By Kang Jin-kyu

A Chinese dissident who has long been a thorn in Beijing’s side has escaped to South Korea on a rubber boat, his lawyer confirmed on Wednesday, after repeated attempts to flee China.

Dong Guangping, a former policeman who was imprisoned for his activism, was found by South Korean authorities on Monday night drifting off the country’s west coast on a 3.3-metre (11-foot) rubber boat with a 9.9-horsepower engine, according to police.

He was taken to shore for questioning on suspicion of violating immigration laws.

The man’s lawyer, Kim Joo-kwang, confirmed his identity to AFP.

Dong, 68, is known for his opposition to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and his advocacy for political reform and human rights.

He was dismissed from his work as a policeman after signing a petition a decade after Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, according to US-based advocacy group Human Rights in China.

He later spent about three years in prison from 2001 for “inciting subversion of state power”, United Nations experts said, and was detained again in 2014 over Tiananmen-related activities.

Dong fled to Thailand with his family, who later resettled in Canada as refugees, but Thai authorities handed him over to Chinese police in 2015 despite his UN-recognised refugee status.

He was released from prison after completing his sentence in 2019.

But faced with constant police surveillance, harassment and a lack of access to housing, work and financial resources, he decided to flee again in an attempt to reunite with his family, according to a UN report from 2022.

Before arriving in South Korea, Dong made several failed attempts to flee China.

In 2019, he tried to swim to the Kinmen archipelago, a Taiwanese territory, but nearly drowned at sea. In 2020, he crossed into Vietnam, but was detained by Vietnamese police.

Dong’s attorney told AFP his client’s current situation is “highly likely to be a political asylum case”.

Full protection

Chinese-Canadian journalist and human rights activist Sheng Xue, who described Dong as a friend, said in a post on X Wednesday that Dong set off from Weihai, in China’s Shandong province, after “meticulous inspection and preparation”.

“Last night, I spoke with him on the phone… He hadn’t slept for over fifty hours and had been at sea for more than thirty hours,” she said.

His rubber boat was spotted by the captain of a fishing boat at 9:30 pm (1230 GMT) on Monday, about 18 kilometres (11 miles) northwest of Taean County, South Chungcheong province, who then alerted the police, according to Sheng.

The Coast Guard dispatched a patrol vessel that arrived at the scene about an hour later, and Dong was detained, she added.

South Korea has granted political asylum to a relatively small number of applicants since it began formally processing refugee claims in 1994, with an overall recognition rate in the low single digits despite tens of thousands of applications.

Critics say the low approval rate reflects strict screening and lengthy procedures, while the government maintains that decisions are made on a case-by-case basis and take security considerations into account.

Seoul’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

The opposition People Power Party has called on the government to offer Dong “full protection”.

“It should take swift humanitarian measures to ensure that he can safely travel to Canada, where his family is anxiously awaiting him,” party spokesman Choo Hyun-chul said in a statement to AFP.

“This is a matter of a fundamental responsibility as a liberal democratic state.”

In August 2023, Kwon Pyong, a Chinese dissident, fled China on a jet ski to South Korea, where he was later convicted of illegal entry and given a suspended prison sentence.

South Korea's Hanwha Oceans and Germany's TKMS, have fought tooth and nail in an unusually short competition to supply the Royal Canadian Navy with some 12 submarines.

South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korean Film Council (KOFIC) have launched a public-private consultative body to discuss setting a theatrical window for films in the Korean market.  A bill is currently working its way through Korea’s National Assembly that calls for a six-month window for films before they can be […]

Naver Webtoon will debut “Maengjong,” a prequel spin-off expanding the supernatural world of Korean occult blockbuster “Exhuma,” on May 30. The vertical-scroll series comes from Haemuri, the artist behind “Olgami,” known for its densely layered psychological portraiture, and is set before the events of the 2024 film. Its story centers on the high school years […]

By Kang Jin-kyu and Claire Lee

President Xi Jinping concluded a visit to North Korea on Tuesday, after meetings with Kim Jong Un that the Chinese leader said reached an “important consensus” on building ties.

AFP looks at what we know about the rare summit.

What happened?

Xi arrived in the North Korean capital Pyongyang on Monday for his first official visit to the diplomatically isolated nation since 2019.

He travelled with his wife and several other top officials for a two-day trip he said aimed to bring ties between the longtime partners to “new heights”.

The timing appeared significant, coming after Xi hosted a string of world leaders, including US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, in Beijing.

State media images showed Xi and Kim beaming as they shook each other’s hand, with the Chinese leader receiving a lavish welcome ceremony with a red-carpet military salute and cheering crowds.

