Kim appears to be associating himself with a hard-core version of his grandfather's juche or "self-reliance" ideology, honed in the 1950s and 1960s, an era of relative North Korean development and affluence. The young leader has made himself the physical reincarnation of his grandfather -- down to the Mao suit, protruding stomach, high-cropped hairdo, and hearty laugh. But this was also a time of deep ideological indoctrination, mass mobilization, and rejection of foreign contaminating influences.
It's hard to square Kim's great leap backwards with a society that is slowly and fitfully opening up. Since 1994, when his father came to power, thousands of North Koreans have embraced once-heretical capitalist concepts. Official and unofficial markets grew out of terrible food shortages of the 1990s, as people traded to survive. For a regime like North Korea's that tries to tightly control everything, that is incredibly dangerous. A study published in 2011 by Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that 60 percent of recent North Korean defectors admitted to getting their food outside of the government's ration system.
Other elements of modernity are starting to seep in. There are now more than a million cell-phone subscribers in North Korea, and thousands surf the web, though the content remains highly circumscribed. Markets, cell phones, and the Internet are a slippery slope. Once they enter a society, they become impossible to uproot.
North Korea is at a dead end. New leadership exercising a more rigid ideology seeks greater control over an increasingly independently-minded society and disgruntled elements of the military. This is not sustainable. With true reform, North Korea would open itself up to foreign influences and create an immediate spiral of expectations in its society that it could not control. Which is exactly why, with apologies to Mickey Mouse and Christian Dior, it's just not going to happen.
SUBJECTS:
