Communist Nation

Kim Jong Il meets with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Pyongyang (Times Online/KCNA Special/EPA)

Yes, it has been a while since I have been regularly posting news, and maybe today is a good day to start. Some news has come from North Korea, although nothing really earth-shattering.

North Korea May Be Open to Talks (New York Times) – In a chilling turn of events, Kim is willing to go back to the table and discuss his nuke program if things go nicely in the bilateral talks. The news is so fantastic, we can all break out the Champagne and dance in the end zone now that Kim is finally cooperating with the International community:

SEOUL — The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, told the visiting prime minister of China that his government was ready to return to six-nation talks on its nuclear weapons program if it sees progress in bilateral talks with the United States, state-run media in North Korea and China said Tuesday.

Oh wait. It is the same song and dance. Kim tosses the bait with promises, gets his goodies and goes right back in his rat hole to do it all over again.

And again.

And again.

Some seem very optimistic, yet in my opinion, is wide-yawn inducing. Kim’s regime needs the aid badly, and this nuke program is his ace in the hole as it always has been from the get-go:

[...] Mr. Kim’s latest comments provided the clearest sign yet that Pyongyang was eager to return to the negotiating table after months of rising tensions over its nuclear and missile tests earlier this year.

But that process, analysts say, is bound to be complicated. North Korea has repeatedly used negotiations over ending its nuclear weapons program as a way of extracting aid and diplomatic concessions from the outside world.

Not news there either. So this much-ballyhooed visit by the Chinese Premier is to make sure he at least has some aid flowing into his coffers as he tries to get Washington to the table. When Washington will go there to have these talks remain unclear, but one thing is for certain; this old game of cat and mouse is far from over, and Kim still has the upper hand in the end (Yes, even with the sanctions).

With the world stage trying to pry the nukes from Kim’s iron grip, some interesting analysis on the economic front from Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard:

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North Korean Prisons Have Become a System of Extortion, Refugees Say (Washington Post) – This article is a must read, and this only reinforces the long-known nature of North Korea’s growing markets. The same authors have painstakingly researched the famine, which in tuen led to the marketization of the economy, which resulted in the regime reacting to those events, including the ill-fated 2002 reforms.

I went to the East-West homepage and did not see the report, but will post it as soon as it is available.

The report says security forces in North Korea have broad discretion to detain without trial nearly anyone who buys or sells in the local markets, which have become a key source of food for a poor population that suffers from chronic malnutrition. Yet if traders can pay bribes, security officials will often leave them alone, the report says.

“This is a system for shaking people down,” said Marcus Noland, co-author of the report and deputy director of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It really looks like the work of a gang, a kind of ‘Soprano’ state. But it succeeds in keeping people repressed.”

As one can see, one better have the means to pay off officials to avoid the prison camps. So now, it appears of instead of trying to stop the market activity, it may be more lucrative to squeeze money from the population, on top of the other “traditional” camps:

The survey data analyzed by Haggard and Noland, although imperfect, is the first large-scale attempt by social scientists to paint a picture of how repression in North Korea has changed in recent years to adapt to the collapse of the country’s command-style economy and the rise of a scruffy network of private markets.

At least half the calories consumed by North Koreans now come from food sold in these markets, according to estimates by outside economists with access to North Korean and U.N. food data. And nearly 80 percent of the country’s household income derives from buying and selling in the markets, according to a study last year in the Seoul Journal of Economics.

The fundamental finding of the new report is that North Korea has reinvented its Stalinist-style gulag, which had focused on repression of political opponents. A network of smaller labor camps, Haggard and Noland say, is now aimed at controlling and collecting money from the broader population.

“The classic political gulag still exists, but increasingly labor camps are used to extract bribes,” Noland said. “My impression is that bribery and extortion have become very important to the livelihoods of local government officials.”

And why not? The regime needs to get some money somehow. This in my opinion, smells of desperation by the regime. Just how long and how broad this will go is unclear to me, but as far as I know, this has been going on for some time. Recall some other anecdotes for bribing officials to look the other way when crossing back and forth from China, upon inspections for contraband radios, media, and the rest of it. The bribes from the markets seems to be a natural extension of that.

Wherever it seems to go, the regime appears to stay where it is at while the rest of the population fights to survive. After all, man cannot eat on ideology alone. Since Kim Jong Il has failed to deliver, people have to fend for themselves however they can. In the meantime, Kim Jong Il is all about him. What is in it for him, how can he gain the maximum benefit? This is the core of his mind, and his stone-cold heart of indifference to the population may be his ultimate downfall. Not just in food, but in the way information is getting in and out of North Korea.

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Path of Succession in North growing clearer by the day (JoongAng Ilbo) – It seems the ROK government received a report that Kim Jong Eun has an important post in KWP as a “deputy director”. Where this report came from or how reliable in the information is unclear, so I will chalk it up as highly speculative. However, the poster spotted in Wonsan may be the clearest indication yet that Kim Jong Eun may be slated to take over the totalitarian regime. The article even goes as far as to date when this may take place:

The report yesterday also claimed that Kim Jong-eun’s formal succession would take place between 2010 and 2012. [...]

Again, I have no idea where those dates came from, and I will not take this for gospel either. Finally, it appears the propaganda is going into some “test markets”, because it appears the propaganda is not all-pervasive yet. Like a frog in boiling water, I am going to guess this cannot happen all at once. If this is successful remains to be seen, and truth be known, once it is official, there will be no escaping the endless propaganda.

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Tags: News, North Korea