Peresnorka Watch: Reuters source says Kim Jong-un to reform North Korean economy after purge of pro-military Vice Marshal

"To that six-year-old kid who will someday run North Korea!"

Remember when I surmised that the Radiant Leader could be North Korea's Gorbachev or at least it's Deng Xiaoping? If you can't remember or if you're new to the Island, see here, here, and here.

Anyway, if Reuters is correct, we might be finding this out sooner rather than later:

Impoverished North Korea is gearing up to experiment with agricultural and economic reforms after young leader Kim Jong-un and his powerful uncle purged the country's top general for opposing change, a source with ties to both Pyongyang and Beijing said.

The source added that the cabinet had created a special bureau to take control of the decaying economy from the military, one of the world's largest, which under Kim's father was given pride of place in running the country.

The downfall of Vice Marshal Ri Yong-ho and his allies gives the untested new leader and his uncle Jang Song-thaek, who married into the Kim family dynasty and is widely seen as the real power behind the throne, the mandate to try to save the battered economy and prevent the secretive regime's collapse.

The source has correctly predicted events in the past, including North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006 days before it was conducted, as well as the ascension of Jang.

The ouster of Ri Yongho is itself a major story, with the Chosun Ilbo reporting that the Vice Marshal went down with guns blazing, leaving perhaps dozens dead. (Seriously, that almost sounds like the opening shots of a civil war, or arguably a twisted sort of coup.) If those reports are true, it could mean the military is facing two stark choices: either give up their starring role and the power that comes with it, or decide that they've had enough of the Young General's antics and boot the Kim Dynasty from power.

[UPDATE: Joshua at One Free Korea takes a detailed look at the sacking/shooting/drowning/illing of Ri Yongho.]

Many of us would like to believe that all this recent intrigue means the Swiss-educated, Michael Jordan-loving Kim Jong-un really is a reformer on wolf's clothing and that he has the cojones (and the acumen) to push his reformist ideas past the dinosaurs in the nappŭn nomenklatura.

Reuters seems to think this is a possibility, although this all could merely be the result of Big Brother China's efforts to mold the DPRK into the PRC's post-Deng image, and KJU and his handlers know that's the surest way to hold onto power for the next generation or two (the CCCP certainly isn't going anywhere anytime soon).

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Peresnorka watch: Are conditions right for Perestroika and Glasnost in North Korea?

By now everyone knows about the North Korean Unha-3's failure to launch. This was followed by a wholly unexpected full disclosure, just four hours later, to the North Korean people.

Joshua at One Free Korea suggests (update 4) that they had no choice but to get frank with the people, owing to what he calls the World Cup theory of information in a global era:

The interesting thing here is that the North Koreans have admitted that the launch failed, which is new for North Korea. In 1998, for example, another North Korean missile test failed, but the North Koreans claimed that that its rocket lifted a satellite into orbit to play “immortal revolutionary hymns” to Kim Il Sung. I suppose some will call this concession a sign of some new North Korean perestroika or Pyongyang Spring; we’ve seen a false dawns predicted for even less. On the other hand, this is a regime that has recently cracked down on border-crossing — punishments now are much more severe than they were just two years ago — and which still goes to great lengths to deceive foreign media.

The more likely explanation is the same one that applies to North Korea’s decision to televise the World Cup live, only to have everyone with access to the broadcast see the North Korean team trounced. In North Korea, the groupthink probably favors boldness and punishes caution, conflating it with the denial of its own innate superiority. So North Korea gambled big that all of this hype would be a huge boost to its regime’s new figurehead on the 100th anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth, and it lost big. And unlike 1998, when the regime knew that the truth couldn’t get in, the regime is no longer capable of suppressing big news — and it is North Korea’s own regime that made this big news.

Although intriguing, I don't think the World Cup theory is an adequate explanation for the (relatively) immediate disclosure of failure. Setting aside the obvious non-parallels — even North Koreans play sports and they know that soccer tournaments always come with winners and losers such that a failure would be a likely outcome, unlike the heavily hyped satellite launch — there are other reasons to question that theory as the primary reason for full disclosure.

