Is Collapse of NK Regime Imminent?

By Bryan Kay
Staff Reporter

A U.K. ― based Korea expert once asked to spy for the communist North claims the end of the Stalinist regime is imminent and the result will be a total collapse.

Aidan Foster-Carter, an analyst on Korean affairs for 30 years, says the last 20 years has offered no reason to believe that gradual devolution is plausible.

Foster-Carter, in Seoul for the Economist magazine's Roundtable event also attended by President Lee Myung-bak, said he stood by his long-held belief that the communist regime's demise would be sudden rather than harmonious, despite first making the prediction when Kim Il-sung was in power.

"I don't see the change necessary in North Korea, so I still feel it will fall at any moment," he said in an interview with The Korea Times, Thursday.

It is a view shared by fellow North Korea expert, Brian Myers of Dongseo University, located in Busan.

Others, though, believe the end of the regime might not be quite so abrupt. Writing in The Korea Times, Andrei Lankov, another North Korea expert, said a succession to Kim Jong-il would likely see the same people continue to run the country.

Foster-Carter, an honorary professor at Leeds University in England, claims there are solid reasons to believe his prediction will become a reality.

"I have been saying this for a long time," said the 62-year-old, who writes about North and South Korea at the request of private institutions such as the Economist Intelligence Unit and Oxford Analytica.

Foster-Carter points to two main factors to support his argument: Firstly, he said, the possibility of a popular uprising is ever-increasing.

"Just because they haven't done it before doesn't mean they won't do it in the future," he said.

"Knowledge of the outside world is increasing in North Korea. Suffering is getting worse."

For this, he quoted the lyrics of reggae artist Bob Marley: "A hungry man is an angry man."

Foster-Carter says frequent travel by some to China combined with the increase in informative material from the outside world is having an influence.

"North Koreans know that other people are living better lives, and that their lives are not normal," he continued.

Information he has received, he added, has revealed pockets of unrest. "You hear reports of a woman not being allowed to sell at a market, so she protests."

The second factor, said Foster-Carter, was the imminent succession of North Korea's leadership, presenting it as a crucial point with regards to the continuity of the reclusive state.

"I don't see how anyone, this time, can say (North Korea) can survive. Successions are the Achilles heel of dictatorships," he said.

Foster-Carter says the role of a leader is so personalised that successions are inevitable fault zones. He said the success of the transfer of power from Kim Il-sung to his son Kim Jong-il was down to its immense publication.

He believes the mooted succession from Kim Jong-il to his son Jong-un would be ripe territory for an "outbreak of factionalism" within the North Korean elite, with moderates pitted against radicals, and intervention from outside powers another possibility.

Like other experts, he acknowledged that the post-unification period would be a hugely difficult period due to the huge economic and social differences between the two nations.

Myers, meanwhile, believes different causes will be the reclusive state's downfall.

"I would bet on North Korea not surviving the next five years," he said in a telephone interview.

"(North Korea) can't afford to have a total lockdown like East Germany, so they have to also inspire the people.

"(North Korea) has admitted (to the population) that South Koreans live a better life, but they want to live in North Korea."

Under the Sunshine Policy of Kim Dae-jung, they could keep up this ruse, Myers said. But after the election of a conservative ruling party in the South and its hardline policy, he continued, it was becoming increasingly difficult to convince the North Korean people.

Lankov believes the talk surrounding the succession of Kim's third son, Jong-un, meant those around the current leader had pinpointed a puppet who would follow their orders. He went on to say, though, that this was unlikely to last forever as the older heads are replaced by the younger generation.

More recently, Lankov, this time writing in The New York Times, said the information control the communist regime was able to exert allows them to sustain the illusion that "North Korea (is) an island of happiness in an ocean of suffering."

Foster-Carter, an Oxford university graduate, first became interested in North Korea in the 1960s when he came across a pro-North Korea book.

He has made frequent visits to the peninsula since and has had multiple run-ins with the North Korean government, once being asked by the North Korean embassy in East Berlin to spy for them, an offer he declined.

bk@koreatimes.co.kr

Korea Times intern JR Breen contributed reporting to this article.