What were the outcomes?

Xi said he had reached “an important consensus with Kim on developing China-DPRK relations in the new era”, China’s Xinhua news agency reported, using North Korea’s official acronym.

The leaders agreed to put the two nations’ friendly relations “on a more solid basis”, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said.

Xi told Kim their countries should “should strengthen exchanges in diplomacy, law enforcement (and) the military” and expand economic cooperation, according to Chinese state media.

He also called for expanded economic cooperation, citing the recent reopening of border crossings and transport links.

Beijing has long been Pyongyang’s largest economic partner, with US and South Korean estimates indicating that China has accounted for almost all of North Korea’s annual foreign trade in recent years.

In March, flights and passenger train services between Beijing and Pyongyang resumed after a six-year hiatus due to pandemic-era border closures and their aftermath.

What about North Korea’s nukes?

Official readouts and state media reports have not said whether Xi and Kim discussed North Korea’s nuclear weapons development, for which Pyongyang languishes under international sanctions.

That is important because the White House said last month that the Chinese leader and Trump had “confirmed their shared goal to denuclearise North Korea” during their summit in Beijing.

Kim has repeatedly vowed never to give up his nuclear arsenal, and his powerful sister said before Xi’s visit that the programme was Pyongyang’s “line of no retreat”.

The absence of denuclearisation from official statements means the summit effectively “appeared to have been a forum where China granted Pyongyang’s rights to nuclear weapons”, Lee Ho-ryung of the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses told AFP.

In return, it appears Kim “supported Beijing’s One-China principle regarding Taiwan”, she added, referring to the self-ruled island China claims as its own.

“Our party and government will fully support the policy and stand of the Chinese party and government to defend the core interests on the ‘one-China’ principle,” KCNA said.

How did Kim emerge from the talks?

Analysts noted that the summit took place as Kim enjoys enhanced global status after backing Russia with troops and munitions in its war with Ukraine.

Kim is “no longer just a recipient of aid, but a provider of critical military assets”, having “successfully leveraged his nuisance value into strategic relevance”, Seong-Hyon Lee, a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Asia Center, told AFP.

Hong Min, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said the meeting reflected the convergence of “North Korea’s desire to cement its status as an indispensable strategic actor through its nuclear arsenal” and “China’s expanding ambitions to shape the Northeast Asian order”.

Besides Xi and Putin, Kim’s meetings with leaders from Belarus, Laos and Vietnam since last year have proven that North Korea is no longer such a diplomatic pariah, said Minseon Ku, a diplomacy professor at DePaul University.

China and North Korea have a military alliance centred on a 1961 treaty obliging each side to come to the other’s aid in the event of an armed attack.

North Korea is the only country with which China has such a military agreement, though Pyongyang also signed a mutual defence treaty with Russia in 2024.

Beijing appears to aim “to offer economic incentives while monitoring North Korea to ensure it does not act against Beijing’s interests in the diplomatic and military spheres”, Hong said.

Incorporating nearly two tons of porcelain fragments, a monumental pair of vessels spills out into a pool of lustrous green. Shards of broken cups and saucers, pots, and other voluptuous forms blanket the gallery of the Green-House at Green-Wood for a new installation by Jean Shin.

Celadon Landscape is one of the latest projects in which the artist transforms a singular material into a sprawling sculpture. Found objects that bear traces of their former purposes and users are prized possessions in Shin’s New York studio, as these often-discarded items are nested into dynamic works that consider the relationship between consumption, environmental care, and community.

Green-Wood presents the second iteration of Celadon Landscape, which originated during the artist’s visits with ceramicists and makers in South Korea. Celadon production has a lengthy history in the region and dates back to at least the 10th century. As Shin encountered the heaps of imperfect pieces these artisans had cast aside, she found the pale green-blue material an apt metaphor for belonging, repair, and the diaspora.

“Celadon vases occupy a prized place in Korean cultural history—objects of reverence, painstakingly made and carefully preserved,” the artist says. “In Celadon Landscape, I shift the gaze to what is usually discarded: thousands of broken ceramic shards. I see in their imperfection not loss, but beauty—fragments that still pulse with the memory of Korea’s enduring legacy.”

With materials donated by studios in and near the city of Icheon, Shin conceived of two bulbous vessels cloaked in patterned, painted, stamped, and textured bits of pottery. Resting on their sides, the mosaic forms appear to emerge from the earth below, as if they’ve been uncovered in an archaeological dig. None of the vessels—the original pieces or the large-scale reconstructions—is presented whole and unblemished, suggesting a fragmentation that doesn’t disappear but rather is made anew.

