Is There A Cell Phone Revolution Going On Within North Korea?

A New York Times article recently featured Dr. Andrei Lankov who we all know from North Korea Zone and other publications as an expert on North Korean affairs. The article focused on the changes of Kim Jong Il’s regime in North Korea due to the expansion of technology such as video players and cell phones.

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.”

However, don’t expect the almighty cell phone to cause regime change any time soon:

Analysts are debating the importance of Mr. Kim’s visits to military bases, which accounted for almost two-thirds of his 92 publicly divulged appearances last year, compared with one-third in 2003. With North Korea closed to American journalists, it is hard to decipher whether Mr. Kim is shoring up his power base in the army out of fear of a foreign attack or of an internal coup.

Past predictions that Mr. Kim’s power was ebbing have not been borne out.

“We have very meager intelligence resources, and we’re sort of flying blind,” Howard H. Baker Jr. said on Feb. 16 in Tokyo, in his final news briefing as American ambassador to Japan. “My country has no alternative but to assume that Kim Jong Il will continue in power. There won’t be any significant change in the governance of that country.”

Reviewing North Korea’s political elite, “we see no big change,” said Noriyuki Suzuki, director of Radio Press, a Japanese government monitoring service that focuses on the North Korean media.

Things look better in the long run though:

Inside North Korea, social, political and economic controls have been eroded by two other changes over the past decade: private markets and a breakdown in travel restrictions, Dr. Lankov said.

“You have private money lenders, you have inns, you have brothels, you have canteens,” he said, adding that most North Koreans survive through a combination of foreign aid and a fledgling private economy.

Draconian controls on internal travel and on travel to China have been breaking down, he said, and hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have traveled to and from Korean-speaking areas of China, exposing them to a thriving market economy and more South Korean television broadcasts.

“They are gradually learning about South Korean prosperity,” Dr. Lankov said. “This is a death sentence to the regime. North Korea’s claim to legitimacy is based on its ability to deliver the worker’s paradise now. What if everyone sees that it is not delivering?”

Like Lankov I don’t see the cell phone causing any revolution in the North but the video tapes have to be of big concern to Kim Jong Il because the regime is centered around the lie of the “worker’s paradise” and their supremacy to South Korea. These video tapes of Korean dramas are exposing these lies that will in turn one day expose the regime. Interesting reading worth checking out.