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Sanitation workers produce hand sanitizer at a soap factory in Pyongyang. (Yonhap News)

The global village is being split apart once again with the unexpected arrival of the novel coronavirus’s “internationalization” in an era of globalization and regional economic blocs. In a sense, the population movements and distribution resulting from globalization have provided a shortcut for the virus’s rapid spread. As a result, the battle against the virus has taken a form that runs counter to the globalization trend, as countries everywhere move to seal themselves off.

Amid a coronavirus pandemic that is being called the biggest disaster since World War II, there is one “clean zone” without a single diagnosed case: North Korea, a place that is far removed from globalization. When the coronavirus outbreak first erupted in Wuhan, North Korea implemented a “state emergency disease control system” and set up emergency disease prevention commands in its central and local governments. It staked everything on what it viewed as a national life-or-death issue of coronavirus prevention. With North Korea already all but sealed off completely amid unprecedented international sanctions, it voluntarily moved to shut any remaining open doors with its army, navy, and air force. Its customs services at Dandong and Sinuiju were opened early this month after some difficulty, but all goods besides coronavirus prevention items, plastic sheeting for agriculture, and urea fertilizer were blocked from coming inside. The aim was to shut off any coronavirus that might be tainting the items at the source.

Even the agricultural products that have entered the North are left for over 10 days, after any coronavirus risk has passed, before they are unloaded from the trucks. It may not be going too far to describe North Korea as the only country in the world where the entire population has been mobilized in a thorough and orderly response since the start of the coronavirus outbreak. Perhaps that is why it also feels like the only country that is functioning under its old methods while all the other countries are losing their normal state functioning amid the virus’s shock waves. Construction has begun on Pyongyang’s first-ever general hospital. A Supreme People’s Assembly meeting is to be convened on Apr. 10. The news pages are splashed with reports about building the economy.

At the fifth plenary session of the seventh central committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea late last year, North Korea selected a new path of breaking through its situation through “self-reliance.” In other words, it plans on adopting self-reliance as a way of overcoming its historically unprecedented sanctions and blockade. As if to test that commitment, the coronavirus outbreak immediately struck, prompting North Korea to seal itself off completely -- a decision that was partly voluntary and partly forced. Some are predicting that as the situation drags on, the effects of the North Korea sanctions will multiply, sending the country into a second “Arduous March” (the massive famine from 1994 to 1998). It is even being claimed that the North Korean economy could be forced into collapse. There are predictions that the calls for a “breakthrough” could end up frustrated. As leader Kim Jong-un put it, North Korea is faced with a “domestic and internal environment of never-before-seen atrocity.” Is this something that North Korea can hope to overcome through self-reliance?

North Korea describes the core of “self-reliance” as lying in the full-scale mobilization of all available production potential. Central to this is the maximal identification and marshalling of proactivity on the part of producers. For internal resources to be mobilized at a time when interaction with the rest of the world has been severed and no new energy can be infused, what must be mobilized first and foremost are human resources. Indeed, whatever increase that the North Korean economy has experienced amid its unprecedented sanctions is due largely to its identification of untapped human resources. The different reform measures of the “North Korean approach to economic management” under the Kim Jong-un era -- which can be traced back to the “July 1 economic management improvement measures” of 2002 -- represent just this sort of human resource mobilization.

What enabled China to revive its economy just two years after the Cultural Revolution left it on the brink of collapse was a reform measure known as the “household contract responsibility system,” which made use of proactivity on the part of farmers. In that sense, North Korea could be said to have many areas yet where it could make maximum use of its productive potential when it comes to driving forces for self-reliance. There are also many reform measures that could be adopted there to offer hope and opportunities to people. During the Kim Jong-un era, North Korea has produced a number of reform measures that have drawn a proactive response from agricultural communities, factories, businesses, and producers. At the same time, even those intensive reform measures can only do so much toward overcoming the present difficulties. New reform measures will be needed to transform the current atmosphere. Only constant reform will offer a shortcut to breaking through the present situation through self-reliance.

By Jin Jingyi, professor at Peking University

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