How can North Korea be That Relaxed Regardless of the UN Sanction?

How can North Korea be That Relaxed Regardless of the UN Sanction?

[Column on North Korea (3)]

By Lee, Jung Hoon

These are some reports on North Korea : ‘Now some Effect of the Northern Restriction here and there (Yonhap News),’ ‘The Employees of the North Korean Overseas Restaurant Voluntarily Escape… Gradually Emerging Effect of the Separate Sanction by South Korea (Donga Ilbo),’ ‘Some analysis that the North Korean economy will be severely hit by the UN Sanction, its export dropping down to a half (SBS).’ The basic content of these reports is in general that the North Korean economy is now seriously hit by the sanctions, so the North Korean regime seems to collapse, not to mention its economy.

Is that so in reality? Let us check the response of North Korea to the UN sanction (NO. 2277), the US sanction (R.H.757), and so forth. The spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (North Korea) called the recent US sanction act “Something ridiculous.” Kim Wan-soo the 615 Northern Committee chairperson said, “Sanctions cannot change us,” and “Our self-strengthening power makes international sanctions bubble, in vain.”

In fact, the media-press has reported, for the last several decades, that North Korea may soon collapse due to economic sanctions. If the reports and analyses had been correct, North Korea should already have collapsed several times, but the reality has been different. North Korea is in reality not that afraid of sanctions, and all economic indicators of North Korea are now growing rather than dropping down. What is the reality then, and why have the sorts of reports and analyses been being continuously repeated?

North Korea has maneuvered under the sanctions in an extraordinary way.

The way North Korea has overcome the sanctions from outside is much more fundamental and strategic than we have thought. The characteristics of it can be summarized as ‘long-term and State-strategic’ instead of ‘temporary and passive.’ It also is aggressive, not defensive, and total-directional rather than only economic.

North Korea has not taken sanctions as simple temporary economic ones. It has interpreted them as part of the hostile policy interlocked with the US strategy of collapsing the North Korean regime. North Korea has treated this aspect as one fixed constant number for as long as the Korean War is still on and no peace treaty between the United States is yet there. North Korea has always planned its economic policies upon this constant number. In other words, the State has solved this sanction problem through deeply connecting it with its long-term State development strategy, aggressively through the way that ‘Good money drives out bad money,’ not through a way of a stopgap policy temporarily enduring sanctions. Therefore, if we understand the purpose that Workers’ Party has aimed under the harsh conditions and the core construct of the aggressive strategy (that the State has taken to actualize the purpose), we can see how the state has overcome the sanctions just as the other side of a coin.

Tear down sanctions through ‘the new century industrial revolution’

“We add ‘the new century industrial revolution’ to one heart unity and invincible military power, then that makes the Great Socialist State.” Chairman Kim Jung-eun declared as such at his first public speech on April 15, 2012. ‘The new century industrial revolution’ might sound quite strange, while we have heard countless times the ‘military first policy’ or the nuclear problem from the media. ‘The new century industrial revolution’ means much more than we can ever think of. It is not a type of simple political rhetoric. It means that North Korea considers this age the age of ‘the new century industrial revolution’, and this shows the melted State strategy and plan, comprehensive and audacious, of the Workers’ Party.

The discourse on the new industrial revolution is about where humanity is and will be heading in regard to its industrial technology and productivity. It is a gigantic discourse being on the table regardless of in capitalist or in socialist society. There is a reason why we better take this seemingly vague and abstract gigantic discourse fairly seriously: now humanity might stand on the eve of one novel therefore unknown industrial revolution.

As widely known, the first industrial revolution was in agriculture. It changed human civilization from moving around (hunting and gathering) to settling down. The next one that greatly influenced human civilization was the industrial revolution in the late 18th century. The frame and direction of this revolution have made ways of current social structure, production and consumption. Futurists like Elvin Toffler and Jeremy Lufkin have named the oncoming new industrial society the third wave or the third revolution, but their discourse has been evaluated as partial, not complete. Other scholars are calling the new age the age of the fourth industrial revolution (with IT, robotics and AI combined altogether) or the age of economy based on knowledge.

England, a small State of islands, could make herself an Empire on which the sun never set thanks to the industrial revolution. Then again, within only three hundred years, a new industrial revolution upon scientific technology and knowledge-based economy is coming onto humanity. What this means is that another new age (where the world map of economically-powerful States and the life and death of a State will be solely up to what States will lead this new industrial revolution) has come onto humanity.

What leads this new industrial revolution is the revolution of scientific technology, nothing else. Humanity is now on the eve of a novel therefore unknown world. It is now entering into the age where human cloning (biotechnology), nonhuman machinery (artificial intelligence) and robot-human combination, all we have seen on sci-fi films, are being actualized thanks to the incredibly speeded-up technological developments. IT(information technology), BT(bio-technology), NT(nanotechnology), MT(materials engineering technology), Space Engineering, Nuclear-energy Engineering and Fusion-machinery Engineering are altogether leading the new industrial revolution.

With some small differences in names State to State, all major power States (especially the United States, Russia, China and Japan) are sweating, linking to their State strategies, in running specialized institutes investing funds and throwing their hearts and souls to those and competing one another, to obtain hegemony in the next generation world. Not just competition among States, the competition between social systems in the future will decide which system more successfully leads the procedure of this industrial revolution, capitalism or socialism. The 4.15 speech in 2012 and the written decision of the 7th North Korean Workers’ Party Convention shows the Party’s strong will that it will also lead the age of the new industrial revolution along with many Power States.

