AHC: North Korea Well (Enough) Off

I have the book.

I'm not contradicting you, but the post-Park period has been when the SK economy really took off.
 
I'm not denying that either, but my point was that both countries were on a similar level in terms of the economy around 1970 or so, as both had enacted widespread reforms. As a result, I find it extremely difficult to imagine a scenario in which the North manages to maintain high economic growth well into the 80s without opening up, and/or having a South that completely ignores manufacturing and education as the main priorities.
 
Here's one. http://www.amazon.com/The-Impossibl...54566389&sr=8-1&keywords=the+impossible+state

It's a fair statement that during the Cold War, NK was doing OK. It had a manufacturing base, hadn't wrecked its agriculture and had two supportive trading partners in the USSR and China.

When the country was originally divided, the North (which had most of the industry, thanks to Japan) was richer than the South (which was mostly agricultural).

...
The statement that "NK was doing OK" "during the Cold War" can at most be true for the early Cold War, if at all. North Korea had to re-negotiate its debts in 1979 and defaulted on its loans (except those from Japan) in 1980. And it does not look very plausible that a country does OK for several decades and then suffers from a famine with several hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of deaths. There must have been deep seated problems preceding this crisis which made it have such catastrophic effects.

To answer the original poster's question: One of the pillar's of Kim Il Sung's ideology of Juche (to the best of my limited knowledge this means something like 'national autonomy') was economic autarky. If a country has to achieve autarky or something near it, its economic possibilities become much more limited than that of a country that trades more freely with the outside world. This is true no matter whether autarky is a self-imposed goal of the political leadership, or whether an embargo or blockade from other countries forces the country to become autarkic. And it seems to be true of both socialist and market economy countries.

So if Kim Il Sung recognizes that a policy of autarky empoverishes the country, one very big problem could be removed. Perhaps it would have been best, if he had recognized that autarky in a country that small was illusionary anyway, and had not even tried to achieve it. Of course it would have been better still if the regime in North Korea was not socialist at all, but a POD removing the socialism would probably also remove North Korea's existence as a separate country.

I have read one text which said that at least at times the concept of 'interest' was not taken into account in North Korea's economic planning, "because it was a capitalist concept". Perhaps North Korea's economic planning could be made more realistic if interest and other 'capitalist' elements were integrated, that were ignored at least at times in OTL.

Allowing private small farms and private small businesses and giving state factory managers some autonomy in their decisions. It seems at if small illegal, but tolerated, private farms and businesses keep the country from starving at present.

And, as has already been stated, reduce expenditures for the armed forces drastically.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Keep it out of the hands of a psychotic, messianic family whose sole aim seems to have been to plagiarize and attempt to make real 1984.
 
The statement that "NK was doing OK" "during the Cold War" can at most be true for the early Cold War, if at all. North Korea had to re-negotiate its debts in 1979 and defaulted on its loans (except those from Japan) in 1980. And it does not look very plausible that a country does OK for several decades and then suffers from a famine with several hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of deaths. There must have been deep seated problems preceding this crisis which made it have such catastrophic effects.

This.

The problem with the statistics for the North is that virtually all of them are based on figures solely provided from the state itself, with virtually no way of cross-checking them with outside sources. Based on how individuals within the Soviet Union and China often fabricated their figures as well in order to impress the ones in charge, and encourage them to continue their flawed policies, it's quite possible that the figures reported by North Korea are mostly unreliable as well.

To answer the original poster's question: One of the pillar's of Kim Il Sung's ideology of Juche (to the best of my limited knowledge this means something like 'national autonomy') was economic autarky.

Although I know virtually nothing about Juche itself, I will attempt to break the word down etymologically. It is a Sino-Korean word, which is generally rarer in the North, as it has attempted to "cleanse" the language of "foreign" influences. However, it also makes it much easier to parse the individual components. Splitting the syllables, "ju" (주/主) means "owner, ruler," and "che" (체/體) means "body, group," so a loose translation would probably be along the lines of "self-government," or "self-reliance." In other words, Kim Il-Sung probably attempted to centralize control by removing "foreign" elements in order to establish his ideology, and I honestly do not see any way for this to be butterflied away if he wanted to prevent any challenges to the government, whether they were internal or external.

So if Kim Il Sung recognizes that a policy of autarky empoverishes the country, one very big problem could be removed. Perhaps it would have been best, if he had recognized that autarky in a country that small was illusionary anyway, and had not even tried to achieve it. Of course it would have been better still if the regime in North Korea was not socialist at all, but a POD removing the socialism would probably also remove North Korea's existence as a separate country.

I have read one text which said that at least at times the concept of 'interest' was not taken into account in North Korea's economic planning, "because it was a capitalist concept". Perhaps North Korea's economic planning could be made more realistic if interest and other 'capitalist' elements were integrated, that were ignored at least at times in OTL.

Allowing private small farms and private small businesses and giving state factory managers some autonomy in their decisions. It seems at if small illegal, but tolerated, private farms and businesses keep the country from starving at present.

And, as has already been stated, reduce expenditures for the armed forces drastically.

The biggest problem with attempting to reform North Korea is that too little will end up in a similar situation to OTL, while too much would most likely result in reunification. The ideology itself would be extremely difficult to butterfly away, because the limited information we have suggests that there were numerous challenges to his rule, of which some of them were along the lines of economic reform. As a result, he would have probably attempted to prevent, not encourage, those changes.
 
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Keep it out of the hands of a psychotic, messianic family whose sole aim seems to have been to plagiarize and attempt to make real 1984.
You've got a point here. If the repressive dictatorship were not hereditary, maybe it would be a little bit less concerned with mindless adoration of its communist monarchs.
 
This is problematic due to the size of the North's military, which was heavily built up due to the DMZ. Given that the North had a total of around 250,000 active at its peak during the Korean War, it could have potentially called on around 500,000 to 1 million at the time, after including reserves, which would have led the rebellion to be most likely suppressed by the state before China managed to respond with significant numbers. This is also probably the reason why such an incident never occurred IOTL, and even if the uprising degenerated into a civil war after a significant amount of the soldiers switched sides, there would be guerrillas in the mountains actively attempting to resist for years, if not for decades. The chaos might also prompt the South to intervene, due to an invitation from the guerrillas, an assumption that they could reunify the peninsula, or fear of a Chinese invasion. This would potentially result in an extremely different Korean War, along with numerous purges afterward, unified or not, further destabilizing the North.

The Workers Councils of Korea are unlikely to be maintaining the kind of force posture and deployment that will protect them from Fraternal Socialist States. Consider the ineffectiveness of the Honved in Hungary in 1956. There's no way that a genuine revolutionary democracy is going to survive with fascists to the South and Maoists to the North. Only a Soviet / Chinese disagreement over who and how the revolution should be crushed could protect them. And that won't last for long, especially if the Koreans are allowed to push ideas into Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania or Yugoslavia.

yours,
Sam R.
 
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