North Korean Economy Watch

James Person of the North Korea International Documentation Project has written an excellent article in The Diplomat on the DPRK’s position in the Failed State Index (FSI):

In recent years, North Korea has collected an impressive array of very unflattering superlatives. Whether it be the most “failed”, “corrupt” or “undemocratic” state in the world, it manages to frequently top (or bottom) such rankings and indexes.

It’s a pattern that emerges frequently, and often places North Korea just a few places below Somalia which, in the case of last year’s Failed States Index (FSI) seemed to confusingly suggest that the two states were almost as “failed” as each other. (A strange comparison to make when the absolute power Pyongyang manages to project across North Korea is the total antithesis of the complete anarchy that exists in Mogadishu).

The FSI uses 12 political, social and economic “indicators” to reach its conclusions. Politically, North Korea achieves an impressive 9.9/10 for “de-legitimization of the state” thanks to its “resistance of ruling elites to transparency, accountability and political representation.” Somalia is again a close second, which gains a rival 9.8/10 in the same group, presumably because it isn’t even clear who, or indeed where, the so-called “ruling elites” of Somalia actually are.

It’s therefore puzzling that we award the two states the same title. Somalia is widely recognized to have collapsed, yet while we’ve been talking about a North Korean collapse for over a decade, the regime has remained stable and resilient in the face of famine and economic decline.

Rearranging the FSI in descending order according to social indicators produces dramatically different results. By reorganizing the list by “human flight” (the term used to describe, among other things, the “growth of exile communities”), North Korea drops more than 90 places, landing only two places ahead of South Korea. It should go without saying why “human flight” is a fundamentally flawed method of measuring to what degree North Korea has “failed.”

Indeed, how the FSI managed to obtain any clear and reliable information from North Korea is a mystery. In the weeks following the death of Kim Jong-il and the succession of Kim Jong-un, analysts were quick to draw enormous conclusions derived largely from the memoirs of Kim Jong-il’s former sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto – a surreal twist in an already bizarre tale.

Read the full article here:
How Failed is North Korea?
The Diplomat
James Person
2012-1-31

Pictured above: North Korean pilots in North Vietnam (1968).

According to Yonhap:

North Korea dispatched dozens of pilots to the Vietnam War decades ago, with its communist ally short of specialists to operate MiG-17 and MiG-21 fighter jets in battles against the United States, according to a recently released dossier.

“On 21 September 1966 an official North Korean request to be allowed to send a North Korean Air Force regiment to help defend North Vietnam against U.S air attacks was officially reviewed and approved by the Vietnamese Communist Party’s Central Military Party Committee, chaired by General Vo Nguyen Giap,” read the documents taken from an official People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) historical publication.

North Korea’s Chief of the General Staff, Choi Kwang, and his Northern Vietnamese counterpart, Van Tien Dung, held talks three days later to detail Pyongyang’s role in the war.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a think tank in Washington, studied the dossier and made it public on its Web site as part of North Korea International Documentation Project.

In 2000, 25 years after the end of the Vietnam War, North Korea and Vietnam admitted for the first time that North Korea had provided military support in combat against U.S. aircraft.

North Vietnam sought North Korean pilots’ help in training and combat apparently to take advantage of their experience in shooting down U.S. fighter jets during the 1950-53 Korean War.

The newly unveiled dossier show details of North Korea’s military support.

“In late October or during November 1966 North Korea would send Vietnam enough specialists to man a Vietnamese MiG-17 company (a company consisted of ten aircraft),” the two sides agreed in the Sept. 21 1966 talks, adding North Korea would send more specialists to man a second Vietnamese MiG-17 company in later 1966 or early 1967.

“During 1967, after North Korea finished preparing specialists and after Vietnam was able to prepare sufficient aircraft, North Korea would send to Vietnam sufficient specialists to man one Vietnamese MiG-21 company,” they also agreed.

You learn more and download the entire report (PDF) at the Wilson Center’s North Korea International Documentation Project (NKIDP).

