Fear and Loathing Across the Tumen, Part 2

Two new reports today describe the accelerating outing of dissent in North Korea. The first, from the Washington Post’s Blaine Harden, cites this new study by Marcus Noland based on surveys of refugees from 2008, this study by the International Crisis Group, which I’d previously blogged, and more recent reports since The Great Confiscation:

There is mounting evidence that Kim Jong Il is losing the propaganda war inside North Korea, with more than half the population now listening to foreign news, grass-roots cynicism undercutting state myths and discontent rising even among elites.

A survey of refugees has found that “everyday forms of resistance” in the North are taking root as large swaths of the population believe that pervasive corruption, rising inequity and chronic food shortages are the fault of the government in Pyongyang — and not of the United States, South Korea or other foreign forces. The report will be released this week by the East-West Center, a research group established by Congress.

Read the rest on your own.

The second report comes from the L.A. Times’s Barbara Demick, from the Chinese-North Korean border, and much like yesterday’s Times Online report, finds evidence that North Korea’s food situation is deteriorating rapidly, food and other goods have vanished from stores and markets, and that popular discontent is rising rapidly. Beyond the widespread tendency for people to blame and lose faith in the regime, Demick found that not all of those she interviewed expressed or directed their discontent in the same ways:

“People are outspoken. They complain,” said a 56-year-old woman from the border city of Musan who gave her name as Li Mi Hee. Lowering her voice to a whisper, she added: “My son thinks that something might happen. I don’t know what, but I can tell you this — people have opinions. . . . It is not like the 1990s when people just died without saying what they thought.” [….]

“We were told that somebody decided he would burn the money instead of giving it to the government. The money had the picture of Kim Il Sung, and because he burned it he was shot to death for treason,” Song Hee said. [….]

Although Su Jong held North Korea’s own economic policies at fault, she said she had not lost her l”People are outspoken. They complain,” said a 56-year-old woman from the border city of Musan who gave her name as Li Mi Hee.

Lowering her voice to a whisper, she added: “My son thinks that something might happen. I don’t know what, but I can tell you this — people have opinions. . . . It is not like the 1990s when people just died without saying what they thought.”ove for Kim Jong Il. “If [Kim] was a good leader, we wouldn’t see children starving, people wandering the streets in rags, the markets with no food,” she said. “But I don’t doubt his good intentions. It is the people under him who are corrupt.”

It’s now quite possible that more people in Berkeley than in North Korea who blame America for North Korea’s misery. This is progress.