North Korean Economy Watch

BBC
6/25/2003

Two top aides to South Korean former President Kim Dae-jung have been charged following an inquiry into a cash for summit scandal which preceded an historic inter-Korean meeting three years ago.

Park Jie-won, Mr Kim’s presidential chief of staff, and Lim Dong-won, the former head of South Korea’s spy agency, were among more than eight people charged as a result of a 70-day probe by independent counsel Song Doo-hwan.

Mr Song’s investigation found that $100m of the $500m transferred by Seoul to North Korea ahead of the 2000 summit was government money.

The inquiry was ordered by incumbent South Korean President, Roh Moo-hyun, after the scandal first surfaced during last year’s presidential election.

Kim Dae-jung has already apologised to the nation for the advance payment to the North, but denied the government itself had made any payments.

Mr Song said that while $400m of the money belonged to Hyundai, and was intended for legitimate business investment in North Korea, $100m was sent by Seoul as “politically motivated government aid”.

He stopped short of saying the government money was a bribe, but said the donation was clearly related to the summit and had been sent secretly through improper channels.

Mr Kim, who left office this February after a five-year tenure, was given the Nobel Peace Prize largely as a result of the historic inter-Korean summit.

He has argued that the money transfers “facilitated peace on the Korean Peninsula”.

But opposition politicians have continued to demand a more thorough enquiry into the matter.

Charges

One of the officials charged in connection with the scandal, former Culture and Tourism Minister Park Jie-won, met North Korean officials in April 2000 to arrange the June summit, according to Mr Song’s inquiry.

During the meeting, Mr Park pledged $100m to Pyongyang, which he later persuaded Hyundai to transfer, Mr Song said.

Lim Dong-won, former director of the National Intelligence Service, is accused of violating laws on foreign exchange transactions.

Chung Mong-hun, the chairman of Hyundai Asan, has also been charged in connection with the falsification of financial documents in order to cover up the payments to Pyongyang.

At least five others have been charged in connection with the case – some of whom could face up to five years in jail, according to the Associated Press news agency.

Mr Roh has vetoed a call by the South Korean opposition that the probe be extended to investigate the role of former President Kim Dae-jung himself.

From the BBC:

North Korea’s economy has been in the doldrums for more than a decade. Perhaps as many as a million people perished in a famine during the 1990s, and the food situation inside the country remains precarious today.

There are two hypotheses about why a country facing such problems has pursued nuclear weapons.

1. Its nuclear programme is merely a bargaining chip to be traded away to extract political and economic concessions from the US – a kind of atomic “trick or treat”.

2.  The North Koreans regard nuclear weapons as an end in themselves – a military deterrent and the ultimate guarantor of the regime’s survival.

North Korea’s foreign ministry said as much on 18 April when it declared, “The Iraqi war teaches a lesson that in order to prevent war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation, it is necessary to have a powerful deterrent force only.”

Yet even from this perspective, there is an intriguing economic angle.

If a nuclear North Korea were to foreswear aggression toward South Korea, then its huge conventional forces would be redundant.

Its million-man army, an albatross around the economy’s neck, could be demobilised.

In fact, before the nuclear crisis erupted last October, North Korea floated trial balloons regarding the possibility of such a demobilisation.

But if the North’s army is to be demobilised, those troops have to have jobs to go to.

Last July, the government announced a package of policy changes designed to revitalise the economy.

These included marketisation, the promotion of special economic zones, and a diplomatic opening toward Japan, which the North hoped would pay billions of dollars in post-colonial claims and aid.

However, the rapprochement with Tokyo has stalled, and the expected capital infusion has not materialised.

The consensus of outside observers is that, so far, the reforms have largely failed to deliver.

Indeed, some of the policy changes, such as the creation of massive inflation and the demand that North Koreans surrender their holdings of dollars, could be interpreted as an attempt to re-assert state influence rather than reform the system.

Last month, Pyongyang introduced a new financial instrument it called a bond, though it is more like a lottery ticket. A mass campaign encouraging citizens to purchase these bonds suggests that politics, not personal finance, is the main selling point.

To make matters worse, the oil flow through a pipeline from China on which North Korea depends was interrupted earlier this month for several days.

The official explanation was that mechanical failure, not diplomatic arm-twisting, was the cause.

