[imText1]Joshua Stanton is no newcomer to Korean issues. As a member of the U.S. military almost ten years ago, he was surprised by what he saw as the obvious contradiction between the public reaction to the deaths of two young South Korean schoolgirls in an accident involving a U.S. military vehicle and what he calls “the nearly unanimous apathy about the millions of North Koreans being starved by Kim Jong Il, or the hundreds of thousands of dead and dying in his political prison camps.”
The result of his shock was One Free Korea, a blog which has subsequently carved out a niche for itself as a source of informed opinion and frank discourse on whatever affects the people of North Korea. If someone deserves to be criticized, One Free Korea will do it. If someone deserves lauding, it will be done. This has resulted in a reputation not only for outspokenness, but also for timely news releases and having, says Stanton, “some of America’s best journalists as regular readers.” He is one of the first in possibly the first generation of westerners who know and care about the situation in North Korea, and are willing to do something about it.
But Stanton doesn’t just report. He has his own ideas on the future of North Korea, and a lot of them center on the markets, which he sees as one of the best ways to sidestep the untrustworthy North Korean regime in order to either improve the standard of living of the North Korean people or undermine the regime’s faltering monopoly on the dissemination of information. Or, better still, both.
On food, for example, Stanton looks to smugglers and traders, those who supply the markets. “It’s long past time,” he asserts in a new interview with The Daily NK, “for a new approach to food aid that harnesses the power of the market and looks beyond the regime’s distribution system,” because old methods all “depend on Kim Jong Il’s compassion and good health.”
“I suspect,” he says, “we’d feed more people by empowering food smugglers, traders and clandestine organizations.”
“There are some obvious challenges in doing this, but it can’t be impossible for a country with a long, leaky border and two very long, rugged coastlines.”
Stanton also believes that a bit more creativity and financing could see information dissemination stepped up a gear as well, again through the market, or at least the system set up to provide for it. “If the funding were there, just imagine what 100,000 iPod Nanos could do to transform North Korea,” he says, admitting to only just having bought one of the MP3 players himself, “You could broadcast every South Korean drama, newspaper and news broadcast into North Korea with one.”
[imText2]The idea of using the free market to bring about change is one agreed upon by another blogger, Curtis Melvin. A PhD candidate in economics at George Mason University in Virginia, Melvin has spent plenty of time analyzing the state of the North Korean economy, an effort he has put to considerable use as the founder and guardian of North Korea Economy Watch, which gathers economic articles and data from around the globe in one place for the use of researchers and policy-makers alike, and Google Earth North Korea, which contains a dizzying array of information on locations inside the North, mapping out economic, political and educational sites, not to mention providing a guide to some notorious penal institutions.
Currently working on a research paper on strategies North Korea might adopt to reduce the risks to others of investing in the country, Melvin is also well-placed to contemplate how the future might be approached.
Certainly, he is not a supporter of unconditional development assistance for North Korea, which he describes as having been “pretty thoroughly discredited.” As he told The Daily NK in a recent interview, “it tends to foster the discretion of policymakers, not entrepreneurs, which leads to official corruption.”
Instead, Melvin says he would like to see the current North Korean regime working to attract investors the same way as anyone else; in the free market, through negotiations with private foreign capital. “If the DPRK needs investment,” he asserts, “they should be ready to seriously approach the market to obtain it. This will no doubt involve making concessions to investors.”
Since this has not yet happened, Melvin agrees that the Chinese are benefitting from North Korea’s isolation. “China,” he points out, “can obtain North Korea’s resources at much cheaper prices than if the North Koreans could access global capital and trading markets,” but he also notes that this is likely to remain the case “as long as North Korea insists on being a nuclear power with a poor human rights record.”
In the end, both men agree that the future of North Korea’s state-run economy looks exceedingly bleak, but both are sure that the free market will provide a number of answers to the question of how North Korea will develop in the future, if it is given the chance.
