Reform or Collapse?

The New York Times has another report from the Chinese side of the North Korean border, which is probably the best we can expect under the circumstances. Read the whole thing and make up your own mind, but I don’t draw the same conclusions from the known facts as the Times, as I’ll explain in a moment (emphasis below mine):

“The standard of living is improving, not just in Pyongyang, but throughout the country,” said another Chinese businessman who has been a frequent visitor to the country since 1997. “Nowadays, if you have money you can buy whatever you want. The problem is that most people still don’t have much money.”

Similar comments about the recent availability of goods were repeated in numerous interviews with North Koreans who had illegally slipped across the porous border, taking a risk in hopes of earning some money in China and buying goods to carry back and sell.

The difference in the remarks of Chinese business people and the North Koreans is one of tone, with the North Koreans almost universally asserting that life has gotten tougher, not better, since the introduction of the economic changes.

“The government has no money, and everything has become much more expensive,” said a woman from the northeastern city of Chongjin, who sneaked into China three months ago. “Many people steal things to survive.”

People from the countryside said farmers had tended to do better than city residents under the economic changes. “You can find anything you want in the markets now, but the prices are too high for us to afford them,” said one 50-year-old woman from a village in the Musan region, near the Chinese border. “Farming for ourselves, though, made us better off than people in the towns. At least we always had enough to eat.”

Given that city dwellers have traditionally been the most favored, and also the most controlled, one could just as well suspect that the regime is unravelling at its traditional periphery, the rural areas. Just as the countryside was the least favored in the distribution of food aid, it is now the last to be reached by the machinery of state control.

A telling–and somewhat contradictory–fact is that merchandise is available (presumably, in the cities) but that no one can afford to buy it. This appears to be explained by the widely differing stories one hears from Chinese visitors and North Korean escapees, as well as the fact that the report mixes two indicators–food supply and the availability of consumer goods. So the urban elites appear to be doing well enough to buy used cars, but the rural population has achieved the breakthrough of marginally ameliorating its starvation by growing food on the sly. And everyone else is doing worse than ever.

Well, let’s hear it for the New Juche!

(You can read more of my analysis of the progress of North Korea’s “reforms” here.)