Fabricated by Miotto Mosaics Art Studios, Inc., Celadon Landscape is on view through January 17 in New York, where Shin is based. Keep up with her projects on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article From Two Tons of Celadon, Jean Shin Sculpts a Metaphor for the Korean Diaspora appeared first on Colossal.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit North Korea next week, state media said Friday, his first trip abroad this year after hosting a series of leaders as Beijing asserts itself as a global diplomatic superpower.

State broadcaster CCTV said Xi would visit from June 8 to 9 at the invitation of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, his first trip to Pyongyang in seven years.

Beijing is a vital source of political and economic support to North Korea, which is one of the most diplomatically isolated countries in the world and under heavy international sanctions.

The upcoming meeting will be Xi’s first official overseas trip this year, and comes after he hosted back-to-back summits with US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin last month.

“China is meeting leaders from around the world, coordinating positions and playing a mediating role,” Lim Eul-chul, a North Korea expert at South Korea’s Kyungnam University, told AFP.

“As China’s international standing rises, Beijing is likely seeking to draw Pyongyang more actively into its diplomatic orbit as a partner in advancing a more multilateral order.”

The two leaders will “exchange views on bilateral relations and issues of common concern”, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a press briefing on Friday.

The visit was “an opportunity to promote the development” of bilateral relations and “make greater contributions to regional and even world peace”, Mao said.

Pyongyang depends on China for up to 95 percent of total trade and 85 percent of its exports, according to 2022 statistics from the National Committee on North Korea, a Washington-based think tank.

But North Korea has drawn closer to Russia since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with Pyongyang sending thousands of troops and weapons to support the war effort.

In return, analysts say North Korea is receiving financial aid, military technology, food and energy, helping it circumvent sanctions over its banned nuclear programmes.

Xi’s choice of Pyongyang for his first overseas trip of 2026 is “a deliberate visual rebuttal to the prevailing read in Western capitals that Pyongyang had quietly migrated into Moscow’s orbit”, said Seong-Hyon Lee from the George H. W. Bush Foundation for US-China Relations.

Managing the relationship

Xi last met Kim in September, when he invited the North Korean leader and Putin as guests of honour to a military parade in Beijing marking the 80th anniversary of the victory over imperial Japan in World War II.

In 2019, Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan were welcomed to North Korea with great pomp and fanfare to celebrate the two countries’ “unbreakable friendship”.

Beijing’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said during a visit to Pyongyang in April that China and South Korea should “enhance coordination” on international and regional issues.

China’s interests include keeping an eye on North Korea’s nuclear programme, the advancement of which is “extremely rapid”, Hong Min of the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) told AFP.

“This aspect needs to be managed. If North Korea acts in a provocative and belligerent manner, it could trigger regional conflict, which could run counter to China’s interests,” Hong said.

Kim vowed an “exponential” increase in nuclear military capabilities on Wednesday as he visited a new atomic facility, Pyongyang’s state-run Korean Central News Agency reported.

South Korea’s foreign ministry has said it hopes exchanges between North Korea and China contribute to peace and stability, and that China can play a constructive role.

Pyongyang has repeatedly shunned efforts by the South Korean government to improve relations, calling Seoul its most “hostile” adversary.

Analysts have viewed Xi’s recent diplomatic flurry as part of attempts to position China as a stable, strategic alternative to an unpredictable United States.

Traditional US allies, including Britain’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron, have also come to Beijing.

However, Hong, of KINU, judged the chances that Xi might help broker a meeting between Trump and Kim as “very low”.

Netflix is following the money in Korea. The streamer has cast Park Hae-soo (Squid Game, Narco-Saints), Claudia Kim (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Gyeongseong Creature, The Atypical Family) and Cho Jung-seok (Hospital Playlist, Exit) to lead crime thriller series Paper Man (working title), which has gone into production. The series follows a man (cho), who works […]

China’s President Xi Jinping hailed an “invincible friendship” with Pyongyang on arrival in North Korea on Monday, his first trip abroad this year after hosting back-to-back summits in Beijing.

China, Washington’s chief geopolitical rival, has been North Korea’s main trading partner by far for decades and a key source of diplomatic and economic support for a country hit by multiple international sanctions.

Military officers lined a red carpet as an Air China plane carrying Xi arrived for his first visit since 2019, video from Xinhua showed.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his wife Ri Sol-ju welcomed Xi, who was accompanied by his wife Peng Liyuan.

The two leaders shook hands, and children presented flowers to Xi and Peng, while a banner reading “We warmly welcome Comrade Xi Jinping” and hailing the two countries’ “unbreakable friendship” hung below Chinese and North Korean flags.

