Quite unlikely yet, but ...

By Andrei Lankov

Not long ago the present author published a column which dealt with the growing income and improving living standards in North Korea. Indeed, contrary to some alarmist reporting, the last decade was a time of slow but tangible increases of income and consumption levels for North Koreans.

North Korea remains a poor country, to be sure, and malnourishment is still widespread there. Nonetheless, North Koreans do not starve to death any more, and their access to consumer durables has improved considerably. TV sets are common, DVD players have ceased to be a rarity, and the number of mobile service subscribers grows in leaps and bounds. Even computers have begun to appear in more affluent North Korean houses.

However, there is an interesting paradox: this improvement does not necessarily mean that North Korea is becoming more stable.

A few weeks ago I discussed the economic situation in North Korea with a European colleague, one of a small number of people who do research on the North Korean economy. We both agreed that the economic situation in North Korea has improved over the last decade, and that this upward trend is likely to continue. But then my colleague said: ``But this is not going to save the Kims’ regime. Actually, the recent economic improvements are bad news for them.” I could not agree more. My interlocutor spent his childhood and youth in the Soviet Union and East Germany, and he knew what he was talking about.

It has often been assumed that the extreme deprivation is what might trigger the regime collapse in North Korea. This indeed might be the case, but world history shows that people seldom rebel when their lives are really desperate. In a time of mass starvation people are too busy looking for food.

Most revolutions happen in times of relative prosperity. A typical revolution is initiated (or at least prepared) by the people who have the time and energy to discuss larger issues. Another condition for a revolutionary outbreak is a widespread belief that an attractive alternative to the current existence is available.

The recent Arab rebellion began in Tunisia which, by all indicators, is one of the most affluent Arab countries with the exception of the oil monarchies. Nobody starved in the Soviet Union of the late 1980s ― actually, at that time the country appeared fabulously rich to visiting North Koreans.

However, information about the material affluence and individual freedoms enjoyed by the capitalist West began to spread in communist countries, and this spread of information sealed the eventual fate of these regimes. The people saw an attractive alternative, and they soon came to believe (wrongly) that the only force which prevented them from enjoying a similar lifestyle was an authoritarian regime. They were affluent and relaxed, and educated enough, to talk about these issues. When the time came, they went to the streets, joining huge anti-government rallies, and the authoritarian communist regimes soon found themselves in the proverbial waste bin of history. It is telling that the 1989 revolutions began in Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the most affluent of all communist countries.

This is the reason why, the recent improvement in the economic situation of North Korea might create conditions which will make a mass revolt, Egypt style, a more likely, or at least, less unlikely, probability.

To start with, the North Koreans are less stressed nowadays. Not all, of course, but many of them. This means that they have time to think and (cautiously) talk about the future. This is less risky, since the regime has become more permissive, and its enforcers are too corrupt to do their job and keep the population under control.

Higher real income means also more consumer durables. However, many of the present-day status symbols in North Korea are related to information technology, like DVD players, computers and MP3 players. This does not bode well for the regime’s future. In a sense, the North Korean elite are unlucky: They run an anachronistic dictatorship whose survival depends on its ability to isolate the common populace from the outside world, but they do it in an era when information processing technology is developing with amazing speed.

A DVD player is normally used to watch South Korean and other foreign movies. Everybody who sees these movies becomes skeptical about the usual claims of the official propaganda and is unlikely to believe that South Korea is an impoverished American colony. Computers are potentially even more dangerous. Internet connections do not exist but computers come with USB ports and DVD drives which can be used to copy unauthorized information. The increasingly common mobile phones also enable people to communicate.

Of course, the chances of the Arab revolts spreading to Korea are pretty close to zero. It might be a long time before the Kim Il Sung Square, the major square in Pyongyang, will witness the scenes we just saw in the Cairo’s Tahrir Square. But paradoxically the moderate economic growth of the recent years might hasten the arrival of this moment.

Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.