Great Confiscation Updates

The Washington Post’s Blaine Harden writes today that popular discontent over the Great Confiscation isn’t going away:

It was an unexplained decision — the kind of command that for more than six decades has been obeyed without question in North Korea. But this time, in a highly unusual challenge to Kim’s near-absolute authority, the markets and the people who depend on them pushed back.  Grass-roots anger and a reported riot in an eastern coastal city pressured the government to amend its confiscatory policy. Exchange limits have been eased, allowing individuals to possess more cash.

The currency episode reveals new constraints on Kim’s power and may signal a fundamental change in the operation of what is often called the world’s most repressive state. The change is driven by private markets that now feed and employ half the country’s 23.5 million people, and appear to have grown too big and too important to be crushed, even by a leader who loathes them.

The currency episode seems far from over, and there have been indications that Kim still has the stomach for using deadly force. There have been public executions and reinforcements have been dispatched to the Chinese border to stop possible mass defections, according to reports in Seoul-based newspapers and aid groups with informants in the North.

Still, analysts say there has also been evidence of unexpected shifts in the limits of Kim’s authority.  “The private markets have created a new power elite,” said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. “They pay bribes to bureaucrats in Kim’s government, and they are a threat that is not going away.”

On balance, however, the signs I’ve seen are these:  (a) the regime’s partial reversal of the confiscation has reduced public anger; (b) in the near term, the rage has given way to acceptance, and the odds of a broader wave of public protest are diminished in the short-term; however (c) the Pandora’s box of public dissent has opened, and will prove very difficult to close in the medium to long term.  That’s especially so now that the people have forced the regime to change a major economic policy.  Furthermore, the measures the regime is taking to appease the people in the short-term, such as cash payments to workers and farmers, may not be sustainable in the long term, particularly as a new bout of hyperinflation eats away at the value of the new currency and makes it impossible to save for leaner times.  In North Korea, food supplies typically run shortest in the spring, after winter reserves run out and before the first harvests come in.  Finally, the misery that the Great Confiscation has already caused will linger for years.

One positive aspect of this is that cash the regime spends on buying domestic stability can’t be spent on enriching high-ranking cadres, the military, and WMD development.

I don’t conceal my view that North Korea won’t change barring the overthrow of this regime, which can’t happen peacefully, and that expressions of discontent are signs that the North Korean people are prepared to support a clandestine opposition movement, should one arise.  No such movement has arisen yet; such a movement still lacks a nationwide galvanizing ideology around which a clandestine organization can coalesce and build.  But I suspect that if such an ideology were propagated to North Koreans via Radio Free North Korea or Open Radio, leaders would emerge locally to support it.