Conditions unripe for North Korea revolt
By Andrei Lankov
North Korean watchers are well aware that the past few years have been marked
by recurrent talks about the coming collapse of the country.
The talk became louder in late 2008 when Kim Jong-il suddenly disappeared from
public view only to reappear a few months later, visibly fragile and aged (it
is now widely believed he had suffered a stroke).
A next wave of "collapsist" speculation rose in early 2010, after a badly
planned and poorly executed currency reform. Indeed, the first few weeks of the
year 2010 were a time of utter social confusion inside North Korea.
Markets were closed, the food situation deteriorated, people were seriously
angry. For a brief time, even high-level North Korean
officials were annoyed enough to openly complain to foreign contacts about
government policy.
However, in both cases the collapsists were proven wrong. The North Korean
regime has survived all challenges thus far. Like it or not, it will probably
survive many more challenges to come.
There is little doubt that in the long run the current regime in Pyongyang is
unsustainable. It cannot reform itself, it is stuck with an obsolete and
grossly inefficient economic system, it is increasingly lagging behind its main
rivals and neighbors. The history of world revolutions has also shown us that
in such cases political revolutions can erupt with little or no prior warning.
Nonetheless, it seems at the time of writing that the North Korean regime is
relatively stable.
Contrary to commonly assumptions, revolutions do not happen when people are
really desperate. Most revolutions have occurred at a time of steady
improvement in political freedoms and living standards, as the recent Arab
Spring has further proved. The Arab revolutions began in Tunisia, one of the
wealthiest Arab states (without oil), and then spread to Libya and Egypt where
incomes may be lower, but the population is by no means destitute.
People start revolutions when they know alternatives to the current system,
when they believe things might and should be better.
Another important condition for a successful (or even just attempted)
revolution is the existence of some organized political resistance, or at least
some networks which might become the core of such resistance. At the very
least, people should be able to talk politics among their most trusted friends.
Revolutions seldom start in brutally repressive societies. It is not incidental
that Cambodia's Khmer Rouge - arguably the most repressive and murderous
government in modern history - was able to rule for four years before being
overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, not by any outbreak of local
resistance.
The Khmer Rouge regime managed in that time to slaughter some 20% of the
population, yet encountered almost no problems with local opposition. This is
perhaps understandable: when people believe that any challenge to authority
means immediate death or, at the very best, long-term imprisonment, they
usually keep their silence. In such situations, resistance is rightly seen as a
form of painful and meaningless suicide.
Another - and often overlooked - condition is required for a revolution: the
existence of divisions within the ruling elite and/or its insecurity. Some
members of the elite must feel insecure and uncertain about the future, while
others might be actively involved in anti-government activities, driven by
idealism and compassion for the people or by opportunism and lust for power.
Contrary to popular perception, a revolution is seldom led by what Frantz Fanon
called "the wretched of the Earth". The 1917 Russian revolutionaries might have
described themselves as the representatives of workers and poor farmers. But
Vladimir Lenin was a son of high-level civil servant, whilst Leon Trotsky's
father was believed to be the richest Jewish landowner in all of Russia. As a
matter of fact, even the founding father of North Korea, Generalissimo Kim
Il-sung, was not a member of the downtrodden classes but rather came from the
lowest strata of the old elite.
The same is applicable to the anti-communist democratic revolutions and mass
movements of Eastern Europe. Even in Poland where the workers played a major
role in bringing the communist system to collapse, they were organized and
represented by anti-communist intellectuals.
In other countries of East Europe, resistance ideology developed in the
intellectual circles. It was the professors, doctors, even minor government
officials who were critical of the communist authoritarianism and kept belief
that things can be better. In Moscow of the 1960s, the proverbial Moscow
kitchen of critical minded intelligentsia were the hotbed of dissent which two
or three decades later conquered the streets and influenced the thinking of
many a party bureaucrat.
If we have a look at the situation in North Korea, we will see that none of the
conditions for a successful revolution are present.
To start with, North Koreans are not aware of alternatives to their existence.
