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COMMENT
North Korea: The smell of a
rat
By Thor May
North Korea
is going to hack off a bit of its backside called
Sinuiju, and call it a capitalist enclave.
Does
nobody smell a rat? The air is full of oohs and aahs,
admiration, a smacking of lips. So a blip on the North
Korean-Chinese border is going to be the new Hong Kong.
How clever. Sinuiju will have different laws, issue
passports, give foreigners full citizen rights. A
fast-talking Chinese businessman is going to be its
supremo. Wow. North Korea's leadership class are going
to transform from international pariahs to international
darlings, innocent of xenophobia, secretiveness and all
the other qualities that have made them smelly.
Now it is true that in politics good things can
and sometimes do come out of warped ambitions by
unlovable power gluttons. That is, there can be
collateral benefit as well as collateral damage. But let
us not get our illusions mixed in the North Korean
equation. What is really going to happen in Sinuiju?
Well the bit about a Hong Kong-cum-Bahrain of Northeast
Asia is a long shot. Other things are more certain.
The first certainty is that almost the entire
population of the Sinuiju district is going to be
disinherited of their land, their homes, their
community, their identity. Yang Bin, the new supremo,
says that they will gradually be "relocated". (Around
200,000 people according to Chosun Ilbo newpaper,
conveniently designated as mostly military personnel.
Who knows? Another report said 500,000). In any case,
they are impediments, the unclean masses, and given the
dynamics of that country, will effectively become
refugees within North Korea. Since the North Korean
leadership has a sudden interest in international image,
they may even finesse the resettlement plan in public.
This is a political clique that has let millions of its
own citizens starve to death, so we can be sure that the
actual future of Sinuiju's real citizens will be bleak.
It is striking that not a single news report or
editorial seems to have picked up on this impending
tragedy. All fascination is with the visa-free access
for carpet-baggers from anywhere but North Korea.
Another certainty is that the Sinuiju experiment
is not being mounted for the future benefit of Korea,
divided or united. Like Hong Kong, it may turn out to be
beneficial sometime in the future. Or it may morph into
a strategic nightmare. Regardless, that is collateral to
the real interests involved. The real interests of
course are those of the ruling clique in Pyongyang. Cult
of the Dear Leader notwithstanding, it is a fair bet
that the overwhelming majority of North Koreans would
like to tear that clique limb from limb and roast them
over a slow fire.
The economic-military mess
that is North Korea has reached a point where it can't
be much fun even for the dictators. When you have to
travel for 24 days in an armoured train just to visit
the neighboring potentate, well, the most armor-plated
egos must take a hit. Heck, you are not even welcome to
spend your ill-gotten gains in the 21st century's real
palaces. That is, you can't strut in those international
luxury hotels which live off the corporate criminal
classes and respectable political scoundrels from richer
climates. I'll lay five bucks to a container load of
soju that Yang Bin has seen this crying need of the Dear
Leader & Friends. He has flogged them a dream, to
own their own pleasure dome, uncontaminated by dour,
hungry Koreans, where the world's glitterati can come to
visit and admire. Still more practically, when the real
working classes of Korea come baying at Pyongyang's door
with axes, Kalashnikovs and bombs, the Dear Leader can
scamper to his helipad and make a swift hop to a
bolthole called Sinuiju where North Korean law and
lower-class North Koreans are not welcome. There is an
old Chinese proverb, no doubt familiar to Yang Bin, that
a clever rabbit always has three burrows.
Well,
what are Sinuiju's chances at glory anyway? In a
rational, equitable world they would be pretty poor. A
hundred years ago you would have said that about Hong
Kong too, since it was little more than a back door
anchorage for the drug-running British empire. As it
turned out there was more money in opium than any
foreigner has made out of China since, regardless of the
damage it did to mere Chinese citizens. Let's hope that
Sinuiju's contribution is a bit more benign. On the face
of it, things don't look good. Not only is the North
Korean economy a shambles, most of Manchuria's economy
is also a shambles. The heavy industrial cities of
northern China like Shenyang, Changchun and Harbin are a
rust belt of polluting, decaying, state-owned factories.
Frantic attempts by the Beijing and regional
administrations to rid themselves of these liabilities
have dissolved into endemic corporate fraud, terrifying
levels of unemployment, and frequent, sometimes violent,
protests by thousands of ex-workers who are looking
poverty in the face.
The refrain we hear from
Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul, Pyongyang and Moscow is that a
Eurasian railroad from Busan to the European seaboard
will resurrect this whole region. And Sinuiju of course
will be a handy rail junction on the magic express
train. Well maybe. The El Dorado theme song from Dear
Leaders, East and West, has some odd flat notes. For
example, the real dynamic is supposed to grow from an
iron umbilical cord between Europe and Japan. The
trouble is, this umbilical cord has been there for
decades - and rusting. Japanese companies prefer to send
their stuff to Europe by ship, thanks very much, even if
the paper calculations say it takes much longer. Why
isn't Vladivostok the Singapore of the North Pacific? It
is not only the real rail-head of the trans-Siberian
railroad, it has an excellent harbor, ice-free for most
of the year. Vladivostok is only a short boat hop from
Yokohama. Why would any sane Japanese businessman deal
in a cut for regional Korean and Chinese pirates when he
can ship directly to Vladivostok and just pay off the
Russian Bear in vodka? The answer, almost certainly and
sadly, is in the shortcomings of the Russian rail system
and its masters.
No champagne party in Sinuiju
is going to change that.
(Copyright Thor May
2001; all rights reserved. Republished with permission.)
Visit Thor May's website at http://thormay.net/
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