By SHELTON BUMGARNER
Marmot’s Hole Guest Blogger
They say breaking up is hard to do, but they never tell us difficult getting together will be. With the DPRK and the ROK giving each other diplomatic goo-goo eyes these days, the objective observer can’t help but think about how much the dinner and a movie is going to cost.
One Philip Bowring, writing over at the IHT, thinks the DPRK might be a significantly cheaper date than first thought. Bowring suggests that because of the industrialization of the DPRK, the mindset of its workers and the fact that simply giving them Choco Pies will make them feel better, that everything will turn out great for a unified Korea.
North Korean workers are literate and highly disciplined and would respond instantly to cash motivations. South Korean firms employ huge numbers of Chinese in low-income, labor-intensive garment-, shoe- and toy-making enterprises, particularly in nearby Shandong. It would be relatively easy to kick start the North by transferring many of these industries to Korea.
Even assuming that there were no controls on movement of people after reunification, there are reasons to believe that there would be no flood of millions to the South. Expectations in the North are so low that easily achieved improvements like better food, the availability of fuel and power, and access to such novelties as condoms would keep most Northerners from migrating. Giving them ownership of the property they occupy would also be a major incentive to staying put.
Bowring also says that upon unification, there will be a limit to how much money the ROK government can throw at the problem, even if it wanted to.
In the immediate aftermath of reunification, the capacity of the North to absorb investment would anyway be limited, and, say, $30 billion a year - not a huge amount for a South with an almost balanced budget and $200 billion in foreign reserves - would go a very long way.
While you should read the entire piece your self, I have to leave you with one last juicy bit, simply because it’ll probably make you chortle like it did me:
Looking a decade or so ahead, Korea also needs the North’s demographics - a replacement fertility rate that contrasts with the abnormally low rate in the South.
So not only will the manufacturer of Choco Pies be set, all those poor dudes working the DDD jobs will be kicked out of the country to make way for the baby-making machines of the North.
5 Comments
If this happens, I’ll flap my arms real hard and fly over to Korea to take a look.
A well educated work force — by NK’s standards.
Highly technical — by NK’s standards.
Highly discipled — by NK’s standards.
When the North’s goes away, there is no telling what those people will do, but simply shrug their shoulders and put those shoulders to hard work for South Korean chaebol?
Maybe in a parallel universe….
A guy who has worked with North Korea refugees in South Korea and China told me — to my utter amazment — taking these people into the US by the thousands would be a huge mistake. He said their decades under the warm leadership of the Kims have left them starkly barren - emotionally and in many other ways. He said things like demanding cash for just a 5 minute interview and other things usually end up making the people who work closely with them some of the most skeptical about them.
I also heard a former South Korean government official who worked on the KEDO project talk about how the work crews with South Koreans and North Koreans soon became segregated by choice soon after the newness of being able to eat together wore off, and he said it wore off fast.
Maybe if unificatoin comes from North Korea working out some kind of outlandish deal with the South, which I highly doubt, they will have a transition, but if unification comes from collapse or a totally dehabilitating break down in the North, I will be shocked to death if the North Koreans just blend into whatever framework SK and anybody else works out….
From the article:
“… make this the best time since Mikhail Gorbachev visited Seoul in 1990 to think beyond nukes and food aid to the possibility of dramatic change and, perhaps, peaceful reunification.”
In reality nothing has substantially changed since 1994. All the changes NK has made are tied together with a common vein; they are easily reversible. The same sort of talk/predictions were made then, and here we are 11 years later at the same spot, except worse (how many died? and how many nukes?).
Yes, we may get some sort of deal, yes, something like progress may appear to be made. But my mantra remains; nothing will change ? really - while KJI is in power.
I would have to agree that reality does not support such a lovely prognosis. There are currently artcles in the Chosun Ilbo that talk of China crushing Korean manufacturing China Threatens to Crush Korean Industry.
Considering such, the only way to keep North Korean labor cheap and competitive in the marketplace is to keep them in a system *like* China or for China’s cheap labor to become more expensive. I have read that China is having more difficulty getting workers for some segments of industry already. Does anyone else believe that a more expensive Chinese labor force is coming and that there really is any hope for cheap NK labor?
Daily linklets 28th September
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access to such novelties as condoms would keep most Northerners from migrating.
Keep on dreaming. Let me sell you a bridge while you are at it.
NK men are soldiers. The society breeds fighting men. NK men have 20 to 40 years of military service. They learn nothing but how to kill, maim or destroy.
Suddenly, one day they will become a happy factory workers because they get Choco pies and condoms? Maybe having a cup of world-famous Starbuck coffee?
They will rather become a pack of wolves, I am afraid. They will come down and take over SK gangs. Lots of killings. Kidnappings and blackmails. They may even control SK government.
Just see Russia. The same things will happen in Korea after unification.