Huh:
Bowing to necessity and Chinese pressure the North Korean economy is increasingly becoming one of privately run enterprises flourishing (because they are more efficient and provide better goods and services) while state run operations rarely improve. This leaves the government with a growing number of inefficient state-owned companies that mainly lose money. It gets worse because the employees of the dying state owned enterprises are angry (and literally cold and hungry) while those in privately owned firms are quite obviously much better off and also more troublesome (in other ways) for the government. Keeping a communist police state going requires that enough people can be policed (kept under control). With more and more state owned firms being quietly and illegally (via bribing the state appointed management) taken over by more efficient donju (entrepreneurs) the government is losing control of the economy and the people who depend on it for survival.
With political power backed by coercive and lethal force, I'm sure the rulers hope that backing up in the face of the donju is just a delaying action until the wealth of his nation improves and the state can clamp back down and throw the donju into the prison camps to rot and take their poisonous skills and history to their graves.
In related news, North Korea's birth rate is below replacement rate because of the lack of hope there; and the government is reaching down to children as young as 15 for sufficient recruits. Although in many ways the army is more of a holding pen for potentially dangerous young men than a force for protecting North Korea from invasion--or their own invasion.
But on the other hand, those young men are also holding the regime hostage by requiring the regime to spend scarce resources at least trying to keep them alive (and passive). The need by the government to keep the young men from being a threat--and a cheap source of labor while they are under government control--foiled the past North Korean plan to focus shrinking resources on nukes to deter foreign threats and the secret police to control internal threats (the people and army), a strategy I called "kooks, nukes, and spooks."
Heck, rather than worrying that the ramshackle North Korean army might capture Seoul in a war, I have more worry that Kim Jong-Un might launch a ground invasion of South Korea to get South Korea and America to kill off his potentially threatening army, counting on America and South Korea not wanting to follow that "defensive success" with an invasion of North Korea to overthrow the regime.
Although the people are so desperately poor that the chance of an uprising is out of the question as people struggle just to survive. So Western hopes and Korean regime fears are probably misplaced. I certainly have hoped that North Koreans would get to the point where they believed they had nothing to lose but their chains, but that's not usually how things work out.
Note that while much is made of North Korea not testing any warheads lately, remember that their underground facility collapsed and China is insistent that no more radiation drift across the border into China. So North Korea needs a new facility before lighting one up again. Kim may be talking not to give up nukes but to buy time to build a new facility while holding off an American air campaign aimed at his nuclear infrastructure.
So while I have little hope that the current rounds of talking will get North Korea to verifiably give up their nuclear program (although they'd be more than happy to repeat the Clinton-era deal where North Korea pretended to give up their goal of nukes in exchange for goodies), if this is just more "talk, talk" for the "die, die" part of my North Korea hopes that end in the collapse of the regime, I suppose the Trump approach is really my hoped-for policy but with more credibility to North Korea because Trump seems to really believe he can talk Kim out of his nukes. And that credibility shields a harsher American policy of squeezing North Korea while we talk. Which could avoid the risks of a military campaign against North Korea that might miss something with a nuclear warhead (and have no doubt that North Korea is using the time he has gotten to increase his supply of nuclear warhead material) that subsequently gets launched at South Korea, Japan, or even the United States if our intelligence if off.
The collapse of North Korea's government or society would have bad effects in the region, but that costly outcome seems like the least bad thing that could happen (note, I searched for the paper in the dead link in that post and fixed it).
The paper defines five factors that could indicate that collapse is coming: divisions within the elites, is the government pushing economic reforms, the state of the army (including the nuclear drive) with investments and morale, the consistency of and state of North Korea's monopoly on information that the people get, and is North Korea maintaining better relations with key foreign states.
The two additional wild cards are ruler succession (which North Korea survived) and the policy of China toward North Korea (which has become harsher, but is it harsh enough?).
Will our policy of squeezing North Korea with sanctions outpace North Korea's policy of letting state-owned enterprises wither away to save the regime?
