South Korea's defense ministry said North Korea must come back to the negotiating table to prevent an unintended armed clash, according to 人民网. Ministry spokesperson Jeong Bin-na said on Thursday that military communication channels between the two Koreas are now completely shut down, and that the two sides have been trading positions through public statements instead — a situation she said reflects that reality.
Jeong warned that actions which could trigger such an incident must stop, and that dialogue is the only way to keep differing perceptions on either side from escalating into something neither government intends. Her remarks were reported by 人民网.
Why it matters
The Korean Peninsula has no working military hotline at the moment, which means the two armies have no routine way to clarify a move, a test, or a misread signal before it escalates. When communication runs through press releases and state media instead of officers on a phone line, the margin for error narrows. Seoul's public call for talks is therefore less about diplomacy than about basic crisis management — a request to restore the channel that keeps accidents from becoming confrontations.
The timing also matters. The appeal came the same week that North Korea's state media carried a sharp statement from Kim Yo-jong, a senior figure in the ruling Workers' Party, signaling that Pyongyang intends to answer Seoul's recent moves in kind rather than quietly.
Pyongyang's response, in its own words
According to the Korean Central News Agency, as cited in the reporting, Kim Yo-jong — a department director of the Workers' Party of Korea Central Committee — issued a statement on Wednesday. She said South Korea's psychological warfare loudspeakers are set to be switched on along the entire border this month.
Kim also said the South had conducted provocative loudspeaker broadcasts and warning shots at no fewer than two locations on Wednesday. 人民网 did not independently verify those claims, and the reporting does not specify where the locations were or what prompted the warning shots.
Her statement was carried by KCNA and picked up by Chinese outlets, including 凤凰网, which reported her warning that if Seoul keeps pressing its argument, South Korea will face what she described as the most miserable situation. That phrasing is her characterization, not a verified description of events.
Loudspeakers, warning shots and a border in flux
The dispute centers on the border area, where loudspeaker broadcasts have long been one of the most sensitive tools either side can deploy. The reporting indicates Seoul plans to run the systems along the full length of the frontier this month, a step Pyongyang treats as a provocation.
Coverage from Chinese outlets also points to North Korea pressing ahead with what has been described as turning the border into a fortified zone, with Kim Yo-jong overseeing that effort. The same reporting suggests South Korean President Lee Jae-myung has been left grappling with a boundary whose exact status is difficult to define — a problem that makes any incident harder to adjudicate after the fact.
None of this is helped by the absence of a working channel. Without one, each side's account of an event — how many broadcasts, where shots were fired, what was heard on which side of the line — stands alone, and there is no joint mechanism to reconcile the versions.
What to watch
Seoul's message is that it wants the North at the table before an accident forces the issue. Pyongyang's message, delivered through Kim Yo-jong, is that it intends to respond to the loudspeaker campaign rather than discuss it. Whether the broadcasts go ahead across the full border this month, and whether the North answers with its own measures, will determine whether the two sides move toward a channel — or further from one.
