As Economy Grows, North Korea's Grip on Society Weakens
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://www.pbs.org/video/2365155890/
"S32 Ep6: Secret State of North Korea"
There are some really funny parts where citizens who are doing illegal things berate the officers who are trying to enforce the laws. It seems rather unlike a state with a firm grip on its populace.
High rates of growth are impressive but also not hard given how much of a backwater NK was. We'll see if it continues. China succeeded because they liberalized and have a massive populace. NK simply doesn't have that and is isolated from the world community. How long can that growth continue and if it stops, will the locals accept it?
Oh, and PBS has lots of good online video content. They're worth supporting.
Political changes take much longer than economic changes, which take much longer than technological changes. Typically, you need to have a whole generation grow up who believes that their prosperity is due to their own hard work and that of their parents, and that they owe nothing to the existing political regime. We're just barely, within the last 1-2 decades, seeing the economic changes that resulted from China's opening to the West and adoption of modern technology. Maybe by the time our grandchildren are adults, they'll see the political liberalization that goes along with that.
A lot of the big shifts happen during a crisis: Europe's social democracies, the liberalized markets of Japan and South Korea, the USA as superpower: all of those were forged from the global crisis conditions of World War II and have only gradually drifted off their various trajectories.
And, to the extent that the world has a crisis now(and we have a whole bunch of events conceivable as crisis scenarios), it isn't going to resemble the last one: the premises are different, and the means of resolution are likely to be different too.
Han Chinese is by far the largest ethnicity on Earth - I've always wondered how that impacts Chinese sentiment and history.
There are countries with more ethnic cohesion, though they tend to be smaller: Iceland for example. Any larger country either came about by annexing smaller ones, or was sufficiently valuable enough that it was colonized at some point.
There's great danger in the Marxoid tendency to see everything in terms of economics and social class. Leaving aside its obvious failures in practical matters, this tendency discounts many real human emotions and often leads one to topsy-turvy assumptions compared to what actually happened.
A lot of countries today are starting to look not to Western democracies as examples/role models of success but to China. Even in existing democracies, it is not surprising that the recent populist/nationalist movements arguing for isolationism, economic-nationalism, increased government control stem out of a world where China is the shining beacon of consistent 5%+ economic growth.
By the time China should change, they might have already reshaped the world such that they don't need to change.
The authoritarians of the day don't have a lot of supporters in NY, SF, London or Paris. It's the US flyover states and French mining towns that are turning away from liberalism.
They have adapted very, very well. For example:
- Mass surveillance and censorship. Over the Internet: State regulated search engines, encyclopedias, news, social networks, etc. Baidu, Baike, WeChat... all curated and monitored.
- Your credit score can be affected if you don't show alignment with the party.
- If you are considered problematic for the party, they can send you to jail, force you into labor, harvest your organs. You name it. There's no press coverage of it.
- The People's Liberation Army does not belong to the People's Republic of China, it belongs to the Communist Party of China. Big part of their training is political indoctrination.
- China pressures countries to align their vision with theirs. Stay silent about human right violations, Taiwan, Tibet, etc. Even through passive aggressive ways like withdrawing Pandas from your zoo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panda_diplomacy
- All entertainment content is also curated/censored. Hollywood movies need to pass state review if they want to be in the Chinese market.
> Mass surveliance and censorship?
Yes, we got that.
> Your credit score can be affected...
Yes, your Zipcode tells everything
> If you are considered problematic for the party...
Yes, we got that. We get people 'suicided' and then we close the files so that they can't be opened for 50 years or whatever. Got that.
> China pressures countries to align their vision with theirs.
US, UK, France, Italy etc etc do that too
> Contents censored
Yup. See 'national board of review'
Disclaimer: I know a bunch of people -- friends, colleagues, neighbours etc that are Chinese/or of Chinese descent.
1. - they got here somehow -- was it hard?. No. They did not have to escape on a raft like Cuban exiles. They just left and noone bothered them.
2. - They seem to be communicating with their families in China with no issues. You know, SMS, email etc
3. - They also travel back and forth, this includes kids, parents, grandmas and grandpas.
Overall, the funny thing is that I never heard any of my friends/colleagues complain about China.
Meantime, CNN and Fox etc keep saying that China is like devil, except worse.
Guess who I trust.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tank+man
One of these searches is incredibly damaging to Chinese interests, one to US interests.
Try doing them in each country.
At the same time I agree very strongly that China is nothing like the former USSR, let alone the current North Korea.
Ask your friends if they would feel safe to go and openly/publicly criticize the communist party of China and hear their answers.
