CINA

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Following "report" I found before yesterday on www.dailynk.com

Actually this is just to strange, to crazy to believe. But if it is true they are just potential suicides...

 

It is a matter of whether I die or Kim Jong Il Dies Lim Chun Yong, the chairperson of Free North Korean Soldiers Association

By Jung Jae Sung, Reporter [ 12.06.2005(Tue) 17:52 ]

Lim Chun Yong is the chairperson of Free North Korean Soldiers's Association (a tentative name), which launched recently with an open letter to Kim Jong Il printed on various media. He had dreadfully sparkling eyes which indicated that he was desperate to fight against Kim Jong Il. He put on a solemn look with his lips closed tightly. "North Korean people and Kim Jong Il are standing at a crossroad. Whether it is North Korean people or Kim Jong Il who should live is an obvious question." said Mr. Lim. "If Kim Jong Il lives, North Korean people will die. On the other hand, if North Korean people live, Kim Jong Il should die. There is a deadly feud between the two parties. This is the consensus among members of Free North Korean Soldiers' Association." Lim Chung Yong's Theory of Direct Fight Against Kim Jong Il Mr. Lim bears a personal hatred for Kim Jong Il. Mr. Lim's family were taken to a political slave-labor concentration camp because it had been known to the North Korean authorities that Mr Lim fled to South Korea. Mr. Lim had been a captain working in the second battalion of the 19th brigade of the pacification corps in North Korea before he entered South Korea. Clenching his fists, Mr. Lim said, "My family in North Korea may also wish the Kim Jong Il regime to collapse. It is a matter of whether I die or Kim Jong Il dies." His eyes sparkled with strong determination. Mr. Lim emphasized that if there should be no direct action against North Korea, the regime change would not occur, and he did not think raising North Korean human rights issue to have any effect on the regime change. His argument may be called the Theory of Direct Fight Against Kim Jong Il, when we compare it to the Theory of Direct Fight Against Imperialism borne by student movement activists in the 80s. The members of Free North Korean Soldiers' Association are North Korean defectors who were commandos when they were in the North. Mr. Lim said they would wage some direct fight, the details of which cannot be revealed. He also mentioned that he was confident that once they moved, anti-Kim Jong Il soldiers would also move in the North Korean army. He suggested that he had some connections in the North Korean army. Mr. Lim said they would start their operation soon after they had a press conference. (!!!) "I will risk my life to revenge my family" - So far there have been several groups and societies for North Korean human rights, and democratization. I think your organization is unique. North Korean defectors can understand and picture the realities of North Korea from the bottom of their hearts. That's why it is their duty to raise their voices about North Korea. I think it is time to change gears from rallying against Kim Jong Il in the street to directly fighting against him. - I think it must not be easy to make such resolution. In 2003, the North Korean authorities came to know that I had entered South Korea. That's why all my family were taken to a political slave-labor concentration camp. I feel a sense of guilt about my family. My family may also want the North Korean people to proceed to freedom and democracy. It is my duty to risk my life to help them. - Are you sure you can manage to do such dangerous things. They even require strict maintenance of security and regulation. I became a member of the special forces when I was 17. Ex-commandos are fundamentally different from ordinary people. We share the congenial spirit. We've had some financial difficulties and been exposed to some danger, but we've overcome such difficulties for the past two years because of our congeniality. North Korean people and Kim Jong Il are at a crossroad of choice. The choice of which party should live must be obvious: North Korean people must live. North Korean regime is a failure. People like us, who have much idea about the inside of the North Korean regime, must come out to help change the regime. - Regime change is not so easy as is told like that. North Korea is on the edge of collapse. Despite Kim Jong Il's Military First Policy, military spirit is slack and soldiers are full of complaints. Before I escaped from North Korea, these phenomena had been existent. They are more severe now. - Are you going to contact North Korean soldiers in order to change Kim Jong Il regime? We are ex-G.I.'s. I was a captain in the pacification corps. Some members were higher than me when they were in the North Korean army. We are sure we still have some influences on North Korean commandos. I hope you understand that I cannot tell you any detail about what we are going to do. Ex-G.I. defectors are confident of North Korean regime's collapse. They suffered the great famine of the 90s, human rights abuses, or political prisoner camps. The incident where an infant was abducted and eaten near a missile launcher in Hakmu laborers district of Jagang-do, Jinchun-gun occurred just next our military camp. North Korean regime have been making people beasts. "There will be the second and third Lim Chung Yong" - Even if the realities are horrible, it is difficult to draw actions from people. We think that North Korea is underway of collapse. We are concerned about our families, and friends in the army, let alone the matter of unification and the people. We will be able to show our actions. This confidence is due to my experience. It is a matter of whether I die or Kim Jong Il dies. If I die, there will be the second and third Lim Chun Yong. I trust my friends. I am confident that I can make some of my friends in North Korea liaisons, and deploy ourselves simultaneously. - What do you think of the Six Party Talk, and various kinds of international pressure to North Korea by raising human rights, drug, and forgery issues. I don't think they have any effect on changing North Korean regime. Each country in the international society has her own interest regarding North Korea. North Korean problem cannot be solved internationally. Her insiders must act promptly and accordingly. - What is the public reaction to your association like? We are receiving a lot of encouragement. But we still need more support from South Korean people and international societies. It is the duty of Free North Korean Solders' Association to change the North Korean regime. We owe our families and friends who were killed because of us. We have to pay off our debts. We think that once we can make our descendants live in a free democratic society, our debts are cleared. - Some South Korean youngsters sympathize with Kim Jong Il regime, or long for communism. You should not see North Korean regime from a sympathetic or emotional perspective. I am sorry to see some youngsters easily hooked by Kim Jong Il's propaganda. I wish to have a chance to meet those youngsters because I think I can open their eyes to the realities of North Korea. - Do you have something in mind to tell South Korean people? If the President is mistaken, the foundation of our nation is in danger. If people are deluded, we lose our nest. South Korean people must clearly discern Kim Jong Il's propaganda and understand North Korean regime. Kim Jong Il holds North Korean people as a hostage for his wealth and hegemony. We must decide whether Kim Jong Il prospers or 23 million North Korean people survive. South Koreans must clearly understand this. You should never do anything that could be a help for Kim Jong Il.

