What happens after a revolution in N Korea?

Great Debates
1

Let’s say some government has had enough of the Kims and decides to wipe them all out. Let’s assume that the assassination of the entire family (carried out by ninjas, of course) is completely successful and no one who had any kind of power before, nor who is in line to gain any power (not really sure of the extent of this) is left alive. No government actually admits to carrying out this operation of course, and thus the world can’t officially assign any “blame.” What happens next?

I confess not to know much about the situation in general, but what I’m most interested in is both the humanitarian aspect (what do we do with the N Korean farmers) and the global aspect (eg China certainly doesn’t want an American-friendly power gaining a foothold in that region).

Any insights? I’m sure N Korea’s sabre rattling is a long way from posing an actual threat on the global scale, but it seems that they make sufficient trouble in the region.

2

The government of North Korea will never be overthrown from inside North Korea.

There is a vast intellegence and spy network in all of the country. If anyone says anything negative at all about the regime or the leadership, they disappear into a labor camp. Not only do they go, so do their entire families, parents, spouses and children, including babies. The North Koreans are also closed off to the World, and only understand the world from what the government tells them. They see the World as their enemy, and especially the United States as the country that killed, mutilated, tortured their people and divided their country forever. The propaganda machine there is endless. If you were in North Korean, you would blame your problems on the USA too. It’s the USA’s fault that they are starving and cold through sanctions. It’s the USA’s fault that their country is in two pieces (which is somewhat true.) It’s the USA that killed my grandfather, and who raped my grandmother. Day after day, year after year of this propaganda brainwashes the mind, and this is what the people truly believe.

North Korea is a military police state. Even if somehow the people could form a protest, the military will cut them down with gunfire in a heartbeat. There was a story several years ago of a factory whose workers haven’t been paid for months, who finally got fed up and started a protest and work stoppage, only to be killed by the military. They have the guns. No one is allowed to leave North Korea without permission. It is truly a prison state.

People are not allowed to travel to other cities and places inside the country without official permission. If the people can freely move around their own country, they cannot be monitored by the government and the police. The public is absolutely forbidden to talk to foreigners. Undountably, there are laws against the congregation of more than several unrelated people in a home, and probably everyone who visited would have to have clearance from the state. The people are not allowed to possess mobile phones because the government worries about communication that they cannot monitor. A factory manager in NK was executed for making international phone calls on various cell phones.

There is a top elite class who live well. It is not just the Kim’s, but the families of the generals and officials of the Korean Workers Party. These people enjoy fine homes, good liquor and cigarettes. Comfort women. Drive a car. Watch South Korean and western DVD’s. Eat meat everyday. A few trusted ones even get the opportunity to travel to China and other places.
They do not want to give up what they have. If the government was overthrown, where would they be? Dead, in prison? Or scratching a living running some convenient store in South Korea or L.A.? That is, if they can even live in South Korea without being a pariah and a second class citizen, which would probably be the case in Korean society. Better to be a King of the Jail than be a Peasant in Paradise.

The only thing that can overthrow the government internally is that possibly the military does a coup after Kim Jong Il dies. This will only happen though if their lives are getting as rough as the people’s, and that having the guns, they can take things over. Actually, it is not well known in international circles who runs what, where and why. Everything there is surrounded by a wall of secrecy based on Korean Xenophobia and to them, protection against a regime change.

The peasants don’t have power to do shit. Eat your cabbage soup, work the fields, get drunk on some homemade wine, do what you are told and shut the fuck up or else, with the brainwashing propaganda, and the lack of outside contact to keep them in line.

3

So essentially it would take wiping out not only the Kims, but the entire military and upper echelons of the society in order to free the people? We’re gonna need some more ninjas for that. But what if it were done? What would China’s reaction be? I’m operating under the assumption that China defends Kim Jong Il largely because they don’t want someone else friendlier to the west on their borders. Is this true? Even if so, I’m guessing that S Korea would have the best claim to the land.

