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Category: Regime Change

May 19, 2010

Kim Jong Eun Becomes a Focus for North Koreans’ Anger

Interesting report from the Chosun Ilbo: Nonetheless, starving families are said to have swarmed local party headquarters and protested, and even local party officials are openly complaining. Provincial party officials in Chongjn, North Hamgyong Province, and Hamhung, South Hamgyong Province, effectively stopped working, telling party headquarters there is nothing they can do if there is nothing to eat. With rumors spreading that Kim Jong-un led an unpopular “100-day struggle” and “150-day struggle” that pressed people into service on the farms...

Categories Kim Jong Un/Resistance
May 4, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch

Today, I catch up with KCJ and the rest of you who’ve commented on Kurt Achin’s intriguing new VOA report on the prospects for regime collapse: For the first time in years, international experts say North Korea’s isolated government is increasingly frail, and potentially unstable. Part of the reason, they say, is Pyongyang’s attempt at currency reform last year. [….] “I think there’s some increasing views in Seoul that after 20 years of wrongly predicting the demise of North Korea,...

Categories Regime Change
April 5, 2010

North Korea Reaffirms Plans to Close Markets

If you’ve read a spate of recent reports and op-eds in places like the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal recently, you might have acquired the impression that The Great Confiscation was a fiasco that caused panic, chaos, and an unprecedented swelling of discontent. The North Korean government wants you to know that all of this is all a brigandish, flunkeyist fabrication: ”In the early days immediately after the currency change, market prices were not fixed, so markets were...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
April 5, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch

Writing in Foreign Policy, Marcus Noland writes about discontent and dissent in North Korea, and the impact of The Great Confiscation as a catalyst for it. The surveys’ results suggest that the regime’s discomfort might be well founded. Countries such as North Korea, where people routinely hide their true opinions, are prone to sudden, explosive political mobilizations like the ones that swept Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1980s. Those mobilizations happen when nascent expressions of discontent cascade —...

Categories NK Economics/Propaganda/Regime Change/Subversion
March 31, 2010

Götterdämmerung Watch: Evan Ramstad and Aidan Foster-Carter

It is now possible to say that a new consensus is emerging that the North Korean regime’s stability is in doubt. The latest article to strike this tone is from Evan Ramstad in the Wall Street Journal: North Korea’s authoritarian regime appears to be weakening and the prospect of its collapse is being discussed anew by longtime observers, though there is still a broad debate about when that could happen. [Wall Street Journal, Evan Ramstad] You’re on your own from...

Categories China & Korea/Regime Change
March 30, 2010

Lankov on the New North Korean Elite, Part 2

Alternative elite members who can apply the knowledge they learned in South Korea well in the North Korean reality could be doctors, technicians, CEOs and scholars of a post-Kim age. Re-education could cultivate specialists in the new North Korea. Despite the very low economic level, North Korea provides a fairly good basic education. Therefore, when carrying out the rehabilitation of North Korea, re-education based on the knowledge they already have is more reasonable than educating North Korean specialists such as...

Categories Reconstruction/Refugees/Regime Change
March 24, 2010

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...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
March 23, 2010

Fear and Loathing Across the Tumen, Part 1

The Times of London sent correspondent Jane Macartney to China’s border with North Korea and found that the refugees there are reporting a rapidly deteriorating food situation, deepening discontent with the regime, and more willingness than ever to express that discontent openly. The editors of the Times are shocked enough by the report to write these cogent words in an editorial: Of all the atrocities of modern history, famine is the least commemorated. It is an agonising mass death sentence...

Categories NK Economics/Refugees/Resistance
March 20, 2010

Rumor: U.S., China Planning for “Upheaval” in N. Korea

The United States Thursday denied reports that it will soon have closed-door discussions with South Korea and China on plans for upheaval in North Korea. “I have not been told we are going to have this type of meeting at this particular point,” a senior State Department official said, asking not to be named. “If we are working on that in sort of an early stage, that could be possible.” [Yonhap] Normally, I’d be tempted to believe this because they...

Categories China/Reconstruction/Regime Change/U.S. Military
March 17, 2010

Must Read: Sanctions Could Cause N. Korean Regime to Collapse

The full report is here. I won’t have time to read it until this weekend, but here’s a teaser: The North “is facing several domestic problems that in isolation would each be manageable but together could threaten regime survival,” said Daniel Pinkston, the group’s northeast Asia deputy project director. “The North Korean government has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to survive, but the regime is under extreme pressure when it must also deal with looming succession issues.” The 68-year-old Kim, who...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Regime Change/Sanctions
March 6, 2010

Food Riot Reported Near Camp 12, North Korea

North Koreans, it seems, didn’t really feel much like celebrating on February 16th: One person was killed by armed guards on Feb. 16 when a group of people attempted to rob a food train at Komusan Railway Station in Puryong-gun, North Hamgyong Province, defector group North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity said. The attack came on North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s birthday after a disastrous currency reform sent food prices skyrocketing. The train was loaded with rice imported from China, the group...

Categories Resistance/The Camps
February 25, 2010

The Victory of the Ajummas

Shortly after North Korea announced The Great Confiscation came The Ajumma Rebellion, an event that may prove to be one of the most significant in North Korean history. The historical perspective comes into focus as I read this analysis at the Daily NK, not so much of why The Great Confiscation failed, but why the regime even tried something so clearly predisposed to fail. It concludes with this: Decades after the leader promised “boiled rice and beef soup” to everyone...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance
February 17, 2010

“They are all bastards, and Kim Jong-Il should die soon.”

Via Open News, we learn that mandatory adulation on Kim Jong Il’s birthday isn’t quite unanimous: Based on the interviews from four regions of North Korea- North Hamkyung Province, Yanggang Province, South PyongAn Province, and Nampo city- between February 2 and 4, North Koreans are expressing their discontentment about Kim Jong-Il and his son Kim Jong-Eun. The expression of discontentment differs from region to region, however. Citizens near the border do not hesitate to express their discontentment, while citizens in...

Categories Resistance
February 11, 2010

North Korean Premier Apologizes for Great Confiscation

If absolute power is never having to say you’re sorry, what could this possibly mean? On Friday, Premier Kim Yong Il apologized for the aftermath in a meeting with government officials and local village leaders, the mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported, citing an unidentified source in North Korea. “Regarding the currency reform, I sincerely apologize as we pushed ahead with it without a sufficient preparation so that it caused a big pain to the people,” Kim read a statement during...

Categories Kremlinology/NK Economics/Resistance
February 8, 2010

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....

Categories NK Economics/Regime Change
February 7, 2010

Great Confiscation Updates and Aftermath; Demonstration Reported in Dancheon

It’s still premature to say that the North Korean regime has retreated in its attack on the system of markets, known as jangmadang, on which the majority of the people had come to depend since the collapse of the state distribution system in the 1990’s. The best available information — and the qualifiers to the aforementioned phrase should be obvious — suggests that the regime has decided against pressing the attack in certain specific places for now. For the time...

Categories NK Economics/Resistance