It only takes them to go and acknowledge membership to Falun Gong/Falun Dafa for them to be put into a organ donor list (while still alive).
Do you get your organs harvested in jail if you oppose the ruling party?
Can you open Wikipedia and read articles that challenge the political views of your leadership? Can you go to a library and buy a book about opposing political systems? Can you study such systems in school? Can an academic have a job if he has opposing political views?
Can you vote and pick a guy from another party? Do other parties exist at all? Can you start your own party?
So no, it's not the same. You can make all the analogies you want, but there's no equivalence, at least not in the extent in which these things are happening.
There is surely shady stuff going on everywhere, and corruption and coverups, but it's still not the same.
We even have RT, the Russian station that is mostly propaganda for the Russian Federation leadership views, and you can tune into it if you want and watch it all day if so you prefer.
All you're illustrating with this one is that the US does a better job of faking democracy.
If China had a pro-establishment Democratic Communist Party alternative to a pro-establishment Communist Party, each sharing 99% of the resources, media, power and influence, along with infinite minnow parties that pose no threat to the system or established order because the system doesn't allow them to, it would be as democratic as the US.
But there are many branches of government that can help influence government, and you can also run for office within your state. Here some states have independent senators.
In China you don't really have independent branches of government, it's just the Chairman of the party and whatever he wants is what gets done.
You can actually do that in China, if you know English. Only the Chinese Wikipedia is blocked.
> Can you go to a library and buy a book about opposing political systems?
If you mean a book that explains the political system of e.g. the United States, sure, you can read that. If you mean a book that proposes an alternative political system for China, probably not.
> Can you vote and pick a guy from another party? Do other parties exist at all?
There are no other parties, but in theory, you can write in any name you want on your vote sheet. It's just that one of the "recommended" guys always wins.
> So no, it's not the same.
Agreed. I just wanted to point out that it's not exactly as bad in China as you think it is.
China works very well for you if you are aligned with the party, or you are indifferent and don't get in their way. Otherwise it does not work very well.
I don't think you understand what the word inevitably means.
https://www.google.com/search?q=china+economic+"inevitably+l...
The Chinese government competently used a combination of crony capitalism and state-run-enterprises to sustain steady economic growth. It's well understood that government policies encouraged and supported the free-ish market.
In North Korea, the markets which have sprung up have happened despite the government. If it is increasingly seen as incompetent, that's clear distinction with the situation in China, which was run by fairly ruthless technocrats (since the 90s).
It's also quite a stretch to think that the farmer's markets in North Korea could possibly transition into the huge industrial giants which have powered China's economy.
I think most of the west would be more-or-less OK with a Chinese-style regime in North Korea -- a competent, responsible, undemocratic politburo more interested in economic growth than pointless military threats (China does not weekly threaten to nuke San Francisco, with 80s-era animated illustrations).
So, there was a huge improvement since the days of Cultural Revolution. Just not enough. And if North Korea achieves the same level of human rights that is available in China now, it will be considered a vast success by everybody who cares.
Strangely, some people seem to maintain that freedom is either absolute everything or nothing. But you don't have to equate everything as "still non-free" in order to fight for more freedom and justice.
For the massive human rights gains in China to be so thoughtlessly dismissed is frustrating.
If anyone is foolish enough to think china will adopt democracy in the guise of America or Europe is foolish, their culture is so different as so to not even be understandable by most westerners.
I'd agree that china is partially democratic and free - insomuch as there are limited methods of redress, and some criticism of the government is allowed, provided you don't attack the foundations of the government.. and every year little by little the Chinese government allows a little more criticisms and adds more methods of redress. They'll make it in my lifetime, but again, it won't look like us in the west.
I think that's wrong and patronizing, everyone is capable of democracy.
Taiwan is a clear counter-example to this ridiculous claim. In many ways, ranging from traditional religions to the writing system, Taiwan has preserved more traditional Chinese culture than the PRC has. None of this has stopped Taiwan from becoming a modern democracy with citizen referendums and more tolerance of peaceful protest than any English speaking country I know of.
Sure, it has internet censorship. But it is no longer jailing people, in mass, for the "crime" of being a university professor.
That's a win in my book.
There are many shades of grey on the scale of terrible place to live to amazing place to live. This is not black and white. Today's China (with its many faults) is a much better place to live than North Korea, or the China from 1970. In fact, China's per capita GDP (adjusted for purchasing power) has risen 7x in the past 25 years![2] I think people in China are happy to have this huge level of economic improvement for now, and will deal with the civil freedoms later.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_Envy#Dogs_and_docto... [2]http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp-per-capita-ppp
I think you're right about the current attitude of people in China. Unfortunately, as I have experienced in software development, often "later" (e.g. the Jira label "Future") means "never."
