The woman at the catalogue desk in the Grand People’s Study House was engrossed in a library book when we arrived. It wasn’t a volume of Kim Il Sung’s works or those of Kim Jong Il. Rather, it was the first of a three-volume comic called Inside the Plot, published in Pyongyang this year, in which a wily female North Korean agent wrecks the machinations of the evil Americans and South Koreans.
Her reading placed on hold, she took the visiting group across the floor to the current exhibition showing books from the private libraries of the two leaders. Kim Il Sung read Stalin on Lenin in Russian, while in pride of place in the second section was Kim Jong Il’s copy of the May 1950 issue of Children’s Union with its colourful comic cover showing celebrating Koreans waving North Korean and Soviet flags in revolutionary solidarity. It was the end of the honeymoon. Only a month later the Korean Civil War started in earnest and first the United States and then the Chinese became the respective surrogate partners of South and North Korea for the first blooding of the Cold War.
Now, after a series of lean years when Beijing edged increasingly towards acceptance of Washington’s continued sanctions against Pyongyang, North Korean and Chinese solidarity is back in vogue. China’s refusal to condemn Pyongyang for March’s sinking of South Korea’s corvette is much appreciated, even if the Chinese position was as much motivated by the cynicism of Washington as it was by the view that the sinking was not attributable to actions of North Korea’s military hawks.
This is the fourth naval clash in just over a decade, concerning a border that no one – including the US – recognises. Yet none of the three previous clashes, where the North Koreans suffered substantially more casualties than the South, saw any threat of reference to the UN Security Council or sanctions for the perpetrators.
The current affection for Beijing is strengthened by China’s early acknowledgement of the planned leadership change in Pyongyang. Hu Jintao met a Korean Workers Party delegation in late August and even Hu’ss explicit encouragement of “socialist modernisation” went unremarked.
Now it’s full steam ahead. The KWP is taking the lead. After a decade and a half in the doldrums, the party is back. The leadership structure that had withered and atrophied since the last party plenum under Kim Il Sung in December 1993 has been restored, with a new central committee and Politburo reflecting a generational change. Now Pyongyang sees the Party’s hammer, sickle and calligraphy brush symbol everywhere. Immediately prior to this first Party Conference in 30 years, Kim Jong Un, the youngest son, and Kim Kyong Hui, Kim Jong Il’s sister, were both promoted to general. At the conference itself, Kim Kyong Hui was elected to the Politburo and her husband Jang Song Thaek – who already holds a series of key posts –became an alternate member, while Kim Jong Un took the post of vice-chair of the party’s central military commission.
Kim Jong Il is still firmly in control, but he has begun to delegate elements of authority among a core group of family members – son, sister and brother-in-law – with others in the standing committee of the politburo and the international department of the party. None of this trinity yet has access to all the centres of power. The son is not a member of the Politburo, the sister not on the central commission and her husband not a full politburo member. But all the pieces have been put in place for a smooth transition at the appropriate time.
The next steps – if fate doesn’t intervene – are likely to follow in 2012 as the celebrations of the centenary of Kim Il Sung’s birth kick off. All the indications are it will reprise China’s evolution with a move towards a more collective party-led leadership, with Kim Jong Un the first among equals. Whatever else, it will be a family affair.
The political result may well be gentle moves towards the market. 90 per cent of the people who count in North Korea live in Pyongyang and, despite last year’s botched currency reform, the local economy is looking good. There is a plethora of Chinese consumer products in the shops and markets at prices lower in real terms than12 months ago.
Pyongyang is set to benefit from new investment in horticulture and animal husbandry, with an enormous fruit farm maturing next year, while the world’s third largest ostrich farm is delivering meat to the city for the first time. The currency reform tried to bring the new “kiosk capitalists” – those outside the sanctioned private enterprise initiatives of the military and party – to heel. They are by-product of the agricultural and industrial reforms of 2001 and 2002 who were beginning to make waves. It may have proved impossible to put the economic reform genie back in the bottle, but this group lost out financially as their bundles of “old” currency (the won) became so much waste paper – far exceeding the limits laid down of what could be exchanged for “new” won. Now there is less conspicuous consumption on display.
The only product not available in the markets is rice. The public distribution system – which once supplied everything – is now limited to providing fitful supplies of rice and other cereals. The PDS has apparently been delivering nothing in Pyongyang since March.
And the current floods bode ill for early 2011. They will have a significant impact on the harvest and matters will not be helped by the fact that sections of rice paddy fields have been turned over to other forms of agriculture. Those likely to suffer most will be in the small cities of the north-east of the country, squeezed between mountains and the sea with little local agriculture, barely any functioning industry compared to a generation ago, and little capital equipment to scavenge and sell. Distribution problems may make food availability problematic. Even where it is available, it may no longer be accessible in the new monetary economy of North Korea.
The obsession with the succession means new reforms have been overlooked. Investment is the key for the future. This has been recognised with the creation of the state investment committee that is to take over the currently divided responsibility for inward investment from the ministries of foreign affairs and foreign trade respectively. It will report directly to the prime minister’s office.
Yet the real problem is not institutional architecture, but international affairs. What is frustrating any attempt by Pyongyang to follow Vietnam and China is the absence of any settlement on the Korean Peninsula. Yet the assumption it is only hardliners inside the Korean People’s Army who are blocking a solution is mistaken. For reasons connected with the prospect of losing some of its bases in Japan where access was granted for the duration of the Korean War, the Pentagon is as reluctant as North Korea’s generals to sign a peace treaty.
Equally, neo-conservatives and others in both Tokyo and Washington also need the threat from North Korea, the former to intimidate Japanese voters into changing their constitution which prevents the deployment of the military abroad, and the latter as an excuse to deploy Theatre Missile Defence – a kind of local Star Wars-lite – in Japan. That would give Washington the capability of launching a pre-emptive attack against the North Koreans on the basis that any odd orphan missile tipped with a nuclear weapon missed on an initial attack could be intercepted before it struck Japan. At the same time, it would neutralise China’s potential threat to Japan and force Beijing to switch resources from civil uses to military ones – aware that it was exactly this distorted economy that played a major role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
All this and a new administration in Seoul that waves big sticks and dangles small carrots may well mean that North Korea’s promised return to the six- party talks may turn out to be one step forward, two steps back – leaving Pyongyang to wonder whether it was all a plot, and react accordingly.
Glyn Ford recently returned from a visit to Pyongyang on behalf of the East West Institute. He is the author of North Korea on the Brink – Struggle for Survival, published by Pluto
