Unification Minister seeing the light about The Kim Who Wasn't There™?

AFP is quoting a Yonhap article suggesting that even ROK Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik (the Tim Conway lookalike above) is having doubts that the ascension of North Korean strongman Kim Jong-il's son, Kim Jong-un, to a done deal.

From AFP:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il faces challenges in transferring power to his youngest son, according to South Korea's top official on cross-border affairs.

"I assume that the power succession is under way, though the internal and external environment is not that good," Unification Minister Yu Woo-Ik told Yonhap news agency in an interview published Sunday.

Kim, 69, is believed to have speeded up the succession plan after suffering a stroke in August 2008.

In September last year he gave his youngest son Jong-Un senior party posts and appointed him a four-star general, in the clearest sign yet that he is the heir apparent.

Yu, whose comments were confirmed by his ministry, told Yonhap in the interview conducted Friday that the leader is healthy enough to perform his job.

He did not elaborate on Kim's health or what he meant by an unfavourable environment for the succession.

It is unclear whether the untested Jong-Un, in his late 20s, faces political opposition to what would be the second dynastic succession. Kim senior took power when his own father Kim Il-Sung died in 1994.

I, of course, have been saying this all along, but here and there I notice that others are jumping on the bandwagon.

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$50 billion fund for reunification

The role of Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik
will be played by Tim Conway.

This idea has been bandied about for the past few months: the ROK government wants people to start getting serious about the prospect of reunification, so they're getting serious by putting together some serious sums of money. Unlike previous proposals, this one won't be a tax.

From Bloomberg:

South Korea will set up a fund as early as this year to begin raising up to 55 trillion won ($50 billion) to pay for its eventual reunification with North Korea.

Individual Koreans at home and abroad will be able to make donations to the fund and the government in Seoul may earmark money including budget surpluses, Unification Minister Yu Woo Ik said in his first interview since being sworn in on Sept. 19. While foreigners will also be allowed to donate, there is no plan to ask overseas governments to contribute, he said.

Yu, 61, is asking South Koreans to put aside more than 60 years of animosity on the divided peninsula and prepare for the fiscal shock of incorporating their impoverished northern neighbors. Fifty South Koreans died last year in attacks blamed on Kim Jong Il’s regime and negotiations to resume six-nation talks aimed at shutting down North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program have made little progress.

“Government agencies are near an agreement over the unification account and I hope lawmakers will pass legislation within this year,” Yu said in his office in Seoul yesterday.

“This will unite people and foster their desire for unification.”

I guess this is better than a tax if you want people to start warming to the idea of unification again. It wasn't that long ago that it was a given — a historic imperative — that the two sides would and must reunify. But then Germany happened, and a lot of people became wary of the cost and the ensuing social disruption.

While that didn't really translate into opposition to unification — most Koreans are still rather adamant that it is the country's destiny — it did make them pessimistic about the future of Korea.

So this voluntary fund is a good way to start drumming up support for the cause, a way to change the narrative. Of course, $50 billion is only a drop in the bucket, with estimates of the overall cost of reunification starting with $2 trillion (some forty times the amount in this fund), but it's a start.

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KCNA rails against Lee Myungbak over reunification remarks

I read KCNA from time to time, checking for any glimmer that Kim Jong-un (aka, The Kim Who Wasn't There) is actually being elevated for public consumption, among other issues.

If you're expecting a flood of vicious propaganda, you might be surprised to know that a lot of the stories — an increasing amount, in fact — are straightforward news, like this one describing the effects of Typhoon Meari.

But if you're occasionally looking for scathing vitriol, the KCNA doesn't disappoint. In this article, we have the KCNA's take on the words of South Korean President Lee Myungbak to the people of South Korea that they should be prepared for unification to happen at any time:

Traitor Lee Myung Bak's Anti-Reunification Remarks Slammed

Pyongyang, June 26 (KCNA) -- Traitor Lee Myung Bak of south Korea recently told gentries of the Advisory Council of Democracy and Peaceful Unification at Chongwadae that "unification can come at midnight like a burglar". He also called for getting prepared for unification, saying it came near.

Papers of the DPRK in commentaries Sunday brand his remarks as an intolerable insult to the Koreans desirous of reunification and an unpardonable politically-motivated provocation to the DPRK.

Rodong Sinmun says that Lee has done nothing for reunification except pushing the inter-Korean relations to a catastrophe to delay it. He dared to defile the arduous struggle fought by Koreans for reunification and the noble self-sacrificing spirit displayed by them.

The said remarks can be made only by a die-hard confrontation maniac, a lunatic seeking division only.

"Unification" touted by Lee is not the independent and peaceful reunification to be achieved by the concerted efforts of the Koreans but "unification of systems" premised on toppling the DPRK. Herein lies the gravity of his remarks.

