In the mid-1990s, when famine began prompting North Koreans to risk moving back and forth between the DPRK and China with much more frequency, hairline cracks in the Kim regime began to appear. The information flow into North Korea – the antidote to Kimilsungism propaganda – has only increased since then. That combined with continued gross mismanagement by North Korea’s elite may be prompting those cracks in regime control to widen even further, as Richards Holloran describes in this article:

The lack of food is basic to fostering dissent. Rations for the armed forces were first cut to 80 percent of normal and recently to 60 percent despite the Kim regime’s “Military First” policy, which priority to the armed forces in everything. Civilians have lost even more.

[. . .]

A lack of heat in many places compounded the food shortage this past winter. Uncounted numbers of people have died, especially among the elderly. A particularly grim report said that corpses of the dead have polluted drinking water in some places. Health care has been neglected. In one province, measles has been rampant while scarlet fever has raged in another.

A sign of political distrust: North Korean diplomats abroad have recently been ordered to send home all of their children except one per family. A sign of dissent: Only a few of the children have returned to North Korea as the diplomats have found ways to ignore the order.

Two scholars who specialize in North Korean affairs, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard, estimate that a million North Koreans have died of starvation in recent years. Resentment against Kim’s regime for this tragedy has been aggravated by favoritism.

“When push came to shove,” they wrote last month, “the residents of the capital, Pyongyang, received privileged access, while some provinces were cut off from grain supplies from the state-run public distribution system, and were later denied aid when it began to arrive.”

Corruption has evidently gone unchecked. The Congressional Research Service, which writes analytical reports for Congress, asserted that Kim’s regime “is involved in illicit drug production and trafficking, as well as production and trafficking in counterfeit currency, cigarettes, and pharmaceuticals.”

[. . .]

Today, that activity may have become a “runaway train,” possibly out of control. Some analysts suggest, the CRS said, that replacing the “crime-related income with legitimate-source income would ignore the need of the current regime to divert funding to slush funds designed to sustain the loyalty of a core of party elite numbering in the tens of thousands.”

Sometimes little things illuminate bigger issues. On Feb. 16, North Koreans had a national holiday to mark Kim Jong Il’s birthday. In the past, the regime has given all of the children sweets that were otherwise all too rare.

This year, the sweets were not only reduced in size but the parents had to pay for them, with the poor missing out.