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North Korea and the Costs of Isolation
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17546 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1990 |
2,553 Words |
| Author
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James Cotton
James Cotton is senior research fellow in the Northeast Asia
Program at the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian
National University, Canberra. His most recent publication is
Asian Frontier Nationalism: Owen Lattimore and the American
Policy Debate (Humanities Press). |
In the last few years, there have been notable additions to the skyline of Pyongyang, capital of North Korea. A block of apartments and amenity buildings has been erected along Kwangbok Street, the project being personally supervised by Kim Jong II, son and successor to supreme leader Kim II Sung. A 100-story hotel resembling a pyramid rises in the Potongang district, and the facilities erected in Pyongyang's bid to cohost the Seoul Olympics are equally imposing.
The reality behind these projects is less impressive. Apart from the occasional speeding Mercedes limousine ferrying a member of the elite, the eight lanes of Kwangbok Street usually are deserted. On the sidewalks, however, crowds of ordinary citizens wait patiently in lengthy queues for the creaking trolleybuses, the only form of transport available as the small Pyongyang subway does not serve this area. Bicycles are banned from the capital, officially because they are untidy and cause traffic congestion but in reality because they render people more mobile and thus more difficult to control.
Such scenes are reminiscent of Eastern Europe before glasnost or China in the Mao Zedong era. Indeed, the North Korean regime is one of the few members remaining of a species now close to extinction. The mechanisms of central economic control still go unchallenged by enterprise initiative and cost accounting, and reliance upon the market (black, white, or gray) accounts for such a small proportion of the supply of goods and services as to be negligible. A small and cautious attempt in 1984-85 to engage in joint ventures with foreign entrepreneurs came to nothing when political criteria were applied to assess the initiative's likely products and by-products. In politics, too, Stalinist logic is manifest, but here dogma is modified to incorporate the fact that the upper reaches of power are monopolized by the leader's family and the relatives of his original partisan band.
Officially in 1980, and in practice in 1973, Kim II Sung designated his son Kim Jong II as his successor. The sole rationale offered for this succession is that the son alone fully understands the policy and message of the father, and that more than one generation of identical leadership is required to accomplish the revolution begun in 1945. Kim Jong II, however, in a remarkable parallel with some of China's former "gang of four" (who sought to succeed Mao Zedong in 1976), shows aptitude only in the production of turgid ideological pieces and revolutionary theater. Not surprisingly, North Korea, after rapid initial growth, has exhibited for the last two decades all the pathological features
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