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North Korean Politics and Reunification
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15125 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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4 / 1989 |
3,800 Words |
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Rinn-Sup Shinn
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In a how-to speech in 1964, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung listed three requisites for national reunification: North Korean political, economic, and military power; South Korean revolutionary commitment to anti-American and antifascist struggles; and "the international revolutionary forces," particularly the fraternal socialist countries led by the Soviet Union and China. Realistically, hoping for victory would be an illusion, he declared, unless all three kinds of revolutionary forces were well prepared. Of the three, he said, "our own revolutionary forces" should be built up first, before they tried to rely on external forces; for if the North was weak, it would be unable to lend active support to the South even if the southerners started fighting "in a revolutionary way." The three requisites spelled out in 1964 still stand as the basic line of the ruling Korean Workers' Party (KWP).
Kim Il Sung conceded in his New Year's address of 1988 that reunifying the peninsula was difficult "right now." As 1988 dawned, the North confronted the monumental task of turning the situation on the Korean peninsula decisively in its favor, a task made no easier by the Soviet and Chinese decisions to participate in the 1988 Summer Olympics hosted by Seoul. Where is North Korea today? Where will it be in the near future in terms of its new policy priorities?
The Setting
Economically, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) faces an uphill struggle, as reflected in part by its continued default on a foreign debt of $2.2 billion to Western and Japanese creditors, excluding $1.8 billion Pyongyang owes to the Soviets and Chinese. Living conditions in the North remain spartan, with reported shortages in food and other daily necessities. At stake is not only whether the KWP leadership can deliver on its long-delayed promise to create a "socialist paradise" for its 21 million people but also whether its self-styled superior socialist system is good enough to win over the 42 million people of the capitalist South Korea.
North Korea's economic problems derive from several factors for which there are no quick and easy solutions. Under the DPRK's tightly centralized bureaucracy, the management of the planned economy has been inefficient, lethargic, and resistant to change, if only because the command economy is part and parcel of Kim Il Sung's highly touted "wise and correct" economic policies and leadership. To compensate for its lack of resources and because of doctrinaire disdain for the "revisionist" idea of material incentives, the party resorts to periodic ideologically charged mass campaigns designed to promote maximum human effort.
Political and military constraints are perennial problems. The party's dogma of economic self-sufficiency may have contributed to domestic stability throughout the 1960s, but at a heavy cost to its capacity to adjust to and benefit from shifting international markets. But most important, the country is handicapped by a heavy defense burden. North Korea maintains a huge military establishment to ensure instant readiness to confront South Korea and the U.S. troops stationed in the southern half of the peninsula. Since 1967, the military sector has claimed a sizable chunk of fiscal and manpower resources--a substantial drain on a resource-starved and technologically backward economy saddled with chronic labor
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