SPEAKING
FREELY Kim
Jong-eun prepares balancing
act By Chris
Green and Sokeel Park
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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Change, the world
keeps hearing, is afoot in North Korea. There has
been a great deal of discussion of the
significance of Kim Jong-eun's new PR style, quite
a lot about how seriously the
regime takes economic
liberalization, plenty on the meaning of signs
that the Chosun People's Army's role in the
economy is being curtailed, and extraordinary
amounts about how long change might be allowed to
proceed before it inspires a hard-line backlash.
Yet despite the apparent diversity of
views on offer, the one assumption running through
practically all the analysis has been that any
attempt at economic reform will ultimately mean
North Korea bringing collapse on itself, and that
therefore signs of change must mean the regime is
either insincere or making a huge mistake. Or
possibly both.
But what about the notion
that reform under Kim Jong-eun might actually
succeed?
It is time to move on from the
debate about whether the regime is preparing for
change or not. Information received by these
authors has revealed time and time again that
change is coming. The first signs of North Korea's
"new economic management system" were received by
the Seoul-based Daily NK back on July 11, and
since then, in-country sources have cited elements
of the policy on a daily basis in calls received
from places as distant as Chongjin, Hyesan, Musan
and Shinuiju, not to mention the corridors of
power in Pyongyang.
Of course, North Korea
watchers are right to be cynical. After all, we've
been here before, and the mere news of a policy's
existence is by no means news of its success. Not
only that; when North Korea actually implements
the policy on October 1 it will be taking just the
first small step along a very long tightrope.
Nevertheless, a close reading of the country's
domestic environment still gives us reason to
doubt the reflex assumption that Kim's balancing
act is doomed to fail.
First and foremost,
there is the fact that members of the North Korean
elite don't defect. Why would they? Despite the
riches and infinitely preferable business
environment on offer in the South, on arrival such
people would still have to start absolutely from
scratch in a completely foreign environment. In
that sense defection is the ultimate leveler, and
for the North Korean nomenklatura the notion of
arriving in South Korea with neither the capital
nor networks they spent a lifetime building is
very unattractive.
We are not just talking
about the top elite. Everyone who is mid-level and
up, about 10% of the population, rationally
assumes that they would suffer greatly in the
chaos of collapse and absorption by the Seoul
government. Thus, literally anybody who is anybody
will unstintingly work to maintain the system.
These people usually do want reform within the
system for the sake of their individual benefit,
but they don't want to change the system itself.
Partly this is a result of North Korea's
highly discriminatory system of political
apartheid, known as songbun, which ascribes
life opportunities based on ancestral political
loyalty to Kim Il-sung. Songbun means that
all ganbu - senior officials - tend to come
from whole extended families of regime
apparatchiks. Naturally, this raises the costs of
collapse for all concerned, for it will not just
be you that loses status and privilege, faces
prosecution or even meets a violent end.
Sure, there is the other 90% to worry
about, but for years now the Chinese authorities
have been falling over themselves to provide
practical blueprints on how to co-opt the massed
ranks using gradual economic improvement without
conferring political liberties. Naturally, the
tiny number who might consider challenging the
established order can be coerced by force of arms,
something the North Korean regime is more than
willing to do.
As if to prove that
economic liberalization does not require all forms
of opening to come at once, our interviews with
recent defectors confirm that security measures in
regions bordering China have been ramped up
significantly under Kim Jong-eun.
As
implausible as it might seem at the time of
writing, if the regime continues to balance
economic liberalization and maintaining political
control in this manner, the expanding North Korean
middle-class may even start to believe in the idea
of reunification on better terms than they would
obtain from system collapse.
Then, Kim
Il-sung-era propaganda themes of reunification
from a position of strength would become useful,
since the inevitable lack of progress on such a
negotiated reunification could be blamed on South
Korean obstinacy, meaning that popular frustration
would be directed at Seoul rather than Pyongyang.
Elsewhere, even the regional environment
is favorable. Kim Jong-il took over from his
father in precarious circumstances characterized
by former president Jimmy Carter's last-minute
intervention to defuse nuclear tensions, the
aftermath of the collapse of world communism and
the normalization of relations between China and
South Korea in 1992. He responded with the
military-first policy and nuclear weapons
development.
Conversely, Kim Jong-eun has
come to power in a relatively placid environment,
and surely recognizes that longer-term threats are
going to come from within. Potential efforts at
economic reform would be unstintingly supported by
the Russian and Chinese governments, both of whom
are willing to offer investment without a whiff of
political reform or progress on human rights.
Beijing would like nothing more than for
North Korea to emerge from modest reforms as a
more stable, less petulant bulwark against US
regional ambitions, and is increasingly willing to
gently point it out.
It is true that US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made clear at
the APEC Summit in Vladivostok this month that the
US won't embrace a reforming Pyongyang without
movement on denuclearization. But so what? The
North Korean leadership is rather reticent to
become even more dependent on China, but relations
with Russia are getting better, and next year's
occupant of the Blue House in Seoul is bound to be
more friendly than the incumbent Lee Myung-bak.
Park Geun-hye, the conservative
presidential candidate, has pledged to talk to
Pyongyang, while her progressive opponent, Moon
Jae-in, has vowed to turn back on the tap of
unconditional aid that flowed northward during the
Sunshine Policy era (1998-2007). In short, aid
from Washington is now an option for Kim Jong-eun
to exploit, rather than a necessity.
Of
course it won't be easy. Even though the North
Korean leadership is aiming at the low-hanging
fruits of authoritarian state capitalism, there
are myriad obstacles in the way. Kim Jong-il
bequeathed his son a rotten hand of cards: a
population disillusioned by any form of government
intervention in the economy, a state and party
apparatus riven with corruption, and a bloated
military that represents a million-man barrier to
meaningful change. And that is without getting
started on the industrial, legal, financial and
communications infrastructure in North Korea, all
of which will be highly inadequate for years to
come no matter what policy is unveiled on October
1.
However, Kim Jong-eun is not yet 30
years old. What is his alternative? He clearly
recognizes that grassroots marketization,
increasingly uncontrollable information flows and
the steadily declining power of the North Korean
state mean that it would be futile to carry on
with his father's politics for another half
century in the implausible hope that he might get
to pass on power to his own favored son.
Economic liberalization is a proactive way
to break out of this doomed spiral, and even if
the regime falls off the tightrope, collapse
following an honest attempt at change will likely
earn him and his handbag-toting young wife a
softer landing than yet more full-blooded
repression.
In other words, Kim Jong-eun
already knows that even if you can't be a Deng
Xiaoping, it's better to be a Mikhail Gorbachev
than a Muammar Gaddafi.
Chris
Green is the Manager of International Affairs
for Daily NK, an online publication covering
internal North Korean affairs based in Seoul.
Sokeel Park is Research and Strategy
Analyst for Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), a
US-based NGO working for the North Korean
people.
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please click here
if you are interested in contributing. Articles
submitted for this section allow our readers to
express their opinions and do not necessarily meet
the same editorial standards of Asia Times
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