In sum, the economic situation remains dire.

However, both China and South Korea have indicated that while they want to see a negotiated resolution [to the nuclear issue], they are unwilling to embargo North Korea in the way the US envisions.

This reluctance to sanction Pyongyang undercuts the credibility of the US threat to isolate North Korea.

The Bush administration’s own rhetoric also calls into question its willingness to promote North Korea’s constructive integration into the global community.  

Marcus Noland is a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, and author of Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas.

“Inside North Korea’s Ruling Elite”
Aidan Foster-Carter
AsiaInt
January 2003

As the international community struggles to find an appropriate response to North Korea’s moves to restart its nuclear programme, the questions of how key decisions are reached, and who by, have become of paramount importance. The received opinion is that “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il is the omnipotent and omniscient genius responsible for everything – as was his father before him, the DPRK’s founding Great Leader Kim Il-sung. Pyongyang’s ineffable media endlessly praise the greatness of these two. Lesser figures, by contrast, remain in the shadows or shine only with reflected glory: success is due to following the leader loyally. Yet it misleads to take this at face value.

By all accounts Kim Jong-il is an active micro-manager. (He is nocturnal, too, and waiting for his midnight faxes causes much anxious ministerial insomnia.) He insists on being the node and centre of many separate chains of command. As in the spokes of a bicycle wheel, these are all linked to the hub yet have minimal lateral contact with one another.

Like his late father, but less energetically, the Dear Leader is also given to “on the spot guidance”: visiting all manner of places and making free with “expert” advice which of course cannot be ignored.

But this is not the whole picture. The public spectacle and personality cult serve to mask a more private sphere: one of smoke-filled rooms, where a few men (and a very few women) grapple with the political, economic, and military choices which confront all states, even those blessed by the Juche philosophy. Moreover, the choices are growing harder and starker, not least between war and peace and between market reform and further stagnation. North Korea cannot feed itself, and its economy lies in tatters. Now even its old allies, Russia and China, have joined the chorus of foes urging it to end its renewed nuclear programme.

So, even if Kim Jong-il is the ultimate decision maker (and even this cannot be accepted with absolute certainty), there are important questions about in what forums, formal or informal, policies are discussed and decisions made, and about who aids him – whether with policy input, advice, chewing the fat, or even daring to disagree. Who, in a word, are North Korea’s power elite, and do their minds really move as one? Or are there – as in any political system – divisions, perhaps profound ones, which could precipitate power struggles or even potential conflict?

Needless to say, no definitive answer to such questions is possible. As with much else, North Korea has succeeded in keeping its politics well hidden. If anything, things have grown more opaque over time (glasnost in reverse), especially under Kim Jong-il, when even the already minimal due process – for example the brief annual meeting of a rubber-stamp parliament to pass the budget – ceased. In 1998 the state apparatus was overhauled, the constitution revised, and normal service resumed, after a fashion. Yet the officially ruling Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) remains in limbo, with no sign that its Politburo or Central Committee have even met since the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994; nor has it held a full Congress since 1980, when Kim Jong-il was proclaimed as successor.

The Dear Leader has scant regard for formalities, ruling instead via a kitchen cabinet of trusted cronies, the most important of whom is his brother-in-law Jang Song-thaek. Meanwhile a third estate, the military, has risen to rival the usual communist party-state dyad.

Rise of a dynasty

It helps to know how North Korea got this way. In 1945 the young ex-guerrilla Kim Il-sung came home in Soviet uniform. Moscow’s support and his own ruthless skills helped him kill off rivals, including three other communist factions: local, Soviet-Korean, and pro-China. The last overt challenge to him was in 1956, and thereafter his Kapsan (partisan) faction monopolized power. Most of today’s Pyongyang elite are descended from, or have married into, this group.

As medieval history east and west attests, dynasties have their own internecine strife. Kim Il-sung’s first choice as heir was his younger brother Kim Yong-ju, who vanished in the 1970s but resurfaced on the Politburo in 1993: a hint that Kim Jong-il’s succession was in trouble. But then the Great Leader died, and YJ has hardly appeared since. The Dear Leader has also seen off his hated stepmother Kim Song-ae, who used to head the women’s union, and her sons. One, Kim Pyong-il, a potential rival, lives in quasi-exile as ambassador in Warsaw.