First, they continue to lie to the North Korean people about a number of things related to the regime, things that, à la the World Cup theory, would eventually be discovered by many to be false, so why be immediately honest about this? Unlike the World Cup outcome, it's not as if it's easy to provide evidence of a high-altitude fizzling of a satellite that would have been impossible to see even if it had succeeded. Ultimately, naysayers consuming outside media may have little more credibility or influence on the non-defecting hoi polloi than, say, a British or Russian media source touting the Obama birther stuff would have on a general American audience.

When it blew to bits, it was dozens of horizontal and vertical kilometers away from what was a sparsely populated area, so I doubt it was observable to ordinary North Koreans with their own eyes (think Challenger disaster and the high-tech stuff in 1986 that was needed to videotape or photograph that). Moreover, any explosion that would somehow be observed could easily be explained as going from stage 1 to stage 2 or some such. Again, no pressing need for the full disclosure.

Second, by shifting gears and not lying about this particular thing, it suggests the regime cares about what the people think about the regime itself. Perhaps care as in worry, and that is an increasingly real thing for the regime. But what it is they are hoping to prevent or to effect by the disclosure, I'm not sure, but one can speculate.

Anyway, if it's not the World Cup theory at work, it seems a possibility at least that some sort of perestroika or glasnost is going on up there. For those of you who are too young to recall a time when there'd never been a President Bush, perestroika was a buzzword from Russian that meant "restructuring" but came to be used as a synonym for openness (that was actually supposed to be glasnost), but that word seems to have been largely forgotten. Leonid Brezhnev proposed perestroika to reform the Soviet Union in 1979, and Mikhail Gorbachev ran with it, applying it to the economy and social institutions. He added glasnost as a policy in 1985.

Within four years, the tight grip Moscow had on Eastern Europe was loosened enough that communism collapsed almost everywhere, including the USSR. Notably, however, Deng Xiapoing's own forms of restructuring and openness were more measured and controlled, surviving internal strife and international condemnation in the spring of 1989, and the regime is still with us nearly a quarter century later. North Korea, if it is adopting any form of perestroika or glasnost, is probably trying to do so on its own terms, modeled closely on the Chinese.

But back to the particular event in question: The disclosure of failure of what was supposed to have been a glorious accomplishment for the North Korean people is, in and of it self, by no means a sign that perestroika or glasnost fever has gripped the regime. One event does not a trend make, and we'd have to see more of this kind of thing before we can start giving the DPRK kudos for taking a brighter path. Televising Western movies or broadcasting Team North Korea's abysmal showing at the World Cup in South Africa may be points on the curve as well (Peresnorka!).

Nevertheless, the conditions for perestroika, based on our n=1 analysis of the past, seem to be in place: a regime that once tightly controlled all media but now is aware that it is undermined by outside news sources (think East Germans watching Dallas and Radio Free Europe, whose positive impressions of the West eventually spread osmotically to the Soviet Union), a brand new leader with a background that indicates a proclivity to regard the West positively (Kim Jong-un was educated in Switzerland), and increasingly deteriorating economic conditions that are starting to adversely affect even the elite. (And on a related note, I dare say that there may be peretroika-minded people in the regime who set the widely disseminated launch event up for a fail.)

It is my hope of hopes, but I don't think it's exactly unrealistic. (And it's not the first time I or anyone else have wondered if Kim Jong-un is North Korea's Gorbachev or North Korea's Deng Xiapoing.)

For naysayers like Joshua, I'll end this post with a few questions: First, if glasnost or perestroika were to occur right now or in the future, what do you think it would look like (a different question from what it should look like)? Second, if glasnost and perestroika were occurring right now or in the near future, might it not be in part because of the very Plan B that you have been pushing and that US President Obama seems to be implementing in some way?