Anyway, I know the proles can’t revolt; I read 1984. :slight_smile:

4

If I were in the PRC government, I would be longing for the day of Korean reunification. NK is just a big headache to China; they support it for historical reasons, but I’m sure they’d be glad to see it go. Let SK have all the troubles of incorporating NK’s dysfunctional economy into their own!

5

My understanding is both South Korea & China want the regime to stay in power. China does because they are an ally on their border and South Korea does because they know North Korea being annexed into south Korea will cost them trillions of dollars in foreign aid and investment. If the Korean peninsula becomes unified again, South Korea will need to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into the North to rebuild after 50 years of damage by the Korean war and the Kims mismanagement.

So with that in mind, I really don’t know what happens. South Korea doesn’t want to annex the North, and China still wants the North to be an ally country. The US & South Korea (and Japan) want the North to stop its militant posturing and stop selling weapons abroad. The world wants the human rights situation to improve.

If an autocratic government allied with China with improved human rights that was still independent of the South and that gave up the saber ratting came about, I think things would be ok. But then you’d have a problem where old time hardliners like they had in the USSR want to overthrow the government (like they did with Gorbachev) and restore the old order. Mostly because like was said there is an inner circle of military and political bureaucrats living high on the hog on the current system that will lose the prestige and income once the revolution happens.

6

I would disagree completely with this statement.

S Korea looks at the German reunification model, which I believe most people including the Germans would say was “successful.” Plus, the industrialized S Korea probably would like to have a low cost labor base.

Maybe HazelNutCoffee or Monty or other Korean (based) Dopers can chime in.

China enjoys public sabre rattling for the Chinese domestic audience but does not
a) want a 'nuclear nut job like any of the Kim’s on their doorstep. Passing the dynastic torch to the grandson is an even bigger concern
b) need more people

I think you’d also see S Koreans getting rid of the US military presence pretty quickly after re-unification. This would also make China happy. China doesn’t want an enemy on it’s doorstep. Someone neutral like Korea sans US presence would be fine. Don’t underestimate how much economic investment and integration there is now between S Korea and the PRC.

7

This has been said a hundred times about a hundred autocratic regimes, and it’s always turned out to be wrong. No government can exercise that kind of control for ever. Hell, even the handpicked “fans” sent to the World Cup are a threat.

8

I think South Korea would look to reunify with the North and essentially take over the country. Obviously this would be a huge economic cost for the Korean economy but national pride would be at stake. Sort of what Helmut Kohl said over the prospect of reuniting the two Germanies - this is the kind of thing you spend your money on.

China’s more iffy. Overall, they’d probably like to maintain the status quo. The problem is that any status quo involving Kim Jong Il is fundamentally unstable. So they have to look at what the alternatives are. Ideally, North Korea would become a nice quiet socialist republic that was willing to be a Chinese satellite. But that’s very unlikely - sixty years of socialism at its worst has probably spoiled that possibility. The only way North Korea is likely to stay socialist is if China directly intervenes and props up a puppet regime - which I think would be unlikely for diplomatic reasons. So China will probably accept the idea of South Korea taking over the north providing it receives assurances that the North will not become a base for outside military forces (ie the 2nd Infantry Division stay below the 38th parallel).

There probably would be a reduction in American forces but I don’t think you’d see Korea becoming a true neutral. Quite frankly, they have no reason to take China’s good intentions on faith. Korea’s historically had problems with its more powerful neighbours and it would almost certainly like to maintain a defensive alliance with the United States.

9

First - yeah, the military elite live high off the hog, but the regular grunts in the army are what are relied upon to preserve order; and they are from the same bunch as the protesting workers they are supposed to shoot. When the disillusion becomes too widespread, spontaneous mutiny may result… but things would have to be “real bad”.

