Koreans, predominantly women, have crossed borders to enter China from starvation. Among those women migrants, about 80% to 90% of them were abducted by traffickers at the border between North Korea and China, and the traffickers sold them to the Chinese sex industry or Chinese men who are unable to find a woman as a wife or a sex slave.This cross-cultural textual analysis examined South Korean and Western (U.S. and British) newspaper coverage of North Korean women as victims of human trafficking to discover similarities and differences in those countries’ news frames. The analysis has shown that politics was a crucial factor in the coverage of the issue. However, by generally failing to report on the fundamental causes of the trafficking, such as inequality between genders, both Western and South Korean newspapers perpetuated hegemonic masculinity and failed to inform and educate people about the grave situations of North Korean women defectors and victims of human trafficking. This study recommends that in reporting the trafficking issues, journalists must be able to observe objectively, not within ideologies or frames provided by politicians.

The dictator ruled North Korea is not a country many North Koreans chose to live in voluntarily. Thousands of North Koreans must endure starvation, public executions, prison camps, rape, and numerous other human rights abuses daily. As a result, many choose to flee the country, hoping for a better and safer life in South Korea. This paper investigates how North Korean refugees are represented in the current North Korean Refugees Protection and Settlement Support Act and its Enforcement Decree Act. This study aims to examine the changes made to the Acts that are relevant to the representation of North Korean refugees in South Korea. I examine the Acts with Critical Discourse Analysis and Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Model of Discourse. The results suggest that the Acts contribute to the negative perception of North Korean refugees by some South Korean nationals. Unstable inter-Korean relations enhance these negative attitudes.

This thesis uses the narratives of North Koreans living in South Korea (t'albungmin) to understand how they make sense of their positioning in South Korean society. Based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul, this study attempts to illuminate the contradictory nature of citizenship for young t'albungmin living under the dictates of neoliberal humanitarian governance in contemporary South Korea. As a result of the specific geopolitical configuration of the Korean peninsula, there are contradictory perceptions of North Koreans as compatriots, victims, and enemies: perceptions both affecting and affected by the role of t'albungmin in South Korea's political economy. I consider citizenship a site of negotiation, influenced by South Korean modes of neoliberal humanitarian governance, which encourage t'albungmin to become autonomous, self-managed subjects at the same time as subjecting them to humanitarian reason which, conversely, rewards passivity and compliance. There is a further contradiction between their automatic entitlement to South Korean citizenship and the neoliberal imperative to demonstrate productivity and deservingness. In light of these contradictory imperatives, perceptions and discourses surrounding issues such as accent, deservingness, and responsibility come to take on significant explanatory power in the lives of young t'albungmin. In this context, South Korean policies and NGOs both discursively and practically construct t'albungmin as different and naturalise them as dependent, with this sense of unequal relations structuring their subsequent relations with South Koreans. I argue that this sense of differentiation reflects a particular mode of governance, which in turn illuminates the workings of citizenship in the South Korean context. I also consider the implications for t'albungmin when supporting them is conceptualised as a humanitarian act. While South Koreans portray their society as a 'community of value' in which t'albungmin are constructed as humanitarian subjects, this thesis illustrates how the narratives of t'albungmin contest this interpretation.

In an inquiry into national behavior, students of international relations treat national data as independent variables. Students of comparative politics treat them as dependent variables in an attempt to compute foreign policy outputs. There is reason to believe that international and comparative studies can be incorporated into a system of linkage politics. This study employs the framework of "linkage politics" of James N. Rosenau in an attempt to investigate the North Korean confrontation policy from 1953 to 1970. The basic assumption upon which this research operates is that the foreign policy of the North Korea has been a function of "fused linkages" between the nation's international environment and national conditions. "Fused linkage" is defined as a phenomenon by which certain national outputs and environmental inputs reciprocate in a continuous cycle. Thus the fused linkage case for North Korea's confrontation is defined as "circular confrontation." Based on Rosenau's proposed linkage framework, this study presents its own analytical framework. The major linkage groups are conceived of "exogenous" and "endogenous" conditions. Both of these conditions are divided into "constants" and "variables" and are treated as such. Each of these conditions was in turn analyzed with reference to relevant referents. Throughout the study particular attention is given to linkage processes between the two conditions.

This thesis deals with methods of ideology decoding in news reports as analyzed in a selected sample of the Korean Central News Agency news - the most important information medium in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The narrative patterns theory is defined from a combination of various methodological approaches of narrative and discourse analysis. With this theory, two weeks of English on-line news are analyzed with regards to their language, text, and discourse level, seeking to reveal potentially ideological structures. As a result of this multistage analysis, several narrative patterns are proposed as possible scenarios for news storytelling and particular lexical, syntactic and rhetorical specifics of the researched materiál are described. Based on these results, the fictional world as narrated by the analyzed text is deconstructed. Also, the construction of the ideology as a set of means by which this world is organized is explained.

Hitherto divided Korean Peninsula is perhaps the most distinctive remnant of the Cold War. The main aim of this work is to analyze the prospects on reunification of the Korean Peninsula by analyzing the various factors that have affected and in the future could affect the development of inter-Korean relations, the possible character of unification and subsequent policy implications of the reunification to North East Asia, with focus on the problematic North Korean regime.

