For decades now, since the world came to agree with what South Koreans felt all along — that theirs was the better Korea — we have been figuratively peering across the DMZ, waiting for the failed side to accept the painful truth.
Experts have been on permanent alert for a clue, a hint, a wink, anything to signal the inevitable shift.
I wonder now, could the signs be there but getting misread? I wonder, has North Korea turned a corner and we have just not noticed?
I can’t say I’m sure, but here is what has triggered these thoughts.
As readers will know, at the end of last year, Kim Jong-un declared that North Korea would no longer pursue reconciliation and reunification with South Korea.
This was more than just words. Through January and February, there was nationwide follow-up. Laws were changed. Wording was tweaked. Songs were unsung. Government and party offices were closed, and people reassigned. Maps were airbrushed — like, weather reports changed from being the whole peninsula to just North Korea. Without enough time before the new school year to print new textbooks, students were recruited in the holidays to stick bits of paper over words like “unification” and anything that suggested South Koreans were compatriots.
Had Kim stopped there, we would have been left thinking he was serious. President Yoon Suk Yeol might have proposed a summit to make him change his mind, been rebuffed, and now we would be planning the invasion or talking about the two Koreas having to forge separate paths.
But in the same speech, Kim laid into South Korea. “I believe that it is a mistake, that we must no longer make, to deal with the people who declare us as ‘the main enemy’ and seek only opportunities for ‘[our] regime collapse’ and ‘unification by absorption,’” he said, according to the country’s KCNA news agency.
He went further. South Koreans are no longer our brothers and sisters, he said. They are foreigners and that their state is North Korea’s officially designated “main enemy.”
That was not very nice. The effect was to make some experts and politicians in this country and overseas think he was having a hissy fit against President Yoon. Others, meanwhile, saw belligerent intent and claimed Kim was laying the foundation for a nuclear attack.
What these reactions have in common is that nobody was taking Kim at face value. This may well be the biggest strategic change on the Korean Peninsula since South Korea’s move to democracy 40 years ago. But in last month’s National Assembly elections, it didn’t come up.
Perhaps it should have. What if Kim really was giving up on reunification and was appearing belligerent simply to make sure our side didn’t get belligerent with him? That’s not to say we would, just that he thinks we would, because if he were us, he would.
The reason this is hard is that dropping reunification is not what we expected. Unification unites all Koreans. It is the sacred task that keeps them Korean. Giving it up is like the devil declaring he’s an atheist. It’s hard to get your head around it.
What everyone expected outside of war or a coup was a decision to make real peace and engage seriously with the South about a merger. The crucial first indicator in such a case, we expected, would lie in a shift of national strategy from reunification to economic development, with resources moving from defense to economic planning, from treating people like inmates of a prison to people whose lives are worth improving.
There’s evidence of something like this.
In a new five-year plan announced last summer, there was a new emphasis on regional development. The new part is a “20×10 regional development” goal to build manufacturing facilities in 20 cities and counties every year for the next 10 years. At the same time as he was calling for the constitution to be changed to drop the national reunification clause, Kim was giving speeches about regional development and attending groundbreakings.
Could this be North Korea’s version of what Deng Xiaoping did in China?
Behind this new policy direction is an ideological change. Kim’s grandfather’s Juche ideology emphasized independence from foreign power. When Kim’s father took over, he continued to sing from the Juche hymn sheet, but changed the lyrics to emphasize “military first.” In recent years, these lyrics have been changed again. Kim Jong-un appears to be emphasizing “nation” and “people.”
Perhaps he really is trying to improve their lives. If that is true, then reunification is taking a back seat.
There is a certain logic to North Korea opting either to give up or postpone reunification. Given that if it were to happen now, North Korea would be credited with contributing nothing of substance, except perhaps the location of the future capital, and might end up the poor cousin, separation now makes better sense.
If that is what is happening — and it is too early to be sure — then our victory in the competition to be the better Korea takes on a quality of one hand clapping. Our choice then becomes whether to continue to push for our desired reunification or opt for peaceful separation.
Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans."
Has North Korea made an unwanted change we never expected?
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23.05.2024
For decades now, since the world came to agree with what South Koreans felt all along — that theirs was the better Korea — we have been figuratively peering across the DMZ, waiting for the failed side to accept the painful truth.
Experts have been on permanent alert for a clue, a hint, a wink, anything to signal the inevitable shift.
I wonder now, could the signs be there but getting misread? I wonder, has North Korea turned a corner and we have just not noticed?
I can’t say I’m sure, but here is what has triggered these thoughts.
As readers will know, at the end of last year, Kim Jong-un declared that North Korea would no longer pursue reconciliation and reunification with South Korea.
This was more than just words. Through January and February, there was nationwide follow-up. Laws were changed. Wording was tweaked. Songs were unsung. Government and party offices were closed, and people reassigned. Maps were airbrushed — like, weather reports changed from being the whole peninsula to just North Korea. Without enough time before the new school year to print new textbooks, students were recruited in the holidays to stick bits of paper over words like “unification” and anything that suggested South Koreans were compatriots.
Had Kim stopped there, we would have been left thinking he........
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