Open Sources, August 26, 2012

ON THURSDAY, I HAD DINNER WITH ANDREI LANKOV, which gave me the opportunity to rib him personally about his statement that Mickey Mouse shows “are by no means trivial.”  We don’t agree about that, but as usual, we found plenty of other things to agree about.  For one, we agreed that the food supply is a significant tool of control, so significant agricultural reforms would be meaningful to the North Korean people (we agreed to wait until spring to see what evidence there really is of significant reforms).  We also agreed that the regime probably isn’t interested in political reform, or such radical measures as ceasing to put hundreds of thousands of people and their kids in gulags, or ceasing to build its nuclear weapons capability, as it continues to do as aggressively as ever.

Those latter points should be deal-breakers for our willingness to relax economic, financial, or diplomatic pressure on North Korea; after all, Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein welcomed foreign investment, and they were still genocidal despots and mortal threats to their neighbors.  We’re still very much at the stage of asking whether North Korea will make any significant reforms to its system, but the question that lies beyond that one is whether those reforms will be of more than academic interest to us … unless the reforms trigger the regime’s downfall.

Andrei continues to work hard toward developing ways to get more information into North Korea, including digital libraries on thumb drives, inexpensive Korean-language documentaries using stock footage, and even a Korean version of Wikipedia (he handed me a CD loaded with the entire thing).  I wish him success, because it looks like the North Koreans and Chinese are achieving some success at re-sealing North Korea’s borders, even as cross-border broadcasting seems to be reaching larger audiences in the North.

———————————————————HAM-HANDED AND TIN-EARED:  Many of you have read Choe Sang-Hun’s story about Kim Young-Hwan by now, and it’s interesting and hopeful for all the reasons you’d think when a man comes to his senses, but it’s also interesting for what it tells us about the sheer polemic incompetence of the Korean government:

In 1995, Mr. Kim began publicly criticizing North Korea in interviews. Zeitgeist, a bimonthly he founded, published a book likening Kim Jong-Il, the late North Korean leader, to Pol Pot and Hitler. By the time the South Korean authorities uncovered and broke up his party in 1999, Mr. Kim and some of his associates were ready to renounce their old politics and avoid indictment under South Korea’s anti-espionage law.

In a statement of “ideological conversion” in 1999, he said: “By spreading misinformation about North Korea, I helped delay South Korean and international attention to the human rights of North Koreans. When I see emaciated North Korean children, I feel too ashamed to say ‘Please forgive me.”’

Interesting that Kim Dae Jung was President when the state broke up Kim Young Hwan’s party.  Maybe the government isn’t so incompetent after all….

———————————————————THE NEW CHINA LOBBY:  Reuters takes a detailed look at how China is trying to buy your love. Pessimist that I am, I think we’ve been in a serious Cold War with China for at least the last ten years. China never really lost its inherent hostility to us even at the peak of its economic reforms; it just chose not to emphasize it until recently, as it has become both more arrogant and more insecure. It was during the 2008 Olympics, which were supposed to welcome China into the international community, when the world really saw China’s angry state-orchestrated nationalism in its full fury. Yet China’s surrogates here still castigate those of us who draw the natural conclusions from its new hegemonism.