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Something for Pyongyang to chew on By Andrei Lankov, Asia Times, 05.05.26 SEOUL - A survivor of the North Korean prison camps concludes a story of his suffering at the hands of Kim Il-sung's henchmen by saying, "I think I will live to see how those bastards will go to prison, to pay for all what they have done to us." It is easy to understand that this man, in his late 30s, with such an experience of torture, betrayal, lies and destitution, would expect revenge. After all, Adolf Hitler's executioners (well, most of them) went to prison, and some even to the gallows. Thus, it is only rational to expect that the same fate would befall the people who run one of the bloodiest "minor" dictatorships in the world. But let's face it: such a triumph of justice is unlikely to happen. Furthermore, it probably should not be allowed to happen: the only way to prevent further suffering in North Korea might be by granting the country's elite complete immunity from persecution for all crimes committed during their rule. A woeful state No complete statistics are available yet, but a few figures (some are more reliable than others) have already emerged from North Korea, and this data leave few doubts that we are talking about a truly murderous system. Currently, 150,000-200,000 people are in political prison camps. We might assume that the average number for the past 50 years has been 100,000, and consider that the average time spent in prison is about 10 years, after which a prisoner can be either dead or released. Thus, we will arrive at some half million people who have been imprisoned for real or imagined political crimes under the rule of Kim Jong-il and his father Kim Il-sung - out of a population of about 24 million. These are estimates, but they seem to agree with the scarce information available from defectors, and those figures are conservative. But the actual number of victims is higher than the number of prison inmates. A large number of people are not sent to prison, they are exiled to remote areas, and their families are deprived of the right to pursue a normal life. Often such banishment leads to the death of the family, as during the "great famine" of the 1990s. Repression on such a massive scale cannot be even remotely compared with the political persecution in post-Stalinist East European countries, where the number of victims was counted merely in the thousands, and where their chances of survival were much higher. The much-vilified Stasi, the East German security police, appeared to be harsh only if compared to the standards of affluent and democratic Europe. What could happen to an individual in East Germany if he got himself in trouble with the authorities? Such a person was likely to lose promotion or the opportunity to travel overseas. However, in North Korea, a similar report normally leads to the victim's execution or a slow death in a prison camp. More often than not, the victim's family will go to prison as well. And we are talking only about victims of judicial persecution. The North Korean government can also be blamed for the famine of 1996-1999, which probably took between 600,000 and 900,000 lives (once again, conservative estimates). Those people died because economic reforms, which could have saved most or all of them, were deemed politically dangerous by the elite. One can also blame the regime for starting the Korean War, which resulted in the deaths of millions. But even if we cling to 500,000 as the minimum number of people who were directly killed or imprisoned for their real or alleged political wrongdoing, it is a very large number for a country of such a size. So, the number of victims is great, but what about the perpetrators? It is equally large. The North Korean political police, known as the Ministry for Protection of the State Security (MPSS), run an extensive network of informers. Defected officers of the MPSS say that under normal circumstances they are supposed to have one informer per every 50 persons, while in more "politically difficult" environments the density is increased. Yi Su-ryon, the daughter and wife of ethnic Koreans from Japan, told about a typical incident. During a drinking party, four out of its seven participants (including Yi's husband) admitted to being informers. These figures mean that roughly half a million people are or have been government spies. And police cadres and government officials of all levels are required to approve arrests, as was the case in Joseph Stalin's Russia or Mao Zedong's China. Then there are the people who were involved in manifold acts of terror and subversion against South Korea - and we can be sure they all know the stories of assassination plots and commando raids are only the tip of the iceberg. There are the officers who kidnap people from South Korea and other countries, officials who run drug smuggling and counterfeit currency rings, and of course prison guards: the average ratio for Stalin's gulags is well known - one guard for every 10 prisoners. This means some 50,000 ex-guards - and this is a conservative estimate, once again. In short, a few hundred thousand people have been directly involved in the criminal activities of the regime. With such large numbers of victims and perpetrators, no serious investigation is likely to be possible. A choice between two evils There is an apocryphal story about Nikita Khrushchev, the man behind the de-Stalinization campaign in the USSR. He was allegedly asked why so few people were brought to trial for crimes committed in Stalin's era (merely a few hundred of the most notorious people stood in secret trials). He reportedly answered, "Well, I suppose we must empty the prison camps, not replace old inmates with new ones." True or not, the story captures the essence of the dilemma: in a truly murderous dictatorship, more or less every member of the elite is somehow involved with what might be best described as "criminal policy". Thus, persecuting everybody might mean putting into prison the majority of educated people with administrative experience. Nonetheless, even if complete and thorough persecution is impractical, some key figures of the regime are very likely to go to prison. And they understand this. The fear of persecution is certainly one of the factors that makes Kim Jong-il and his entourage so stubborn and, as a result, so murderous. The North Korean leaders must be aware that their system does not work too well - at least, this is what many documents smuggled from Pyongyang's inner circles seem to confirm. But these people have no decent exit option for themselves, and this is a disaster, not so much for them, but for their subjects. They have good reasons to be afraid of persecution and revenge, and thus they are determined to resist until the end. As someone who witnessed the collapse of the Soviet system from the inside, this writer can testify that popular discontent (quite real in the 1970s and 1980s) was only one of many factors which led to its breakdown. The final blow to the communist system was dealt when members of the elite decided that it would make perfect sense to jettison their formal allegiance to communist beliefs (few of them sincerely shared these beliefs by the 1980s anyway), and re-package themselves as supporters of the market economy and democracy. Politically, this was a wise decision: in nearly all post-Soviet countries, the elite nowadays overwhelmingly consists of former communist bureaucrats who, 15 years ago, after a lifelong career in the Communist Party, suddenly proclaimed themselves staunch enemies of communism. In North Korea, such a peaceful, if cynical, solution appears impossible - it is prevented by the seemingly intractable problem in the form of South Korea. The very existence of this affluent (from the North Korean point of view - not simply "affluent" but unbelievingly rich) and free country creates manifold problems for Pyongyang's leaders. If common North Koreans learned of South Korean prosperity and if they became less fearful of political persecution, nothing would stop them from behaving like East Germans did in 1990. Why on earth would they agree to live in a crumbling and destitute state if they knew that there was a prosperous and free "other Korea" just across the border? And what will happen to the top crust of the North Korean government, and the few hundred neo-aristocratic families who surround Kim Jong-il? They are afraid that a gloomy future awaits them, and they are probably correct. Any post-unification transformation is certain to be painful. The new post-unification government will need scapegoats, and the former North Korean leaders will be first in the firing line - perhaps both figuratively and literally. Thus, the North Korean elite is cornered. These people do not want to tamper with the system since they are afraid it will collapse as a result of some experiments. In such a case, they have nothing to gain and everything to lose - not only their prosperity, privilege and power, but also their freedom - and in some cases even their lives. This means they have to continue with their policy, believing that their choice is "kill or be killed". The carrot of amnesty How to break this deadlock? The short answer is an amnesty. People who run the country should be granted immunity from persecution for all crimes. Such an amnesty might not exclude what is known as "lustrations" in Eastern Europe, where former party, police and security bureaucrats were not eligible for certain positions in the government and could not run businesses of certain types. Such people above a certain level under Kim might (and perhaps should) be excluded from keeping official positions in the post-unification era. But criminal persecution is not an option, both because it is not practical, and also because the fear of such persecution contributes toward the ongoing tragedy of the North Korean people. Nobody can restore to life the people who have perished in the torture chambers and concentration camps of the regime. But we are talking now about the living and of preventing more deaths. Countless people would be alive or have better lives had North Korea's leaders been less persistent in their stubborn (and understandable) rejection of reform, and had they been given a way out. Certainly, the North Korean leaders might be cautious of buying into any talk of amnesty. They will have seen what happened to the former South Korean generals-turned-presidents who once were promised immunity in exchange for their willingness to surrender power in a peaceful manner. The new democratic South Korean government tried to keep its promises for a while, but in 1995, facing mounting pressures from the political left, former presidents Roh Tae-woo and Chun Doo-hwan faced prosecution. Hence, to make such a promise believable, it should be very public, unequivocal and all-inclusive, leaving as few loopholes for future revenge-seekers as possible. Further, international involvement and overseas asylum for the top leaders might be a good idea. There is a precedent for this, from Idi Amin of Uganda, Mobutu Sese Seko of then-Zaire to Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The latter, the hereditary dictator of Haiti, if anything, was much more of a bizarre personality than Kim, but this did not prevent him from being warmly accepted by France after his downfall. Talk of an amnesty for North Korea's elite will have its opponents, but it is a compromise solution that might help save lives and hasten the end of the regime: if the rulers in Pyongyang know that in spite of being on the losing side they will not face persecution, let alone die in jail, but will spend the rest of their days in relative safety and comfort, they might be more willing to throw in the towel. And if lower-level officials know that they will at least keep their personal freedom after unification, they will be far less ready to fight and kill. Dr Andrei Lankov is a lecturer in the faculty of Asian Studies, China and Korea Center, Australian National University. He graduated from Leningrad State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea, and his thesis focused on factionalism in the Yi Dynasty. He has published books and articles on Korea and North Asia. He is currently on leave, teaching at Kookmin University, Seoul.

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No sunshine yet over North Korea
By Andrei Lankov

(source: Asia Times, May 13) 

For half a century, the worst fear of the South Korean government and people alike was that one day they would be conquered by their Northern brethren. In summer 1950 they saw how easily the North Korean tanks rolled into the streets of their cities, and the persistent fear of a new Korean War was the single most important factor in South Korean politics from the 1950s until the 1980s.