By contrast, Kim Jong-il is close to his one surviving full sibling, his sister Kim Kyong-hui, and her husband Jang Song-thaek. She runs the party’s light industry section; he is a vice-director of the KWP Central Committee. As often in Pyongyang, an anodyne nominal title belies real rank. In November Jang visited Seoul with an economic delegation, to great excitement there. One day he overslept but none of his compatriots dared wake him; a South Korean had to do it.

Kim Jong-il turned 60 last year, so his own succession is a real if not yet a public issue. Given a tangled marital history, this too risks conflict. His Swiss-educated elder son Kim Jong-nam, 31, who runs the DPRK’s IT activities, was front-runner until caught on a covert trip to Japan last year. That embarrassment might make JN’s half-brother Kim Jong-chol, 20, the favourite.

A party preserved?

All this, of course, is behind the scenes. Officially North Korea is ruled by the KWP, but as noted this seems oddly frozen. The most important Politburo member is ex-foreign minister Kim Yong-nam, 74, who as presidium president of the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) is the titular head of state. (The DPRK’s “eternal president” remains Kim Il-sung, mortality notwithstanding.) It was Kim Yong-nam who met foreign dignitaries before the Dear Leader began to do so, selectively, in 2000. He is also a unifying bridge between generations in the party.

Other full Politburo members each have specific oversight responsibilities. Jon Byong-ho, 76, as head of the secret Second Economy Committee, runs an arms industry which is bigger than, and has priority over, the civilian economy. Han Song-ryong, 75, has the poisoned chalice of heavy industry; while Kye Ung-tae, 77, oversees public security.

Alternate members (a rank lower) of the Politburo include Yon Hyong-muk, 71, a technocrat who impressed as prime minister a decade ago on several visits to Seoul. Demoted, after North-South ties worsened, to run the remote northerly Jagang province, he showed his mettle by a campaign to build local power stations, and he is now a rare civilian on the National Defence Commission (see below). Other alternate Politburo members are the current premier Hong Song-nam, 78, a former chief planner; Yang Hyong-sop (76) and Choe Thae-bok (73), respectively vice-president and chair of the SPA (in effect, speaker); and Choe Yong-rim, 76, the prosecutor-general.

Several of the above are also among the KWP’s secretaries. Others include Kim Kuk-tae, 78, who monitors the elite; Kim Ki-nam, 76, in charge of propaganda; and the best known, Kim Yong-sun (68), who after years in charge of international relations now has the hot potato of North-South ties. Here the stakes are high: a Seoul daily claims Kim was jailed last year after the new Bush administration chilled the atmosphere, until Kim Jong-il ordered his release.

All the above, as their ages attest, have been around for a while. (Some even older figures in their 80s, including the last survivors of Kim Il-sung’s guerrilla band, play a merely honorific role.)

As in the traditional communist model, the party takes priority over the state. Cabinet ministers, therefore, are a lesser breed unless like Hong Song-nam they also hold party positions. To complicate matters, at the eight rounds of inter-Korean “ministerial” talks since the June 2000 Pyongyang summit, North Korea has sent not ministers as such but a “cabinet advisor”, Jon Kum-jin (70), leading a younger team whose precise jobs and status are unclear.

Similar oddities apply in foreign affairs. Whereas Kim Yong-nam as foreign minister had real clout, the incumbent now, Paek Nam-sun (formerly Paek Nam-jun: name changes are another quirk), mainly does smile diplomacy – as at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Brunei, where he had coffee with Colin Powell. But for serious talks his nominal deputy Kim Kye-gwan takes over, or the real heavy hitter, first vice-foreign minister Kang Sok-ju. Kang negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework, and it was reportedly he who in October defiantly boasted to the US of North Korea’s new nuclear programme. By all accounts, he is one of Kim Jong-il’s closest confidants.

Soldiers on the march

Other emissaries to foreign lands are military. Two years ago, when Kim Jong-il sent a special envoy to Washington, he picked vice-marshal Jo Myong-rok, who took tea with Bill Clinton in the White House in full Korean People’s Army (KPA) uniform. That choice bespeaks the rise of the KPA under Kim Jong-il as a third elite, alongside or even above the party and state. Not only have the military as such gained status, but ups and downs in the ranks contrast with the KWP’s stasis.

