2025-10-04
36 分钟The Economist.
North Korea is the world's most secretive country.
That makes reporting on it an exercise in detective work.
Journalists rely on shards of information, gradually assembling them until a clearer image emerges.
Some of those shards are visible for all to see.
Like the trip that the country's leader Kim Jong-un recently made to Beijing for a Chinese military parade.
North Korea state TV added footage of Kim spending time with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
It also showed him traveling with his daughter, Kim Jo-ae, who some think could be his successor.
Other scraps of intelligence are found in satellite images or hidden inside trove of data.
And then there are the pieces of information that come from North Korean people themselves,
ones that the state definitely does not want made public.
Can you tell me about how you escaped and what what that that process was like.
I'm Rosie Blaw and today on the weekend Intelligence, we're changing up the format a little.
For the past few months, Noah Snyder, our East Asia correspondent, has been working on a story about North Korea.
Noah is here to tell us how shard by shard he's pieced together a troubling picture,
revealing a country that's going through a sweeping overhaul, becoming ever more oppressive and ever more dangerous.
You probably think of North Korea as a closed totalitarian regime, which it is.
But what it has become is in many ways a darker version of itself.
We see increasing evidence that the state has been tightening control both over its society and its economy in ways
that we really haven't seen in in years if not decades.