BEIJING - They are scattered all over the world but prefer Europe and China. They have turned their back on their own country, while waiting to be summoned home, and until then learn sciences that will not improve the well-being of most of their fellow countrymen, but only of a few satraps.
They are North Koreans who have escaped their nation not by scaling the barbed wire now surrounding most embassies in Beijing, but who have been sent abroad to study, fully paid out of the meager revenues of domestic coffers. They amount to only a handful, but they are still significant. There are a few dozen of them in Europe, concentrated in Italy, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. They study architecture, to build modern fashionable villas for their leaders, or music, to add amusement to their leaders' TV-less evenings. A close relative of the top North Korean leader is said to reside in one luxurious apartment in Beijing where he can enjoy a life forbidden in Pyongyang, sporting, as the legend goes, a fast car. Indeed, Mercedes-Benzes drive in and out the centrally located North Korean Embassy in the Chinese capital, which has no barbed wire on its fence, and the few North Koreans one meets at the capital's airport, fully identifiable by their Kim Il-sung badge, are fashionably dressed.
The times of hunger and famine in Pyongyang are gone, or so it would seem by all these indications. However, witnesses coming out of North Korea recite stories of starvation, kids small for their age because of undernutrition, medicine that goes bad because of a lack of electricity for refrigeration. And the flow of refugees into China doesn't seem to stop. There could be between 100,000 and 300,000 North Koreans in China who have fled their country.
True, one can buy modern Western commodities in Pyongyang's new Friendship stores, styled after the old Soviet models, where customers can enter only if they show the ID of a senior official. Electricity brightens the once-dark nights of Pyongyang, and the dear leader, Kim Jong-il, is said to be acquainted with the modern Internet thanks to a satellite link bypassing his antediluvian telephone lines. Meanwhile the casino in one of Pyongyang's central hotels, allegedly run by Macau's old hand Stanley Ho, boasts waitresses officially imported from the neighboring Chinese province of Liaoning.
It is a world where, despite all the official communist rhetoric, a lucky few enjoy a better life, while the vast majority barely survives. True, this is not unique of North Korea - it is the situation of many countries in Latin America or Africa. But those countries don't draw attention to themselves by crying to the whole world about their plight and spreading tales of natural disasters causing a seven-year famine, thus begging for aid. Neither do they blast missiles around their neighbors or mount pitiful extortion schemes of the "give me rice and I won't shoot rockets over your head" kind.
Meanwhile, the huge income disparity in North Korea is hidden by an ideology officially attacking the unfair distribution of wealth. Neither has there been any official announcement encouraging some to get rich first, as Deng Xiaoping did in China. And even in China, it is disputable whether income differences were as striking as in North Korea.
If these disparities were to lead to an increase in productive investment they could be useful, but this doesn't seem to be the case, and there no sign of the surge in agricultural output that signaled the beginning of economic reforms both in China or in Vietnam. In fact there is no sign that reforms of any kind are afoot, while the country appears to be ruled by the world's only necrocracy, the cult of the dead president Kim Il-sung, head of state forever.
In this situation China fears that the trickle of refugees to South Korea, and their flow to North China, could trigger the demise or the implosion of the Pyongyang regime. If that were to happen, it is clear that the burden of rescuing North Korea would fall on China, not South Korea. This is because North Korea's border with China is porous, while that with the South is impermeable, and China is now home to hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees while South Korea hosts only a few hundred.
The situation would worsen if the Pyongyang regime collapsed, with millions of North Koreans looking toward Beijing, not at Seoul, for their survival. For this reason, China is less than keen on seeing the collapse of North Korea. Such a collapse would create nothing but problems for China. If China were to take over North Korea after a collapse, that would move its frontier up to the US military zone, and the whole world would be suspicious of Beijing's motives. But if Beijing were to do nothing, it would be attacked on humanitarian grounds.
So China more than anyone else is keen on keeping North Korea's status quo. But can Pyongyang's downfall be prevented forever? Can North Korea carry on without reforms? The present experience says no, the costs of not reforming Pyongyang would increasingly be shouldered by China, if only in terms of bad publicity.
Therefore China has an interest in reforming North Korea, but to accomplish this a way must be found to change Pyongyang's corrupt and erratic leadership. Reform is not possible without the support of North Korea's leaders, and the only alternative would be revolution, something that would impose an extra cost on the North Korean people with uncertain benefits.
One strategy could be to organize a united front of all nations with an interest in North Korea and impose some reforms on Pyongyang. There are two drawback to this strategy. First, it could be quite difficult to hammer out a reform package that would be welcomed by United States, Japan, China, Russia and the European Union at the same time. Second, such reforms would salvage the present Pyongyang leadership, something that the West would be loath to do for moral reasons: "Why should we save the people who are responsible for the present predicament?" they'd wonder.
An alternative strategy would be to let the situation fester in the hope that the bubble takes a long time to burst, giving China time to prepare itself for the onslaught of refugees and dealing with Pyongyang.
Both courses have their downsides, but possibly the first is the one most likely to produce some lasting results in power politics of Asia. Giving a way out for the corrupt North Korean satraps, while despicable on moral grounds, could pave the way for the reforms necessary to improve the living conditions of North Koreans and thus prepare for future unification with the South. And the longer the current problems are allowed to fester, the more difficult reunification will be.
China would favor the first course, but as it stands on shaky ideological ground, it can't be the first to go down this path. The US would also be an unlikely front runner in pursuit of a united front for the salvation of the Kim family. Japan and Russia have a history of close interest in North Korea, so ulterior motives would be suspected if they made the first move.
That leaves the European Union. A comprehensive North Korean initiative would have the added value of proving to the US that the EU can serve the purpose of peace and stability in the world outside its strict area of influence.
If nobody makes a move, the Kim family and its extravagances will haunt us for many more years. (2002-07-02 Asia Times)