Moreover, if it actually were occurring, would you be able to recognize it as such and even be willing to acknowledge it? The murderous Pyongyang regime has been so epically horrible and cruel to its people, and that makes it hard to imagine any change, but does the past make future change so unlikely that we can just ignore the possibility (while remaining very cautious)?

UPDATE:
I forgot to add a preemptive rebuttal to those who would say that Kim et al would be crazy to allow glasnost or perestroika, lest they be booted out of office or worse, as in the case of Kim Ilsung's buddy Nicolai Ceausescu. But let's take a look at post-Deng China and post-Gorbachev Russia. In the former, the communists are still very much in power and the people live relatively much more freely, while some form of capitalism has brought a great deal of prosperity to the elite (and to many of the people) that didn't exist before.

Meanwhile, in Russia, there is also considerably more freedom, and the country has essentially been run since 1999 by Vladimir Putin, a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB. And while his predecessor Boris Yeltsin was not part of "the organs" like Putin, he was a former member of the Communist Party as well.

Indeed, if Pyongyang went the path of Moscow or Beijing, it's hard to imagine a scenario where someone would rise to power who wasn't part of the nappŭn nomenklatura, even if they were reform-minded.

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Sorry, Mr Kim. We've decided to go with the dead guy.

I've been meaning to write a post highlighting this story from NPR which asks if North Korea is changing or resisting change, but that will have to wait, because the big story is Kim Jong-un's job promotion.

Although I still hold out that there is considerable factionalism in the Pyongyang regime and that some of those coteries (Koteries?) are none too happy that a wholly inexperienced kid of twenty-nine has become the new Nepot Despot, there are clear signs that, outwardly at least, KJU's hold on power is solidifying.

What KJU lacks in congeniality he makes up for in congealment of power.

Of course, it helps when your political patrons behind the scenes are executing your would-be rivals right and left. Still, just as the Great Currency Obliteration of 2009 likely turned entire classes of people against the regime that they no longer saw as on their side, the killing of so many of the elite may give opponents a sense that they must kill or be killed. Or something like that. Since I don't know which faction is more likely to allow openness and reform, I'm not sure for whom to root.

Anyway, Kim Jong-un's position appears to have strengthened with his new title:

Kim Jong Un was named first secretary of the ruling Workers' Party, a new post, while his late father, longtime leader Kim Jong Il, was given the posthumous title of "eternal general secretary" at a special Workers' Party conference, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported.

Kim Jong Un's formal ascension, nearly four months after the death of his father, comes during a week of events leading up to celebrations Sunday marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of his grandfather, late President Kim Il Sung.

The centennial is a major milestone in the nation Kim Il Sung founded in 1948, and the streets were awash with new posters, banners and the national flag. Outside the city's war museum and the Pyongyang Indoor Stadium, women in traditional Korean dress gathered in clusters, practicing for this week's events.

Still, I think it's notable that he still has not been granted all the trappings of power that his father or grandfather had. I mean, he should have been named General Secretary, instead of giving his father that significant title in the form of an "eternal" position (Kim Ilsung is eternal president).

That's not just a blow to the ego, it's also a precarious situation. What does the First Secretary do that a General Secretary does (or does not)? Just as he was made a mere vice chairman of the Central Military Commission before his father's death, this is a half measure (or three-quarters) that may reflect a lack of solid backing.

(I think the point I'm making is even starker if you look through the KCNA website: all over the place, Kim Jong-il is the ch'ong pisŏ [총비서], as in ultimate secretary, whereas Kim Jong-un is merely che-il pisŏ [제1비서], as in the first secretary after the chief secretary, sort of like first runner-up in a beauty contest.)

Sure, he was made Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army a couple weeks after his daddy died, but it's not entirely clear how much power that affords him either.

Baby steps for the baby general.

Anyway, with the hope that the Western-educated Kim Jong-un might actually be a Gorbachev or a Deng Xiaoping in wolf's clothing, maybe a shoring up of support could be the best thing for North Korea in the long run. (I still think one could make a convincing case that Kim Jong-il himself may have been a mere figurehead.)

