COMMENT Kim Jong-eun should fear
Sunshine By Andrei Lankov
Whatever policy towards North Korea will
be chosen by the new South Korean government
following the December 19 presidential election,
it seems clear that it will be significantly
softer than that followed by the Lee Myung-bak
administration.
Right now it appears that
Park Geun-hye, the candidate of the moderate
right, has better chance of winning, but it is
unlikely that she will continue with the hardline
policy of her predecessor.
This looming
dovish turn is likely to annoy some people on the
political right in South Korea. They often vilify
aid to, and cooperation with North Korea as
"appeasement", and they point to the obvious lack
of reciprocity in North-South relations. It is
stated that the money earned by Pyongyang through exchanges
with the South is used to
strengthen North Korean leader Kim Jong-eun's
rule.
These accusations have within them a
kernel of truth. In few, if any, cases have
interactions between North and South Korea been
equal. Much of these interactions are officially
termed "economic exchanges", but in most cases
they are heavily subsidized by the South Korean
government. To be blunt, without direct or
indirect subsidies neither the Kaesong industrial
complex, nor the now defunct Keumgang and Kaesong
city tours would be viable economically.
It is also true that the North Korean
government takes the lion's share of all the
"profits" from such "economic cooperation"
projects, then re-distributing this income as it
sees fit. It is indeed likely that many secret
police in North Korea have been paid indirectly by
the South Korean taxpayers.
However,
things are not so simple as all that. Economic
exchanges do not merely fill the coffers of the
regime, but also introduce dangerous knowledge
about the outside world to North Koreans who are
involved.
A North Korean seamstress in a
Kaesong textiles factory has a South Korean
manager to whom she has to talk every day. When
the Kaesong city tours were in operation, the
entire city of Kaesong could see busloads of South
Koreans whose behaviour and dress clearly
demonstrated that they were not merely the
enslaved, downtrodden pawns of US imperialism. The
same can be said about virtually any interaction
between North and South Koreans.
For
decades, the North Korean government has insisted
very shrilly that North Koreans "live lives
without envy worldwide" and enjoy extraordinary
material prosperity. The outside world was alleged
to be a living hell, a veritable inferno of human
suffering, with South Korea the worst of this
world. These claims were important because the
North Korean government justified its right to
rule through its alleged ability to deliver
material prosperity and economic growth.
Unfortunately for the North Korean elite,
this is exactly the area where their failure has
been most spectacular.
Once the most
industrially advanced region of continental East
Asia, North Korea is now a basket case, hopelessly
lagging behind its neighbors. Therefore, knowledge
of the outside world and foreign lifestyles is
understandably very dangerous politically, and the
North Korean government has gone to great lengths
to hide from its citizens the scale of the
economic successes of the outside world
(especially, tremendous economic success of South
Korea).
However, spontaneous
inter-personal exchanges - an unavoidable product
of the economic interactions - are undermining
this policy of enforced ignorance about the
outside world.
The spread of dangerous
knowledge is something that we, of course, should
welcome. If the common North Koreans and,
especially, lower strata of elite (those with no
vested interest in keeping the present system
going) learn about the yawning gap between the
North and South, they are highly likely to demand
massive changes.
This may mean revolution,
but it may also create internal pressure for
reforms among lower levels of the elite, thus
pushing Pyongyang towards abandoning its current
anachronistic system. Either way, the spread of
information will put North Korean decision-makers
under considerable pressure from within, and this
is the best way to ensure that North Korea will
start changing.
It might be argued that
information might be pushed into the country
through various means (for instance. through
broadcasts, leaflets and the like). Though such
information operations are already being
undertaken, they are part of what is termed
"psychological warfare" and are likely to be seen
as such by North Koreans themselves as well. When
a North Korean sees a leaflet, she understands
that this leaflet was sent to influence her mind,
and this understanding (combined with ingrained
mistrust for all propaganda) makes her somewhat
skeptical about leaflet content. Thus effect is
less pronounced than the impact of spontaneous and
uncontrolled exchanges which result from personal
interactions day-to-day.
This author grew
up in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, and nearly
everyone around me listened to foreign radio
broadcasts, but exposure to other kinds of Western
information was quite limited (it was a largely
working class social milieu, after all). News from
foreign broadcasts was discussed and taken rather
seriously, but it was still widely understood that
we were dealing with propaganda meant for us, not
with some impartial news source.
At the
same time, stories told by those few Soviet people
who had had interactions with Westerners were the
object of much interest, and were treated as more
reliable and authentic source of information about
the outside world. There is little reason to
believe that North Koreans react to a similar
situation any differently.
In some cases,
unintended consequences follow on even from events
planned and micro-managed by the North Korean
authorities themselves. A perfect example is the
1989 visit of Im Su-gyong to Pyongyang (then she
was a prominent radical Left-wing student
activist, and now she is a member of the South
Korean National Assembly). Im Su-gyong went to
North Korea in defiance of the South Korean
National Security Law in order to take part in the
International Youth and Student Festival (then
being held in Pyongyang).
Im was, and
judging by her recent controversial remarks
perhaps still is, a moderate sympathizer of the
North Korean regime. Therefore she proved herself
willing to follow the scripts produced by the
North Korean agitprop for her. But her
unrestrained and spontaneous enthusiasm and her
unusual (by the then North Korean standards) style
of dress was fascinating and indeed shocking (in a
very positive way) for common North Koreans.
Many North Korean refugees have told me
that Im's visit was the first event that seriously
made them reconsider the officially sanctioned
image of South Korea as a near starving colony of
the US. If such an impact could be produced by a
zealous leftist activist in her early 20s, what
are the results of interactions with far more
normal and mature South Koreans.
Thus,
contrary to what is often stated, economic
cooperation between North and South Korea is not
merely a way to appease Kim Jong-eun and to line
the regime's pockets with the hard-earned won of
South Korean taxpayers. The actual impact is far
more ambivalent than such rhetoric leads one to
believe.
The South-North cooperation means
exchanges, and exchanges are creating ferment for
change which in due time might bring a radical
transformation to the long-suffering land of North
Korea.
Therefore, this correspondent hopes
that in the next few years we will see a revival
of the economic interaction and interpersonal
exchanges between two Korean states. This will be
good for the common Koreans, and not that good for
the Kim family and their close henchmen.
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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