Lee fully revealed his true colors as a traitor seeking the confrontation of systems by doggedly standing against national reconciliation, unity and reunification.

Explicitly speaking, it is a pipe dream to try to expand the corrupt fascist dictatorial system of south Korea to the DPRK through the confrontation of systems.

Minju Joson says that the traitor compared reunification to a burglar only to reveal the poor level of his thinking as a political imbecile and philistine and the nature of human scum accustomed to lining one's pocket with others' cash.

Now just how could telling people to be prepared for unification be an "intolerable insult" to people who desire unification? For that matter, how could it be a "politically motivated provocation"? Well, the answer is that the KCNA is reading between the lines, figuring that what President Lee means is that North Korea could collapse at any time (the North Koreans themselves worry about the same thing), and that is how unification would be achieved.

And that points to one of the odd things about the KCNA, that they would print things like this that include a criticism (even if veiled) of the Pyongyang regime. I mean, they didn't have to print this (a similar story is in Korean), but they're laying it out there that North Korea's opponents seem to think there's some reason why unification might happen really, really soon. It would seem to me that that kind of thing is emboldening the rank-and-file party members and soldiers to switch sides to the winning team if anything should go wrong (and some of these people have been iffy since the Great Currency Obliteration of 2009).

Anyway, it's interesting the phrasing that President Lee chose, that "unification can come at midnight like a burglar." This sounds suspiciously like "a thief in the night," which comes from 1 Thessalonians 5:2, where St Paul was telling the church at Thessaloniki that the triumphant Day of the Lord would come in such an unexpected way.

One almost wonders if President Lee knows of something — evidence of an impending collapse and/or a deal with Beijing to let Pyongyang crumble and Seoul pick up the pieces (perhaps a deal like the one listed in the bottom third of this post). After all, he already has us paying a Unification Tax.

Hmm... Should we get the Mongolia estate ready?

Is China actually sick and tired of a rogue North Korea it has no control over?

Well, that's one thing that seems to have come from the recent dump of diplomatic cables by the folks at Wikileaks.

From AFP:

China, long viewed as North Korea's protector, increasingly doubts its own influence and would support the peninsula's reunification if the regime collapses, leaked US documents have said.

Over an expansive dinner last year, the Chinese ambassador to Kazakhstan revealed that Beijing considers North Korea's nuclear program to be "very troublesome," according to a memo obtained by whistle-blower site WikiLeaks.

Ambassador Cheng Guoping "said China hopes for peaceful reunification in the long-term, but he expects the two countries to remain separate in the short-term," said the leaked cable by US Ambassador Richard Hoagland and reprinted by Britain's The Guardian newspaper.

In another cable reproduced by The New York Times, a Chinese official whose name was removed said that Beijing believed North Korea had "gone too far" after carrying out its second nuclear test and firing a missile.

The official told a US diplomat "that Chinese officials had expressed Chinese displeasure to North Korean counterparts and had pressed (North Korea) to return to the negotiation table," it said.

"Unfortunately," the Chinese official was quoted as saying, "those protests had had no effect."

China doubting its own influence? Why, just yesterday I was saying almost the same thing:

While North Korea is a client state and buffer zone for China, without whom the Pyongyang regime would have collapsed long ago, it may very well be the case that North Korea has gone so far off the reservation that Beijing is in no position to rein in North Korea at all.

And as loath as they are to being told what to do about North Korea, they are even more loath to admit they can't do anything.

The Guardian actually went a bit further with the reunification issue and China's apparent position:

The leaked North Korea dispatches detail how:

• South Korea's vice-foreign minister said he was told by two named senior Chinese officials that they believed Korea should be reunified under Seoul's control, and that this view was gaining ground with the leadership in Beijing.

• China's vice-foreign minister told US officials that Pyongyang was behaving like a "spoiled child" to get Washington's attention in April 2009 by carrying out missile tests.

• A Chinese ambassador warned that North Korean nuclear activity was "a threat to the whole world's security".

• Chinese officials assessed that it could cope with an influx of 300,000 North Koreans in the event of serious instability, according to a representative of an international agency, but might need to use the military to seal the border.

If China really is willing to accept a reunified Korea (probably in exchange for a promise that the US will not place military bases in the former DPRK), then that would really change my view of China. I'd start speaking of benevolent Big Brother China with far less irony and sarcasm in my voice, for starters.

Joshua at One Free Korea has a must-read post on the Wikileaks dump here, where he talks about it shows that China has been helping North Korea with weapons proliferation.

