The Korea Times

Jeju rolls tangerine diplomacy out of deep freeze to engage North Korea

For two decades, the southern resort island of Jeju bypassed the rigid ideological battles of the Korean Peninsula through a unique brand of soft power dubbed “Vitamin C diplomacy,” sending hundreds of thousands of tons of its signature local tangerines across the border to North Korea. But after a collapse in inter-Korean relations froze the program in 2018, Jeju’s orchards fell silent. Now, after an eight-year hiatus, the island has engineered a quiet return to cross-border engagement, managing a delicate back-channel operation to deliver a fresh shipment of agricultural and medical aid to the isolated North. The Jeju Special Self-Governing Province said Monday that a cache of relief supplies and agricultural materials — including high-end Hallabong citrus saplings, greenhouse equipment, pine wilt disease treatments and critical kidney dialysis machinery — successfully arrived at the North Korean port of Nampo on May 4. The shipment, which traveled via the Chinese port of Dalian, marks the first formal exchange between the local government and the North since cross-border t