But now a very different kind of fear reigns supreme in Seoul. The South Koreans are not afraid of military defeat, which they know would be very unlikely. They fear their own victory instead. North Korea is in deep crisis, and its collapse seems to be a real possibility. But nobody in the affluent South wants unification - at least, an immediate and complete unification - with the impoverished North.

It was the German experience that became a wake-up call over a decade ago. Economists' calculations indicate that if North Korea collapses, the reconstruction of the impoverished country will become an almost unthinkable burden for the affluent South. The estimates vary greatly, but everybody agrees that the amount of necessary investment will be truly astronomical.

The situation in Korea is much worse than was the case in Germany. The per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in East Germany was only one-third of that of the capitalist West, and some 80% of all Germans lived in the capitalist part of the country. In Korea, per capita GDP in the North is at least 10 times smaller than in the South, and the South Korean population is merely 65% of the total. Apart from economic issues, there are also social and political problems - so painful indeed that few people even dare to raise them.

Thus, a new dream plan gradually developed known as the "Sunshine Policy". Now the South Korean policy planners hope to steer Pyongyang toward Chinese-style reforms. It is believed that such reforms will create economic growth, and thus eventually the gap between the two Korean states will diminish. Such peaceful transformation will probably take a few decades. In the meantime, the South Korean government is ready to keep its northern neighbor afloat with large amounts of aid: direct and indirect, open and clandestine. It is also ready to ignore provocations and, of course, not to attract excessive attention to the human-rights abuses and police terror in the North, still one the world's most repressive and brutal regimes. All this is done to prevent a sudden collapse of North Korea and thus ensure that South Koreans will continue to enjoy their hard-earned prosperity.

The South Koreans are not ready to sacrifice their shiny new cars and regular vacations in Southeast Asia for the sake of their starving brethren. This might sound judgmental, but their position is easy to understand. Whatever the official line, for the average South Korean the North has long been another foreign country, whose problems and concerns are quite alien to those living in the South.

South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun has made a number of statements, assuring everybody (perhaps, even himself) that North Korea is not going to collapse. "Even if there is a certain situation in North Korea, I think there is an internal organizational ability to manage the situation," Roh said in Germany a year ago. And in Poland in December: "Some have said that North Korea will collapse. But I believe there is almost no such possibility."

The peaceful transformation envisioned by the Sunshine Policy might appear to be a dream scenario, at least to a South Korean taxpayer. (The estimated 200,000 inmates of the North Korean prison camps or the millions of starving North Korean commoners might have a dramatically different view on this subject). But there is one serious problem with this scenario: it is not realistic. It is based on the implicit assumption that the common North Koreans somehow will be willing to spend a few decades patiently and obediently waiting for the time when beneficial reforms will help to reduce the gap between the two Korean economies, so unification can be achieved in a manner most pleasant and comfortable for the South Korean taxpayers.

The examples of China and Vietnam are often cited as proof that a gradual reform without an "implosion" - a nice euphemism for a democratic revolution - is possible. But the experiences of these two countries are not applicable to North Korea. It is often overlooked that the existence of an economically affluent and politically free South Korea makes the Korean situation completely different.

In China and Vietnam, the affluence of the capitalist West is well known, but it is not seen by the populace as relevant to the problems of their own countries (apart from the quite nebulous argument that "democracy brings prosperity"). After all, the current Western prosperity can always be explained away in Marxian-cum-nationalist terms as a product of sinister imperialist policies and a result of the brutal exploitation of the non-Western world and its resources. Due to the existence of South Korea, however, the situation in North Korea is different.

From its inception, North Korea has gone to great lengths to present itself as a paradise while South Korea has been depicted as a "living hell", where penniless students sell their blood to pay for textbooks and sadistic Yankees drive their tanks over Korean girls just for pleasure. The year one textbook presents North Korea's children with an enlightening picture: "A school principal in South Korea beats and drives from school a child who cannot pay his monthly fee on time." In high school, North Korean children learn that "South Korea is swamped with 7 million unemployed. Countless people stand in queues in front of employment centers, but not even a small number of jobs is forthcoming. The factories are closing one after another, and in such a situation even people who have work do not know when they will be ousted from their position." Needless to say, these stories are inventions. Primary education in South Korea is free, and the number of unemployed people did not even remotely approach 7 million. (South Korea actually has one of the lowest unemployment levels among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, about 2-4%.)

These lies, however, were necessary since North Korea always presented itself as another part of the same state, as another government of one Korea. Its claims on legitimacy and the right to govern were based on its alleged ability to deliver a better material life for its people. (In 1962 North Korea's founding father Kim Il-sung famously promised to deliver "a house with a tiled roof, soup with meat and silken clothes" for every North Korean.) This Marxian emphasis on material and economic success is what has made the myth of North Korean prosperity and South Korean poverty so indispensable to the regime's survival. It is not for nothing that the North Korean bank notes bear the inscription, "We do not envy anybody in the world."

The North Korean leaders understood the importance of strict information control or, rather, a self-imposed information blockade. Historically, all communist countries have tried to cut their populace off from unauthorized information from overseas, but few, if any, went to the extremes that North Korea has. Radio sets sold in North Korean shops have no free tuning and can be used only for receiving the official Pyongyang channels. (Even in Stalin's Russia short-wave sets were readily available to the public.) Foreign media, including the periodicals of supposedly "fraternal" countries, have not been publicly available in North Korea since the early 1960s. All foreign publications, with the exception of purely technical materials, are kept in special departments within major libraries, available only to those individuals who have the requisite security clearance. Until the recent breakdown of control on the border with China, only a handful of North Koreans had any overseas experience.

The market reforms and foreign investment that have been anticipated and encouraged by the "Sunshiners", as proponents of the Sunshine Policy are known, are almost certain to be economically beneficial, but they will have an unavoidable side-effect: a further deterioration of the carefully constructed system of information control.

Is it possible to check the spread of subversive information while still promoting economic reforms? Perhaps, but only to some extent, and only if reforms remain limited in scale. However, minor reforms are not sufficient to bring about a serious transformation of the North Korean economy. In the longer run, large-scale foreign investment will be necessary to sustain growth, and when this point is reached, contacts between North Koreans and outsiders (overwhelmingly South Koreans) will become unavoidable.

Sunshine Policy believers tacitly assume that a reformed North Korean regime will still be able to suppress open dissent, while the majority of the population will be kept docile by increased living standards, augmented by a slow yet steady improvement in their political rights - essentially, the situation that existed in China and Vietnam in the 1980s and 1990s. However, as it has been stressed above, the sheer existence of South Korea makes such a scenario implausible. Knowledge of the prosperous South will present the North Korean public with the belief (possibly naive, and certainly exaggerated) that their problems would find an easy solution through unification and the wholesale adoption of the South Korean social, economic and cultural system.

It is doubtful that the North Korean population, especially its better-educated sector, would agree to live indefinitely in a less affluent and more restrictive version of South Korea when a German-style unification could present them with a much easier path to instant success and prosperity. Will they agree to endure a decade or two of destitution followed by a couple of decades of poverty if they see another, better off Korea just across the border? Will they agree to tolerate a highly repressive regime run, at all probability, either by scions of the ruling Kim clan or by people who once were Kim's henchmen? Will they be persuaded that such sacrifices are necessary to ensure "economic stability" in South Korea - or, in other words, to provide their brethren with chances to enjoy sunbathing in Thailand and a new Hyundai Sonata once every few years? Probably not.

One can easily imagine how discontent about the North Korean system, as well as information about the almost unbelievable South Korean prosperity, will first spread through the relatively well-heeled North Korean groups who are allowed to interact with South Koreans and foreigners or have better access to the foreign media and entertainment, and then filter down to the wider social strata. Once people come to the conclusion that they have no reason to be afraid of the usual crackdown, followed by the slaughter of real or alleged rebels and their entire families, they are more likely to react in East German style than the supporters of the Sunshine Policy are willing to consider. And this will be the end of South Koreans' dream of the North's peaceful and painless evolution. Of course, the current South Korean government is dead set against German-style unification. But what will they do if a large-scale popular movement erupts in the North demanding immediate unification?

