[세계 경제]새 자본가 북한

North Korea

The new capitalists

Even as another nuclear provocation looms, hope glimmers for the world’s most oppressed people

Feb 9th 2013 |From the print edition

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571421-even-another-nuclear-provocation-looms-hope-glimmers-worlds-most-oppressed-people

NOT long ago North Korea-watchers were speculating that the new leader, Kim Jong Un, might prove a moderniser. The path-breaking boy-dictator let himself be seen with his fashionable wife. He actually spoke in public, whereas his late father’s speeches were as rare as a well-stocked Pyongyang supermarket. Lately, though, Mr Kim has reverted to type by prophesying war. Experts fear the North’s Punggye-ri underground complex is about to host a nuclear test. If it does, Mr Kim will inherit the family title of Asia’s pariah-in-chief.

The nuclear threat and the vicious eccentricities of its leadership are, for the West, the most compelling of the country’s features. But, as our briefing explains, a revolutionary force is rising from below: a new class of traders and merchants. Capitalism is seeping through the ba

mboo curtain. This is not at the behest of the regime, as happened in Deng Xiaoping’s China. North Korea is more repressive and backward than Cuba or the old Soviet Union. The regime will not depart quickly or easily: in the short term, Mr Kim’s growing unease could well make him still more of a threat to his neighbours. But a familiar picture is emerging—and the world should do what it can to encourage it.

Jinxed by juche

Mr Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, built his post-war paradise in the north on the principle of juche, or “self-reliance” (though, the Soviet Union greatly helped). At first the North and South Korean economies matched each other won for won but, starting in the 1970s, autarky decayed into inefficiency. The North’s huge army hogged resources. Managers and workers stripped state factories bare and flogged anything of value on new black markets. Today perhaps 200,000 North Koreans remain imprisoned in the gulag. Output per head is over 17 times larger in the South than the North. Twenty-year-old South Koreans stand 6cm (2.4 inches) above North Korean contemporaries stunted by famine and malnutrition.

In the 1990s famine provided an opening for a new sort of North Korean trader. Many of them were smallholders, often women, selling vegetables grubbed up from the family plot. The facts are patchy, but it is becoming clear that other merchants operate today on a far more ambitious scale, exporting raw materials to China and bringing back consumer goods. The merchants use an informal system of money-changing to move funds in and out of the country. In the capital those with cash go to restaurants and play the slot machines. It sounds surreal, but they are the North’s nouveaux riches.

North Korea’s capitalists are here to stay. The regime has repeatedly tried to purge them, by suppressing the farmers’ markets and cracking down on smuggling. But money talks in today’s North Korea, and the traders often have enough cash to bribe their way out of trouble. Moreover, they have become an indispensable part of the economy. Industry functions so poorly that tower blocks in Pyongyang cannot be built without the imported supplies the merchants provide.

As in China, capitalism is letting in the outside world—a vital change for a people fed only grotesque lies. Corrupt border guards and security operatives can be bribed by people determined, for religious or political reasons, to get information in and out. The mobile phones, computers and radios that the traders sell are eroding the state’s monopoly on truth. Television shows and films smuggled in on memory sticks confront North Koreans with the potentially revolutionary fact that their brethren in the South live in comfort and plenty—and without the fear of a knock on the door at midnight. They discover that the Workers’ Utopia is built on a Great Lie.

And the capitalists count because they stand somewhat apart from the security establishment. The Kims have always surrounded themselves with a caste of revolutionary families present at the North’s creation. For decades power began and ended with them. But some of the merchants come from outside the Kims’ circle—and all have a keen eye on their wealth. Although the traders make money from the status quo, they are likely to value growth more and security less than the ruling clique. Competition for resources is also emerging in parts of the government-controlled economy. Fissures are thus emerging in what used to be a monolithic state.

For years now the world’s dealings with North Korea have chiefly been about stopping its nuclear programme, which poses a grave threat to peace. But that policy has pretty much failed. Today’s nuclear intimidation is just the latest in a series of provocations from a state that will lie, threaten and blackmail its way to the negotiating table only to storm off again into belligerent isolation. The bet is that Mr Kim will never give up his weapons, because they are his only claim to influence.

