It Ain't Easy Being a Paranoid and Closed Dictatorship

North Korea is a purposively opaque society. Discerning its intentions - much less its motivations - inevitably leads one treading murky waters, probably much in the way Kim Jong Il's regime prefers. To paraphrase one seasoned observer I know (who has spent 2 months in North Korea once before), "Studying North Korea is like peering into a black box." Good insights into the state of affairs in Pyongyang are thus hard to come by.

But in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Lankov, a top Russian-born North Korea analyst, discusses Pyongyang's political insecurities (subscription required) and provides a bleak forecast for the prospects of change:

Pyongyang's stubborn refusal to embrace an apparently beneficial strategy of reform may seem to be driven by paranoia. But this is not the case. Considering the peculiarities of Pyongyang's situation, its current policies are perfectly rational. The North Korean elites know that the greatest threats they face are internal, not external, and that resisting reform is the most effective way to control the population.

Consider an important--and frequently overlooked--difference between North Korea today and China or Vietnam in the 1990s: North Korea borders a rich and free country that speaks the same language and shares the same culture; South Korea is, in other words, a real-life vision of what North Korea could and perhaps should be. The people of China and Vietnam, although well aware of the affluence of, say, the United States and Japan, do not feel that their experiences are directly comparable. Likewise, tiny Taiwan and Hong Kong have followed their own trajectories in the shadow of huge mainland China. But for the North Koreans, the comparison with South Korea hurts. The Bank of Korea recently estimated, for example, that per capita gross national income in the South is 17 times that in the North. By comparison, per capita gross national income in West Germany before unification was roughly double that in East Germany.

Were North Korea to reform, the disparities with South Korea would only become starker to its population. For decades, Pyongyang has based its legitimacy on its alleged ability to provide its people with a better material life. Even though for most North Koreans living well means eating rice every day, government propaganda has insisted that they enjoy one of the world's highest living standards and has presented South Korea as a land of destitution--a "living hell." It has managed to sustain the legitimacy of these claims with a self-imposed information blockade apparently unparalleled anywhere in the communist world, past or present.

Market reforms and increased foreign investment would unavoidably undermine this isolation. Many North Koreans, who have been exposed to South Korean videos and high-quality consumption goods smuggled in from China, already suspect that the official line about South Korea is misleading. But even they underestimate the extent of the government's lies. Faced with more graphic descriptions of the South's prosperity, the population would come to seriously question the North Korean regime's legitimacy. And this new-awareness, combined with the intoxicating effect of unification talk, could imbue them with the belief--possibly naive--that their problems would be easily resolved under Seoul's tutelage or by the wholesale adoption of the South Korean model. When outsiders extol the benefits of reform for North Korea, they seem to assume that a transformed Pyongyang could continue to suppress dissent by improving the living standards of the majority of the population--much as Beijing appears to have done. But the Chinese government has not had to manage the kind of burst in popular expectations that Pyongyang would face.

Can Kim's regime hold on much longer? Some argue that the current situation is untenable because North Korea's economic system is inherently inefficient and the country is incapable of meeting its most basic needs, including feeding its people. But none of this is new, and the leadership in Pyongyang has nonetheless managed to retain its grip for decades. The North Korean economy was already unsustainable in the 1970s and 1980s and has been kept afloat largely thanks to aid grants, first from the Soviet Union and then from China and South Korea. The elites have good reason to believe that with skillful diplomacy such achievements can be repeated and some aid maintained. So far, they have deftly played on fears of a possible U.S.-Chinese rivalry, as well as on Seoul's anxieties about the consequences of North Korea's implosion and the costs of unification, to secure a moderate but steady flow of assistance from their neighbors. If the aid money does dry up, mass starvation would be a risk again, but even the great famine of 1996-99, which killed as many as one million people, created no immediate domestic political challenge. Trained under the old system, deprived of opportunities to organize, and ignorant about the outside world, North Korea's starving farmers did not rebel. They just died.

Lankov does provide some glimmer of hope for, say, 30-40 years from now:

This is not to say, however, that North Korea is doomed never to change. Although the famine of the late 1990s has not prompted much political reform so far, it has had an irreversible impact on the expectations of ordinary North Koreans. The old Stalinist economy cannot be fully rebooted; even the authorities seem to care more about asserting state control over the people than about restarting the Stalinist production regime. Information from the outside world is filtering in more than the regime ever thought would be possible. Small efforts at grass-roots capitalism over the past decade have also created a new mood. The North Koreans once accepted being completely dependent on the government. Now they realize that they might be able to survive without its handouts. They make items for sale at home, trade in goods smuggled to and from China, and resell any food aid they can get their hands on. This grass-roots capitalism has created a new (slightly) rich class and changed the aspirations of the young.

Things will play out very differently in the long run, however, for aid and cooperation--as well as spontaneous exchanges with the outside world--will eventually undermine Pyongyang. They will facilitate the spread of rumors about life in South Korea and thus erode the major pillar of Kim's legitimacy. The North Koreans will gradually learn that their brethren across the border enjoy material conditions and social freedoms that would be unthinkable in North Korea, and sooner or later the masses will be tempted to join in that prosperity--and quite likely by getting rid of the government whose policies have been disastrous. This change, however, will occur in very slow motion, for North Korea's leaders are in no hurry to introduce any reforms.

There are enormous economic, political, and security benefits currently on offer to North Korea, from the US and South Korea in particular, in exchange for an admission of the scope of its nuclear program, forgoing the technical infrastructure for nuclear weapons production, and eventually handing over the actual weapons. But by far the largest hurdle for Pyongyang is not in acknowledging that it could fundamentally alter its relationship with the outside world - when Kim Jong Il hands down an order, you can bet that it's followed - it's whether it really wants to grapple with the change that would result.

For now we wait and see.