EYE-OPENER FOR NORTH KOREA

EYE-OPENER FOR NORTH KOREA
Los Angeles Times: North Korean leader Kim Jong Il came away from his recent six-day visit to China impressed with its development and perhaps even a convert to the cause of market economics. Kim was also more than politely interested in how China's Communist leaders were able to maintain virtually absolute political control even as they embraced capitalistic reforms and opened the country to foreign investors.
Kim could hardly fail to compare what he saw with what his country's rigidly controlled economy and sanctification of "juche" -- self-reliance -- have brought: the near collapse of North Korea's antiquated industries and transportation system and an estimated 2 million deaths from malnutrition since 1995.
Listless bureaucracy: Editorials in North Korea's state-run newspapers have lately demanded "new thinking." That's an apparent sign that Kim now feels secure with the mantle he assumed in 1994 after the death of his father, "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, and that he recognizes the ideology he inherited has brought his country to a dead end. Whether fresh thinking can cut North Korea loose from its failed past remains to be seen. The country lacks China's human and natural resources and its organizational abilities. Instead it must find a way to energize a listless bureaucracy and motivate a hungry, numbingly propagandized and isolated population that knows almost nothing about the world beyond its borders, especially the successes of such neighbors as South Korea that could offer a model for its own economic salvation.
China eagerly supports reforms in North Korea. It worries that an unchecked economic crisis could send millions of desperate refugees across its border, and it thinks that an economically healthier North Korea would be more stable and less inclined to disturb the international climate with bellicose talk and provocative actions. South Korea also hopes that a better life for North Koreans would reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula. President Kim Dae Jung, whose "sunshine policy" aims at encouraging change in North Korea, says his government is ready to help if Pyongyang opens its economy to reform. But he has also warned that he will insist on reciprocity, something there has been little of in the years since Seoul began providing generous humanitarian and other aid to the North.
As his Chinese hosts showed him the economic marvels of Shanghai, Kim Jong Il reportedly turned to his aides and asked angrily, "What have you done all this time?" What they have done, as Kim surely knows, is unfailingly carry out their masters' policies. The newest master seems to have grasped the folly of continuing along that calamitous path.