Kay Seok, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said North Koreans were now more restive than in the famine of the 1990s, when up to 1m people are believed to have died.

“I wonder whether North Korea could have underestimated how much people have changed. Fifteen years ago people were very obedient, but since then they have been struggling and defying many restrictions,” she said. But no one should doubt the willingness of the regime to crack down hard on dissenters, she added.

One reason Kim Jong-il went ahead with the currency reform may have been to discipline the nascent moneyed middle class, who could be seen as his political opponents. Several organisations who deal with refugees have had reports of North Koreans burning money through fear it will be seen as treasonable to have accumulated it.

Is this really business as usual in the DPRK?

This blasphemy is occurring, a key indicator that the Juche religion is in trouble:

Chosun said security authorities have gone on emergency alert after old bills carrying the image of late president Kim Il-Sung were found torn or damaged on piles of garbage in several cities.

The situation is pregnant with a forthcoming Ceaucescu moment… please God!

This “ajumma merchant” class is of course the first re-appearance of a long tradition of merchant class in North Korea dating back to the Kaesong traders of the Koryo period. That’s not what’s surprising – you can’t suppress centuries of tradition, with a mere fifty years of trying. The real kicker here is that the North Koreans are alarmed enough to actually go through with something as drastic as this – perhaps they read history and discovered that the merchant/bourgeoisie class has frequently been the spearhead against economic suppression (and sometimes political too!)