Tim Savage, Deputy Director of the Seoul Office of the Nautilus Institute, writes, “China and South Korea cannot meet in a smoke-filled room and decide the fate of North Korea. But the more they can overcome their own mutual distrust, the less likely it becomes that whatever does happen in North Korea will lead to a broader regional crisis.”

Marcus Noland, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, writes, “If fully realized, the Orascom venture would represent a major foreign investment in the North Korean economy… and in the context of generally favorable trends in external relations, a successful outcome could have a favorable knock-on precedential effect with respect to future infrastructural deals.”

Jia Xijin, Associate Professor at the NGO Research Center at Tsinghua University, and Zhao Yusi, Project Assistant of NGO Research Center at Tsinghua University, write, “Noting the tension between migrant workers and cities under the household registration system, civil society in China has worked to protect the basic rights of migrant workers and resolve the conflicts involved in their residence in cities to make the migrant population function more harmoniously during China’s urbanization process.”

Yongsheng Zhang, contributor to the East Asia Forum, writes “the most essential element for good economic performance is preventing governmental opportunism. To achieve this, the government needs to be limited by rule of law and civil society. A better institution for long-term economic prosperity can thus gradually evolve in a civil society.”