For example the ex-air force chief Jo, 72, who in 1995 ranked 95th on one funeral committee (a vital index of political snakes and ladders for Pyongyang-watchers) by 1997 had shot up to 7th. His post as KPA political chief belies his role as Kim Jong-il’s top military ally and North Korea’s number two.

Similarly, Japanese sources report an unnamed general as central to secret talks to arrange Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit last September. Amid the debris of that abortive initiative, this figure told his Japanese counterpart: “At worst, you may lose your job” and drew his hand across his throat.

Whatever an individual’s fate, there are many signs of the KPA’s new clout overall. Formally, the revised 1998 constitution made the military-dominated National Defence Commission the highest state body, above the cabinet. Kim Jong-il rules North Korea as NDC chairman. An “army-first” policy is proclaimed; last year the army even replaced the proletariat as officially the core force of the revolution. Theory and practice point the same way. North Korea’s hard line on many issues is widely attributed (including by some DPRK diplomats, sotto voce) to military veto. The KPA would have much to lose from an outbreak of peace on the peninsula.

Besides Jo, the two main military figures are defence minister Kim Il-chol (69), a navy man, and chief of staff Kim Yong-jun (66 or 70; sources vary). Both have shot up the ranks, at the expense of others like O Guk-ryol, chief of staff in the late 1980s who was seen then as Kim Jong-il’s key ally in the KPA.

The crucial question of the Dear Leader’s precise relations with the military remains unclear. Many must have resented his being foisted on them, without any military experience, as commander-in-chief, his first official role. Then again, the success of his succession (so to say) was not predetermined; this testifies to his own political skills, even after paternal protection ceased. So he might have tamed the KPA – or have they tamed him? He has certainly promoted generals en masse and lavished gifts to buy their loyalty. It is just not known whether the current crisis reflects their stubbornness, or the limits of his horizons.

All change?

What next for North Korea’s political elite? At a well-lubricated lunch in happier times two summers ago, Kim Jong-il told visiting South Korean press magnates that a KWP congress would be held that autumn (it was not), which could remove a clause pledging it to communize South Korea. But there was a problem: “Among the top officials…are several who worked with President Kim Il-sung, so I find it’s difficult to revise. If the platform is changed, a lot of officials here will have to quit their posts. Some may claim that if I initiate the revision of the platform, I am trying to purge my opponents”. The laughter around the table was nervous.

Will there ever be another KWP congress? Maybe it is neither necessary to Kim Jong-il – nor possible for fear that desperation might unleash real debate over the country’s tragic trajectory. Many in Pyongyang must dread their future. If debate between hawks and reformers is barely audible, this reflects not only fear of getting out of line, but a shared stark awareness that they might all sink together.

If and when real change begins, by whatever means, then the chances of it evolving into a complete unravelling of the regime and state as such grow ever greater. Who, in 2003, would even want to save the foul shell that the DPRK has become? And how could they do it? But North Korea’s eventual agents of change, be they KPA colonels or workers goaded beyond endurance by hunger, still have no names that we yet know.

USA Today
Paul Wiseman
9/15/2002

For North Korea’s regime, the actions by tight-knit communist sympathizers living in Japan mean it is gradually losing its last international support group.

In one of the oddities left over from the Cold War, tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans living in Japan claim North Korean citizenship. For the past 50 years, even as Japan and South Korea emerged as wealthy democracies and a repressive North Korea slid into poverty, North Korean sympathizers in Japan have:

• Operated dozens of schools across Japan teaching the Marxist-nationalist ideology of late North Korean strongman Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader.
• Run what amounts to a North Korean embassy through the Tokyo headquarters of their General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or Chongryun. The organization issues visas to those who cross the Sea of Japan in ferries from the
• Japanese port Niigata to visit relatives in North Korea — one of the Stalinist state’s few direct links to the outside world.
• Helped finance the regime in Pyongyang through murky business dealings, including control of hundreds of pachinko pinball arcades across Japan.