North Korea, throughout its history, has had four representative pop music bands that frequently appear on broadcast media to propagate Juche philosophy and represent the political stance of the government: the Bochonbo electronic band, the Wangjaesan light music band, the Moranbong band, and the Chongbong band. The first two were formed during the Il-Sung-Kim regime and gained popularity during the Jung-Il-Kim regime; and the latter two are representative of the Jung-Eun-Kim regime. These bands always appeared at special occasions of North Korea and are used as mouthpieces for the government and the supreme leaders. This study explores the characteristics of North Korean pop music in conjunction with political implications by examining performances of these representative four bands. The aims are to interrogate how pop music in that country has been presented under governmental control, to ascertain what perception the North Korean governors have about pop music, and to delineate specific features in the music that can be identified as political. Certain aspects of the current Jung-Eun-Kim regime and its pop music are appearing for the first time in an academic context and existing research on the earlier regimes of Il-Sung Kim and Jung-Il Kim are posited in relation to this. The genesis of the Wangjaesan light music band and the Bochonbo electronic music band is closely connected to Jung-Il Kim’s directive that North Korean music had to be modernised. The Wangjaesan band concentrated more on traditional music, while the Bochonbo band did on modern trends and life songs. Their performances provide evidence of an un-detachable relationship with Jung-Il Kim’s politics and his perspective on music, “artistry without ideology is worthless”. The Moranbong band and the Chongbong band were formed by Jung Eun Kim himself and they can be regarded as symbolic musical groups of his regime. Demonstrating the earlier Juche ideas of the previous regimes by performing older songs from that era, the bands also illustrate new ideologies of the current regime. It would seem that none of their music was created purely for the artistic and cultural demand of the public. The political use of the bands has been totally intentional since their formation. / Thesis (DMus)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Music / DMus / Unrestricted

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This dissertation examines how media literacy education can be implemented and practiced for North Korean refugees to enhance their cultural competency. It is conducted as a form of participatory action research, which pursues knowledge and progressive social change. As a participant researcher, I taught media literacy to North Korean refugees in five different institutions during the summer of 2008 for a period of three months. This dissertation reviews my strategies for gaining permission and access to these educational institutions to teach media literacy education. Since media literacy classes cannot be separated from current events nor from the media environments of the given period, the dissertation also presents the significant role that the issues of importing U.S. beef and the candlelight demonstration played in the design of media literacy lessons during the summer of 2008 and in the process illustrates the value of teachable moments. It is hoped that other media educators will see how I made a connection between current affairs and media literacy lessons. Since this dissertation aimed to address how media literacy education can be effectively used to enhance North Korean refugees' cultural competence, I as researcher adopted an emergent curriculum approach which incorporates what emerges in the classroom into the learning. Based on predetermined educational goals, on what emerged in the classroom, on students' reactions, and on my own reflections, I continuously modified lesson plans throughout the summer. While I tried various pedagogies and covered several themes in the class, I selectively presented six different lesson models in this dissertation. The first lesson model includes drawing and talking about the mapping of students' media experiences. I started the initial class at each institution with this media mapping. As students drew and shared their media maps, they were able to reflect upon their own media usage. I also was able to gain better knowledge and insight about their media experiences. This exercise also allowed me to set the tone of the class as a comfortable venue in which students could honestly share their stories; as a result, the students were able to gain confidence in sharing their thoughts and experiences. The second lesson model used the film Crossing, the fictional film about North Korean refugees. Using this film in the lesson created an atmosphere in which students could talk freely about issues of North Korea and North Korean refugees. While the issues of North Korea refugees and North Korea are very sensitive topics for discussion between native South Koreans and North Korean refugees, the act of discussing this film naturally led students to share their stories about being North Korean refugees. The groups' deconstruction of this film also provided an opportunity to learn how media stories are purposely crafted and represent only a certain part of reality. The third model incorporated in-class reviews of different media sources related to the film Crossing -such as articles in women's magazines, film magazines and newsmagazines, blogs, internet fan cafes, official sites of the film, and the star ratings at the portal site. Critically analyzing these media sources informed students of the various purposes of the media and offered the possibility of participation in the public discourse. Because North Korean refugees are not familiar with the various possible uses of the media, they found it helpful to see effective ways to utilize the media to accomplish various goals. In addition, this activity was a valuable way by which to teach the concept of target audience, helping the students to see how different target audiences influence the emphasis, format, and style of media content. The fourth lesson model incorporated comparisons of different news sources about the candlelight demonstration. This helped students to understand the variety of views and tones of different news sources that are influenced by their own history and political affiliations. By closely examining what factors impacted the creation of the news stories and their influence on the public, students started to acknowledge the importance of critically examining media messages and locating a reliable news source that they could trust. The fifth lesson model was the stereotyping activity. Students reflected upon their own stereotypes that they had toward others and how the prevalent images of certain groups of people are influenced by the media. This lesson encouraged students to think about the importance of conveying a balance of varied images of different groups of people so that these people could not be misunderstood and stereotyped by others. The six lesson model involved watching and discussing documentaries about North Korean refugees in order to help students to better learn how the same group of people can be differently represented based on the purpose of the film and the knowledge and perspective of the producers. As two of the four documentaries discussed were created by teenage North Korean refugees, students also were inspired and learned how direct participation in producing the stories which they felt were important could make a difference. Ultimately, students who earlier had considered themselves as inadequate and incapable started to see that they themselves are valuable and that their voices are important, and therefore they can have a meaningful impact on others and on society. / Mass Media and Communication