Though I share the concerns of folks like Joshua Stanton that the dump may be illegal and might actually get a few people killed (not to mention that it may hamstring future diplomatic efforts), I do see a plus side. Maybe this is something China needed to get off its chest, and I dare say it could be a catalyst for an end to Beijing's propping up of the Pyongyang regime. The North Koreans should see these private exchanges as a wake-up call, perhaps a sign that they've overreached.

UPDATE:
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser under Jimmy Carter, believes that the WikiLeaks cables were spoon-fed to them by anti-US spy agencies and that the PRC-DPRK revelations were actually meant to embarrass the United States.

Forbes on the manageable cost of Korean unification

Forbes has an interesting op-ed piece that addresses the costs of Korean unification, which it paints as a prudent thing to consider given the turmoil that's been going on in the DPRK lately. In fact, the first part of the essay seems to have taken a page out of my blog and Joshua's blog regarding how far-reaching have been the effects of the Great Currency Obliteration/Confiscation of 2009:

Although the new won's value was pegged at 100-times the old won, the amounts of won that could be exchanged as well as the time period (48 hours) for the exchange were sharply restricted. It's doubtless that some of the ruling elite in the military and government apparatus were severely affected by these confiscatory measures. Their loyalty to Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il's rule may be diminishing as a result.

Indeed, I wrote last year:

In other words, movement (but not "a movement") at the local level that could contribute to a critical mass of dissent, whatever point that is. That critical mass itself may have been reset as local party cadres have seen the rug pulled out from under them. To put it another way, at what point will they become East German border guards who do not shoot at people trying to get over the wall... or into the storehouse, or out of the prison, or whatever.

In other words, those middle-level party cadres who run the show outside of Pyongyang suddenly have a lot less stake in keeping the regime going.

But the issue at hand is the costs of unification, not the prospects, and Forbes points out how inherently questionable the various estimates are:

The principal explanation for the widely varying estimates ["ranging between less than $100 billion, and more than $4 trillion"] is the economic goal specified for reunification. A secondary explanation is the relevance (or irrelevance) accorded Germany's precedent.

Most of the prior estimates assume that the goal of reunification must be equalization of per capita GDP between North and South Korea. Data for North Korea range between unreliable and apocryphal. However, a reasonable estimate of per capita GDP in the North is perhaps $700, in South Korea about $20,000. The North's population is 24 million, South Korea's 48 million, according to the latest census. Linking these disparities to a goal of raising per capita GDP in the North to that in the South, and assuming a medium capital requirement of $4 per unit increase in North Korea's GDP results in estimated reunification costs of $1.7 trillion.

That's a mighty big number, but Forbes suggests that perhaps the goal itself is too costly, and unnecessarily ambitious:

If a more modest goal is adopted focusing on dramatically increasing per capita income in the North---say, by doubling it within 5 or 6 years---instead of equalization with the South, the cost burden decreases sharply to $62 billion. The goal and the resulting reunification costs are both more modest and more feasible. Arguably, the reassuring experience of a tangible doubling of living standards in the North, combined with the forbidding uncertainties that would attach to possible emigration, are also likely to minimize southward refugee flows.

Let's hope that's the case. A large influx of displaced workers flowing into South Korean cities can lead to many of the social problems China is facing today. The op-ed piece goes on to dismiss the German example as being immaterial to the Korean case:

The costs of Germany's reunification are both frequently cited, and largely irrelevant. This is because the economic policies adopted by the West German government after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 simply decreed for immediate political reasons that wages, pensions and other entitlements for East German citizens must equal those in West Germany. Germany committed itself to paying the bills. They continue to arrive, currently totaling $3 trillion and still counting.

To be sure, adopting the more modest but still ambitious goal of rapidly doubling per capita GDP would leave a reunified Korea with sharp disparities between North and South. How far and how quickly Korea would move toward reducing these disparities would no doubt be a top priority of the Korean state. Still, there are many instances of countries and governments that have faced large economic, political, and social disparities while functioning with tolerable stability and effectiveness. These instances include Belgium (the Flemish and Walloons), Italy (prosperous Piemonte and poorer Mezzogiorno), Indonesia (in Ambon) and the United States (California and Mississippi).

Definitely some food for thought.

As the problems faced by a unified Germany mounted in the post-Soviet era, the prospective costs of Korean unification emerged among South Korean citizens as the principal factor behind a growing pessimism about a rejoining of North and South. Some believe it became a reason for forestalling unification by the Kim Daejung and Roh Moohyun administrations, though I don't know how strong such a case can be made.

Because ultimately, in the end, unification is going to happen when it wants and how it wants, with little control or input by Seoul (or even Beijing or Washington) about the timing of the eruption. And when it happens, huge price tag or not, South Koreans are taking that item home with them. Seoul really has no choice. The best we can do is simply plan ahead and think of ways ahead of time to be prepared to provide services, treat people fairly, and work on building a better future for them, the price be damned.