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Millions of moviegoers would approve

If you're a regular visitor to Monster Island, you're no doubt familiar with North Korea's unexpected cell phone market.

Indeed, back in December 2008, I first blogged about North Korea's plans to implement a 3G network (that one includes a list of North Korean emoticons). I then reported in November 2010 that North Korean youth had led to a quadrupling of cell phone subscriptions in the DPRK (which autocorrect wants to change to dork), and again in April 2011 that their 18,750% growth over the past three years made them the fastest growing mobile market in the world.

[source]

At the time, I expressed my pleasure that the Norks were allowing such openness, perhaps the sign of positive pressure from China, which hopes to see North Korea follow Deng-esque reform:

Anyway, I'm thinking Orascom's North Korean adventure is a good thing. 300K subscriptions means there is one cell phone for every eighty people, and that number is growing. Simply put, the more subscribers there are, the harder it is for the authorities to monitor communications.

Well, unfortunately, there may be folks in Pyongyang who also visit Monster Island, and they may have taken note of what I'd written in the very next paragraph:

And while most or nearly all the current subscribers are regime loyalists, if events go sour in such a way that it turns people against the dynasty or the party or whatever (as they have done for much of the peasantry), then — boom! — you've got an instant means of communication for the opposition. Indeed, the Egypt-based Orascom may very well be paving the way for North Korea's own version of a popular uprising somewhere down the Jasmine Revolutionary road.

Certainly I'm not the only one who has suggested such things, though I was one of the first. And this week we get news that indeed the North Korean government may be sitting up and taking notice at the potential threat of all those cell phones: the regime has announced a ban on cell phones:

North Korea has warned that any of its citizens caught trying to defect to China or using mobile phones during the 100-day mourning period for Kim Jong-il will be branded as "war criminals" and punished accordingly.

Granted, this is just for a three-month period and be completely lifted in the spring, but it could be an ominous sign of things to come. This certainly isn't a first when it comes to draconian measures against mobile devices: In May 2011, we also got word that the regime was cracking down on unauthorized phones smuggled in from China.

Though I'm no fan of Selig Harrison, I share his view that the seemingly monolithic regime in Pyongyang is actually caught up in some serious factionalism, the kind you'd see in any Korean palace drama on the telly. And I'm holding out that the Michael Jordan-loving Kim Jong-un, who have long believed is just a figurehead, may somehow find a way to transcend the fears of the different cliques in the government and drag his country into the 21st century, or at least the 20th century (circa 1990s). And if cell phone usage returns, I can hold onto that hope.

If not, prepare for things to get ugly before they get any better.

"Arrest him!" [source]

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A kinder and gentler abomination?

I am not the only one who has wondered out loud whether Prodigious Progeny Kim Jong-ŭn could actually turn out to be North Korea's Gorbachev, or at least North Korea's Deng Xiaoping. And in that vein, it's easy to imagine (or at least hope) that a birthday amnesty could be a signal of better things to come.

Or maybe North Korea's Dukakis?

From the BBC:

North Korea says it will grant an amnesty for prisoners to mark the birthdays of two late leaders.

State news agency KCNA said that the amnesty would begin from 1 February, in honour of Kim Jong-il, who died last month, and his father Kim Il-sung.

No information was given as to how many prisoners would be released or who.

Amnesty International estimates as many as 200,000 people are being held in political prison camps around the country.

KCNA said that the amnesty embodied the "noble, benevolent and all-embracing politics of President Kim Il-sung and leader Kim Jong-il".

The Dear Leader's seventieth birthday and the Great Leader's hundredth birthday are both auspicious occasions (yeah, yeah, I know they're dead, but birthdays get marked anyway, just like with Jesus and Buddha, though the latter are likely in an environment closer to room-temperature), and that could be just the excuse that the reformists — if in fact they exist — may need in order to release thousands and therefore nudge things toward normalcy.

We'll have to wait and see.