It is true that rumors about the impressive success of China and the
unbelievable affluence of South Korea are gradually spreading in the country.
In due time therefore, North Koreans will discover that such alternatives
exist. At present, however, it seems that such destructive knowledge has yet to
spread wide enough or produce sufficiently strong impact on the average North
Korean's view of the world.
Needless to say, North Korea has no information technology-based social
networks which played such an important role in Middle Eastern revolutions. It
is the world's only country without the Internet (connection to the Web is
allowed only for foreign missions, and top government agencies), and this is
not incidental: the North Korean government had been aware about the Internet's
subversive potential even before it learned of the events in the Middle East.
To a certain extent, official propaganda has also contributed towards
mitigating the impact of the slowly spreading word about South Korea's
affluence. The North Korean propagandists used to represent South Korea as a
land of hunger and poverty, but they do not do this anymore.
Rather they draw attention to real shortcomings of South Korean society -
income inequality, environmental degradation and the like. For these purposes
they widely quote publications of South Korea's left-leaning press outlets.
This is unlikely to work for long time, but for now it seems to cushion the
impact of the spreading information about the outside world.
The North Korean state has always understood that the emergence of independent
social networks should be prevented at all cost, and the state has been quite
successful at breaking horizontal connections between individuals. The Soviet
government did not mind when its subjects made chess clubs and folk song
societies, but North Korean authorities have always been very careful in
rooting out all kinds of uncontrolled social activity.
To make matters worse, mutual distrust is pervasive in the North. Though in
recent decade or two, the scale of political terror has seemingly subsided,
North Koreans are still deadly afraid to discuss anything political even with
their most trusted friends and family members - and this fear is by no means
unjustified. This fear also means that most North Koreans assume that any
attempt at resistance is futile, since it is likely to crushed, immediately and
brutally.
This is also a reason why no independent-minded intelligentsia has managed to
develop in North Korea so far. It seems that there are no "Pyongyang kitchen"
whose activity was reminiscent of the "Moscow kitchens" of the late Soviet era.
Even if North Korean professors or engineers talk politics, they do it with
much more caution than would be a norm in the Soviet Union of the 1960s or
1970s, in the relatively permissive times of Leonid Brezhnev.
The North Korean elite remains unified. These people have no intention of
rocking the boat. They assume (correctly, perhaps) that a revolution would
likely to be followed by unification with the prosperous South. For the current
North Korean elite, this will mean the complete loss of power and privileges or
perhaps even death at the hands of lynch mobs.
Rightly or wrongly, these people assume that regime collapse will bring
complete ruin to them and their families. Therefore no counter-elite currently
exists in the North, and everybody who is somebody remembers an old maxim:
"Gentlemen, we should hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang
separately."
Therefore conditions for a popular revolution, Tunisian style, seem to be
currently absent from North Korea. Things will likely change eventually. The
regime is gradually losing control over the population, dangerous horizontal
connections are developing (thanks, in large part, to the manifold activities
of the booming unofficial economy) and information about life overseas is
getting inside the country.
Nevertheless, if the North Korean government is sufficiently careful, if it
avoids reforms (emulating China seems to be an especially dangerous idea) and
if it remains ready to use brutal force against all opposition, it is likely to
stay in power for some time to come.
Nobody can predict how long this time will be. One cannot rule out that
eventual demise of Kim Jong-il and subsequent succession will trigger an
outbreak of power struggle which, in turn, will launch train of events leading
to regime collapse. At the same time, it is also highly possible - and indeed
more likely - that the regime will survive this challenge and will continue
essentially unchanged for another decade or two.
So, in 2020 we might still face Kim Jong-eun's North Korea which will not be
much different from North Korea we see nowadays - and every bit as troublesome
for its neighbors. One should be prepared for a collapse, but one should not
bet on this collapse happening any time soon.
Andrei Lankov is an associate professor at Kookmin University in Seoul,
and adjunct research fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian
Studies, Australian National University. He graduated from Leningrad State
University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea.
He has published books and articles on Korea and North Asia.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
