Some social experiments are harmless, and some are not. Biting off some more of this fascinating interview with North Korean expert Mitsuhiro Mimura by Jeff Baron of 38 North, this caught my attention:
JB: What’s the trajectory you’ve seen in the North Korean economy since you started going there in 1996?
MM: The first years I was there, the mid-1990s, was a time of great hunger. The people who waited for the government to help them, as it had for the previous 40 years, suffered greatly—and many perished. Those who believed in the government but decided to act independently, to survive through their own efforts—they survived. And some of them are becoming rich now.
Sounds like classic evolution – the weak die off and the strong survive. It just depends on how you define strong and weak. The question in my mind is how this will affect the North Korean culture, all the way up to the leadership and its survival, in the future. And it sounds like the North Korean leadership may be aware of the situation – from another part of the interview:
But between 1980 and 2016, there wasn’t a single Workers’ Party Congress. That coincided with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the East Bloc, the development of capitalism in China. And especially in the terrible food shortages in North Korea in the 1990s and early 2000s, as the people stopped looking to the State for what they needed to survive and instead relied on their own efforts, we saw some erosion of the formal institutions of control.
What we’ve seen from the Seventh Congress of the Korean Workers Party, held in May 2016, is a re-invigoration of the tools of control, to reinforce the importance of the group over the individual, to drill in what’s expected, demanded, of a North Korean citizen, through groups such as the Youth League and women’s groups.
Those groups are the means for the leadership to hammer home propaganda and the continuing education of youth and adults. The leadership wants citizens to identify as members of a group, ultimately, to form a national polity—and not as individuals.
So they’re trying to control or even snuff out the elements of independence that had to be developed in order to survive. While it’s disturbing that they have nuclear weapons through the incompetence of the Bush Administration, possibly the approach of strategic patience taken by Obama may not be a huge mistake. Perhaps North Korea’s leadership will eventually be overturned by the people, who’ve tasted a trifling bit of liberty and are seeing the saddle being cinched tight again.
But who replaces the leadership?
