In 1949, Mao Tse-tung's Communists established the People's Republic of China, and the following year, his People's Liberation Army invaded central Tibet.
Gonpo Tso was born a princess. As a young woman, she dressed in fur-trimmed robes with fat ropes of coral beads strung around her neck. She lived in an adobe castle on the edge of the Tibetan plateau with a reception room large enough to accommodate the thousand Buddhist monks who once paid tribute to her father.
In 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in vivid colours. Rays of yellow and orange emanate from his face: he is the sun.
One of the ways the North Korea regime has kept power is by keeping its people ignorant of the living standards in the outside world. That's the underlying lie that supports the regime - not that their country is 'normal' but that they are better off.
North Korea, under its thirtysomething Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, is no country for old men. The latest casualty in Kim's ongoing purge of the senior military command was the defense minister, Hyon Yong-chol, who reportedly committed the classic old man's offense of falling asleep in a meeting.
North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin.
In 2012, a five-year-old girl in Shandong province described to me how ten officials had chased her six-months-pregnant mother through the fields to prevent the birth of the family's second child, a boy. She died during the procedure.
I agree with Kathi Zellweger that sanctions mostly punish the ordinary people who live at the edge of starvation.
Kim Jong-un's style is more suggestive of Saddam Hussein or his murderous son, Uday Hussein.
For a North Korean watcher, seeing 'The Interview' is like seeing an earnest endeavor reflected back through a freak-show mirror.
The scene that has raised the most objections in 'The Interview' is at the very end, when Kim's head dissolves into flames. To me, it feels gratuitous.
North Korea is probably the only country in the world deliberately kept out of the Internet.
Televisions and radios are locked on government frequencies - it is a serious crime to listen to a foreign broadcast. As a result, North Koreans think that they live in the best country in the world and that, as difficult as their lives may be, everybody else has it much worse.
We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces - but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else.
Over the years, so many exceptions and amendments were made to China's one-child policy that it was hard to pinpoint a moment to pronounce it dead.
By 2022, China is expected to cede the dubious distinction of being the world's most populous nation to India, according to the population division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
China's one-child policy was born in 1980, after years of less severe measures to discourage births. The Communist Party promised that the policy would be temporary.
Good reporting should have the same standard as in a courtroom - beyond a reasonable doubt.
When North Koreans cross the border into China, they are stunned to learn that the Chinese can afford to eat rice daily, sometimes for three meals daily.
If you look at satellite photographs of the Far East by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