It is a great irony that the expectations of a peaceful evolution are especially popular among the Korean left, whose supporters always portray themselves as staunch believers in the role of the "people's masses", known in their parlance as minjung. According to their view of history, the proud and active minjung were the major agent of change in South Korea. But when it comes to the North, the same people suddenly change their tune and equate North Korea with its officialdom, completely overlooking the fact that common North Koreans might have their own opinions about the future of their country and might indeed have an influence on its future. Fortunately or not, a vast majority of North Koreans are not members of the elite, and they are not terribly interested in scenarios that will keep real estate prices high in Seoul while forcing them to survive on 400 grams of maize a day.

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...a possible future of the N.K. Problem

 

Strategy to 'Encircle North Korean Regime’ (2) NK Regime Collpase, Half Way to the Korean Unification

By Shon Kwang Joo, Editor / Shin Ju Hyun, Reporter [ 05.12.2005(Thu) 15:37 ] (source:Daily NK, here you can read #1)

Hwang Jang Yop, the chairman of North Korea Democratization Committee (some call him the "creator of the Juche "ideologie"/주체주의 - just check it out in any searching machine, or try http://www.kimsoft.com/korea/nk-whang.htm), kept saying that China is holding the key to solve the North Korean nuclear issue and that the crucial point is how South Korea acts toward the issue. What is the strategy to change North Korea? See below to check out his latest opinions about the situation of Northeast Asia since North Korea’s declaration of nuclear weapon state (Feb. 10) and North Korea as an issue. - By what kind of promise between the US and China can make an agreement to resignation of the Kim Jong Il regime? What China is worried about is US presense reaching up to the Yalu River. The US should try to tell China that they have no intention to do that. The problem which the US faces right now, is making North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons. Therefore, what the US has to do is to take the position, that it wants the change of the Suryeong dictatorship. Once the dictatorship is dismantled, North Korea can open its door as China did. At this stage, the US should clearly its position known to China. US declares not to involve in post Kim Jong Il North Korea The US should send a signal to China that “the US does not want a pro-America government to be set up after the collapse of the Kim Jong Il regime.” What the US can say about North Korea’s new government is “reform and liberalization like Chinese style and then both nuclear and peace isseus in Korean peninsula shall be solved.” If so, the US will not care even if post Kim Jong Il government enters into diplomatic relation with Japan and will see progress of the Korean peninsula peace pacts. It would be better for the US sending a message, “keep friendly relation with North Korea”, to China. The US should show China where they stand at the same time. If China does not respond to teh US attitude and want to maintain its alliance with Kim Jong Il, the US should take a decisive step. The US must not treat China as a companion anymore. The US can support independence of Taiwan. The US has been supporting ‘One China Policy’ in order to keep a friendly relationship with China. There is no reason for the US supports it anymore. It has to express that it can support nuclear armament of Taiwan and Japan. For the trade partnership which China put all their efforts into, the US also has to express a possible sanction against China cooperating with the EU. - Do you really think that the US can apply this kind of strategy and take an action? What China needs right now is peace and high growth. They do not want to be affected by Kim Jong Il. A new North Korean government might be pro-Chinese government. It is the quickest way. The problem is whether the Bush administration can handle it or not. I personally think that there is a low possibility. Why do I think like that? It is because the US does not know that such a solution is the solution one for teh future development of the US and the world. The US still regards North Korean issue as a minor problem. That is why not many people in the US agree with this kind suggestion. The US would be against even the nuclear armament of Japan. The South Korean government will play an important role to solve the North Korean issue - In which case will the US not able to stabd against it? If the South Korean governments supports it, everything will be ok. South Korea is the owner of the Korean peninsula. If teh South Korean government insists the US that we have to make China remain in on our side to make Kim Jong Il regime collapse peacefully, then there is nothing the US government can do. Who will be against it when the owner supports it? If the South Korean government insists it strongly and presents the solution for the problem of the Korean peninsula, there is nothing the US government can do, but follow us. Existence of the Kim Jong Il regime depends on China, and the South Korean government has the key to separate China from North Korea. - In South Korea, people try to keep teh US distanced and embrace North Korea and China. What do you think about it? The US government also made a mistake over it. They overlooked rising of anti-America sentiments in South Korea. They don’t take any actions to prevent growing pro-North Korea and anti-Americanism power. They are just discontented with the anti-America sentiments and they do not take any action to prevent this kind of sentiments. They should try to let people in South Korea know about necessity of the ROK-US alliance and the importance of democratic solidarity. No need to worry about setting up of a pro-Chinese government - Some people are worryed about setting up a pro-Chinese government in North Korea. Some people are worried about it. They think if North Korea sides with China continuously, the unification will be impossible and China would keep controlling North Korea. However, there’s no reason to worry about it. China does not have a power to be greedy to take North Korean territory. There is nothing China can get in North Korea. People in North Korea would have to decide their destiny by themselves, so there is no need to worry about it. - Is there any chance that Chinese army will be stationed in North Korea when something’s going on in North Korea? People in China would not do that. There is no need for China to be stationed in Manchu. Standing by is enough for them. They will not cause any trouble. There are already many troubled areas, so they will not trouble themselves in such a way. There is no need to worry about it. What they do care, though, is for the US to enter into North Korea. We can say that they are not interested in taking North Koream territory. - Do you mean if Kim Jong Il regime is dismantled, there is no problem of how the next government builds its diplomatic relations? If Kim Jong Il regime is dismantled, the most important problem is solved. Root of the evil and unhappiness are from Kim Jong Il and the dictatorship. If the Kim Jong Il regime is dismantled, the effect will be enormous. Dramatic changes will be followed in North Korea. Capital and technology will flow into North Korea, and teh defectors can return back to North Korea and start a business. If so, there might be no problem politically and economically. People in North Korea will work hard to catch up with South Korea. Social atmosphere should be set up for North Korea to focus on economic development. If Kim Jong Il regime is dismantled, it means a half unification If Kim Jong Il regime is dismantled, we achieve a half unification. Kim Jong Il regime should be dismantled as soon as possible for teh unification. You can see how important it is, right? There is no need to discuss about whether the regime is to be pro-China or pro-America at this stage. - Globalization means global democratization. Nobody can stop globalization at this moment. Nobody can stop it whether it is good or bad. Globalization means changing living style based on a nation (state) to the one based on the world. It is a huge change, so it is not that easy as we think. What we have to think about is to decide on how we will make globalization. Communism in the past suggested realization of globalization with the class theory, but it failed. Now it is time for making globalization with democracy. It is a historical trend. - The Bush administration also emphasizes ‘spreading of freedom’. The US should start it first. The US abolished racial discrimination for the first time and abolished class discrimination. The US is the advanced country of democracy and the strongest country in the world. It plays an important role. It should not be satisfied to be remained as a united states in its own country. All countries in the world should be united. There is no reason for the people in Africa and Asia stay behind of the Europeans. They also have sufficient individuality and ability. Globalization through democracy is necessary to improve their ability. Global democratic unity among the nations should be built up. Western advanced countries should take the lead for this. Destiny of all races and countries should be taken care of by all of us. Then you will see how important the unification of two Koreas is. Unified Korea will play an important role for the global democratization - Why are democratization in North Korea and unified Korea important for global democratization? North Korea wants to take an advantage by inducing conflict between the US-China, the US- Russia, and ROK-Japan. The Kim Jong Il dictatorship is the most villainous dictatorship in the world. South Korea, US, Japan and China should cut off the connection with the dictatorship. If the US-China, and ROK-Japan strengthen their solidarity, global democratization shall be progressed rapidly. The EU shall be participated in us and India should follow us. Imagine how powerful it is if we conduct global democratization. Surrounding countries including the US should know that the unified Korea is located in the important position for the global democratization. - After collapsing of Kim Jong Il regime, what’s the first thing we have to do? After ousting Kim Jong Il regime, making a reform and opening as China did is he first step. Opening and reform is important for not only peaceful Korean peninsula and nuclear problem but also global democratization. We should see North Korea issue as not Korean peninsula problem but global democratization problem. Democracy is not completed by demonstration only - President Roh makes attacks against all successive governments saying liquidation of the problems in the past. How do you evaluate all successive governments in democratic development way? Democracy is not completed by demonstration only. If democracy is completed by demonstrations on the streets, all countries shall be the advanced democratic country. First of all, economy should be developed. All people in South Korea played an important role so far. All people like professors and labors contributed to development of democracy in South Korea. Religious people also contributed to development of democracy in South Korea. Just demonstration does not mean development of democracy. Democracy means development of politics, economy and culture all together. Democracy can’t be completed by system only. Democracy is the result of cooperation by all people. - What kind of attitude do we need to solve current issues such as North Korea nuclear issue? Some people insist that holding dialogues is the only way to deal with the communism country. Those who insists it do not know about communism. North Korea is a despotic country. ‘Pacifists’ beg peace to Kim Jong Il. They should not do that. For real peace, power of democracy should be strengthened and power of dictatorship should be weakened. If a country brings a war and develops nuclear, we have to let the country know that a hardhearted punishment from the world society shall be followed. It was impossible to end the Cold War without economic power, scientific technology and military power of the US. Violence such as nuclear weapon should be confronted decisively to maintain peace.

