It Makes a Difference to the Sheep

ECONOMIC ROOTS FOR THE CURRENT DPRK CRISIS?

Interesting anecdote:

North Koreans traveling over the border to Yanji, about 700 miles northeast of Beijing, said an initial wave of hope triggered by the changes announced in July is gone in almost all parts of the country except the capital, Pyongyang. Lee Xiangyu, a North Korean refugee in China, was arrested by Chinese border police and returned to North Korea last summer, when the changes began. After a short stint in jail, the 19-year-old returned to her home town, Musan, along the border with China. By October, she said, the lumberyard where her father worked had stopped paying him and other workers the huge raises they had received as part of the effort to promote some aspects of a free-market economy.

But prices continued to rise. "There was no money in my house, and now the prices are so high," she said. Lee sneaked back into China in December. "It's not like it was in 1997 when people were starving to death," she said, speaking of the famine that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. "But it's worse in a way. Because everybody had hope for a little while and now they are desperate again."

Revolutions don't take place when people are at rock-bottom but when things are beginning to improve but not quickly enough. Can we expect regime change in the DPRK soon?