Start the new century industrial revolution with space engineering and nuclear engineering

It is only recent that North Korea has started to use the term ‘the new century industrial revolution’, but in fact North Korea has long been proceeding with policies of scientific technological revolution upon knowledge-based economy. South Korea also advocated knowledge-based economy in the early 2000, but it was mainly within the IT field and ended up being a sort of temporary trend. The North, from the 90’s (the time of Chairman Kim Jong-il), aggressively started to proceed with knowledge-based economy and the strategy preparing for the incoming new industrial revolution as the strategies for the State’s survival and revival. Now they reorganized those through the 7th Party Convention.

North Korea declares, “The new age industrial revolution is basically the scientific technological revolution.” Then, in what field and what way did North Korea earnestly start the scientific technological revolution? The fields the North chose were Nuclear Engineering and Space Engineering and the CNC machine tool field which could support the fields. Why did North Korea start with Nuclear and Space Engineering? Because the North was still at war with the United States in the hostile relationship even after the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, in the midst of the severest economic crisis in the 90’s. Because the industrial revolution or economic development would have been no use if North Korea had become like Iran in relation with the United States.

As well known, the Internet, artificial satellite and as such have all been diverted for industrial usage from previously developed and used for military purposes by the United States. North Korea has handled the scientific technological revolution closely connecting to the strategy for the national defense. Western capitalist States were also aware of the market value of space industry and dealt with it investing huge amount of capital, but their stances were very well far different from that of the North Korean scientists who were facing the crisis of their State’s life or death. Looking back, the 90’s of North Korea was the time of founding the bases of the new industrial revolution to decide the State’s future, not a simple age of ‘march of ordeal’ while all had to pull up their waist belts as tightly as possible. And North Korea, in a short time, succeeded to develop cutting-edge nuclear weapons, artificial satellites and strategic missiles one by one. On surface these might simply look like some fruits in military field, but in fact these are also the first visible fruits of the new scientific technological revolution which North Korea has been proceeding with since a long time ago.

As the North Korean Workers’ Party itself describes, it was a miracle that North Korea did not let go of the bases of the scientific technological revolution and the new century industrial revolution throughout the multiple jeopardy of the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, the extreme natural disasters and the sanctions from outside. Furthermore, it was an ingenuous strategy that North Korea had linked the knowledge-based economy and the scientific technological revolution to the cutting-edge national defense engineering and developed them. North Korea, in the midst of the State crises, has planned and prepared the keys to actualize simultaneously its long-term development strategies, for a long time.

The mutability of the knowledge-based economy and the dual aspects of the Chinese and Russian sanctions against North Korea

Now there are the world-leading cutting-edge industries and the drop-behind ones coexisting in North Korea. North Korea has gained critical scientific technologies mainly centering on military engineering, but there seem some difficulties in applying those into the areas of general industries. This could be one of the missions ‘the 5-year strategy for the State economy development’ (which the 7th Party Convention newly adapted) to complete. This is the strategies that North Korea will earnestly put the excessive finance (previously applied to the military defense area for the nuclear matter and such) into the general industry areas and that the state will swiftly re-organize the drop-behind fields applying its already-gained cutting-edge technologies. Also, North Korea needs huge amount of funds to develop its natural resources and the infrastructure of industrial roads, railroads and harbors; the North is now proceeding with these along with the Chinese and Russian capitals. Had we kept the 6.15 Joint Agreement and the 10.4 Declaration, these might now have been being proceeded with under the collaboration with South Korea. This is sad, what we have missed.

The extensive content decided at the 7th Party Convention is based on these strategies and perception written on the above. North Korea in fact is on its way of re-structurizing the whole society so as it to be an educational system corresponding to the new century industrial revolution. It now is not a rumor but a fact that there are enormous amount of natural resources such as petroleum and rare-earth elements in North Korea. Nevertheless, not simply depending on underground resource development, North Korea has planned its State strategies and established its foundation upon scientific technology and cutting-edge brain-warfare. One result of the procedure is the fact that now what Russia or China wants from North Korea is not simply natural resources. Russia and China now come to need North Korea, with a fine level of technology and strong potential for growth on its own, desperately as their future industrial partner.

Russia is now strengthening North Korean-Russian economic cooperation, and China is also proceeding with its strategy of developing the Northeasten three provinces. As the United States has stated, sanctions against North Korea is of no use if China does not cooperate for those; China, as time flows further and further, instead of sanctions, is requiring help from North Korea for natural resource, future market and Northeastern development. North Korean nuclear possession is paradoxically weakening the sanctions instead of strengthening them in time flow.

Time to drop the dream of eliminating North Korean nuclear weapons through sanctions

While the way North Korea is responding to the sanctions is aggressive and future-oriented as such, the sanctions the United States is imposing, through putting UN up-front and cooperating South Korea and Japan, are old-fashioned. They might have worked during the 90s’ ‘march of ordeal’, but not anymore.

“You might want to call me skeptic, which is fine. But I suspect China will not faithfully keep the sanctions nor agree upon any further sanctions more powerful enough to satisfy us,” said Jannuzi, a US Korean Peninsula specialist on Voice of America (VOA) this past March.

Now it is time for the United States to change its North Korean policy into the direction of admitting reality, getting over its vacant formula of the North Korean collapse. The South Korean government, too, stopping to follow the US failed policy any further, now should entirely change its North Korean policy. The Gaeseong Industrial Complex shutdown is not a sanction but an action of self-injury. It is the Korean people and South Korea that go behind, not the United States. In regard to the way of South Korea to get over the current unrealistic sanctions against North Korea and to the way that North Korea is now getting over the sanctions, the people of South Korea, whether progressive or conservative, now should grasp the reality as it is, beyond any stance or ideology.

About the author

* Lee, Jung Hoon served as member of the politburo at the Democrat-Labor Party (S. Korea), education member at the United Progressive Party (S. Korea). He is now the director of Min[people]Plus International Affairs division (Seoul, S.Korea).

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