I don’t think a regime collapse will ever happen in North Korea.

Unlike you, I think there will be a “revolution” in North Korea this year, and that it has been underway since 2001. The Great Confiscation is the dying Party’s attempt to stave it off. It will not be “freedom” but will instead be the total control of government by the regular military, with the approval of China.

North Korea presently has five elements — the party, the military, the urban proletariat, the peasants and the outcasts (merchants, politically suspect categories, Christians, Koreans in China.)

The outcasts are our sources of information (and your blog and your link to Good Friends are each wonderful.) By force of miserable circumstance, the outcasts have been forced to become entrepreneurial, and paradoxically they are the grease that keeps the system running by smuggling. (But smuggling, even of 120 tons of food daily, is a drop in the ocean of starvation.) The outcasts are a source for information and discontent, but not for change, because there is no external Lenin or Simon Bolivar around which they can form.

The proles and the peasants don’t count as revolutionary forces because they have no weapons, no organization and no rallying point. The proles and the peasants have been kept lethargic by deprivation, upheaval (the “struggles”) and uncertainty through the work of informers and local police. The only stability came from small profits in the market and the bribery that accompanied it. The struggles have failed, the police are as hungry as their victims, bribery is difficult without small money — and starvation over the next three months is again certain. Still, they won’t rebel nationally.

BUT and it is now a central BUT, they supply the entire intake of of the lowergrade Korean military. They suffer in the military — but with the Great Confiscation, the conscripts see their families suffering far more than they. Their misery will be transmitted upwards to their majors and colonels, and it from these young officer cadres that the takeover will come. This year.

In the upper ranks of the octogenarian Marshallate, there is a struggle — between the infantry types, whose equipment is outdated, whose men are starving, and who have just had all their foreign currency confiscated — and the pretty nuclear forces, whose political linkage with the Party and Kims has caused the present disaster.

The Party is in disarray. It works in Pyongyang, but nowhere else. Following the clear failure of the Party in the starvation years, the military took on the ascendancy. Military farms for food (pigs in nuclear bunkers), military mines and factories, military work camps, military foreign earnings all made for a totally independent army — and the local market policy came from the military rather than the party planners. The constitution has been rewritten in favor of the military, and the senior council is in fact a military-weighted one.

The Great Confiscation, your wonderfully apposite phrase, appears to be the Party’s attempt to curb all non-Party activities — which is an attack on the military. It is a horrible failure, and the lack of any pricing mechanisms let alone the lack of stable prices or adequate goods shows the Party has lost the ability to organize or lead. It has been accompanied by attempts to reassert the Party’s monopoly on terror (for instance by transferring reidence records from local police to Party police) but these appear to be minor afflictions — except that they may indicate that the local police are no longer trustworthy in Party eyes.

Now the reports are of an unusual mid-January nationwide military drill, of troops and reserves. If, as it appears, the military can feed the workers and proles from military stores in mid-winter while the Party has failed, the military will have bought the loyalty of the population, to their relief. All that is then needed is for the Kims to die and the Marshals to be replaced by young officers, and for the new military regime to sell their nuclear weapons and facilities to China (and only to China) for food and materials. The new Chinese road to Rason would make sense, and the military would still have all that lovely hard currency from their mining operations. China wants that too, because the prospect of a unified Korea with the South Koreans holding a nuclear bomb is insufferable.

I think this will happen this spring — and there’s nothing we can do about it. Wait for the border to be closed on the Chinese side.