Subscribe
E-Paper
 |
North Korea is a nation about which little is known to the outside world, except for its notorious weapons of mass destruction program. The scarcity of information about the country has produced plenty of theories, speculation and even rumors about the regime and its leader's health, most of which were later found not to be true.
Insufficient information frustrates policymakers, particularly when they are wrestling with policy measures to cope with a country like North Korea, which poses a great threat to other countries' national security.
Blessed is South Korea to have alternative reliable sources of information. South Korea is privileged to have around 30,000 North Korean-born escapees who migrated to the South via China through perilous journeys to freedom and to live a better life.
These North Korean defectors are an asset to South Korea in many ways.
Based on their testimonies, South Korean policymakers can put together various bits of information that they learned from the North Korean escapees in order to imagine what North Korea is like and understand more precisely how it works.
There are people who believe that information can trigger a revolutionary change in a repressive country like North Korea. Some activists keep flying balloons to send fliers and other materials to let the North Koreans know what is happening in the outside world. North Korea has certainly showed its paranoia about this information war, and threatened the South with consequences.
The South Korean government is wary of the activists' work because it can only deteriorate already strained inter-Korean relations.
The rationale of those activists is that once ill-informed North Koreans are awakened and realize that they have been deceived by the North Korean regime, they will stand up and overthrow the repressive regime.
But no one knows whether such a situation will actually happen or not.
There are naysayers like me who are skeptical about the feasibility of such a grassroots-driven, civil disobedience movement in North Korea.
I know information is critical and more important than we think to make certain things happen. But I don't buy into the idea that information can facilitate a dramatic change in North Korea. My personal view is that the role of information in North Korea is overstated.
We can see the limited role of information in changing a particular society if we turn our attention to China to see what happened there.
China is the country that sends the largest number of students to the United States. Most of them are pursuing advanced degrees in various graduate school programs or as serving as post-docs or visiting scholars.
Last year alone, nearly 300,000 Chinese students went to the United States to study. I don't know the total number of Chinese who had years of living experiences in the United States or other Western countries for study or work before they returned home, but we can assume that the number is high.
During their stays in the United States, they are much more informed of and have had direct experiences in Western ways of life, culture and democracy, more than North Koreans, who are only partially informed about how the outside world lives. Most of this information comes from South Korea, through fliers or other written materials sent by South Korean activists.
If the proponents of bottom-up democracy movements are right, then these U.S.-educated Chinese should have already been playing a role in changing their nation. Unlike people in Western democracies, Chinese people are not allowed to elect their own leaders. Compared to their peers in Western democracies, the Chinese do not enjoy broader freedoms. In China, top-down methods of decision-making and policies are more common than bottom-up movements.
If the proponents are right, there should be some U.S.-educated Chinese who challenge or question the legitimacy of their government or leaders.
Where are all the potential agents of change? Why has China remained the same?
In fact, I asked these questions to a Seoul-based foreign national who is qualified to answer. He said that U.S.-educated Chinese try to do their part to make their country better in their own ways, based on their expertise and lived experience in Western democracies, rather than trying to challenge the Chinese way of life in the political sphere.
According to him, "change" is a relative term. The Chinese who spent years in the United States before they return home, tend to believe that, as privileged citizens with years of experience in the Western world, they ought to contribute to making their country better and stronger, rather than seeking ways to change the system that has been in place for decades. That's the change they believe in.
The lesson I learned from China's "compliant" U.S.-educated citizens is that there's no one-size-fits-all policy that can be applied to any country in order to have a positive impact in terms of social change. There may be countries where information has played a key part in mobilizing their citizens to stand up and take collective action to overthrow autocrats.
But there is no guarantee that the same recipe will have the same impact in other countries grappling with similar problems. Each country has a different value system and different ways of thinking.
Therefore, looking at North Korea, if South Korea, the United States or any other countries really want a change in the North, they must come up with a customized policy approach. We do not know what that will be. We must keep working to find an appropriate one.
The writer is politics/city desk editor at The Korea Times.
