Attention North Korean generals: You have exactly six months to plot your coup.

Notwithstanding some reports to the contrary yesterday, it looks like Kim Jong-Un’s big party congress will proceed in May, as planned. According to the Korean Institute for National Unification, a South Korean think tank, personnel changes will be on the agenda:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is expected to reveal his new aides in a major community party convention to be held in May next year, a South Korean government think tank said Tuesday. [….]

Chances are high that it will set the stage for a “political ceremony for the full-scale resignation of the second revolutionary generation led by Choe Ryong-hae and the rise of the third and fourth revolutionary generations to power,” the institute said in a report on the outlook for next year’s security situation involving the North.

Choe, a party secretary, was one of the closest confidants to Kim but he has reportedly been demoted and underwent “re-education” as a punishment for an unconfirmed reason.

As to the scheduled party congress to be attended by more than 3,000 officials, the KINU said it would introduce more new faces in the ruling elite rather than fresh policies.

“A new line-up of power elites in the Kim Jong-un administration will be revealed,” it said, adding Kim is apparently confident of his grip on state affairs. “That would have been a basis for Kim Jong-un’s decision to open the 7th party congress in 2016.” [Yonhap]

Beware the Ides of May, comrades.

You can read the original report of KINU’s soothsayer analyst here. It doesn’t say much about its sources for these predictions, but rather, seems to be based solely on the author’s analysis of historical patterns of succession and power consolidation in other totalitarian states, along with a healthy dose of speculation so unleavened it would be kosher for Passover. It isn’t what you’d call exact science or inside knowledge.

It also predicts that His Corpulency is “unlikely to conduct a nuclear test in 2016,” and may “offer an olive branch toward the South in his New Year speech,” to which I’ll respond by referring you to this evergreen analysis of North Korean New Year speeches. Frankly, the genre of post-New Year speech analysis tends to be so cherry-picked, wishful, and contrived that you almost have to admire KINU for not waiting for the actual speech to (over-)analyze it.

KINU also joins in the widespread speculation that Kim will announce new economic reforms. In the wake of the Orascom fiasco and a series of other financial misadventures in “engagement” (Masikryong, the Kaesong shutdown, the Ebola quarantine, tourist arrests) I don’t doubt that His Porcine Majesty will want to at least talk about reforms, to bait a whole new class of suckers to bring him some money. Hey, talking about reforms is Pyongyang’s equivalent to GoFundMe. But in their practical effect, North Korea’s economic reform plans tend to be a lot like Kim Jong Un’s weight loss plans: more aspirational than empirical.

Take the latest reports that Pyongyang has just arrested scores of Chinese North Koreans, who make up a critical component of the North’s nascent merchant class. The report has since been denied by Chinese media, but if you were a hwagyo considering a new venture beyond the no-smile line, you’d be a fool to discount the possibility that there was at least some truth to the report. And after all, it’s not the first such report we’ve seen this year.

Or, take the so-called June 28th agricultural reforms — functionally, nothing more than sharecropping, an arrangement which everyone knows has never been used to exploit anyone, ever — and which KINU also expects Kim to build on during the upcoming congress. More than three years after their announcement, the evidence for those “reforms” remains scant, and North Koreans tell the Daily NK that they’re non-existent, as a practical matter.

It all sounds like astrology to me, but KINU has done some excellent work, including this very extensive new white paper on human rights, which actually shows that Kim has increased his political isolation and repression of his own population.

After 20 years of wishful talk about reforms in North Korea, political repression is as severe as ever, inter-Korean tensions are as high as they’ve ever been, the centrifuges at Yongbyon are spinning like a politician’s Twitter feed, and our best evidence is that the economic gap between the Koreas continues to widen. It’s hard to imagine that Kim Jong-Un will allow the necessary interaction between its population and the Outer Earth for reforms to work, if that interaction increases the risk that his subjects will learn the truth, or alternatively, that we will.