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Dear Dead Leader

ORIGINAL POST BY iPHONE:
Holy crap! It's a Christmakkuh miracle! I turn on my phone after a six-hour flight to California, and my inbox is flooded with news reports and private emails informing me that Kim Jong-il is dead, and why haven't I written anything about it.

I'll write more on this when I get settled, but I'm guessing in the next days or weeks we will find out if Kim Jong-ŭn really is (or is not) The Kim Who Wasn't There™.

(from here and here)

UPDATED (TWO HOURS LATER):
Wow. Where to begin. I guess if you want the latest news, you can go to the Los Angeles Times or perhaps The Marmot's Hole. Everyone is asking what will happen next. The answer is, beyond Kim Jong-il receiving some sort of unending torture in an inner circle of Hell, no one really knows.

Right now, everyone is looking at Kim Jong-ŭn. And Kim Jong-ŭn is crapping his pants. He's not even thirty and he's supposedly been tapped to lead the country. Right.

If you don't already know how I feel, read this and follow the links that tell you all about The Kim Who Wasn't There. Although The Marmot's Hole is reporting that Kim Jong-ŭn was "named... as his father’s successor," I'll believe it when I see it.

Before I go any further, let me tell you of two posts I was working on but was waiting until vacation (which began today) to write. Bear in mind, they are going to make me sound very, very nutty. The first was going to be a follow-up to my original "The Kim Who Wasn't There" post, basically a similar analysis of how much the KCNA (North Korea's central news agency) actually mentions Kim Jong-ŭn, which is not much. I was timing the analysis for the week around the first anniversary of him being named co-chair of whatever committee it is that he's pretending to run.

The second was a bit more out of left field. I was actually sitting down to analyze how much Kim Jong-il travels to give guidance and how much that keeps him away from Pyongyang. I was doing this in order to suggest that — get ready for this — Kim Jong-il might be a mere figurehead himself. Wow, wouldn't that ever be a trip (literally and figuratively)?

Some, of course, might think that really it was one of the KJI doppelgänger doing all the guidance, but I was starting to wonder if KJI really had all the power we have supposed he did. After all, the guy apparently nearly died from a stroke two or three years ago, and then went through a long recovery. Just who the hell was his Edith Wilson, if he had one at all? Maybe, just maybe, the ruling generals or nappŭn nomenklatura (see how I did that?) sorta got together and formed a junta or an oligarchy or something.

And where would that leave supposed designated heir Kim Jong-ŭn? Maybe they really do need a figurehead. Maybe they need a uniting force and a source of legitimacy. Maybe they have decided that Kim Jong-il's only son who is not crazy or possibly gay but is a team player must be the figurehead.

And if that's true, then my speculation that Kim Jong-ŭn would end up wielding no real power is still true. Not that he (or his supporting faction) wouldn't try. But just what can a figurehead do? I have wondered aloud if Kim Jong-un could possibly be North Korea's Gorbachev. Maybe the English-speaking, Swiss-educated KJU might just have some ideas of his own about opening up the country, and even his nominal power might be just enough to nudge the regime in that direction.

It all comes down to China.
But ultimately, whether or not Kim Jong-un will be in power as a figurehead, a leader with real power, or none at all, will depend on China. In the past, I and others have spoken about the ominous prospect of China working to turn North Korea into Inner Cháoxiān Autonomous Prefecture. China has a great deal of control over the DPRK and it does not want to relinquish it. It certainly does not want the Koreans to unify and have a US military presence at its backdoor.

And so China has been doing whatever it can to prop up the North Korean government. They started doing this during the Korean War and they've been doing it since. But lately they themselves have found the Pyongyang regime belligerent and unwieldy, even an embarrassment to Beijing. And don't think for a minute that China wouldn't give their blessing to even a transfer of power to a figurehead unless they had assurances that the post-KJI North Korea would be better behaved.

And here is where I'm actually kinda sorta glad that China is holding the reins (at least for the time being), because China has been prodding North Korea to follow a path similar to Deng-era China, and to integrate North Korea (economically at least) with China's northeastern provinces (i.e., a process I call the Manchurianization of North Korea).

