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Rason Special Economic Zone development plan

Under my grandfather’s leadership, the WPK held the fifth plenary session of its fourth Central Committee on Dec. 10-14, 1962, which is when the parallel development approach to building the economy and national defense was decided on. Faced with a million troops from the US and South Korea, they opted to establish a deterrent against the US, since North Korea’s defense had been left unstable by a conflict between fellow socialist countries China and the Soviet Union. Under pressure from then Soviet Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and US President John F. Kennedy, my grandfather seems to have felt a kind of fear of abandonment when the plans for building a nuclear missile base in Cuba were dropped. The US invaded Vietnam around the same time, and it also put pressure on South Korea and Japan to establish diplomatic ties for the sake of trilateral security cooperation, while getting South Korea to send troops to Vietnam.

The US was aggressive; the Soviet Union was willing to negotiate. The Soviet Union also refused military aid on the grounds that North Korea had been critical of Khrushchev’s revisionism. Tough as it was, my grandfather made the decision that the North had no choice but to protect itself. Because of his parallel development approach, he declared that it was “necessary to channel a lot of human and material resources into national defense and delay economic development (report by WPK Central Committee chairman Kim Il-sung during WPK representatives’ meeting, Oct. 5, 1966). In other words, it was a “parallel development approach” in name only, one where the economy had to be sacrificed for the sake of defense. After that policy was adopted, a total of 31.1% of the budget “was channeled into strengthening the country’s defense capabilities . . . between 1967 and 1961” (report by Vice Premier Kim Il, fifth WPK representatives’ meeting, Nov. 5, 1970). The parallel development policy had been a forced choice, but its effects on economic growth were severe.

As for me, I have no intention of sacrificing the economy. I’m also not interested in giving up on defense. But how do you see North Korea stacking up against the US and South Korea militaries with conventional weapons? It’s a bit embarrassing, but let’s look at some figures. South Korea’s gross national income is 43.7 times higher than the North’s. (South Korea: 1.49 quadrillion won (US$1.23 trillion); North Korea: 34.2 trillion won (US$28.1 billion)). South Korea’s yearly defense spending far outstrips the budget for the North’s entire government (2014 North Korean government budget US$7.12 billion; 2016 South Korean defense budget 38.8 trillion won (US$31.8 billion)). Those numbers come from the Bank of Korea and the South Korean government. You can trust me on this.

In addition to being a definite means of defense, nuclear weapons also cost a lot less than conventional arms. And since we have a secure defense, we can also mobilize our troops to build the economy. When I said at a WPK Central Committee plenary session that the parallel development approach was “a way of further strengthening defense at a lower cost without additional defense spending and achieving improvements in economic growth and public livelihoods,” that wasn’t idle talk. You may think it’s a decision that will only deepen our isolation from the international community. From my standpoint, it’s a desperate measure for channeling strained resources into rebuilding the economy.

And I am working to rebuild the North’s economy. Besides adopting the parallel development approach at the WPK Central Committee plenary session, I also ordered the development of Economic Development Zones - special regions for courting foreign investment and developing the economy. We’ve now got 21 of those zones set up, eight of them in the Chinese border region on the Amnok (Yalu) and Duman (Tumen) Rivers. The idea was to promote economic cooperation with China there. I introduced a system of family “personal garden” responsibility (granting a certain area of rice paddies for personal production disposal; since reduced from 10-25 people to 3-5 people) to promote desire to work and a sense of ownership among farmers, and I adopted measures to encourage business autonomy. I also did a lot to promote markets. I’ve been beefing up local autonomy and incentives as a way of building motivation to rebuild the economy. Where I talked about the “North Korean-style economic management approach” and formalized my vision and commitment to it is in what you refer to as the “May 30th Measures” (Kim Jong-un, “On Establishing a North Korean-Style Economic Management Approach Suited to Realistic Development Demands,” talk with party, state, and military organization officials, May 30, 2014). And while you may talk about the obvious limits, it has achieved something. I know you won’t take my word for it, so let’s look at some South Korean data. There was an interesting study done by the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies (IPUS) at Seoul National University. They interviewed 146 people who had defected to the South because of hardships living in North Korea, and 86.9% said they had eaten three meals a day there. Another 61.4% said they’d almost always had rice, and 53.4% said they’d eaten meat at least once or twice a day. In other words, we don’t have people starving here today like we did during the Arduous March in the ‘90s. There are also far more people 55 and younger who favored North Korea possessing nuclear weapons than opposed it (IPUS, “North Korean Social Trends and Changes in Popular Perceptions 2015”). And those are the people who left! Don’t you think the ones actually living there see things even better? Whatever else you may say, I think the parallel development course is having an effect.

By Lee Je-hun, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

To be continued.....