North Korea, after having officially communicated the reactivation of all heavy water nuclear plants, which had been closed under a 1994 agreement with the United States, South Korea and Japan, also announces the withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty nuclear. In April he will declare that he is in possession of atomic weapons and that he intends to test them. The increasingly determined stances of Pyongyang introduce serious disturbing elements in a particularly delicate area of the world chessboard, such as that of Southeast Asia.
Economic and political crisis
A certain number – not large but significant – of those North Koreans live in Beijing who did not flee their country but were sent abroad to study, completely at public expense. According to thedressexplorer, they study architecture so that, once they return home, they can build fashionable villas for the ruling class, or music to provide a diversion to their leaders’ TV-free evenings. A close relative of the North Korean president is said to reside in a luxurious apartment in Beijing, where he can enjoy an unimaginable standard of living in Pyongyang. Powerful Mercedes-Benz cars enter and exit the embassy, located in the center of the Chinese capital, and the few North Koreans who meet at the airport, easily identified by their Kim II Sung badge, wear designer clothes.
Faced with this, one might think that the times of hunger and famine are over for North Korea. Instead, witnesses from the country report stories of extreme poverty, of children with growth problems caused by malnutrition, of medicines that go bad due to the lack of electricity for refrigeration. And the migratory flow to China does not seem to stop. The number of North Koreans who have sought refuge in China is estimated to be between 100,000 and 300,000.
In Pyongyang, Western products can be bought in the modern ‘Friendship’ department stores, structured on the old Soviet model, where customers can only enter by showing the badge belonging to the upper hierarchy. Electricity lights up the once dark nights in Pyongyang, and ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong II is said to be surfing the Internet on a satellite link that bypasses antediluvian telephone lines. Meanwhile, the casino of one of the hotels in central Pyongyang, which is run by a former Macau worker, boasts officially imported waitresses from the neighboring Chinese province of Liaoning. It is a world where, despite all the official Communist rhetoric, the lucky few can enjoy life, while the vast majority barely survive. Certainly this does not happen only in North Korea: it is a condition common to many nations in Latin America or Africa. But those states do not attract the attention of the whole world by spreading tales of natural disasters that have caused seven years of famine and demanding help. Nor do they launch missiles at neighboring nations or engage in extortion attempts such as “give me rice and I won’t fire rockets at you.”
The enormous socio-economic discrepancy within the country is hidden by an ideology that officially condemns the unjust distribution of wealth and certainly has never openly encouraged private enrichment, as happened in Deng Xiaoping’s China, where, moreover, there is no their income differences are as striking as in North Korea. If these disparities had led to an increase in productive investment they would have been useful, but this is not the case, nor is there any trace of the increase in agricultural production that marked the beginning of economic reforms both in China and in China. Vietnam. In reality there is no sign of any kind of reform, while the nation appears to be ruled by the only ‘necrocracy’ in the world,