North Korea has been opening in ways thought unimaginable just a few years ago. North Korea has brought in cell phone service, eventually becoming the world's fastest growing mobile market (more posts here and here). News reports said recently that they topped 1 million (in a country of about 22 million).

There are also things like Western-style coffee shops, television commercials for beer, and other trappings of the West as seen through Chinese eyes. In other words, China has lately been trying very hard to re-make North Korea in its own image.

And just what does all that mean? China does not allow a whole lot of dissent. Two decades after Tianamen Square, China is still authoritarian. And if North Korea follows a Dengesque path, you should expect North Korea to also be authoritarian as long as China is. Unless...

What if North Korea goes off China's game plan?
The only thing that could change the trajectory of North Korea being pulled toward Deng-era reforms that would bring it closer and closer to China would be unification. The question now is whether that can happen or not. The generals and the politicos in North Korea have no interest in giving up their own power and possibly risking arrest, imprisonment, and even execution which might result if North Korea allowed itself to be absorbed by a democratic South Korea. (I think there's a way to convince them while keeping that in mind, but that's another post for another time.)

But what if there is an uprising? What if Kim Jong-un just isn't cutting it as a figurehead or a real leader? What if the people have caught a whiff of the jasmine revolution and think now is as good a time as any to make a real change? Don't forget that in 2009 the regime dealt a body blow to almost everyone in the country — including many who had once felt quite loyal — with the Great Currency Obliteration. That has been, I believe, a real game changer in people's attitudes toward the regime, a moment where they suddenly realized, "These people aren't on my side."

Kim Jong-il died at a time when there are already food shortages, and the bitter winter will only make it worse. This is a precarious time to be changing leadership. Beijing itself may not be able to control what results. The biggest thing they have going their way, however, is that much of the population lives in rural pockets that are kept from communicating with each other. If there is a North Korean Spring, à la the Arab world, it will only be because of some very diligent people risking their lives to bring the message to the masses wherever they are.

So, in conclusion, with 3.5 hours of sleep and having just come off six hours of flying, these are my thoughts. I still think Kim Jong-un's faction does not have his power solidified, and I think there's a good chance he will either be squeezed out or allowed to be merely a figurehead. China will continue to push for reforms that make North Korea more like Deng-era China, but a popular uprising could easily thwart their plans to integrate the DPRK more with the Northeastern Provinces.

What would a North Korean spring look like? How would China react? Could we get China to back off a bit by (a) agreeing to keep their port facilities at Rajin and (b) promising that the US military will not be stationed in any territory that had been the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?

So much to think about. And I'll probably rewrite a lot of this in the morning.

UPDATE FROM THE NEXT MORNING:
Before I start, I'd like to add a few links to other blogs, who are as interested in this story as I. Make no mistake: this is the biggest story of the year and, depending on how things go, possibly the decade. So here are links from the biggies that cover North Korea regularly: One Free Korea, and Daily NK (which is like a news service, so just go there and see all the KJI-related articles).

I will forgive Asiapundit brazenly linking to themselves, just because that's something I would do, too, so go to this link and read the Marmot's Hole-worthy post they put up (frankly, others doing that meant I didn't have to, and I could thus concentrate on my theses about what might happen in the future — hint: the answer is likely to involve continued Manchurianization). Roboseyo has some thoughts. If you know of any others I've missed, please feel free to provide them in the comments.

And soon we'll start hearing from the experts on North Korea, as well as the pundits who liken themselves as experts on North Korea. And then we'll have a new round of blog posts on people talking about how North Korea expert Selig Harrison is nucking futs (and possibly on the take?).

Now for a couple things I forgot to mention in my bleary-eyed post from last night.

First, a huge dollop of honesty: I may not know what the fudge I'm talking about. Nobody does. And five, ten years from now, a lot of us will consider ourselves lucky if no one was keeping score.

