Be Careful What You Wish For
Glenn Reynolds links approvingly to this report on North Korea:
Intelligence sources and other observers both here in the capital of the PRC and elsewhere in Asia are stating that they project a possible collapse of the North Korean regime within six months time.
Although there have been similar dire predictions made in the past, those analyzing the current situation point to several factors that indicate that the regime may finally be unraveling.
The Weekly Standard claims that Kim Jong-Il Is hiding setting aside gobs of cash money for his exile retirement. If the regime collapses in a hurry–a Romanian-style coup, Kim will be lucky to escape the country with his life. It all sounds too good to be true–and it is.
Here’s what I had to say about this exact same issue four years ago:
South Korea has fewer than 50 million people, and while they’ve made great strides, their per capita income is still only up to that of modern Poland. They aren’t poor, but they aren’t nearly as rich as West Germany was [in 1990, when they absorbed 17 million relatively rich and well-fed East Germans]. In addition, their {South Korean] economy isn’t as mature or robust, as the Asian Financial Crisis of a couple years back showed.
Up north are 22 million of their starving brethren. Before the Communist dictatorship, they lived a brutal existence as virtual slaves of Japan. “Chosen,” as Tokyo called Korea, was annexed by the Japanese Empire 93 years ago. It’s safe to say that there is no one in North Korea with any experience living in a politically modern, free, democratic, or tolerant state. Travel is forbidden. Only a small handful of South Koreans are allowed north. There is only one radio station, and it runs nothing but the foulest sort of propaganda. And according to a story in US News & World Report a few weeks ago, North Korea even has concentration camps bigger than the District of Columbia.
Through no fault of their own, the people of North Korea simply aren’t ready to enter the modern world, and South Korea can’t afford to feed, house, re-educate, and re-civilize them all.
I don’t know if I buy this six month timeframe idea–Pyongyang has looked like a dead regime walking since Old Man Kim got himself entombed back in ’94. But no matter how you slice it, the liberation of 22 million people would be a wonderful thing. The disappearance of a hereditary communist gangster state wouldn’t exactly suck, either. But the aftermath is going to be bloody and messy–and might require the involvement of Beijing to a degree not seen in Korea since 1951, when the PLA crossed the Yalu River en masse.
Sleep tight!
A few other things to think about.
Can China afford to watch after a few million refugees? I think the answer is yes, but don’t expect the Chinese to be very hospitable, much less lavish.
The US Army in South Korea is now based away from the DMZ, much further south than it once was. That’s good news–you don’t want American troops maybe having to enforce possible (unlikely, but possible) South Korean orders to shoot at North Koreans fleeing towards Seoul. The bad news is, somebody has got to secure North Korea’s WMDs, and it’s likely to be a race between the US Army and the PLA. And I wonder if we have any idea where to look.
Also, we’ll be hamstrung by refugees in ways the Chinese won’t allow themselves to become.
North Koreans are, thanks to 50-plus years of especially-inept communism, shorter, dumber, less educated and more paranoid than their southern brethren. Northerners and Southerners are, in effect, no longer one people. Who’s to say Seoul will want to reunify any time soon? In that case, what becomes of North Korea, and who is going to run the place? Would it become a UN, US, or Chinese protectorate? A new dictatorship to replace the old one? Anarchy?
I’m just thinking out loud here, on the logistics of a rapid and thorough North Korean collapse–and my head is spinning. I hope Washington and the Pentagon have given all these questions a lot more thought than I have.
North Korea will stay in place until the day that China decides that its time to go. And China craves stability over all other things. China has its eyes focused on the coming Olympics, which is their arrival in the big tim. With that in mind, lets take a look at a few things:
First, China has geography in their favor. Now kids, pull out your magical ‘google earth’ toolset and take a virtual ride along that northern border that North Korea shares with China and Russia. You’ll quickly see that theres only a handful of bridges that cross the Yalu and those mountains will naturally contain ( or funnel) the refugees into controllable ‘chokepoints’.
