North Korea might be changing its tune:
There’s a more significant explosion going on up north and it has nothing to do with loud noises and radioactivity. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un recently gave a speech that talked about making peace with South Korea and opening up the economy. In the last few months more North Korean officials have been in China looking into how China reformed its economy over the last three decades and more foreign economic experts have been flying into North Korea for discrete discussions with their North Korean counterparts. Something is up, but one of the few open indications is the recent move by North Korea propaganda officials to drop the use of terms (like “juche”) that emphasize self-reliance and opposition to foreign trade.
I wondered about that talk of lowering tensions. This may be more about North Korea than suckering the South Koreans and the rest of the West into providing more aid to prop up the elites in the north.
Remember, in the middle of last decade, the North Koreans realized they couldn't afford their army, and so turned to a policy of bolstering the secret police to keep the army and people in line and building nuclear weapons to keep foreign enemies at bay. The people in general and the army got the shaft under this plan.
The obvious problem is that it leaves a whole lot of unhappy young men with guns and training to contemplate how their families are doing and ponder who is to blame.
Kim Jong-Un apparently recognized that problem and restored the position of the army in the pie-sharing exercise. This left the people with the shaft under this plan, but they aren't organized or trained to use weapons.
The obvious problem with this plan is the problem that led to the strategy of spooks and nukes in the first place--there isn't enough money to support that large army.
Unless, North Korea's rulers want to demobilize a lot of troops--which would deny the government a lot of cheap labor for non-military work--the only solution is to get more money. Since the West seems tired of playing the aid game, the North Koreans may have finally accepted they must earn it. And the Chinese may have finally convinced Kim Jong-Un that the only way to earn it is to follow China's path.
I'm relieved that the North Koreans didn't choose the option of rolling the dice and hoping to go down in a blaze of death or glory by trying to capture Seoul with their large if fragile army.
China's path may not be so good in the long run in keeping the communist party elites in charge, but North Korea has the choice of a problem now or a potential problem decades down the line. Perhaps the North Korean rulers aren't completely immune to reality, after all. Times are desperate, right?
Whether they can reform successfully in time is another question altogether.
