The hermit kingdom
Christopher Hitchens’s Slate column about North Korea is a good reminder of just how bad things are there (via Downtown Lad). Something struck me as odd, though. He links to a satellite photo showing the differences in nighttime lighting between north and south. The DPRK is way darker, as you’d expect…but it’s so completely, unrelievedly dark that I have to wonder. Every single hospital blacked out, for instance? And you can see how blacking out military installations would help keep them from detection, but it also means that soldiers on lookout can’t see what they’re monitoring.
But even if we assume that the DPRK has managed to effect, through force and the unreliability of its power grid, a blackout of the whole country. the photo should still show at least some lights in Russia and China, right? Northeast Manchuria and Siberia aren’t the most population-dense places on Earth…but look at the peninsula right under where it says 40N on the left. That’s cut off right at the edge of Dalian, a Chinese city of 3 million people, which is at its tip. The outcropping below it is the Shandong Peninsula, which is also populous. While China may not have become a first-world country yet, I don’t think its large northeastern cities are invisible at night. There was a similar photo that made the blog rounds a few years ago that looks more like what you’d expect.
Maybe I just know too little about what things are like in Chinese cities. The Federation of American Scientists, which houses the photo, doesn’t seem likely to have doctored it. But the imaging seems to stop northwest of South Korea and Japan. There must be something here I’m missing.
The texture in the upper left hand corner suggests to me some serious cloud cover in China on 15 April. I’d like to know how far down any obscuring weather patterns reached into North Korea at the time this photo was taken.
I thought of that, but would clouds follow the DMZ so obligingly?
Well, I assumed that N. Koreas lights would be further North – the southern end is pretty barren and probably full of military installations that observe blackout. If that’s true, the clods in S. China may also be obscuring the lights in the Northern part of N. Korea, That’s just a guess, though. I’d really love to see an IR and a UV photo of the area. Yeah, yeah, I’m a
spectrocopistgeek.Clods? Clouds. Freudian slip, I guess.
Daily linklets 24th May
ESWN has an archive of citizen reports from the Huaxi riots. A Japanese survey on China that demonstrates the lack of understanding on both sides…plus Koizumi’s brilliantly stupid move. Forget about Ms Universe…here comes Mr Asia. And look out Bollywood, here comes ex-Governor’ Alice Patten. China can teach America about social security. Ironically Communist China relies far more on personal saving. Hithcock was right: beware the birds. Fundamental problems with China’s stockmarket. Rising tariffs and re-imposed quotas on Chinese exporters? No problem, they just move to India. Will America go after India and Japan now? The Swanker puts the Thai controversy over Big Brother into perspective. Brad Setser’s 5 myths about China’s currency. Scroll down to the comments by DOR and also note Setser continues to omit any reference to the main culprit in this economic game of poker: Japan. Confucius didn’t say it, but Belle Waring had…
Asia by Blog
The Daily Linklets have superceded the previous Asia by Blog roundups. I’ve decided to turn Asia by Blog into a weekly summary of the most popular links of the previous week. I judge this using mybloglog and taking the 10 top links that you clicked on. It’s not perfect but it should provide an interesting summary of what interested most people during the week that was. This week’s top 10: 1. Muninn’s report on the Japan survey on China. 2. Spirit Finger’s exclusive coverage of Chinese actress Bai Lai’s deleted scenes from Star Wars. 3. ESWN on China’s virgin prostitutes. 4. Robert Kagan’s The Illusion of ‘Managing’ China. 5. Sean’s satellite picture of North Korea than doesn’t quite add up. 6. Danwei on Bai Lai (she’s popular given she wasn’t even in the movie). 7. Public Enemy 1’s post asking if China can become rich and powerful without democracy?…
The lights are on but nobody’s home
Today’s SCMP reports on doubts about South Korea’s offer of massive energy aid to the North in return for denuclearising. As part of the article the SCMP graphics team got some figures from the CIA fact book for a couple of charts. But that wasn’t enough, so they added in a famous satellite picture showing the Korean peninsula by night (see below the fold for the graphic). The same picture was linked by Christopher Hitchens in Slate a while back. In May Sean raised serious doubts about that photo:But even if we assume that the DPRK has managed to effect, through force and the unreliability of its power grid, a blackout of the whole country. the photo should still show at least some lights in Russia and China, right? Northeast Manchuria and Siberia aren’t the most population-dense places on Earth…but look at the peninsula right under where it says…