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At the New Ledger: Sowing the Seeds of Self-Government in North Korea

Because once you do the math, no one can govern post-Kim North Korea without the consent of the governed.

There are now 17,000 North Koreans living in the South.  Who is training them to play a leading role in governing and rebuilding their homeland?

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  1. An interesting question re: NorKs in the ROK. I was talking to one of the higher level defectors and he was lamenting the fact that out of the 17,000 in the ROK now, only about a hundred or so were members of the “North Korea Intelligentsia Coalition” (북한 지식인 연대). His explanation of this was the demographics of the people getting out of North Korea – the educated, the elite, those who’ve had some sort of experience with governance were not the ones coming out; instead, according to him I should stress, you had instead the miners, the factory labourers, the textile workers of the northern regions. His argument for why there was no provisional North Korean government right now opposing Pyongyang was that the people who’ve been able to escape don’t have the capacity to do so.

    Or so his argument went. Mind you, he himself was part of the governing elite before he left, so a grain of salt with all his words.

  2. Andrei Lankov has made the same point, and he buttresses that with surveys of defectors. And yet I don’t find this an adequate excuse. A system that elevates people according to songbun as opposed to merit cannot be without potential leaders among its working classes. In any society, talented people are always springing up from every socioeconomic category.

    Really, I’d have to say that one of the things I love the most about this society is its social mobility. I’m blessed with a great career despite coming from a place where my richer neighbors lived in trailers (and deeply appreciate that good fortune because what I came from). Note also that I didn’t have to survive famine, oppression, and the ChiCom police to get here, meaning that in a sense, those 17,000 are some of North Korea’s toughest, boldest, and most determined survivors. If South Korea isn’t finding the potential leaders of North Korea among a pool of 17,000, that’s only because it isn’t trying.