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If this story is realy the truth, then sooner or later the

S. Korean government may get a huge problem^^!!!

Just let's see the future!!

 

Culture Shock

A flow of information from the outside world is changing the Hermit Kingdom.

Source:

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North Korea: Market forces have female faces
By Andrei Lankov (source: Asia Times)

SEOUL - A defector from the North, a typical tough Korean auntie with trademark permed hair, smiled when asked about "men's  role" in North Korean families: "Well, in 1997-98 men became useless. They went to their jobs, but there was nothing to be done there, so they came back. Meanwhile their wives went to distant places to trade and kept families going."

Indeed, the sudden increase in the economic strength and status of women is one of manifold changes that have taken place North Korea over the past 10 or 15 years. The old Stalinist society is dead. It has died a slow but natural death over the past decade and, in spite of Pyongyang's frequent and loud protestation to the contrary, capitalism has been reborn in North Korea. The old socialist state-managed economy of steel mills and coal mines hardly functions at all, and the ongoing economic activity is largely private in nature.

But the new North Korean capitalism of dirty marketplaces, charcoal trucks and badly dressed vendors with huge sacks of merchandise on their backs demonstrates one surprising feature: it has a distinctly female face. Women are over-represented among the leaders of the growing post-Stalinist economy - a least on the lower level, among the market traders and small-time entrepreneurs.

This partially reflects a growth pattern of North Korean neo-capitalism. Unlike the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union or China, the "post-socialist capitalism" of North Korea is not an affair planned and encouraged by people from the top tiers of the late communist hierarchy. Rather, it is capitalism from below, which grows in spite of government's attempts to reverse the process and turn the clock back.

Until around 1990, the markets and private trade of all kinds played a very moderate role in North Korean society. Most people were content with what they were officially allocated through the elaborate public distribution system, and did not want to look for more opportunities. The government also did its best to suppress the capitalist spirit. The rations were not too generous, but still sufficient for survival.

And then things began to fall apart. The collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics brought a sudden end to the flow of the Soviet aid (which was, incidentally, happily accepted but never publicly admitted by the North Korean side). This triggered an implosion of the North Korean economy. In the early 1990s people discovered that the rations were not enough for survival, and thus something had to be done. In a matter of years acute shortages of food developed into a large-scale famine, and in 1994-96 the public distribution system ceased to function in most parts of the country.

But men still felt bound to their jobs by their obligations and rations (distributed through workplaces). Actually, rations were not forthcoming, but this did not matter. Being used to the stability of the previous decades, the North Koreans saw the situation as merely a temporary crisis that soon would be overcome somehow. No doubt, they reasoned, one day everything will go back to the "normal" (that is, Stalinist) state of affairs. So men believed that it would be wise to keep their jobs in order to resume their careers after eventual normalization of the situation. The ubiquitous "organizational life" also played its role: a North Korean adult is required to attend endless indoctrination sessions and meetings, and these requirements are more demanding for males than for females.

Women enjoyed more freedom. By the standard of the communist countries, North Korea has always had an unusually high percentage of housewives among its married women (for example, in the northern border city of Sinuiju, up to 70% of married women were estimated to be housewives in the 1980s). While in most other communist countries women were encouraged to continue work after marriage, in North Korea the government did not really mind when married women quit their jobs to become full-time housewives.

Thus when the economic crisis began, women were first to take up market activities of all kinds. This came very naturally. In some cases they began by selling those household items they could do without, or by selling homemade food. Eventually, this developed into larger businesses. While men continued to go to their plants (which by the mid-1990s had usually ceased to operate) women plunged into market activity. In North Korea such trade involved long journeys in open trucks, and nights spent on concrete floors or under the open skies; they often bribed predatory local officials. And, of course, women had the ability to move heavy material, since the vendor's back tends to be her major method of transportation.

This tendency was especially pronounced among low- and middle- income families. The elite received rations even through the famine years of 1996-99, so the women of North Korea's top 5% usually continued with their old lifestyle. Nonetheless, some of them began to use their ability to get goods cheaply. Quite often, the wives of high-level cadres were and still are involved in resale of merchandise that is first purchased from their husbands' factories at cheap official prices. It is remarkable that in the case of North Korea such activities are carried out not so much by the cadres themselves, but by their wives. Cadres had to be careful, since it was not clear what was the official approach to the new situation of nascent capitalism. Thus it was assumed that women would be safer in such undertakings since they did not, and still do not, quite belong to the official social hierarchy.

But for the cadres' wives, these market operations were a way to move from being affluent to being rich. The lesser folks had to do something just to stay alive.

Perhaps, had the state given its formal approval to nascent capitalism (as did the still formally "communist" state of China), the men would be far more active. But Pyongyang officialdom still seems to be uncertain what to do with the crumbling system, and it is afraid to give to unconditional approval to capitalism. Thus men are left behind and capitalism is left to women.

This led to a change in the gender roles inside families. On paper, communism appeared very feminist, but real life in the communist states was an altogether different matter, and among the communist countries North Korea was remarkable for the strength of its patriarchal stereotypes. Men, especially in the more conservative northeastern part of the country, seldom did anything at home, with all household chores being exclusively the female domain. But in the new situation, when men did not have much to do while their wives struggled to keep the family fed and clothed, many men changed their attitude that housework was something beneath their dignity (at least this is what recent research among the defectors seem to suggest). As one female defector put it, "When men went to outside jobs and earned something, they used to be very boastful. But now they cannot do it and they become sort of useless, like a streetlight in the middle of the day. So a man now tries to help his wife in her work as best as he can" to keep the family going.

Recently, when it is increasingly clear that the "old times" are not going to return, some men are bold enough to risk breaking their ties with official employment. But they often go to market not as businessmen in their own right but rather as aides to their wives who have amassed great experience over the past decade. Being newcomers, males are relegated to subordinate positions - at least temporarily. Or alternatively, they are involved in more dangerous and stressful kinds of activity, such as smuggling goods across the badly protected border with China. As one woman defector said: "Men usually do smuggling. Men are better in big things, you know".

Economic difficulties and change in money-earning patterns as well as new lifestyle and related opportunities in some cases led to family breakdowns. In South Korea the economic crisis of 1998 resulted in a mushrooming divorce rate. In the North, the nearly simultaneous Great Famine had the same impact, even if in many cases the divorce was not officially recognized.

Of course, we are talking about a great disaster here, and a large part of the estimated 600,000-900,000 people who perished in those years were women. Of the survivors, not all women became winners, bold entrepreneurs or successful managers: some were dragged into prostitution, which has made a powerful comeback recently, and many more had to survive on whatever meager food was available. But still, it seems that years of crisis changed the social roles in North Korean families. For many women, the social disaster became the time when they showed their strength, will and intelligence not just to survive, but also to succeed.

