The Economist December 18th 2021 29
AsiaNorthKoreaA decade of despair
L
ooking acrossthe Han river estuary
from the Aegibong peace park observa
tory in Gimpo near Seoul, South Korea’s
capital, North Korea is just a short paddle
away. Less than a mile from the observato
ry, its citizens can be seen tending fields
and riding bicycles past a cluster of low
rise blocks of flats not far from the river
bank. If any of them were to peer back, they
would see gaggles of South Korean school
children trying to get a closer look at their
settlement through the row of binoculars
erected at the viewpoint.
The sense of closeness that comes from
looking out over the river in Gimpo has
rarely been more deceptive than today, ten
years into the rule of Kim Jong Un, the
North’s dictator. The latest hope for open
ing and reform was dashed in Vietnam in
2019, when Mr Kim and Donald Trump,
then America’s president, failed to come to
an agreement to exchange sanctions relief
for arms control at what was to be their fi
nal meeting. Over the past two years, ever
more of the few remaining links betweenNorth Korea and the outside world have
been severed as Mr Kim has instituted one
of the world’s strictest border closures in
response to the covid19 pandemic. What
little information trickles out is hardly en
couraging: there are reports of severe food
shortages and political purges, even as
state media rebuff diplomatic overtures
from America and the South.
When Mr Kim took over upon the death
of Kim Jong Il, his father, on December 17th
2011, such a grim state of affairs did not
seem inevitable. Some observers at the
time thought the regime would soon col
lapse, and economic opening under Chi
nese supervision would follow. Others, in
cluding this newspaper, doubted that Mr
Kim would develop an appetite for serious
reform but still assumed that he would beunable entirely to resist pressure for
change. Both elites and ordinary North Ko
reans were increasingly cynical about the
might of the state after witnessing its fail
ures during the famine in the 1990s.
For the first few years of Mr Kim’s ten
ure, predictions of improvement did not
seem unrealistic. In a speech on the cente
nary of his grandfather’s birth, in 2012, the
rookie dictator laid out his plan to build an
“economically powerful state” and “im
prove the people’s livelihood”. He re
formed laws governing agriculture and
stateowned firms to allow a degree of priv
ate enterprise in the economy, invited out
side experts to advise him on setting up
new special economic zones and awarded
official status to hundreds of the country’s
informal markets.
Mr Kim also embarked on a binge of
“socialist construction”, filling Pyongyang,
the capital, with futuristic skyscrapers, wa
ter parks and a dolphinarium. And he set to
work on new tourist infrastructure else
where in the country, notably at his sum
mer retreat in Wonsan on the east coast.
Trade with China picked up, driven largely
by a new class of quasientrepreneurs op
erating from within stateowned firms.
As a result, things visibly improved—
albeit from a low level and mostly in the
capital, where those with spare cash could
enjoy wellstocked supermarkets and new
coffee shops. Refugees from North Korea
arriving in the South began to report differS EOUL
Ten years into Kim Jong Un’s reign, his country is more isolated than ever→Alsointhissection
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