Tom Plate, whose views on Asia, Korea in particular, I have long reviled, has discovered Andrei Lankov!

Don’t call it [North Korea] a Stalinist state anymore… This is the astonishing and almost unbelievable picture painted by one of the world’s most incisive and informed experts on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The master painter is Andrei Lankov, and his cliché-shattering portrait of the land of Kim Jong Il is to be found in the inaugural edition of “Asia Policy.”

Er, Plate, that Lankov article is from the January issue. It’s now, what, August? This isn’t exactly breaking news to the rest of us who have been keeping up with North Korea issues.

He writes of the country’s youth from the best-connected families sporting “mod” haircuts and dressing like any other street-savvy South Korean kid. He describes the stream more like a flood of steady if technically illegal videotapes of South Korean soap operas and pop music making their way northward (generally through China); of the proliferation of mobile phones; of the enormous popularity of South Korean goods of all kinds; and of the rise of female North Korean entrepreneurs, whether working in the country’s growing service industries or peddling their sexual favors to “newly rich and corrupt minor officials.”

There is no doubt that North Korea of today is no longer North Korea of 1960s (but then again, which country of today is really like that of 1960s?). And certainly the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-Il is extremely brittle. But the fact that the uppercrust of the North Korean regime in privileged Pyongyang is sporting “mod” haircuts and watching South Korean videos, if remarkable, isn’t exactly the stuff of revolutions. Much of North Korea’s population, living in desolate, crumbling rural areas, neither has access to such luxuries or can afford them even if they were available.

And a minor quibble:

The well-regarded Australian scholar…

Lankov holds a position from the Australian National University, but isn’t he originally Russian?

Regime change needs not to be produced by sudden military action but by continual, patient, steady economic interaction.

Oh, it’s back to the standard Tom Plate “economic engagement solves everything” mantra again. And how many millions more will perish while the so-called Sunshine Policy continues on? (Observant readers may note that Plate has been a big fan of both “Sunshine” and President Roh Moo-Hyun.)

Collapse and oblivion of the current regime is the only way out for the North Koreans.

In time — in a year, in five, but not much longer than that — surely the end will come.

Whoa! What happened here? Now he sounds like Michael Horowitz!

I actually agree with the first sentence (and that’s probably a first with Tom Plate). The destruction of Kim regime is the only way out for North Koreans. But such an event will not follow from the likes of “Sunshine” which only sustains the regime and prolongs its demise.

The regime knows that only a third or less of the population is loyal to it — and only because it has bought off the fraction at the top with luxuries unavailable to the rest of the population. While more projection of outside information into North Korea is always helpful, what is needed to bring down the regime is vigorous pressure so that it can no longer buy off the elites. When even the elites are deprived and dissastisfied, then and only then, will there be a real impetus to topple the regime from within.

And finally, this being Tom Plate, there must be a cheesy Asia cliche:

Koreans, by nature, are survivors.

And I guess we Americans are just donut-eating fatsos who will die out.

People are survivors. Well, some of them anyway. There is nothing magical about Koreans or any particular ethnicity. The fact that some North Koreans are survivors neither aids or hinders the elimination of Kim regime (after all, it has survived for this long). What will co-opt the North Korean elites’ survivor instinct into the goal of ending Kim’s regime, however, is not to sustain North Korea’s regime with “economic interaction,” which will perpetuate the status quo, but to make life for the elites just as miserable as it is for ordinary North Koreans.

Then we just might see Tom Plate’s “evolution.”
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