“North Korea on the Cusp of Digital Transformation”
Nautilus Institute
Alexandre Mansurov

“North Korea: An Up-and-Coming IT-Outsourcing Destination”
38 North
Paul Tija, GPI Consulting

“NK People Speak, 2011″ (Interviews with North Koreans in China)
Daily NK (PDF)

“The Rise and Fall of Détente on the Korean Peninsula, 1970-1974″
Wilson Center NKIDP
Christian F. Ostermann and James Person
(Coverage of the report in the Donga Ilbo can be found here)

Don’t Expect a Pyongyang Spring Sometime Soon
Center for Strategic and International Studies (via CanKor)
Hazel Smith

The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program and NKIDP hosted a panel on the North Korean diaspora in North East Asia.

Panelists include:
Apichai Shipper, Visiting Scholar, University of California, Los Angeles;
Hazel Smith,Professor, Cranfield University, U.K.;
Suzanne Scholte,President, Defense Forum Foundation

I have not seen the panel yet, but it is in the queue for this weekend.

Watch the entire event here.

The Wilson Center’s North Korea International Documentation Project (NKIDP) has published another manuscript in the Critical Oral History Conference Series: Crisis and Confrontation on the Korean Peninsula: 1968-1969

Download PDF here

The Donga Ilbo reported on this paper:

Armed North Korean spies caught while trying to storm South Korea’s presidential office to assassinate then President Park Chung-hee on Jan. 21, 1968, are known to have also planned to attack the U.S. Embassy.

When the North seized the American intelligence ship USS Pueblo in waters off the North Korean port of Wonsan two days later, the U.S. planned to immediately mobilize F-4 Phantom fighters to bomb the North. This plan was shelved, however, because the U.S. Air Force lacked devices for loading conventional weapons required for an air strike.

This information was derived from a compilation of declassified documents from 1968-69 titled, “Crisis on the Korean Peninsula and Standoff” obtained exclusively by The Dong-A Ilbo from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington Monday.

The documents were compiled after the center held in September 2008 a closed forum with 15 experts and seven former U.S. officials who worked in both Koreas and China in the late 1960s.

Through the forum, the U.S. think tank comprehensively analyzed classified documents 1,285 pages in volume, including those from the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European bloc like the former East Germany and Romania.

Those who attended the forum included Horst Brie, former East German Ambassador to North Korea; Walter Cutler, former political adviser to the U.S. ambassador to South Korea; Thomas Hughes, former director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. State Department; James Leonard, former chief of the Korea Desk at the State Department; and David Reuter, analyst for Northeast Asia at the U.S. National Security Agency.

Also at the event were Kang In-duk, former South Korean unification minister, and Yoon Ha-jeong, former South Korean vice foreign minister.

Leonard said, “According to multiple documents considered classified at the time, North Korea’s seizure of the USS Pueblo constituted an emergency situation. After the incident was reported to the U.S. Air Force, F-4 Phantoms were to be mobilized within several minutes but did not take off because they only were equipped with devices for loading nuclear weapons but none for loading conventional weapons.”

“The USS Pueblo incident was apparently a disgrace to the U.S.,” he said, adding, “With security concerns heightened at the time and Seoul’s presidential office under attack, the U.S. Defense Department should have been prepared to protect the Pueblo by mobilizing the Air Force when necessary.”

Ultimately, Washington merely mobilized the nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise and two Aegis destroyers from the U.S. Navy`s 7th Fleet.

Kang, who served as the first chief of the North Korea intelligence bureau at the (South) Korean Central Intelligence Agency, said, “Armed North Korean spies, including Kim Shin-jo, originally had five targets including the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, (South Korean) Army headquarters, Seoul Prison and Seobinggo North Korean Spy Detention Camp.”

“But judging that the targets were too scattered, the North reduced the group of armed spies to 31 from the originally planned 35, and only targeted the presidential office.”

Through interrogation of Kim, Seoul secured intelligence that the spies originally had the U.S. Embassy as a target but it did not inform Washington of this finding.

Cutler, who was stationed in Seoul at the time, said, “We had no prior intelligence that the embassy was a target and thus took no special security measures in this regard.”