Xi makes the trip after hosting US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin separately in Beijing and as North Korea’s nuclear talks with Washington remain deadlocked.

The White House said last month that Xi and Trump “confirmed their shared goal to denuclearise North Korea” during their summit in Beijing.

However, Kim’s powerful sister said on the eve of Xi’s arrival that North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme was “the line of no retreat”.

South Korea’s dovish President Lee Jae Myung said Monday Seoul should not give up on North Korea’s denuclearisation, adding that “North Korea is still producing nuclear material even at this very moment”.

Minseon Ku, a diplomacy professor at DePaul University, told AFP that “Beijing probably has accepted North Korea as a nuclear state”, but Xi “will probably tell Kim that China wants stability more than anything”.

China has “always prioritised stability and is currently having to manage its relations and differences with the US”, Ku said.

‘Irreversible’ nuclear state

Seong-Hyon Lee, a visiting scholar at the Harvard University Asia Center, also said Beijing is shifting towards “underwriting regime durability” rather than seeking to coerce North Korea into denuclearisation.

“China’s broader regional strategy benefits from a stable, heavily armed, and aligned buffer state that absorbs US and allied military bandwidth,” he told AFP.

North Korea has repeatedly declared itself an “irreversible” nuclear state since Kim and Trump’s 2019 summit collapsed over the scope of denuclearisation and sanctions relief.

Kim has also been emboldened by the war in Ukraine, securing critical support from Moscow after sending troops to fight alongside Russian forces.

Some analysts say the summit could be Xi’s way of countering Russia’s growing influence over North Korea, but DePaul’s Ku stressed that “overall, Moscow is not a major power like China”.

“Moscow-Pyongyang power relations are more equal than Beijing-Pyongyang; Moscow needs Kim for their war in Ukraine as much as Kim needs technology sharing and food from Russia,” she said.

In an article published on the front page of North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun, Xi pledged closer cooperation.

“No matter how the times change or how the international situation evolves, the traditional friendship between China and North Korea is always invincible,” Xi wrote.

Xi last met Kim in September, when he invited the North Korean leader and Putin to a military parade in Beijing marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Military alliance

Jun Sang-gab, 65, a South Korean tour guide who lives near the inter-Korean border, said he hopes that “North Korea opens its economy” and follows China’s development model.

“If they (the North) establish themselves economically, there won’t be any incidents like armed unification or war” on the Korean peninsula, he told AFP.

Trump has made little progress on North Korea, especially on the nuclear front, despite his earlier high-profile summits with Kim.

North Korea is also the only country with an official, binding military alliance with China.

North Korea could also serve as a useful counterweight to US partners in the region, including South Korea and Japan, analysts said.

Long-frosty China-Japan ties have deteriorated since Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a security hawk, suggested last year that Tokyo might intervene militarily in any Chinese attempt to take self-ruled Taiwan.

“As China’s international standing rises, Beijing is likely seeking to draw Pyongyang more actively into its diplomatic orbit,” said Lim Eul-chul, a North Korea expert at Kyungnam University.

SEOUL, June 8 — Nvidia on Monday announced a series of deals in South Korea with tech giants including SK Hynix and Naver, as it looks to secure crucial memory chips to power its AI ambitions and entice new customers.

The agreements come during a high-profile trip by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to South Korea that began on Friday and has seen him dine on grilled pork belly and local spirit soju with the country’s top corporate bosses, throw a baseball pitch and meet with a well-known gamer.

Nvidia and its partners, which also included SK Telecom and conglomerate Doosan Group, did not disclose the value of the deals.

SK Group, South Korea’s second-largest family-owned conglomerate, said its SK Hynix and SK Telecom arms had agreed deals with Nvidia.

Memory chip maker SK Hynix signed a multi-year technology partnership that will see it commit to developing advanced types of memory for global AI data centres, SK Group said.

SK Hynix and Nvidia said the agreement, which comes as memory chip makers have been straining to keep up with demand, would enable supply to keep pace with Nvidia’s plans, which have expanded to robotics, personal computers and AI supercomputers.

“SK Hynix has been Nvidia’s largest memory partner. SK Hynix will continue to be Nvidia’s largest memory partner,” Huang said after a meeting with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won at the headquarters of the chipmaker’s parent.

Huang said the deal with SK Hynix, a rival to Samsung Electronics and US-based Micron Technology, was for more than two years with the option to keep extending.

“We already procure and we buy from SK Hynix already billions and billions of dollars each year, and it’s going to grow substantially,” he said.

Ryu Young-ho, a senior analyst at NH Investment & Securities, said the SK Hynix-Nvidia partnership reinforced the view that memory chips were evolving from a commodity product into a more customer-specific business.

