It’s from Christian Caryl, a Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute and a Contributing Editor at Foreign Policy magazine, writing at the blog of the New York Review of Books. And I say it’s encouraging because of lines like these that suggest there is some hope for limited change in the Hermit Kingdom:
After all, isn’t the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a staunchly totalitarian state where nothing ever changes? Actually, no. You could have gotten away with writing that just a few years ago. But too much has happened in North Korea in the interim . . .
… North Korean society has evolved dramatically over the past decade … As a result, North Koreans probably know far more about the realities of the outside world today than at any previous time in their history … Don’t believe those pictures of hysterically grieving Northerners on the streets of Pyongyang. Most North Koreans have long since figured out that their country is a mess. So Kim the Third enters office in a country quite different from that ruled by his grandfather. The family name is no longer theologically beyond reproach.
Caryl believes that the real power behind the young throne of Kim Jong Un will be Kim’s uncle, Chang Song Taek, a 65-year-old who is married to Kim Jong-Il’s sister. “I, for one, wouldn’t be at all surprised if we soon started hearing evidence of purges in the upper ranks of the government,” Caryl writes. “Chang will want to get his own people in, and there is probably little that Kim Junior can do about it.”
