North Korea has in effect scuttled dialogue with the United States, South Korea and Japan, shut down South Korean business interests within its borders and evicted many humanitarian aid operations.
"The North Koreans want to close off their country so they will not be hurt by sanctions. They think everybody is out to ruin their country and they are getting rid of anything that could be a threat," said Cho Myong-chol, a former economics professor at Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung University who defected to South Korea in 1994.
Kilju is an agricultural and industrial city in North Hamgyong province, known to the outside world for its proximity to North Korea's Musudan-ri missile base and to the underground site of the May nuclear test, about 30 miles to the northwest.
Like other remote North Korean cities, it was decimated by famine in the mid-1990s when the public distribution system for food broke down. As a consequence, the government was forced to loosen its grip on the economy.
Farmers markets that had been permitted to sell homegrown vegetables, usually laid out on tarpaulins on the ground, gradually expanded. Traders (many crossing the border illegally) started importing Chinese goods, including children's sneakers, bananas and DVD players. North Koreans brightened up their famously drab landscape a bit by wearing pinks, polka dots and paisleys, occasionally sporting T-shirts with English writing.
In 2002, the North Korean regime belatedly legalized the markets and in many cities built stalls and enclosures to rent out to vendors.
The dismal state-owned stores closed their doors and mysterious North Korea began to look a little more like other countries.
But then, the pendulum started to swing backward. In ideological sessions compulsory for all North Koreans, the Workers' Party railed against markets as "hotbeds of anti-socialism."
In recent months, the North Korean government has become as strict about what is exported as what comes in. The sale of soybeans -- a staple in the North Korean diet -- has been banned, with the explanation that they might be taken out of the country for re-sale in China.
"They tell us the army needs the soybeans and that our soldiers won't be strong enough to lift their guns," said Lee, the unemployed factory worker.
Kim Chol Hee, a trader from Yanji, a Chinese city near the border with a large ethnic Korean population, said it was harder now than at any time in the 10 years he's been in business to import from North Korea.