Second, China has simple survival economics in its favor. It takes about 1500 calories of food per day to travel 25 miles by foot on level ground, that number goes up dramatically in uneven terrain and in colder climes. Just to get that 1500 calories into something you can more easily imagine, thats something roughly the size and weight of your average decorative brick. So, you need one brick for every 25 miles you want to travel, for each person you want to move with. The material logistics of something like that adds up pretty fast, but the total miles for any migration start to work against you. For the moment, we will ignore the water and sanitation problems that come with mass migrations of humans, but keep that in the back of your minds. For one example take the case of Cholera. Cholera is a far off legendary disease in the minds of the modern human because it is so rarely seen, but in the past with our own ‘western migration’ in the United States, cholera killed far more people than indian warfare or rapacious ‘Donner parties’ ever did. Cholera spreads because of bad sanitation and its spreads fast. You get it by breakfast, youre doubled over by dinner and dead the next day and your death helps spread the disease.
What it means is that a sort of evacuation pyramid will arise the minute that the very top of the pyramid is either removed or goes into exile. Those with the most means will go first( the small end of the pyramid) and as each of those layers of the pyramid begin to move so as to protect their natural inclination for personal security, and society and its controls break down, each lower layer will also begin to move to secure its own level of its ‘hierarchy of needs’. The “masses” that remain – those at the lower ends of the pyramid,will because of these “survival economics” will be largely be unable to move anywhere fast without direct outside aid, and its my guess that aid will not be coming, because while it is our reflex to do so – to do so is to guarantee that they will move and no one wants that to happen.
For people living without the benefit of a nomadic lifestyle and culture, moving from the city to the country ‘en masse’ means you’re will probably be dead within a week. Most of the North Koreans will know this to be true, and will likely remain right where they are until help arrives from the outside world and by that I mean China.
So, one part of North Korea will move real fast but thats the real small part so they will not be noticed. The big middle part will break down into two groups, one that moves and dies and the others who have been preparing for the big day with contraband goods and stolen supplies. The ones that are already in prison camps or at the bottom of a very structured society will stay right where they are because they are where they are already because they have no support system to fall back on.
China, will step in and re-establish governmental order through a local puppet government that will be in place within 72 hours of our noticing that the Kim family has gone into exile.
In summary – I expect that it will come quick, and I expect that it is probably underway to some degree and that the Chinese have long been preparing and exercising their military for this day to come. Keep an eye on Chinese activity in the Shandong penninsula just across from North Korea.
China can ill afford to have this country implode while they have the world coming over with all their cameras during the olympics. My guess is that they would rather have this particular ‘stain in the rug’ removed before company arrives.
There’s no real reason to think that South Korea would allow China to control the northern half of the country. The emotional element of reuniting their people can’t be so easily discounted. And they really despise China.
TO: Stephen Green, et al.
RE: The Chicom’s Rabid Lapdog
I doubt if the Chinese Communists will allow Kim to collapse. They need him for the sake of plausible deniability.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
Allow China? You mean like theres a damn thing they could do about it if thats what ends up happening? You think the South Koreans are going to slug it out militarily with China? Nah. They will stomp their feet and get angry, but in the end theres not a damn thing they can do but sit and watch.
Well, if China invades, that’s a whole different ball game, isn’t it? Operation Team Spirit and whatever else they call it now would no longer be an operation, it would be a war and we’d be in it too.
But absent a military invasion, South Korea will take the lead in resurrecting their kin.
Not to sound crass, but I suspect the nukes are really all that matter to us (USA)at this point.
We
Does it really matter whether we grab the nukes, or let China grab them?
I was just thinking that sammler. Who cares who grabs the nukes provided they are grabbed by a stable government? They don’t work and there’s no new technology in them.
I would think getting our hands on at least some of the DPRK’s fissile material might come in handy someday–like for fingerprinting Syrian or al Qaeda nukes.
Helpful, should the terrible need arise.
Stephen,
Bingo. Originally, it made no sense to me that NOKO was included in the