China has a long way to go yet to really be a first world country. Even now I think it's clear that the party is nowhere near as powerful as they were and there are things they don't do anymore.
They know that protest could break out if they do the wrong things, they are careful.
I don't think it is inevitable but I highly doubt that a country could get to the same GDP per capita as the western democracies without some government reforms.
If someone can guarantee 100% that ending "Internet censorship, jailing human rights activists, intimidating journalists, etc" wouldn't hurt the economic progress than perhaps they would be on board.
With so many huge changes both inside and outside DPRK during the past decades, to credit the gradual introduction free market systems to sanctions seems tendentious.
Free market in NK? Maybe free as in the state is too busy caring right now and market as in flea market.
US foreign policy seems to at least pay lip service to the idea that democracy is inherently good. But efforts to impose democracy on nations that have only ever been autocratic seems to have a poor history.
Likewise others have mentioned that China is "proof" that economic growth doesn't lead to democracy.
China I think is a really interesting case. When I compare China and India, which are both developing nations of massive size (over a billion people each), it seems to be as an outsider looking in that the Chinese are way better off than the Indians despite China being ostensibly communist and India ostensibly democratic.
This is likely to be a controversial statement.
This doesn't excuse the bad on either side. China has the annexation of China, lack of a free press, labour camps, the almost industrial scale genocide of baby girls and poor labour conditions to name a few. India has a huge problem with poverty, a population growth rate that's really concerning, a real problem with rape (at least in parts) and a ridiculous territorial ego fest with Pakistan over Kashmir.
But what the Chinese have, which I think ultimately benefits citizens, is political stability. While China is still called a Communist country it's unlike any other Communist country I've ever seen in that there are markets, a form of capitalism and the accumulation of private wealth.
What I also see is the topping of totalitarian regimes in places like Iraq and Libya. This is part of the reason fro the current refugee crisis in Europe. And as awful as I'm sure the al-Asaad regime is in Syria, has anyone really benefitted from the prolonged civil war in Syria?
So anyway, North Korea. It's certainly another interesting case and it has managed to survive when other such regimes have fallen by the wayside. This is in large part to China. Powerful countries like buffers between other powerful countries. Russia certainly wanted and wants one with the EU and NATO.
North Korea also survives by a strict and brutal control on information so I'm happy to see efforts people make to smuggle even things like TV shows into North Korea. These I do think ultimately help to weaken the regime but the process is not quick.
I don't think that North Korea--or anywhere else--is ultimately bound for democracy however.
The fact that so many democracies derive from the UK means that democracy is not a default state and to be successful needs centuries of tradition and institutions to make it work well.
I agree, that the Weimar republic was weak. Main problem was a missing election threshold, resulting in a divided, weak parliament. But some other minor things happened, too. For example several militaristic regimes packed on a small continent were competing to divide the world resulting in a world war, for which Germany was made solely accountable for and had to give up territory and pay huge reparations.
There are numerous examples of democracies collapsing from what seemed a stable state much quicker than that.
The collapse of the French Fourth Republic in 1958 is a good example[1]. In that case it led to another democracy, but that is only because the army wanted de Gaulle, and de Gaulle was happy to be president in a parliamentary system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Fourth_Republic#Algeria...
The UK has nothing to do with it.
Then there was that whole cold war thing, and the USSR lost its client states, most of which adopted the political system of the winners.
The fact that so many democracies derive from the UK means that democracy is not a default state and to be successful needs centuries of tradition and institutions to make it work well.
I don't see how that follows at all. Democracy seems to be working out pretty well in Timor Leste, which doesn't have a long tradition, but not in Thailand, which does. Switzerland was never ruled by the UK and democracy works well, Zimbabwe was ruled by the UK and democracy hasn't worked out.
There's a lot more going on than some kind of simplistic explanation like this.
The US didn't just become what it was over night. It faced very difficult issues at its birth especially with federal power. Luckily the right choices were made, but each case is going to have its own set of circumstances.
As I understand it, the only countries left on the planet in control of their own money supply are North Korea, Cuba & Iran.
With the greatest leader above them,
people barely know one exists.
Next comes one whom they love and praise.
Next comes one whom they fear. <-- Kim Jong Un
Next comes one whom they despise and defy. <-- His father
When a leader trusts no one,
no one trusts him.
The great leader speaks little.
He never speaks carelessly.
He works without self-interest
and leaves no trace.
When all is finished, the people say
“We did it ourselves.” <-- North Korean people