But as Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi prepares to make a historic visit to the North Korean capital Pyongyang Tuesday, Japan’s North Koreans are abandoning their anti-U.S., anti-Japanese, anti-South Korean communist ideology and their financial support for North Korea. “Our generation does not like our children to be taught politics,” says Jun Im Joung, 48, a North Korean shopkeeper in Tokyo who has put three children through Chongryun schools and attended them. (Related story: Newspaper: Leaders set to exchange overtures )

Descendants of laborers

An estimated 1 million ethnic Koreans live in Japan. Most of them are descendants of laborers forcibly brought to Japan before and during World War II and who decided to stay after the conflict ended. More than 600,000 of them keep North or South Korean citizenship. Japan doesn’t recognize North Korean citizenship. “We’re stateless,” says So Chung On, a Chongryun spokesman. The group claims more than 150,000 members, down from a peak of about 300,000 in the 1960s.

The vast majority of Japan’s North Koreans came from what became South Korea when the peninsula was partitioned after World War II, says Sonia Ryang, an anthropologist at Johns Hopkins University. So their support for the communist North over the U.S.-backed South was a choice, not a geographical circumstance.

The decision seems odd now. But in the tumultuous atmosphere after World War II, it made sense: Japan’s Koreans were mostly laborers and naturally sympathized with communists claiming to represent the working class. North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung’s ultimately ruinous policy of juche, or Korean self-reliance, appealed to expatriate Koreans’ fierce sense of patriotism and independence. Being North Korean became a defiant way to protect their Korean identity while living in a Japan where they faced discrimination.

North Korea, which outperformed the South economically into the 1960s, also ingratiated itself with the ethnic Korean community in Japan by supplying scholarships and books.

Koreans in Japan returned the favor, at one time funneling as much as $600 million a year to the impoverished North Korean regime from pachinko parlors. The financial maneuverings seem sometimes to run afoul of the law. Last December, a Chongryun official was arrested on charges of illegally diverting loans from a failed credit union to the organization and to his personal accounts. Chongryun spokesman So dismisses the charges as “politically influenced.”

At school, students learned an uncompromising brand of North Korean communism. “They used to teach all about the ‘U.S. imperialist wolf’ and ‘the South Korean puppet clique,’ ” says Johns Hopkins’ Ryang, herself a graduate of North Korean schools in Japan. Jun Im Joung remembers studying Russian during his years at a pro-Pyongyang high school in Tokyo three decades ago: “Our teachers told us the Soviet Union would control the world.”

Contributions wane

Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists and North Korea is a famine-ridden pariah state, the old rhetoric has lost its appeal. Financial contributions to the North Korean regime have dried up, victims of a decade of economic stagnation in Japan and diminishing enthusiasm for Pyongyang. Enrollment at Chongryun’s 124 schools is down.

Under pressure from parents, the schools scrubbed the communist propaganda out of textbooks a few years ago. Posters at the high school now ask students whether they’ve been practicing their English. This month, Chongryun elementary and middle schools started taking down classroom portraits of Kim Il Sung and his son and successor, the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il.

These days, the schools focus simply on trying to keep Korean language and culture alive in a community that becomes more Japanese every day.

At Tokyo’s Korean high school, the gymnasium is designed to resemble the turtle-shaped warships Korean Adm. Yi Soon Shin used to defeat the Japanese in the 16th century. Girls wear traditional Korean chogori dresses and dance traditional dances. Students practice traditional Korean instruments such as the changgo (drums) and choktae (flute). This month, the school sent a dance troupe to South Korea, an event that would have been unthinkable even five years ago.

But preserving Korean culture is an uphill struggle. Anthropologist Jeffry Hester of Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka estimates that 80% of Japan’s ethnic Koreans who marry choose a non-Korean Japanese spouse; so they are rapidly being absorbed into mainstream society. Thousands more chose Japanese citizenship. Chongryun’s So sighs and says, “Generation after generation, second, third, fourth generation, cannot help being influenced by Japanese society.” Even some teachers at Chongryun schools — where speaking Japanese is banned in favor of Korean — admit that they speak Japanese when they get home.

BBC
9/14/2002

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il – who is to meet Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Pyongyang on Tuesday – says he wants to establish diplomatic ties with Tokyo.

In a written interview with Japan’s Kyodo news agency, Mr Kim said he would be willing to visit Japan once relations had improved.

But he reiterated his government’s demand for an apology and compensation for Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean peninsula between 1910 and 1945.

This is among a number of issues that have soured relations between Tokyo and Pyongyang.

Japan, for its part, accuses North Korean agents of abducting 11 Japanese in the 1970s and 80s, and is still angry over Pyongyang’s launch of a missile over Japan in 1998.