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For today’s 4.18 “Link”(Liberation in N. Korea) (Is there any?) and Ehwa Dream invited for the “North Korea awareness day”.

First checking the exhibition in students hall: just flattest propaganda, such as the famous-notoriously drawn picture about the butchered child (“Father, you want the lunch more spicy, or not?”, see the 2nd pic) or, also drawn by unknown “artists” about executions. The entire was added with a lot of religious trash.

Following in the building, which looks like a factory, a movie about some executions, recently smuggled out of the North. And than something about North Korean refugees in China – actually nothing new. The last was a Q&A with young female NK refugee, was a kind of interesting, because she reported convincingly about her experiences before she fled to China and later to Mongolia, now she is since five years in the South.

The final event: some kind of lecture by Ms. Kim (wow, what a surprise) from an anti-North group (“Democracy Network Against NK Gulag”) about how we can be happy to life in the South, how beautiful the democracy works and how nice the police (yeah the cops) is here (I know some people they see this complete different!!). Really terribly and even the young woman from the North felt annoyed.

After all: not a real nice afternoon performance, especially when I had to learn, that the “event” could be realized without any protest from student activists from Ehwa University. And actually the afternoon started for me really nice, but this is another story…

 

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Tomorrow’s headliner in Korea Times (KT)

 

"Roh Opposes NK Regime Change

President Wants Reform in Pyongyang to Model After China, Vietnam"

 

Nowadays Roh is in Germany to visit there the political and economical “leadership”, a.k.a. the capitalist class and their means of power.

It seems that, at least, on the trip to there he went definitely stupid. First of all he can’t compare the DPRK with China and Vietnam. Vietnam already had its unification and China is a monster power country, in the near future THE main rival to the US imperialism.

In both countries red painted capitalist dictatorships are ruling, not dissimilarly the several dictatorships here in the past or the Guomindang (국민당/國民黨) period in Taiwan.

Both kinds of terror regimes had/have just one aim: fast industrial “development” (a.k.a. maximum profit for the capitalist class – its doesn’t matter if they are “national employed managers” or private capitalists), of course on the costs of the working class. Like in the past (and often still now) S. Korean (and Taiwanese) working class had just one right: to work like a donkey. No labor rights, no democratic rights, no human rights – just the right (or the DUTY) to work.

The same in today’s China and Vietnam: everything what smells after democracy, or other progressive ideas, is strictly prohibited by “law” (there not by a quasi fascist dictatorship such as in S. Korea and Taiwan was happen, instead by the ruling “communist” parties, the left underground opposition, some calls themselves the “real communist”, is threaten with death penalty).

But this is what Roh and the new S. Korean capitalists really want: one army of workers without any rights, their only right of existence should be the right to work to maximize the profits of the S. Korean capitalists by the smallest expenditures. If Kim Jong-il’s regime this is guaranteeing this (no workers rights, no trade unions, no human rights), than Roh will except his regime and will oppose all “regime changes” in the North. ``We are ready to help North Korea experience a market economy and pursue openness with the ongoing projects for the Kaesung Industrial Complex (KIC)…’’ Roh said, according to tomorrow’s KT. Naturally, because “even” migrant workers (migrant workers will be the first victims of this…) here are not willing to work for 50.000 won per month, North Korean workers get per month in KIC (and please remind that they will create workplaces there for around 500.000 NK workers).

 

“CONCLUSION”

 

Roh went not crazy or stupid – it’s just a very clever plan to get millions of cheap and (allegedly) defenseless slaves for the S. Korean capitalism.

BUT WE SHOULD FIGHT (not only in our interest) AGAINST THAT!!!

 

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NYT, March 28, 2005

North Korea Experiments, With China as Its Model

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

 

ANDONG, China - At night, the view from the upper floor of a hotel looking out across the Yalu River toward the North Korean city of Sinuiju seems one of utter desolation. Three naked bulbs twinkling feebly is all that can be seen along a several-miles arc of riverfront.

By day, though, the scene at the border in this bustling Chinese city could scarcely be more different. Trucks steadily lumber across the bridge linking the countries, ferrying North Korean raw materials into China and Chinese manufactured goods to market in North Korea.

Westerners have long taken the nighttime view as the truest reflection of North Korea, a country all but frozen in time, its leaders so obsessed with control that they do not countenance contact with the outside world. The view from China, though, in cities like this, where small groups of North Koreans can be found in the downtown shops and hotels, scouring the city for bargains, is of a country already well into an experiment, however uncertain, aimed at rebuilding its economy and even opening up, ever so gingerly, to the outside world.

North Koreans who have recently arrived in China, and Chinese businessmen who have extensive experience in North Korea, speak of significant changes in the economic life in a country with a reputation as one of the most closed and regimented.

They say the changes, which were officially started in 2002 and have gradually gained momentum, have undone many of the most basic tenets of North Korea's Communist system, where private commerce was banned, private property circumscribed, and an all-powerful state the universal employer and provider.

Now in ways that many Chinese say remind them of their own early economic reforms a quarter century ago, North Korean farmers are allowed to take over fallow land and plant it for their own profit, selling their products in markets.

"It seems they are learning from the Chinese model of the 1980's, giving land to farmers and not allowing people to depend on the central government for everything," said Yu Zhongde, a Chinese businessman whose company operates bus routes in North Korea. "The rate of change is speeding up, and the aspiration for wealth among the people is really growing."

In the cities, Mr. Yu and others say, the changes have been even more noticeable, with people being allowed to trade goods for profit in newly created public markets, including 38 in the capital, Pyongyang. These days, traders sell everything from clothing and bicycles to televisions and refrigerators, mostly imported from China.

Private automobile ownership is still not permitted, but people reported seeing signs advertising used cars for sale in Pyongyang, nonetheless. Here and there, others also report the opening of small restaurants and karaoke bars.

"The standard of living is improving, not just in Pyongyang, but throughout the country," said another Chinese businessman who has been a frequent visitor to the country since 1997. "Nowadays, if you have money you can buy whatever you want. The problem is that most people still don't have much money."

Similar comments about the recent availability of goods were repeated in numerous interviews with North Koreans who had illegally slipped across the porous border, taking a risk in hopes of earning some money in China and buying goods to carry back and sell.

The difference in the remarks of Chinese business people and the North Koreans is one of tone, with the North Koreans almost universally asserting that life has gotten tougher, not better, since the introduction of the economic changes.

"The government has no money, and everything has become much more expensive," said a woman from the northeastern city of Chongjin, who sneaked into China three months ago. "Many people steal things to survive."

People from the countryside said farmers had tended to do better than city residents under the economic changes. "You can find anything you want in the markets now, but the prices are too high for us to afford them," said one 50-year-old woman from a village in the Musan region, near the Chinese border. "Farming for ourselves, though, made us better off than people in the towns. At least we always had enough to eat."

Deok Ryong Yoon, an economist at the South Korean Institute for International Economic Policy, acknowledged the growing social disparity. "The market has become the main mechanism for the North Korean economy, and they are trying to use the market to rehabilitate their economy," he said. "The changes have increased net production in North Korea. They have more goods and seem to be benefiting from the reforms, but distribution is very unequal."

North Korean officials have used the state's propaganda machine to spread the new market-economy gospel, including quotes from the supreme leader, Kim Jong Il. They began with an article attributed to Mr. Kim published in the state press in 2001 under the headline "Gigantic Change," in which he called for making "constant efforts to renew the landscape to replace the one which was formed in the past, to meet the requirements of a new era."

More recent articles have gone further, praising some aspects of capitalism and extolling "those with money using money" as a new force for social regeneration. Many analysts say this most recent language also echoes important changes in China, including most famously the quote often attributed to Deng Xiaoping: "to be rich is glorious."

Chinese businessmen and foreign economists say North Korea's emergent capitalist class has two disparate components: the operators of a small, clandestine private economy who have survived since their emergence during the famines of the mid-1990's, when the state distribution system was failing, and a far larger group consisting of officials of all description, from petty and mid-level functionaries to members of the political elite and perhaps largest of all, the military.

