Although the rhetoric coming out of China still hearkens back to the bad old days of Mao, I can guarantee you that North Korea is a completely different world from China. I've been to both countries.

Let me put it this way: choco pies [0] are considered bonus incentives in North Korean factories.

And a lot of folks in the West don't seem to realize that there is quite a bit of international trade involving North Korea; there's a lot of countries that aren't so picky about whom they do business with. They clearly have capable engineers and scientists. The day I left Pyongyang on the public flight to Beijing, there was an unscheduled flight to Bangkok on the airport departure board.

Heck, for that matter, they have software engineers who design cell phone games like "Big Lebowski Bowling." [1] And it's likely that the Simpsons is animated in part there. [2]

[0] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Choco_Pie [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-06/kim-jong-il-bowls-f... [2] http://www.korea-is-one.org/article.php3?id_article=1856

PR China is a dictatorship. There are no longer totalitarian, since Mao died.