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North Korea: Thorn in China's side
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - They are scattered all over the world
but prefer Europe and China. They have turned their back
on their own country, while waiting to be summoned home,
and until then learn sciences that will not improve the
well-being of most of their fellow countrymen, but only
of a few satraps.
They are North Koreans who
have escaped their nation not by scaling the barbed wire
now surrounding most embassies in Beijing, but who have
been sent abroad to study, fully paid out of the meager
revenues of domestic coffers. They amount to only a
handful, but they are still significant. There are a few
dozen of them in Europe, concentrated in Italy, the
United Kingdom and Switzerland. They study architecture,
to build modern fashionable villas for their leaders, or
music, to add amusement to their leaders' TV-less
evenings. A close relative of the top North Korean
leader is said to reside in one luxurious apartment in
Beijing where he can enjoy a life forbidden in
Pyongyang, sporting, as the legend goes, a fast car.
Indeed, Mercedes-Benzes drive in and out the centrally
located North Korean Embassy in the Chinese capital,
which has no barbed wire on its fence, and the few North
Koreans one meets at the capital's airport, fully
identifiable by their Kim Il-sung badge, are fashionably
dressed.
The times of hunger and famine in
Pyongyang are gone, or so it would seem by all these
indications. However, witnesses coming out of North
Korea recite stories of starvation, kids small for their
age because of undernutrition, medicine that goes bad
because of a lack of electricity for refrigeration. And
the flow of refugees into China doesn't seem to stop.
There could be between 100,000 and 300,000 North Koreans
in China who have fled their country.
True, one
can buy modern Western commodities in Pyongyang's new
Friendship stores, styled after the old Soviet models,
where customers can enter only if they show the ID of a
senior official. Electricity brightens the once-dark
nights of Pyongyang, and the dear leader, Kim Jong-il,
is said to be acquainted with the modern Internet thanks
to a satellite link bypassing his antediluvian telephone
lines. Meanwhile the casino in one of Pyongyang's
central hotels, allegedly run by Macau's old hand
Stanley Ho, boasts waitresses officially imported from
the neighboring Chinese province of Liaoning.
It
is a world where, despite all the official communist
rhetoric, a lucky few enjoy a better life, while the
vast majority barely survives. True, this is not unique
of North Korea - it is the situation of many countries
in Latin America or Africa. But those countries don't
draw attention to themselves by crying to the whole
world about their plight and spreading tales of natural
disasters causing a seven-year famine, thus begging for
aid. Neither do they blast missiles around their
neighbors or mount pitiful extortion schemes of the
"give me rice and I won't shoot rockets over your head"
kind.
Meanwhile, the huge income disparity in
North Korea is hidden by an ideology officially
attacking the unfair distribution of wealth. Neither has
there been any official announcement encouraging some to
get rich first, as Deng Xiaoping did in China. And even
in China, it is disputable whether income differences
were as striking as in North Korea.
If these
disparities were to lead to an increase in productive
investment they could be useful, but this doesn't seem
to be the case, and there no sign of the surge in
agricultural output that signaled the beginning of
economic reforms both in China or in Vietnam. In fact
there is no sign that reforms of any kind are afoot,
while the country appears to be ruled by the world's
only necrocracy, the cult of the dead president Kim
Il-sung, head of state forever.
In this
situation China fears that the trickle of refugees to
South Korea, and their flow to North China, could
trigger the demise or the implosion of the Pyongyang
regime. If that were to happen, it is clear that the
burden of rescuing North Korea would fall on China, not
South Korea. This is because North Korea's border with
China is porous, while that with the South is
impermeable, and China is now home to hundreds of
thousands of North Korean refugees while South Korea
hosts only a few hundred.
The situation would
worsen if the Pyongyang regime collapsed, with millions
of North Koreans looking toward Beijing, not at Seoul,
for their survival. For this reason, China is less than
keen on seeing the collapse of North Korea. Such a
collapse would create nothing but problems for China. If
China were to take over North Korea after a collapse,
that would move its frontier up to the US military zone,
and the whole world would be suspicious of Beijing's
motives. But if Beijing were to do nothing, it would be
attacked on humanitarian grounds.
So China more
than anyone else is keen on keeping North Korea's status
quo. But can Pyongyang's downfall be prevented forever?
Can North Korea carry on without reforms? The present
experience says no, the costs of not reforming Pyongyang
would increasingly be shouldered by China, if only in
terms of bad publicity.
Therefore China has an
interest in reforming North Korea, but to accomplish
this a way must be found to change Pyongyang's corrupt
and erratic leadership. Reform is not possible without
the support of North Korea's leaders, and the only
alternative would be revolution, something that would
impose an extra cost on the North Korean people with
uncertain benefits.
One strategy could be to
organize a united front of all nations with an interest
in North Korea and impose some reforms on Pyongyang.
There are two drawback to this strategy. First, it could
be quite difficult to hammer out a reform package that
would be welcomed by United States, Japan, China, Russia
and the European Union at the same time. Second, such
reforms would salvage the present Pyongyang leadership,
something that the West would be loath to do for moral
reasons: "Why should we save the people who are
responsible for the present predicament?" they'd wonder.
An alternative strategy would be to let the
situation fester in the hope that the bubble takes a
long time to burst, giving China time to prepare itself
for the onslaught of refugees and dealing with
Pyongyang.
Both courses have their downsides,
but possibly the first is the one most likely to produce
some lasting results in power politics of Asia. Giving a
way out for the corrupt North Korean satraps, while
despicable on moral grounds, could pave the way for the
reforms necessary to improve the living conditions of
North Koreans and thus prepare for future unification
with the South. And the longer the current problems are
allowed to fester, the more difficult reunification will
be.
China would favor the first course, but as
it stands on shaky ideological ground, it can't be the
first to go down this path. The US would also be an
unlikely front runner in pursuit of a united front for
the salvation of the Kim family. Japan and Russia have a
history of close interest in North Korea, so ulterior
motives would be suspected if they made the first move.
That leaves the European Union. A comprehensive
North Korean initiative would have the added value of
proving to the US that the EU can serve the purpose of
peace and stability in the world outside its strict area
of influence.
If nobody makes a move, the Kim
family and its extravagances will haunt us for many more
years.
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