The Woodrow Wilson Center’s North Korea International Documentation Project has launched a working paper series which draws from their unique archives of diplomatic papers from formerly socialist countries.  The second working paper in the series has just been released, you may download them both from the links below:

1. Charles Armstrong, “Juche And North Korea’s Global Aspirations,” Spetember 2009

2. Bernd Schaefer, “Overconfidence Shattered: North Korean Unification Policy, 1971 -1975,” December 2010

According to the Wilson Center’s web page, they also just received over 2,000 pages of Romanian documents:

NKIDP would like to thank Eliza Gheorghe, a PhD student in History at Oxford University, for obtaining on behalf of NKIDP over 2,000 pages of newly declassified Romanian archival documents on relations with North Korea in the late 1960s and 1970s. The collection brings together minutes of conversations between North Korean leaders and Romanian officials with daily communications from the Romanian embassy in Pyongyang between the critical period 1966-1968. Other documents report on the inner-workings and foreign relations of North Korea from 1970-1979.

The Woodrow Wilson Center’s North Korea International Documentation Project has published some more great document readers compiled from archives in the Soviet Union, USA, ROK, China, Hungary, Romania, Poland and East Germany.

The Rise and Fall of the Detente on the Korean Peninsula: 1970-1974
Download PDF here
A collection of archival documents on inter-Korean, US-ROK and DPRK-Communist bloc relations from 1970 to 1974 compiled in preparation for a 1-2 July 2010 conference.

New Evidence on North Korea
Download PDF here
New archival documents from Russia, China, South Korea, Hungary, Romania, Poland and (East) Germany on North Korean history from 1955-1984.

New Evidence on the Korean War
Download PDF here
New documentary evidence on the Korean War from Russian, Polish and other archives. Compiled in connection with the 16-17 June 2010 conference New Documents and New Histories: Twenty-First Century Perspectives on the Korean War.

A press conference was held at the Truman Presidential Library announcing the release of the latter two Document Readers–which was carried on C-SPAN. You can watch it here.

According to the Wilson Center’s North Korea International Documentation Project (NKIDP):

Documents obtained by NKIDP scholar Bernd Schaefer from the archives of East Germany’s state security service, or Stasi, were featured in an article in South Korea’s Dong-a Ilbo. The documents detail procedures for admitting clandestine members of the Korean Workers’ Party from South Korea to East Germany for meetings with North Korean officials. According to the documents, North Korea and East Germany established special procedures for South Korean “comrades” to secretly enter the GDR for meetings with North Korean officials at the DPRK embassy. East Berlin was also used as a stopover for these South Korean “comrades” traveling to Pyongyang for meetings with North Korean officials.

View the article in Korean at the Dong-a Ilbo website.  There were additional articles in Korean (here and here) and one in English here.

North Korea International Documentation Project (NKIDP)
September 23, 2009

NKIDP is pleased to announce the publication of NKIDP Document Reader #3, New Evidence on Inter-Korean Relations, 1971-1972.

This latest addition to the NKIDP Document Reader series features newly available South Korean, Romanian, East German, and Bulgarian documents on the North-South dialogue which marked the first significant thaw between the rival regimes on the Korean Peninsula.

New Evidence on Inter-Korean Relations, 1971-1972 , like all NKIDP publications, is available for download free of charge from the NKIDP website.

Yonhap reports on this publication here.

From the Wilson Center’s North Korea International Documentation Project:

The North Korea International Documentation Project is pleased to announce the publication of the latest addition to NKIDP Document Reader Series, Limits of the “Lips and Teeth” Alliance: New Evidence on Sino-DPRK Relations, 1955-1984.

The collection was specially prepared for the joint NKIDP-United States Institute of Peace conference, North Korean Attitudes Toward China: A Historical View of Contemporary Difficulties, and contains newly obtained documentary evidence on North Korea’s relations with China throughout the Cold War from Russian, (East) German, Albanian, and Hungarian archives. The 24 documents contained in the reader shed new and invaluable light on Pyongyang’s perspective of the Sino-DPRK relationship, and may force a reevaluation of the U.S. strategy of relying on China’s political leverage over North Korea to resolve contemporary disputes over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.

Limits of the “Lips and Teeth” Alliance: New Evidence on Sino-DPRK Relations, 1955-1984 was edited by NKIDP Coordinator James Person with indispensable assistance from Tim McDonnell. NKIDP is part of the Center’s History and Public Policy Program directed by Dr. Christian Ostermann. This publication, like all NKIDP publications, was made possible by a generous grant from the Korea Foundation and is available for download free of charge from the NKIDP website.  

Download a PDF of the NKIDP reader here.