Other deals

SK Telecom said it would build a gigawatt-scale AI cloud in South Korea using Nvidia technology, with the first AI data centre to come online in 2027. Nvidia said internet giant Naver and conglomerate Doosan would also use its technology to help build AI data centres.

Doosan, which is developing robots and makes materials used in Nvidia’s most powerful Blackwell chips, said it expected its energy solution to be used in Nvidia’s data centre platforms and for it to use the US firm’s physical AI technology as well.

Nvidia is also partnering with LG Group on electronics, mechanical systems and AI for humanoid robots, Huang said after a meeting with the tech conglomerate’s Chairman Koo Kwang-mo.

Huang said the pair were also working on the architecture of future data centres including cooling, power delivery and the entire design and building of the data centres.

After a meeting with Hyundai Motor Group’s Executive Chair Euisun Chung in the afternoon, Huang said Nvidia would deepen its partnership with Hyundai across a range of AI initiatives, including autonomous mobility, robotics and AI-powered manufacturing.

He also highlighted opportunities to accelerate the development of industrial robotics, saying Nvidia and Hyundai would work together to bring AI to “all forms of mobility” and deepen collaboration on robotics for practical industrial applications.

Huang referred to Hyundai Motor Group’s planned AI data centre in Saemangeum as an “AI Valley” akin to California’s Silicon Valley and said he was “very happy to build Nvidia in Saemangeum.”

South Korea stock rally falters

South Korea is an Asian manufacturing powerhouse, home to major producers of chips, electronics, cars and ships. SK Hynix and Samsung are the world’s two largest makers of memory chips, which are key components in data centres.

The country’s benchmark Kospi index has doubled in six months as heavyweights SK Hynix and Samsung benefited from the AI wave, but closed 8.3 per cent lower on Monday after robust US jobs data fanned bets on a Federal Reserve rate hike this year and sparked a rout in global tech stocks.

Shares in Samsung and SK Hynix closed down 10.2 per cent and 7.7 per cent respectively.

When asked about the global chip stock rout, Huang waved off concerns. “Everybody should be very excited; they can now buy stock at a cheaper price, and it’s absolutely true that the future of AI is very bright.”

Huang also planned to meet Samsung’s semiconductor business head Jun Young-hyun later on Monday.

 

On 19 July 2025, intense, long duration rainfall triggered over 550 landslides in Sancheong, South Korea, killing at least 10 people.

On 19 July 2025, extremely heavy rainfall triggered multiple landslides in Sancheong, South Korea. This event has been described by a new paper (Nguyen et al. 2026) just published in the journal Landslides. The paper is behind a paywall, but this link should give you access at the time of writing.

The core of the affected area is at [35.4333, 127.9111] (as usual, Landslides provides the location in degrees minutes and seconds when digital degrees is so much more useful – a pet frustration of mine!). This is a Planet Labs image of a part of the area, captured before the event. The marker is at the coordinate noted above:-

And this is the same area after 19 July 2025:-

And here is a slider to allow a comparison:-

Nguyen et al. (2026) have mapped 568 individual landslides triggered by this rainfall event, triggered by rainfall in the range of 498 – 619 mm over a c. 55 hour period. These landslides killed at least 10 people and caused damage to homes and infrastructure. It is estimated that the restoration costs are in the order of US$800 million.

In common with many other events of this type, the landslides are mainly shallow, translational failures in soil or regolith on steeper slopes. As I have frequently noted, such terrain is very susceptible to unusually intense rainfall events, which often trigger a cluster of landslides in close proximity. These often merge to form channelised debris flows. Nguyen et al. (2026) note however that their modelling indicates that it was a combination of the intensity of the rainfall and its duration that led to these failures.

As rainfall intensities increase due to climate change, we are seeing increasing numbers of these landslide clusters. I greatly welcome studies such as Nguyen et al. (2026) , which allow us to build understanding in each case.

Reference and acknowledgement

Nguyen, H.H.D., Song, C.H. & Kim, Y.T. 2026. Physically based data-driven analysis for large-scale investigation of the July 2025 rainfall-induced landslide in Sancheong, South Korea. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-026-02778-x

Planet Team 20246. Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://www.planet.com/

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

The 2020s have been the most fruitful half a decade for the K-drama landscape, introducing multidimensional, multi-genre series that promise to stay a part of the genre's modern history for a long time. The only thing that has changed in the past few years is the format, with more K-dramas actively embracing shorter episodes with less filler; some hardcore fans may worry that this takes away the K-drama charm from their favorite genre, but it has shown to only make the material better.