Victor Cha: Without a Loosened Grip, Reform Will Elude North Korea
[The author is a professor at Georgetown University and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of "North Korea: The Impossible State," which will be published by Ecco in 2011.]
The massive Communist Party rallies in North Korea this month provided the world's first real glimpse of that mysterious country's next leader. Kim Jong Eun, youngest son of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, seen in pictures for the first time, was almost certainly named the successor to his ailing father through his recent promotions to the rank of four-star army general and second-in-command of the party. He is under 30 years of age....
The real problem is the system itself. Even if the young Kim is enlightened, there are three obstacles to reform. First, despotic regimes such as North Korea's cannot survive without an ideology to justify their iron grip. And the ideology that accompanies the son's rise appears to look backward rather than forward.
I call it "neojuche revivalism." It is a return to the conservative and hard-line "juche" (self-reliance) ideology of the 1950s and '60s, harking back to a day when the North was doing well relative to South Korea. Neojuche revivalism is laced with "songun" (military-first) ideology, which features the North's emergence as a nuclear weapons state (Kim Jong Il's one accomplishment during his rule). This revivalist ideology leaves no room for an opening-up, because it blames the past decade of poor performance on "ideological pollution" stemming from experiments with reform....
Read entire article at WaPo
The massive Communist Party rallies in North Korea this month provided the world's first real glimpse of that mysterious country's next leader. Kim Jong Eun, youngest son of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, seen in pictures for the first time, was almost certainly named the successor to his ailing father through his recent promotions to the rank of four-star army general and second-in-command of the party. He is under 30 years of age....
The real problem is the system itself. Even if the young Kim is enlightened, there are three obstacles to reform. First, despotic regimes such as North Korea's cannot survive without an ideology to justify their iron grip. And the ideology that accompanies the son's rise appears to look backward rather than forward.
I call it "neojuche revivalism." It is a return to the conservative and hard-line "juche" (self-reliance) ideology of the 1950s and '60s, harking back to a day when the North was doing well relative to South Korea. Neojuche revivalism is laced with "songun" (military-first) ideology, which features the North's emergence as a nuclear weapons state (Kim Jong Il's one accomplishment during his rule). This revivalist ideology leaves no room for an opening-up, because it blames the past decade of poor performance on "ideological pollution" stemming from experiments with reform....