A view of Dokdo. Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
North Korea has removed Dokdo from maps and booklets that introduce the country’s geographical features in Chinese, in what appears to reflect Pyongyang’s policy shift rejecting unification and treating South Korea as a hostile state.
Japan’s Kyodo News reported Wednesday that it had confirmed North Korea did not mark Dokdo on maps and electronic books about its territory published in Chinese last year. “Not only South Korea but also North Korea has claimed Dokdo as its own territory and previously marked the islets on the same type of maps and publications,” the report said.
Atsuhito Isozaki, a professor at Keio University and an expert on North Korea, said the move can be interpreted as Pyongyang excluding Dokdo from its territory after revising its constitution to define only the northern part of the Korean Peninsula as its territory. “There is also a possibility that North Korea has abandoned its sovereignty claim over Dokdo,” he explained.
Since late 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has defined inter-Korean relations not as relations between people of the same ethnicity but as “two hostile states” and “two belligerent nations at war.” More recently, the regime completed a constitutional revision reflecting the two-state line, including establishing a new territorial clause that defines only the northern part of the Korean Peninsula as North Korean territory and deleting the unification clause.
“Observations are emerging that North Korea, amid its rejection of unification, may have removed Dokdo entirely from the maps because it effectively considers the islets as belonging to South Korea,” Kyodo News reported. “The last article on Dokdo in the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of North Korea’s Workers’ Party, was published in January 2024.”