The Chosun path

Change will not necessarily make North Korea safer. It may destabilise the regime and thus, in the short term, make it more dangerous. That is what China fears: its strategic nightmares feature migrants pouring across the Yalu river and South Korean or American troops approaching its borders.

But in the long run the best way of making North Korea less dangerous lies in defanging the Kims. That means taking every opportunity to undermine the regime, as the West did in eastern Europe during the cold war. The Soviet era teaches that nothing is more potent than exposing people to the prosperity and freedoms of the world around them. So outsiders should pay for North Koreans to travel and to acquire skills abroad, support the radio stations that broadcast into the country, back the church networks that supply documentaries and films and turn a blind eye to the smuggling networks and the traders.

China’s policy is contradictory. It props up the Kims, at the same time as its officials encourage North Korea to emulate the economic policies that transformed China 35 years ago. But development and stability—of the suffocating sort that the Kims represent—are incompatible.

Ultimately, the Chinese will have to choose. What the mercurial Mr Kim offers leads nowhere. The capitalists at least promise something better. China should back them.

요약

전문가들은 북한이 핵 실험을 하려는 움직임을 두려워 하고 있고, 만약 이를 한다면 김정은은 아시아에서 왕따가 되는 전통을 상속하게 될 것이다. 핵 위협과 리더의 악랄한 행동은 서양에서 가장 주목을 받고 있다. 그러나 자본주의는 중국을 통해 스며들고 있다. 북한은 더 탄압을 받고 있꼬 쿠바 나 옛 소련보다 뒤쳐지고 있다. 단기적으로는 김정은의 불안은 증가하여 그의 이웃국을 위협할 것이다. 그러나 세계는 이를 장려하는 일을 해야만 한다. 

김일성은 주체사상(북한의 통치 이념)으로 전후의 낙원 또는 자립을 만들었다. 처음에 북한과 남한의 경제는 비슷했으나, 1970년대를 시작으로 경제 자립 정책은 부패해졌고, 북한 거대한 군대는 자원을 독차지했다. 남한의 한 사람 당 생산량은 북한의 17배 이상이 되고, 북한의 20살은 기아와 영양 실조로 인해 남한보다 6cm가 키가 작다. 1990년대 기아는 북한 무역 개방을 도모했다.  대부분은 소작농이며 종종 여성들이었다. 오늘 날 상인들은 더 큰 규모로 중국에 원자재를 수출하고 소비재를 들여 오면서 운영하고 있다. 상인들은 비공식적인 환전 시스템을 사용하고 있고, 북한의 졸부들은 종종 현금을 들고 레스토랑에 가서 도박을 한다. 정권은 반복적으로 그들을 억압하려고 노력하고 있다. 그러나 그들은 뇌물을 줄 만큼 돈이 충분하며 경제에 없어서는 안 될 존재가 되었다. 중국처럼 자본주의는 세계로 내보내고 있다. 부패한 국경 수비대와 보안 요원은 뇌물을 받고, 무역자들이 판매하는 핸드폰, 컴퓨터, 라디오는 정부의 독점을 약화시키고 있다. TV쇼와 영화는 안락한 남한에서 살고 있는 가족들에 대한 기억을 상기시키고 있다. 몇몇 상인들은 김정은의 집단 밖의 사람들이며 이들은 모두 김정은의 부를 눈여겨 보고 있다. 상인들은 현재 수익을 창출하고 있음에도 불구하고, 집권 세력보다 안전에는 덜 가치를 두고 있고 더 많이 성장에 가치를 두고 있다. 또한 자원에 대한 경쟁이 정부 통제 영역에서도 나타나고 있다. 

오늘날의 핵 위협은 단지 도발에 불과하며, 김정은은 영향을 끼칠 수 있는 유일한 것이기 때문에 절대 핵 무기를 포기하지 않을 것이다. 변화는 북한을 안전하지 않을 것이다. 단기적으로는 더 불안하게 할지도 모른다. 그러나 북한을 덜 위험에 빠뜨리게 하는 최고의 방법은 김정은을 무해하게 만드는 것이다. 이는 정권을 약화시키는 모든 기회를 누리는 것을 의미한다. 중국의 정책은 모순이다. 김정은을 지원하면서 중국을 변모시킨 경제 정책을 모방하도록 격려하고 있다. 그러나 발전과 안정은 공존할 수 없다. 궁극적으로, 중국은 선택해야만 할 것이다.