Report: North Korea’s Control of Information Breaking Down

For years, advocates of appeasing the North Korean regime have claimed that more “engagement” with its dictators would gradually change its character and moderate its belligerent and brutal tendencies.  U.S. policy expressed this hope in a series of failed agreed frameworks by presidents of both political parties.  These made no progress toward disarming North Korea, but did provide significant, regime-sustaining financial windfalls for Kim Jong Il.  South Korea’s version of this theory was its “Sunshine” policy, which was — you guessed it — an immense, regime-sustaining financial windfall for Kim Jong Il, but which probably did more to change the character of South Korea’s regime than North Korea’s.

The latest Sunshine experiment is the AP’s establishment of a bureau in Pyongyang, which the AP hailed as a “new window” into North Korea, but which has been controlled strictly on North Korea’s terms.  So far, this experiment has produced plenty of propaganda and at least some outright fakery, but no new insights into reports of, say, widespread famine deaths and human rights atrocities a short drive from the AP’s bureau.

This is not to deny that engagement on the right terms can change the character of North Korea, both profoundly and irreversibly.  It has — when the engagement is directly with the people of North Korea, not with its regime, but in spite of the regime.  We saw the first hard evidence of this in Witness to Transformation, by Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard.  More recently, outside observers were surprised when North Korea admitted that its launch of an Unha-3 rocket had failed, causing most to speculate that the regime knew it couldn’t keep the failure secret.  Today, a new report finds that the North Korean regime shows no signs of easing its controls on information intentionally, but is losing control over what its subjects can read and hear, and the subversive impact could be profound:

More and more North Koreans are defying strict government controls on access to outside information that starkly contrasts with official propaganda, said a U.S. study released Wednesday.

Avid consumption of South Korean movies and pop music as well as foreign radio and television broadcasts is changing North Korean views of its southern neighbor and even of the United States, a report by the InterMedia consultancy showed.

“In 2012, North Koreans can get more outside information, through more types of media, from more sources, than ever before ? and they are less fearful of sharing that information than ever before,” said InterMedia.

The U.S. State Department-commissioned study, “A Quiet Opening: North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment,” captures 10 years of research on refugees, travelers and defectors from North Korea, including face-to-face interviews with more than 650 adults in 2010 and 2011.  [Reuters, Paul Eckert]

The information leakage includes “mobile phones, computers, MP3 players and USB drives . . . in substantial numbers, particularly among the elites.”

You can read the full report and see a webcast on InterMedia’s site.

Access to information by itself will disillusion the North Korean people, but by itself, it will not change the regime.  The regime is willing to use any degree of force necessary to preserve its power, and the people know that.  The problem of communication in North Korea is not only the problem of establishing communication between North Koreans and the outside world, but also of communication between North Koreans and other North Koreans.  Without the means to organize, North Koreans can never pose a significant challenge to the state.  That’s why multiple incidents of anti-regime resistance were quickly contained and quelled.  Organization will begin in small ways, like social and trade networks, and then evolve toward more political applications, like churches, alternative media, and labor organizations.  It will be the ability to organize the North Korean people on a wider scale that will enable the people to challenge the state, whether by popular mobilization or by force of arms.  This report is several steps from that inevitable consequence, but it shows us that North Korea has made strides toward it.

Update:  Radio Free Asia reports that smuggled South Korean DVDs are widely available in the North now.  No surprise there.