‘Liquidate the past’

In the interview with Kyodo, Mr Kim said it was “the historic mission for the two countries’ politicians of today to normalise relations”.

But, he went on, “in order to liquidate the past, (Japan must) apologise sincerely by giving thorough consideration to all the sufferings and damages it inflicted on the Korean people”.

The issue of compensation, Mr Kim added, must also be “correctly resolved”.

President George W Bush has welcomed Mr Koizumi’s visit to North Korea, saying the United States has not given up on resuming talks with Pyongyang.

Mr Koizumi will be the first Japanese leader to visit North Korea – a country described by Mr Bush as part of an “axis of evil”, along with Iraq and Iran.

BBC
Caroline Gluck
9/14/2002

Military officials from the two Koreas have held talks to discuss carrying out work inside the demilitarised zone separating them, so that cross-border road and rail links can be restored.

These talks – the first of their kind in more than a year and a half – are another sign of improving ties.

The meeting, in the border village of Panmunjom, focused on the technical details of reconnecting cross-border road and rail links, which will pass through the heavily-mined demilitarised zone.

Agreements signed by defence ministers from both countries are needed to guarantee the safety of workers and prevent accidental clashes between the two armies, which have maintained an uneasy truce since the Korean War ended in 1953.

Last month, the two sides set out a timetable for the work, saying they hoped to complete one rail link by the end of the year.

Reunions

At least two more rounds of working-level talks are expected, and officials are confident that agreements will be in place before ground-breaking ceremonies are held in the two Koreas next Wednesday, marking the resumption of work.

The South has agreed to provide construction materials to the North, and in separate meetings held in North Korea officials are discussing the engineering details of the projects.

The two Koreas are still technically at war, but Seoul sees transport links as one of the most powerful symbols of their reconciliation efforts.

High-level talks between the two Koreas resumed last month and have been followed by a series of exchanges.

Limited numbers of elderly relatives from the two Koreas are currently holding emotional reunions in the North after being separated for half-a-century.

They are the fifth round of reunions since the historic Korean summit in June 2000.

From The Economist
June 17th, 2000

About 100,000 northerners are believed to have crossed into north-eastern China, where some 2m ethnic Koreans have lived alongside the Chinese since the mid-1800s. Recently, the numbers crossing the river have slowed down, partly, it is thought, because the famine in North Korea has eased. But the North Korean guards have also doubled the bribe they demand from those they let pass.

Some people return home after scavenging for food, but many remain, hoping to better their lives or to escape persecution. They face a perilous existence, in constant fear of being caught and deported. It is from these refugees that a picture of the grim existence of North Koreans emerges. They also give a glimpse of the extent of the opposition to Kim Jong Il’s rule.

That opposition is feeble. Some of it comes from Christian groups, especially those established by South Korean missionaries who look after some of the refugees. A mission in Yanji, for instance, helps to care for 100 or so North Korean children and 50 adults. Missionaries say they convert about one in five to Christianity and some are then sent back to North Korea to spread the word.

There are said to be about 50 underground churches in North Korea, usually houses where people go to pray and read the Bible in secret. Although there is little sign of it yet, some people think that the Christians could one day openly stand up for their rights, as the Falun Gong movement has in China.

Other refugees seem more determined to overthrow rather than challenge the North’s leaders. A group of armed North Korean soldiers sneaked into China in May to join a resistance group hiding in the mountains, according to one missionary. This, he claims, has made China strengthen its frontier controls.

A North Korean academic, who came to China two years ago to carry out a survey of the refugees, says he decided not to return home: after experiencing life in China and learning about South Korea, he felt betrayed by the North’s regime. Now he says he is determined to help overthrow it.

Some people talk of attempted coups. One is supposed to have been staged by the 6th Army Corps in the north-east of the country in January 1996, but was quickly put down. Officers were executed and the unit has since been dissolved, recalls a former lieutenant in a North Korean special-forces unit who crossed the Tumen river with his wife and son three years ago.

A woman who fled a year ago says one of the North’s big problems is a lack of food-processing skills. Only when she came to China did she realise that canned fish could be sold for more money than raw fish. She plans to use this valuable piece of capitalist knowledge if warmer relations ever allow her to go home.