North Korea’s Plastic-Bubble Engagement

OFK friend Don Kirk has a new piece in the Christian Science Monitor, in which he reports on his latest visit to the North, beginning with a non-visit to the Kaesong Industrial Complex:

The tour bus stops on a bridge amid fallow fields, and the North Korean guide points to a cluster of small factories nearly a mile away.

“That’s the Kaesong industrial zone,” says Choe Kyong Jin, an official in this historic city several miles north of the line between North and South Korea. “We cannot go in there, but you can see it from here.”

Foreigners, he explains, “are banned” from the zone where five small South Korean factories are already making such products as pots and pans. These factories are the vanguard, the guide says, of a dozen South Korean companies that are committed to build here in what is seen as one of the most hopeful signs of North-South reconciliation.

Kirk then segues into a discussion of North Korea’s much-touted reforms, and what is becoming of them.

If the zone symbolizes the future, however, the present reality – as seen by members of the Western diplomatic and aid community in the capital Pyongyang and some South Koreans who travel here – is altogether different. The economy, they say, shows no sign of improving as the government imposes ever more draconian steps to snuff out budding economic freedom.

A Western resident, requesting anonymity, cites a series of measures for reimposing tighter controls following attempts at reform. The growing economic clout of traders, says the Westerner, has frightened the political elite here, prompting the backlash.

He then describes the Arirang Festival–a million people holding up pieces of cardboard instead of bringing in crops–a passage you can read on your own if you’re interested. Now comes the part where I would have given anything to be sitting in the bus behind Kirk and Bradley Martin, who also attended. Martin, who is much more open to the idea of engaging the North than your correspondent, surveys the result of eight-plus years of engagement–a society that’s never been more closed, controlled, or paranoid:

For all the hype, however, foreigners are startled by how little has changed visually. “It’s worse than it was in 1979,” says Bradley Martin, who visited Pyongyang at that time as a reporter and has recently authored a book, “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader,” detailing the regime’s tortuous history. “At that time you had a lot of mechanization. They had rice planting machines and electrical tractors.”

Now, says Mr. Martin, on the tour bus as it rolls down a nearly empty highway between hills stripped of growth by villagers desperate for fuel and food, the process of mechanization “has been reversed.”

Martin marvels over the regime’s success in shielding itself from protest from within. “Indoctrination here is the strongest the world has known,” he says.

Now, say foreigners with embassies and aid groups here, Kim Jong Il is intensifying the pressure after replacing the head of internal security, one of the most powerful positions.

New measures include a crackdown on communications that began by outlawing cellphones. Next, telephone networks were cut so foreigners can only dial other foreigners – and have to get Koreans to dial Koreans. Then too, Koreans are banned from driving on Sundays and evenings to discourage socializing.

Here in Kaesong, the sight of a cluster of South Korean factories pales beside the mighty industry that dominates South Korea.

Guide Choe Kyong Jin points to empty land on the other side of a bridge. There, he says, will be “the tourist area,” complete with hotels and a shopping center. So far, though, there is no sign of life. “Of course, North and South Korea have different systems,” says Choe. But “we have a vision that South and North are one nation.”

Must-reading.