"Pretty much everyone in business is an official of one kind or another," said one Chinese investor who is a frequent visitor to North Korea. "Ordinary people simply don't have the money, and if they had money, they'd be asked where they got it, and get in trouble."

The businessman said corruption, abuse of office and the seemingly arbitrary application of rules were the biggest weaknesses in the country's new policy drive. "Changes are declared," he said. "They are spoken, but it's not put into law, and this makes it very difficult for business."

Ordinary citizens say these uncertainties hit them hard, too. A hint of this notion, of a state that gives and can also take away, was included in a sarcastic but menacing commentary by North Korea after its rejection last month of new multinational talks about its nuclear program. Washington "can just have talks with peasant market merchants, whom the United States is said to like, or with the representatives of the North Korean defectors organizations the United States is said to have formed."

One city dweller told a story of how the government had engineered the introduction of new banknotes for the won, the currency, as part of the economic changes. With little explanation except a vague discussion of addressing social inequality, people were ordered to turn in their old won for new ones, the woman said.

"No matter how much of the old money you turned in, each family was given 4,500 new won," she said. "You didn't dare complain. If you did, you would be denounced as an enemy of the people."

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<China-NK relations, Economic policy>
by Michael Rank (source: http://www.nkzone.org) 

There's a very interesting Chinese look at North Korea on a website specialising in the hermit kingdom, it compares NK with China during the Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward, paints a generally bleak picture of a starving country where there is much anti-Chinese resentment. It's anonymous and is written from a personal perspective, but it's on a well established website and seems to reflect a strand of official opinion.

It's roughly comparable with the highly critical article in the Chinese journal Strategy and Management (“S&M” to its fans) which was censored last summer, though a bit less official. S&M was closed down for publishing this article, incidentally, and its website has been wiped.

A short introduction by the “webmaster” quotes the U.N. as saying at least two million people died of starvation in the 90s as the country was arming itself with nuclear weapons, maintained the world's fifth biggest army, etc. “This is the Kim family's choice, not the choice of the North Korean people. The article says here are no fat people in North Korea but this is not right, Kim Jung-il's fat stomach which the webmaster has seen on television continues to make a deep impression on him.”

The article starts off in Dandong, where he notes few trains or cars or trucks cross the bridge into NK. “Clearly NK's closed policies have restricted border trade. But there are hardly any restrictions on tourists visiting NK from Dandong and local people can go on a four-day tour for 2,100 yuan ($250).” [When I visited Dandong in 1999 I was slightly surprised how many of the people I met had visited NK - Michael].

The author says he was hoping to visit NK to find out about everyday life there but was told tours were highly regimented and restricted official sites like Kim Il-sung's old home, the Juche tower, etc, and “there is no time for free activities, while there are also language problems and North Koreans are not willing to have contact with foreigners, so it is difficult to learn about NK on an ordinary tour.”

But he adds that if you establish a good relationship with your guide, they are likely to be more open, “and even be mildly critical of the authorities, which in NK amounts to subversion and can be severely punished.”

He adds that talking to Korean-Chinese on the border is also a good source of information as many of them have close ties with NK and have relatives there.

He says NK is still in the grip of hunger/famine and that (even) in Pyongyang the state ration has fallen to 100 grams a day [can this be right...?], while meat and eggs are considered luxuries, and people supplement state rations with leaves and bark. He says that even during the “years of hardship” (Great Leap Forward) in China people received 28 jin (14 kg) a month, or 467 grams a day, so NKs are much worse off than Chinese during that terrible time. [But the 28 jin a month was pretty notional, millions starved during the GLF - Michael].

He says Chinese tour groups are told to bring extra food because of the shortages, and not to give locals any of their extra food. Some tourists who gave some of their foods to some “as thin as sticks” children were fined and the children were punished by the police, their crime was insulting socialist NK's glorious reputation. But many tourists who have given children food without being found out, he adds.

All North Koreans are thin, he didn't see a single fat person, “the people you see on television are the same, apart from Kim Jung-il, of course.” And people on both sides of the Yalu say even Kim has got thinner.

Many people say the reason ordinary North Koreans aren't frank is they are afraid of being punished. The author says he travelled all over China before and after the Cultural Revolution, when things were much the same, so of course he understands this. “The only thing that the author found shocking is the surprising similarity between North Korea today and the Chinese interior before Deng [Xiaoping]'s reforms and opening up.”

“In fact fear of punishment is only a secondary reason for their not being frank, the basic reason is their fierce national pride. But fierce national pride is a common feature of all civilised countries,” is often manipulated, eg Japanese denial of atrocities in WW2. He says Chinese ethnic Koreans share this pride, he was told by young Koreans in a Korean restaurant in Dandong that the whole of northeast China is ours, in the Koguryo period there was no civilisation like ours. The author replied that the northeast was in fact formerly Manchuria, its original inhabitants were Manchus and Koreans have only been there 100 years at most, many came in the 1930s to flee the Japanese.

Many Korean-Chinese admire SK for its economic success but regard Kim Il-sung as a national hero and are unwilling to criticise NK publicly. But many don't want to go to NK because of its poverty, many who went to SK to work found themselves victims of discrimination, so they don't want to live there either. They told the author sincerely that China is our home. Many people take part in semi-official border trade, which is why there is less hunger near the border. A very few NKs cross the border to beg or steal food, he adds.

There used to be NK border trade in ginseng, timber, coal, scrap steel which were bartered for food, detergents, soft drinks but as the NK economic crisis has intensified few Chinese consumer goods have been imported. Forest resources are exhausted, hunger has reduced coal production...

People's freedom of movement has been restricted, just like during the Cultural Revolution, so people are unable to move around in search of food, many people are dying in mountainous areas, he says, but adds that because such areas are closed he did not see this for himself.

He quotes Chinese who have close contact with NK officials as saying most officials get the same rations as anyone else, this relative equality reduces discontent, in contrast to China where there is unrest because of great inequality of wealth. High NK officials live lives of luxury, but ordinary people aren't aware of this, so this has not affected stability.

Hunger is blamed on drought/floods, but on the Chinese side of the border crop yields are high, so it is clearly not just a matter of the weather. Chinese-Koreans who often cross the border to visit relatives blame the collective agriculture system and “eating from one big rice pot” [the slogan used to attack the Maoist system], this makes peasants are apathetic, not interested in saving crops when there is a disaster. The NK government says there is no need for reform, but has in practice relaxed its policies and allows some private plots. “If the NK government relaxes its policies further that will clearly help NK leave severe hunger behind.”

If NK adopts Chinese-style reform and opening policies, there should be no fundamental obstacle [to recovery]. In Dandong NK, SK and Chinese company managers talk business as well as getting together over karaoke, all the songs are South Korean. And in Beijing and Russia NK businessmen also negotiate deals and “take back to NK the buds of reforms and opening up.”

He also mentions an NK ship which is a floating casino moored at Dandong, which he dubs “Macau on the Yalu”. The owners of speedboats which take people towards the NK side of the river say they haven't been on board as you need to have thousands of yuan, but it comes under NK jurisdiction so you don't have to worry about the Chinese ban on gambling. However, the casino was recently closed and nobody is allowed on board, “but this shows that the degree of openness in NK can actually exceed China's”.

NK hostility to China - when the author went out on one of these speedboats they were pelted with stones from the NK side, those throwing the stones included soldiers, the stones were quite large and somebody could have been killed but nobody was hit. “Over the last few decades China had given NK vast amounts of food aid, so why are the NKs hostile to Chinese people?”

In recent years Chinese magazines have published long articles about the Korean war, including documents from ex-Soviet archives, saying Stalin and the NKs placed more importance on the Korean problem than on Taiwan, which worried the Chinese...

Later when China and the Soviet Union quarrelled over ideology and international leadership, NK often supported Moscow over Beijing, ordinary NK people became biassed against China because of media attacks.

