NYT: How Electronics Are Penetrating N. Korea's Isolation (pol. effect?)

[DeepModem Mom]

How Electronics Are Penetrating North Korea's Isolation
By JAMES BROOKE

Published: March 15, 2005


SEOUL, South Korea - Halfway through a video from North Korea, the camera pans on a propaganda portrait of Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader, magnificent in his general's dress uniform with gold epaulets. Scribbled in black ink across his smooth face is a demand for "freedom and democracy."

If genuine, the graffiti speaks of political opponents willing to risk execution to get their message out. If staged, the video means that a North Korean hustler was willing to deface a picture of the "Dear Leader" to earn a quick profit by selling it to a South Korean human rights group.

Either way, the 35-minute video is the latest evidence that new ways of thinking are stealing into North Korea, perhaps corroding the steely controls on ideology and information that have kept the Kim family in power for almost 60 years.

The construction of cellular relay stations last fall along the Chinese side of the border has allowed some North Koreans in border towns to use prepaid Chinese cellphones to call relatives and reporters in South Korea, defectors from North Korea say. And after DVD players swept northern China two years ago, entrepreneurs collected castoff videocassette recorders and peddled them in North Korea. Now tapes of South Korean soap operas are so popular that state television in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, is campaigning against South Korean hairstyles, clothing and slang, visitors and defectors have said.

"In the 1960's in the Soviet Union, it was cool to wear blue jeans and listen to rock and roll," said Andrei Lankov, a Russian exchange student in the North at Kim Il Sung University in 1985, who now teaches about North Korea at Kookmin University here in the South. "Today, it is cool for North Koreans to look and behave South Korean, as they do in the television serials. That does not bode well for the long-term survival of the regime."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/15/international/asia/15north.html

[teryang]

1. It is not going to be around much longer

But this will not be panacea that everyone thinks. A unified Korea will present enormous challenges to the great powers that have walked over it for more than a century.

I'd look for greatly increased Russian influence with the new Korea. Raw materials, nuclear technology, and oil. The Russians have much to give and a less predatory role than the others, US, Japan, and China. I don't think there is any question that a united Korea will become a nuclear power to protect itself.

Great power rivalry over the peninsula has been extreme in recent history. The constant sensational news concerning N.Korea disguises a great power accomodation based upon the division of the peninsula. A division which existed in the 1890s until the Japanese simply took over the peninsula and then later annexed it in 1911.

Neo-cons no doubt envision control of the peninsula to the Yalu river. That isn't likely to be accepted by the Chinese. The Russians appear best suited to play the honest broker role. I think that the US will lose its pre-eminent influence on Korea.