By Kim Jae-kyoung
SINGAPORE ― North Korea’s “byeongjin line” or its dual policy to pursue nuclear armament and economic developments simultaneously may backfire on the Kim Jong-un regime, according to North Korea experts.
North Korean leader Kim highlighted the policy during the latest party congress but analysts say that Kim’s empty talk on the economic front will put a growing burden on his regime over time.
“Clearly it (congress) raises the profile of Kim Jung-un, recasting his role as one now squarely in charge of the Workers’ Party,” William Brown, professor at the Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, told The Korea Times.
“The problem is there is nothing new in the business he talked about so it would be easy to see the public quickly becoming disenchanted with more propaganda about nuclear weapons and more empty talk about economic development.”
During the Workers’ Party Congress from May 6 to 9, the leader of the isolated country, while declaring North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, introduced a five-year economic development plan with little substance to it.
“There must be some danger in this. With no details, it’s hard to figure what he aims to do but he probably has to do something in terms of laying out some goals and allocating resources to meet them,” Brown said.
“Kim continues to raise expectations both on the military and economic fronts but he will have a hard time fulfilling them. And this could eventually spell trouble.”
Kim used the first party congress in 36 years to consolidate his leadership and strengthen internal unity against the outside amid a worsening economy and deepening isolation.
North Korea’s economy is suffering from a further squeeze in the wake of the latest UN economic sanctions aimed at depriving Pyongyang of funds if it continues its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
A Singapore-based businessman knowledgeable of North Korea, who recently visited Pyongyang, said that the latest sanctions have yet to send a ripple effect on the livelihood of North Korean people but the government there is worried about the rise of dissatisfaction.
“The problem is that Kim and his regime know they have to change its economy more toward a market-based system but they don’t have plans and don’t know how,” the businessman said, asking not to be named.
That’s why they are wittingly allowing individuals to open shops and stores to support the growth of a private market economy without relevant laws and systems to support it, according to him.
“I think Pyongyang does care about the UN sanctions but they suppress information about it so that people do not have it. They become afraid that the economy will stop growing and they don’t want people to panic,” he said.
“North Korean people still have very limited access to information from the outside. The country doesn’t have a lot of foreign investment going in. So they don’t care much about it. What they care about is the domestic economy.”
The five-year economic blueprint unveiled by Kim, who became leader in 2011 after death of his late father Kim Jong-il, focuses on restoring Pyongyang’s electricity supply and developing domestic energy resources through nuclear power.
According to the state's Korean Central News Agency, Kim said in his speech during the congress that he will place a top priority on solving the energy problem and place the basic industry section on the right track to improve the lives of the people.
His pledge to beef up the energy sector, however, is far from happening in reality.
Brown, a former U.S. government official, pointed out that talking about the need to fix the electric power sector, for example, in a five-year time frame, is particularly risky.
According to him, the country has put far too much emphasis on nuclear power electricity for a long time without any significant amount of it actually being produced. “I don't think there is even a significant new capacity under construction,” he said.
The small pilot project at Yongbeon in his view must be decades away from any commercial scale production and all the dams they talk about don't really add up to much.
Experts expect that the congress may help Kim earn some attention from the outside world but it will eventually deepen Pyongyang’s isolation from the world.
“Occasions like this must instill a strong impression that North Korea is a place like no other, and thus leads to isolation both from the inside and from the outside,” Brown said.
Kongdan Oh, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses, echoed the view, saying, “North Korea will keep developing weapons of mass destruction and nothing fundamentally changed.”
She is also a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
“Kim will continue tightening social control, but how effectively he can manage that is a real question. I saw bored faces at the official meeting,” she added. “It was relatively sad event: lonely king's lonely and controlled coronation.”