A lot of people got prtty rich under the market reforms a few years ago. Then the government replaced the currency and made all their riches worthless. There are probably a huge number of people who are severely disillusioned with the government today and have no mistaken impression it was some foreign power’s fault. Plus, the richest were the ones with some sort of asset base to start with - i.e. someone who had access to trucks (army) would have a good head start in a black market trade. Much of this extra money floating around outside the government’s control made things like bribes easier, therefore disrupting the careful control Kim had on the country.

Yes, we have no idea who is in charge of how much and how Kim ensures that no conspiracies are ahppening. A few years ago when he visited China, someone tried to blow up his train on the way home. So despite the massive spy network, some form of conspiracy can take place -which has to make Kim even more opppresive and paranoid.

What happens if the regime falls? Let’s say some massive protest, army refuses to fire on them and shoots their own officers andpolitical spies, someone emerges to take the opposition leadership role and manages to organize a systematic overthrow of teh existing order…

Now we have a huge disorganized mod. Nobody in control to enforce food distribution. Food riots imminent. Border controls break down, as most PRC/SK posts are there to watch the North’s army, not to stop huge floods of people like at the Rio Grande; and they are not likely to shoot, especally in SK. Even the PRC does nto want to be the one shooting hordes of starving foreign refugees. So how do you control things?

So now someone has to start airlifting/ container shipping supplies; then decide if they will let NK people just wander into SK. What about family reunions? Who keeps all those NK showing up to work so the telephones and the trains still run, the trucks still make deliveries? What are you going to pay them in - NK trash or SK solid currency? How do you reconcile ownership of land, factories, etc.? Take a lesson from Eastern Europe, where the recriminations and outright theivery were really bad and they ended up with an oligarhy of organized crime thugs.

I don’t think PRC or SK want to keep the regime going, but they basically have a tiger by the tail and one day things will fall apart and that tiger will turn around an chew their hands off with its dying gasps. The only question is how messy it will be - somewhat messy or very messy?

10

I just want to point out the the Korean war was a UN enforcement, not a US vs Korea even though thats mostly what it was

11

Very messy.

Let’s not pretend that the military is separate from the people there. It is not really a police state as much as it is a military camp. The policies are to provide for the military first.

From here;

Population: 23-24 million.

Armed Forces: 1.2 million (5%, or about 11% of the ‘fit for military service’ adult population)
Reserves: 4.7 million (another 46% or so of eligible adults)

Which means that almost 60% of the ‘fit’ adult population is either in the military, or in the reserves.

So rethink the “military against the rest of the population” thing, because the nature of the beast is that the only way your family survives in a Military First economy is if large chunks of it are serving that military in some form or another.

If things fell apart, you’d have a fuck-ton of weapons in the hands of a lot of people, all of whom are trained in their use and are fighting each other to stay alive. The civil war and chaos would be extremely brutal and destructive, and very difficult to clean up.

12

While China may not particularly enjoy being associated with the antics of Kim Jong Ill and his fiefdom, they are rather suspicious of a unified Korean peninsula that is aligned toward the West…enough that they continue to be the primary benefactor to North Korea in order to maintain that status quo. China also substantially concerned regarding a massive rush of refugees that could possibly pour into Jilin Province if there were hostilities between the North and South. Such a rush would upset their coveted state stability and harmony.

China likes to view itself as being ‘surrounded’ in Asia with few (if any) ‘true’ allies and a unified Korea would be a further crank on that vice.

13

I’d venture that the overriding concern for the PRC is stability, not a concern that the US military will be on their borders.

14

If Kim got overthrown you’d have 24 million people on food stamps.

:slight_smile:

15

UNfortunately, the regime has more or less bribed the army. They have it decent, if not good, and have a high position in society. So the army is probably loyal, and it’s large enough to stop any protest.

This is true. I also very much doubt most North Koreans really believe in the Big Bad USA anymore, if they ever really did. Those who are really invested in the government? Yeah, they can probably pretend until they almost believe it themselves. But I suspect the Average Joe (or whatever) probably thinks it’s all crap and just wants better opportunity. They know the regime is full of it - the starvations and people fleeing and repression is obvious, but not spoken of in public.