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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1948 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 18, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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North Korea

Kim Jong Un says he no longer wants to reunify with South Korea:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would no longer pursue reconciliation with South Korea and called for rewriting the North’s constitution to eliminate the idea of shared statehood between the war-divided countries, state media said Tuesday.

The historic step to discard a decades-long pursuit of a peaceful unification, which was based on a sense of national homogeneity shared by both Koreas, comes amid heightened tensions where the pace of both Kim’s weapons development and the South’s military exercises with the United States have intensified in a tit-for-tat.

Not that all that much progress was happening towards reunification before, but still I guess its newsworthy.

North Korea has also sent its Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui to Russia to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In the west this has raised suspicions on North Korea provided more weaponry for Russia in the Ukraine conflict.

Makes me think - what's life like for a Nork? Does anyone happen to have a good source on the matter?

I lived in North Korea in 2015 and 2016 in order to teach computer science at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I have a pretty detailed journal of my trip posted online. From that I think you should get a decent sense of what life as a university student in North Korea is like.

Unfortunately, Trump instituted a travel ban to North Korea in 2017 (and Biden has kept the ban in place), so I haven't been back. I still have regular zoom calls with the faculty/students there. Some examples of successes that have come from this work are facilitating only open source contributions from North Koreans and helping North Koreans fix their internet infrastructure. But this sort of work is obviously much harder without being able to go in person, and these days I have much less insight to what the average North Korean thinks.

In my opinion, "no longer pursuing reconciliation with the south" is a huge deal. This pursuit of reconciliation was one of the main pillars of legitimacy for the Kim regime. Whenever I talked to a North Korean about their country, they always brought up that they want reunification. Literally on every street corner in Pyongyang were maps of a unified Korea and propaganda posters saying things like "We want to hug our brothers in the South". So I am very curious how this will be spun for the domestic audience.

I'm reading through your journal at the moment. It's quite interesting, though I can't help but notice you often insert small nods and nudges that seem to say "see, it's not as bad as foreigners think!". It looks out of place for a letter to the family. Do you always write like this, even when not recounting your experiences in countries often blamed for censorship?

Re: reunification, the word itself does not hold much good vibes behind it to me. According to Russia, what it's doing right now is reunification with Ukraine, for example. Some say they wish to restore Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood, others claim that there should not be such a thing as Ukraine.

I kind of read them in the sense that this seems like your ordinary travelogue of any East Block country in the Cold War era - which would probably mean it's not as bad as the Western common view is, but of course also not as good as North Korea fanboys, such as there still are, would present it.

My audience at the time (maybe a 200 or so friends/family) consisted of plenty of skeptical people, and so the small nods were directed towards them. This is a pretty common format for people doing overseas NGO work in non-US friendly countries.

I lived in North Korea in 2015 and 2016 in order to teach computer science at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I have a pretty detailed journal of my trip posted online. From that I think you should get a decent sense of what life as a university student in North Korea is like.

Thanks a ton for the insider account.

Is there any need by the DPRK to spin things for its own citizens? I imagine everyone will have to go along with the new direction whether they want to or not.

Though, realistically, I imagine the domestic shift might be more gradual.

Read it all. Fascinating stuff. Thanks for sharing (again).

I still wonder what life is like elsewhere in the country, though.

I remember that! But back then I cynically dismissed it for some reason. Don't even recall why. Thanks for bringing it up again; I'll give it a read.

IIRC it had been trending this way for a long time. SK polls showed that the generations old enough to remember the Korean War (and who often had brothers, sisters, aunts, or uncles on the other side) still supported reunification, while the youngest generations (who have only ever seen NK as a bizarre, menacing foreign country) opposed reunification, partly due to lack of ties, but also due to an unwillingness to shoulder the inevitable economic and social damage to SK caused by absorbing the impoverished, uneducated, dysfunctional NK population.

Sad to see this finally formalized but I suppose it was unavoidable.

If the United States gets embroiled in simultaneous hot wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the Taiwan strait, it massively changes the potential success calculus for a North Korean Invasion. Especially now that it’s starting to become apparent that ammunition stocks for Western advanced weapons are not very well supplied. That doesn’t mean that Kim will necessarily go for it, but at the very least it gives him a card to bluff with.

North Korea's dysfunction does extend to its air force, or so I've heard. It's hard to invade a country that has a vastly superior air force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Korea_Air_Force#Aircraft

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People's_Army_Air_Force#Aircraft

Even with the element of surprise, it's hard to imagine that North Korea could neutralize this disadvantage.

South Korea is armed to the teeth though and doesn't depend on US support in a border war the same way a Ukraine does. Even if they were really cut off, we have some 20k soldiers there already plus another 50k in Japan, nearly half of our forces deployed abroad. In a situation where a Taiwan strait crisis was happening Korea and Japan would also already be involved in that war.

South Korea could put up a good fight conventionally. The casualties would be immense because of the extreme volume of artillery pointed at Seoul, but much of NK’s weaponry and missile stock is extremely degraded, missile defense is antiquated and troops are poorly fed and trained. Leadership is extremely concentrated in Pyongyang. There are a lot of reasons to believe it would be a pretty quick war.

If the US pulled out China would be even less likely to intervene in support of Kim, and honestly even now I suspect they’d let SK take out the leadership (in the event of Kim making a move) and then step in to put someone in power in the north, and everyone would tacitly be fine with it because it’s better for China to pay for reconstruction.

South Korea unlike most of the countries in NATO actually has decent artillery capability and the ability to conscript. I suspect North Korean equipment is in better shape than expected. Most of the lines about their starving troops and rusted artillery sound suspiciously similar to the media line about Russia in the first year of the Ukraine war.

IMO the real danger is the Chinese armies in that theatre. They have the training and technology that North Korea lacks and no shortage in numbers. It's unlikely that North Korea would strike without Chinese approval and assistance, though they are wary of Chinese influence.

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