Some honest punditry.
But here's where I get a little more honest: I was completely wrong about what would happen with North Korea back when the elder Kim died, and if only I'd been blogging in the mid-1990s, you'd know that.

See, I've been a news junkie ever since late elementary school, when I delivered newspapers. And that plus our own connection to Korea meant my young self would follow news on North Korea long before Kim Il-sung kicked the bucket in 1994.

And I was confident back then that Kim Il-sung — who at that point had ruled the country for four decades — was the only thing in the way of unification. So my late teen self actually bet someone fifty dollars (where was my late teen self getting that kinda money? ) that within five years of the Great Leader's Death, the two Koreas would be unified.

How's that prediction working out for you, late teen kushibo? (Good thing the person I bet kinda forgot; for a teen, that was Romney betting money.)

And so this is just me being honest. I was optimistic and perhaps naïve, but the thing is we all were. But there were so many things we didn't account for, such as Kim Jong-il's own ruthlessness (seriously, the guy looked like some sort of fat Korean Bill Gates, and who could imagine Bill Gates being evil?), and China's own willingness to support evil in order to maintain a satellite state (we thought they got that out of their system in 1950).

So now maybe we're overcompensating. We think North Korea's "leadership" doesn't have the capacity to move beyond dynastic dictatorship, and we worry that North Korea's people can't do anything but cower in fear. And we now understand that China will do whatever it can to ensure that North Korea doesn't become part of the string of pearls the United States intends to use as a choker.

But are we overcompensating too much? (By definition, any overcompensation is too much.) Is North Korea something that even Beijing cannot tame enough to use for their purposes?

A bulimic state cannot stand?
And that leads me to the other thing I forgot to mention last night: the purges. Right now on Capitol Hill in the US, we've got the leaders of Freddie and Fannie up there talking about charges that they'd misled the public. Now imagine that they were in fear that they would be taken out back and shot, and their families rounded up. That's what happened with the guy who was the scapegoat for the botched currency reform.

And that's just one example. You move way up the ladder, having been noticed for your competence but patiently and obsequiously playing the sycophant, and then you risk losing it all on a whim to a bullet through the skull when you piss off the wrong person.

"I can't work under these conditions!" is what you want to scream, but that's a guaranteed trip to the salt mines. So maybe you just wait, bide your time, until the old man's son is dead, and then we'll retake the asylum and set things right. Right? Right?

Notice a resemblance?

I mean, we don't want to have to wait until the son of the old man's son is also dead, do we? Junior the First, if he really was in charge, was only interested in selling off the country and buying coke. Sure, he kept all of us in Pyongyang living large, but we were always living in fear of the boom coming down. Maybe if we get rid of his son, we can actually move toward being a normal country where we are still the elite. Right?

They've just got to be thinking that way up there. I mean, Junior Junior has no real knowledge of how to run a country. He's weak, and possibly as whimsical as his dad, and that's a recipe for disaster, right? Best to off the kid — or put him in a figurehead role — and move on. But will the powerful Kim Jongsuk (his aunt) allow for that? Maybe we need to wait for her to croak.

So what I'm getting at is that the generals and the top bureaucrats have a deeply personal incentive to not stick with the status quo. And that could upend whatever plans China has (or maybe bolster them, depending on China's plans and how they feel about Round 3 of a Kim Dynasty).

Okay, I'm starting to blab again. So many thoughts in my brain right now, and I need some breakfast.

(And say what you will, but the flood of tears for the Dear Leader that will be seen on video clip after video clip, some of them from deep human emotion and some of them crocodile, were exactly what happened when the Great Leader seventeen years ago. Do not be alarmed, do not be shocked, do not adjust your set.)

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Parallel universes

Despite all the inter-Korean tension that erupted with the sinking of the Ch'ŏnan, despite efforts by Washington to step up sanctions against Pyongyang (what Joshua Stanton of One Free Korea calls Plan B), and despite real concerns that the Lee administration would have to just get up and walk away from the infrastructure already in place in Kaesŏng, we have an odd report that Seoul is in talks to expand the Kaesŏng experiment with another industrial complex:

The governments of both North and South Korea are in talks to build a second industrial complex in Kaesong, the southern province of North Korea.

