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No sunshine yet over North
Korea
By Andrei Lankov
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.
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.
(Copyright 2005
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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