NK became extremely unhappy when China established diplomatic relations with SK, so NK voted against Beijing [or abstained???] hosting the Olympics in 2000 [that doesn't sound right to me, can anyone confirm/comment - Michael], greatly upsetting large numbers of Chinese people.

Not only this, but NK has also quietly referred to Taiwan as the Republic of China and “honoured nation” in order to gain economic advantage [to refer to Taiwan as a “nation” is of course anathema to Beijing].

But he adds that China wants stability in the Korean peninsula to ensure its own economic stability, so it needs to cooperate with NK. “Therefore China's relations with NK will strengthen”.

He is scathing about the Juche ideology, which he says is similar to China's Great Leap Forward theories. “China's 'Great Leap Forward'” resulted in famine and NK's 'Juche idea' has had the same result.“ But he notes that NK remains wedded to Juche and they have attacked China for taking the capitalist road (a note adds that this has since largely ceased).

Although NK is a closed society most North Koreans are aware that living standards in China are much higher. They also tend to blame China but if China hadn't provided them with large scale food aid it would have nothing to eat, and the results would be unimaginable. ”But China which is itself not wealthy could not take care of NK's 24 million people and has no duty to do so. To basically end North Korea's hunger, North Korea must rely on itself“ is how the article ends.

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But much more better/interesting is this article from World Magazine (www.worldmag.com), March 5:

 

Room with a view

ASIA: An American businessman gets a bird's-eye look at what may be regime change underway in North Korea | by Priya Abraham

American businessman Roy Browning has a front-row seat for the unusual signs of change emerging from North Korea. Mr. Browning lives in a high-rise in Dandong on the Chinese side of the border with North Korea, overlooking the Yalu River that separates the two countries. He has been there for three years, but in recent months the usually well-sealed border has come unglued, admitting more North Koreans into China. Mr. Browning has talked with several businessmen and North Korean officials, accompanied by KGB-style secret police.

"Trade across the border with civilian officials has increased dramatically in the last few months, and our connections have also increased in frequency," he told WORLD on Feb. 21. "We have even been able to talk to some very senior officials with their secret police looking on. This is very strange and implies that things are loosening up but with a lot of apprehension."

Why the sudden activity? Mr. Browning hears from his sources that "the state is being increasingly controlled by the military and the higher ranking civilian officials due to the strain that a possible Bush invasion was causing," he said.

Those rumors intensified late last year after reports that portraits of Mr. Kim, which dominate Pyongyang's public buildings, had been removed. Insiders claimed the portraits and other Kim images were removed to be cleaned, or because their presence had drawn comparisons to Saddam Hussein. But South Korean officials took them seriously enough to dust off decades-old contingency plans for civil emergency in the event of a collapse to the north.

Any such retooling of Mr. Kim's likeness is significant in the country, which has built a cult of personality around the Kims. Great Leader Kim Il Sung remains president for life, even after his 1994 death. His son, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, is supposed to command singular loyalty. The country's goals of reunifying with South Korea and defeating U.S. "imperialism" hinge on the presence of an all-powerful leader. One of the younger Kim's sayings is, "To expect victory in a revolution without a leader is as good as wishing for a flower where there is no sun."

But the persistence of the rumors are significant, given North Korea's announcement in February that it has nuclear weapons. Activists and observers used to probing the communist country's idiosyncrasies believe a dramatic change is slowly underway, one that is shifting power away from dictator Kim Jong Il and toward a cabal of military generals.

Mr. Browning first learned last November that portraits of Kim Jong Il had been taken down from public display across the country. Though official denials quickly followed, his sources are adamant the portraits were removed. He also noticed that North Koreans he met coming across the border were hiding their "Dear Leader" pins inside their coats instead of displaying them over their hearts as mandated.

From his 12th-floor apartment window, where the Oregon resident lives while overseeing a semiconductor equipment business he co-owns in the city, he further noticed more-than-usual cargo-truck convoys waiting to cross the border on the bridge leading to Dandong, the only land-link between the two nations. Before, there were about 10 to 15 trucks a week; now between 50 and 70 lined up each day.

As first reported by The Oregonian, Mr. Browning also has seen North Korean trucks driving within Dandong, identifiable by their number plates and exhaust fumes that smell like burning tires—literally, he said, because North Korea recycles tires for fuel. Then there are the businessmen he has met, buying rice, vegetables, and other food and even computers, while selling their own products. From all these signs, he speculates that momentous change is afoot.

"I believe that we will see a slow disintegration followed by a revolution, although the revolution may not even be visible to outsiders," he said. "It is difficult to see things happening even as close as we are because of the strict control the country has. If you can imagine Nazi Germany in 1939 and then make it much worse, you will then have the situation in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea."

 

While Mr. Browning is seeing physical changes unfold before his eyes, others are coming to similar conclusions watching other signs. Seoul-based Korean-American human-rights activist Douglas Shin has been tracking blips in North Korea's usually predictable propaganda. From subtle rewordings in the state press and from reports Mr. Shin receives from a high-ranking North Korean official, he believes a band of military generals has already sidelined Mr. Kim.

Most unusual, Mr. Shin said, is Kim Jong Il's virtual disappearance from the public eye. "This kind of thing on this scale has never happened before," Mr. Shin said. "Kim Jong Il has never spent more than five months away from outsiders' view." Yet even photos released of Mr. Kim with Chinese envoy Wang Jiarui in late February appear dated. The same entourage from Mr. Wang's North Korea visit last year is shown.

Mr. Shin said official news organs are increasingly highlighting subordinates more than Kim Jong Il. At a Feb. 2-3 meeting of the "General Onward March for the Songun Revolution," a pow-wow of the Communist Party leadership introduced 10 years ago by Mr. Kim to reinforce military-socialist indoctrination, the rhetoric shifted slightly away from praising Mr. Kim alone and toward the military leadership around him. An editorial in the country's state-run newspaper, the Rodong Shinmun, carried "very unfamiliar terminology," Mr. Shin said. "It said all the people have to protect and follow—usually Kim Jong Il—but this time also the head leadership. It was a plural concept with Kim Jong Il at the peak."

Mr. Shin is persuaded enough by such signs to believe the military generals are gradually consolidating their power. He speculates that they found themselves in a dilemma. On one side the United States was pressuring North Korea to disarm. On the other, Mr. Kim feared he would lose power if he did give up nuclear weapons. After all, his belligerent rule is necessary to project the urgency of defending North Korea against an impending U.S. invasion. The only solution, Mr. Shin believes, was to sideline Mr. Kim. North Korea's declaration that it has nuclear weapons could be, he said, the generals "bluffing for the last time."

Still, decoding secretive North Korea remains an intensely speculative parlor game. Tim Peters of Helping Hands Korea, a group assisting North Korean refugees, also hears growing chatter from his contacts about changes in Pyongyang. They confirm the increased border activity Mr. Browning has witnessed, but note that while approved forays into China have multiplied, a parallel clamp-down on refugees escaping North Korea has occurred on both sides of the border.

While Mr. Peters believes Mr. Kim is suffering challenges to his rule, he is not sure the bouffant-haired dictator has lost control just yet. "I don't think we should underestimate the staying power of this regime," he said. "Not because Kim Jong Il is so powerful, but because of the [indoctrination]. There's a joke that if any two people had a conversation that was even remotely critical of the government, they would both inform the authorities."

In the meantime, Mr. Browning has noticed another odd development across the Yalu. North Koreans seem to be re-occupying an abandoned village just outside of border-town Sinuiju. That is unusual because the village is too close to the river, he said. Anyone wanting to escape could swim across, or almost walk across, when the water level is low.

He said North Korean businessmen and regime officials are in evidence in Dandong at least once a week, compared to six months ago, when he only heard about one or two showing up. Asking about Mr. Kim's hold on power, now that rumors circulate, is a touchy subject. "They'll just clam up—they won't say a word," he said. "Something's going on, but it's difficult to find out." With North Korea suggesting last week it may be ready to resume six-party talks over its nuclear arsenal, knowing just who holds the levers of power will be crucial for the United States and its allies. —•