hankyoreh

By Jin Jingyi, professor at Peking University

Since Kim Jong-un took over in North Korea, his country has made some moves towards reform and openness. However, North Korea continues to deny that it is reforming. It says that expecting reform from North Korea is like expecting the sun to rise from the west. To explain this, we need to look at what reform means to the Pyongyang regime. In the North Korean dictionary, for instance, the word ‘reform’ is defined as, “the act of fundamentally redoing an old system,” and it uses the example of land reform or democratic reform. The dictionary definition alone makes it difficult for North Korea to carry out reforms, let alone redo its entire regime.

Another reason that North Korea denies reform is concern over how sudden change could shock its society, as was the case with the socialist states in the Soviet bloc that attempted reforms in the late 1980’s.

In September of 1982, Kim Il-sung and Deng Xiaoping met immediately after the 12th Chinese Communist Party Congress was held, and they visited Deng’s hometown in Sichaun province and one of the places where China’s market reform policies began. Seeing all the rice on the farms they visited, Kim asked how such abundance was possible on every farm. Deng attributed it to the “household responsibility system” that was adopted. Ever since, North Korea showed great interest in China’s reforms, and there was a time when it did experiment with farm reforms similar to those enacted in China. The regime also introduced such systems like joint investment law, joint venture income tax law and foreign investment or income tax law for foreigners.

Not much later, in close succession came the protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. North Korea then gave up any efforts at reform. What was defined in the dictionary had become too close to home. And as experts in the South or the US or Japan continued to foreshadow reform leading to North Korea’s collapse, Pyongyang began to think that reform would lead to the regime’s collapse.

In the Chinese dictionary, the word ‘reform’ is defined as “changing or innovating an old system or an old artifact.” By adding the concept of “changing or innovating an old artifact,” for the Chinese everything is subject to reform. But the Chinese focus is naturally the reform of a system. And thus, it has carried out major changes to the old, centrally planned economy, the basis of the socialist, Stalinist system.

To carry out this reform that was almost a revolution, there was a new evaluation of the old system and a definition of the new concept. This reform would only be possible by negating Hua Guofeng’s concept that Mao’s decisions and orders were all correct, and by establishing a new concept that practice is the only standard for verifying truth. This denial of the old was able to give birth to the new thoughts and policies of “socialist market economy.”

This is not the kind of reform that North Korea would be readily open to. It will have no reason to carry this kind of reform. North Korea is better suited to small, incremental change than larger reform measures.

For North Korea, change would be something like “getting as much as possible while securely maintaining its socialist principle” That in itself, trying to reap as much as possible from any kind of economic profit will be a change for Pyongyang. Depending on what measures they choose, North Korea could end up with more room to maneuver.

The more benefits it reaps, there will be debates and controversy on what is the spectrum of its socialist principles. Ultimately what will determine success is how much the regime will be able to mobilize the participation or understanding of its people.

Even though North Korea is not about to reform their system, they have room for change, such as expanding the autonomy of farms and businesses and implementation of new policies in special economic zones. Also they can concentrate investment of their limited funds on particular sectors, and expanding the function of small, private markets.

Revolutionary changes can happen without reforms. If it is a change that takes care of the people, no matter whether that is a planned economic, a market economy, or reforms, it will be good change.

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