January Issue: The Days After

Author: Julie Ha
Posted: January 19th, 2012
Filed Under: Back Issues , BLOG , January 2012

The Days After

Korea expert David C. Kang talks with KoreAm about a post-Kim Jong-il world, prospects for reunification, and why Kim caricatures may be funny but counterproductive.

story by Julie Ha

What does a post-Kim Jong-il world look like so far?

All the indications are that they have planned for this for the last three years, since [Kim’s] stroke in 2008, so there doesn’t seem to be a sense of panic in North Korean leadership. As a result, I would expect more of the same in the short run. They chose Kim Jong-un because they expect him to be able to carry on the regime leadership, and there is going to be a senior set of leaders who are going to be guiding him in the next year. So I don’t expect a whole lot of change.

What’s the best thing the U.S. can do in relation to North Korea?

I think what everybody is going to do is spend at least a year cautiously waiting. They’re going to see what the regime does because, in a way, if you don’t know how [Kim Jong-un is] going to react, any policy is even more risky. The interesting thing is, literally a week before Kim Jong-il’s death, North Korea said it was going to freeze its uranium [enrichment] program [in exchange for food aid]. We’ll see if North Korea follows up on this, if they’d be willing to continue the discussion.

I just don’t expect a whole lot to happen. Both leaders in South Korea and the U.S. are going to go through presidential elections [in 2012]. All are going to be fairly cautious.

I’ve heard several Korean Americans express that, with the death of Kim Jong-il, there’s this sense that reunification is more likely to occur within our lifetimes. Is this overly optimistic?

You never know. My sense is, almost all of us agree that, at some point, this regime has got to go away, but it’s lasted far longer already than anyone predicted.

My assessment today, when we see what’s coming out of the regime and what deals they’re making with the Chinese government—40-year deals on mining rights—that’s a regime that doesn’t look like it’s panicking. It seems like it’s planning for the future and quite stable. So, yeah, it could collapse, but I don’t see a lot of cracks in the edifice.

I think [it hinges] much more on how the regime and the people and particular interests in North Korea play out. The biggest test for Kim Jong-un is probably not foreign policy, but how do you manage selecting good leaders? When a new leader comes in, up and down the regime, people are going to be jostling and jockeying for political positions. Everybody and his cousin are going to be trying to get on his good side. How do you manage a bureaucracy whose members’ careers and lives and futures depend on] playing a political game?

In all the media coverage of Kim Jong-il’s death, what in your assessment has been missing?

One voice missing has been the North Korean people themselves. We’ve tried to see what defectors think, but defectors are a very small portion of the populace. But there are 23 million in North Korea, and all we do is caricature them and talk about them as brainwashed automatons. … We fall back on the ‘I’m so ronery’ [South Park caricature of Kim Jong-il], or these guys goose-stepping through the Mass Games and just take it without putting much thought into why are these people acting this way.

Clearly, there’s enormous repression and coercion in North Korea, but to put it all on repression and coercion is to miss the fact that the regime has managed to make itself the true Korean nationalists. The way they portray themselves to Korean people plays into some deep Korean cultural themes: nationalism, defending the country, independence from foreign powers. And we all think that they must look at South Korea and see [South Koreans] are so much better than us, richer than us. But the way the regime has characterized them is: Look how corrupt they are and how much they’ve abandoned being Korean for material things.

There’s no question the North Korean people would be better off if the regime was gone, [but] just making jokes about it doesn’t help us get there. Even international relations scholars who know better are using words like “crazy” or “erratic,” but if you just stop for a second and think about it, that’s probably not how the regime is keeping power. It’s survived for over 60 years. At some point, we should ask: Why are they surviving, versus when are they going to collapse?

This article was published in the January 2012 issue of KoreAm. Subscribe today!