Will North Korea’s Failure to Control Markets Mean the End of the Regime?

Reuters has a long round-up on the failure of the Great Confiscation, with this being the bottom line: “The collapse of the market system brought about by the currency revaluation produced rare civil uprisings. But the violence appears to have been sporadic and should fade as long as the North allows market activity to return.”

Marcus Noland, catching up on the latest reports for the BBC, wonders if the failure of the Great Confiscation has damaged Kim Jong-Eun’s succession prospects. Noland says North Korea “is beginning to look increasingly like a nuclear-capable failing state.”

Both views seem partially right to me. Violence against the state is a big risk anywhere, and especially there. If the regime’s climbdown makes the people less desperate, they won’t resort to violence until the next time they’re this desperate, but because it’s North Korea, that time will come. And when it does, the Great Confiscation has taught the people that (a) they aren’t alone in their anger, and (b) if enough of them challenge the state at once, they can win. More fundamentally, a restoration of the markets will mean that people may regain their economic independence, escape from their state-assigned jobs and the propaganda harangues they endure there, and build the physical and mental strength to get into a rebellious mood. Starving people don’t rebel. People who struggle against the state for their daily bread, and who live in envy of those atop the state’s caste system, might.

But if we’ve learned anything from the lessons of the Rangoon Autumn or Robert Park, it’s that nonviolence is useless against brutal tyrannies. No rebellion will succeed unless the security forces splinter or mutiny, or unless the people organize and arm themselves. Look at how long the Burmese regime survived since the massacres of 1988.