According to Lee Myung-bak, President of South Korea, a second industrial complex may be built by South Korea if the North implements changes. “The ball is currently in the camp of the North” Lee said in an interview with a Russian TV station.

Frankly, I think there's a good chance that this report has simply gotten it wrong, with the writer or the news agency for whom he/she works simply operating from a skewed translation (that happens a lot) or otherwise having their facts mixed up. After all, the report also says that "a free trade agreement is in place between the US and South Korea," which is not quite right, either.

Still, anything is possible. Seoul has been denying reports of secret high-level meetings between ROK and DPRK officials (including expected future regent Jang Songthaek, uncle of Kim Jong-un), but things denied are often things that have really happened, so who knows.

With a slight majority of the South Korean public skeptical of Seoul's take on the Ch'ŏnan sinking, it's plausible that some in the Lee administration may have felt there was no point in hardline sanctions against Pyongyang. Perhaps the release of the seven South Korean fishermen held for the past month was meant as a bit of quid pro quo for reconsideration of restrictions on Kaesŏng.

And if I'm right about my bold prediction that North Korea is planning to pursue Chinese-style economic reforms, then it would make sense not only that they would pursue an expansion of the Kaesong Industrial Complex, but that Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law Jang would be spearheading it or be otherwise involved.

If that were the case, it begs the question: How should Seoul proceed (or Washington or Tokyo, or Taipei for that matter)? If Pyongyang is genuinely and earnestly embarking on its own sunshiny project, should South Korea, the US, and Japan hold their noses and cooperate in the hope that these reforms will, à la China, dramatically change the lives of the average citizen for the better, even if it doesn't completely alter the totalitarian nature of the regime?

The son also riles

The Washington Post is reporting that there are "signs of public discontent" about the anointing of little L'il Kim (aka known as Brilliant Comrade, aka Kim Jong-un) as big L'il Kim's successor:

Almost every night, seeking to gather opinion from a country where opinion is often punishable, Kim Eun Ho calls North Korea. He talks mostly to people in Hoeryong city in Hamgyong-bukto province, and the conversations never last long. Hoeryong city employs 14 men who monitor the region's phone conversations, Kim believes, and typically they can tap a call within two or three minutes. Kim says he knows this because, as a North Korean police officer before he defected in December 2008, he sometimes monitored the conversations.

Kim Jong-un

But these days, with Pyongyang preparing for a Workers' Party convention that could trumpet the rise of leader Kim Jong Il's youngest son, Kim Eun Ho and other defectors who speak regularly to North Koreans hear plenty of opinions reflecting what he described as a broad sentiment against hereditary succession.

"Of 10 people I talk to," he said, "all 10 have a problem with Kim Jong Eun taking over."

Just as North Koreans know little about their potential future leader, the rest of the world knows almost nothing about North Korean opinions. Recent academic research, based on surveys with defectors, suggests that North Koreans are growing frustrated with a government that allowed widespread starvation in the early 1990s and orchestrated brutal currency reform in 2009 that was designed to wipe out the private markets that enable most residents to feed themselves.

Okay, I have serious problems with that kind of methodology (not a random representative sample by a long shot), but that's pretty much all we've got to work with, yeah? (And by the way, that's an interesting tidbit about how many people tap the phone lines in Hoeryong and how long it takes them to do it.)

Anyway, some cited in the article are hopeful KJU (written in the WaPo as Kim Jong Eun) will be North Korea's Gorbachev:

There are some who think that Kim Jong Eun will take power and gradually lead North Korea to Soviet-style reforms. Some defectors say that even though the younger Kim is largely unknown, they hope he'll allow for a free economy after his father dies.

Of course, I'm holding out for him to be North Korea's Deng (a must-read link). Anyway, if we actually see protests like we did over the Great Currency Obliteration of 2009 (see also here), then we know Brilliant Comrade is in trouble.