Book Review: The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future – Victor Cha

Ford, G. (2012). The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future by Victor Cha, Asian Review of Books, 7 December.

Victor Cha was the Director for Asian Affairs in George W. Bush’s National Security Council from 2004-2007 and his new book The Impossible State is promoted as “the definitive account of North Korea”.

The Six Party Talks—brokered by China—loom large as they meandered nowhere. These were central to Cha’s work in Washington. Part of the problem is that Washington—like North Korea—lives in a parallel universe. The U.S., despite two nuclear tests by Pyongyang, refuses to acknowledge the North a nuclear weapons state.

The U.S. persists in staying in denial because the only alternative would be to implicitly acknowledge that they are in the same category as India, Pakistan and Israel, namely nuclear weapons states outside of the control of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But consequentially then Pyongyang might dare to argue that they should be treated in the same way and with Washington engaging in nuclear arms reduction talks.

Cha’s engaging writing makes the 530 pages turn quicker than they might with a different author. Cha amusingly describes his visit to Pyongyang and—more seriously—the visits of refugees like Kang Chol Hwan (the author of the camp memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang from the Kim Il Sung period), to meet President Bush in the Oval Office. 
        But all in all, we learn less about North Korea and more about Washington’s (mis)perceptions of and attitudes to the North. Here The Impossible State is seriously schizophrenic, although the same is true of Washington’s policy. We learn both that the U.S. has no belligerent intentions against the North and that during the 1994 nuclear crisis the Pentagon prepared for a preemptive strike on the Yongbyon nuclear plant. We are informed that the North Koreans are engaged in the drug trade—but not recently—and that Pyongyang counterfeit dollars and may make as little profit as $15 million per annum, surely not enough to get the average mafia boss out of bed in the morning.

We are told that the North has abducted 180,000 foreign citizens over time from France, Italy, Guinea, Japan, Lebanon, Macau, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Romania, Singapore and Thailand. Certainly Japan and its citizens are rightly incensed by Kim Jong Il’s admission that the North had abducted 18 Japanese, but the sheer quantity claimed by Cha reminds us that former Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama’s wife firmly believes that she was abducted by aliens. Cha also records that only 9% of North Korean refugees report that they left for political reasons and that there are 1211 refugees spread between England, Germany and Canada but a mere 96 in the US. He doesn’t explain why they are not in South Korea as all North Koreans have an automatic right to South Korean citizenship, although others suspect that many of these may be ethnic Koreans from China’s Jilin Province who would fail to pass the tests Seoul applies to weed out genuine North Korean sheep from Chinese goats.

Cha’s figures don’t necessarily support his thesis. For example, Cha also records that only 9% of North Korean refugees report that they left for political reasons and while there are 1211 refugees spread between England, Germany and Canada the United States, so adamantly opposed to North Korea’s human rights record, has take a mere 96. Cha doesn’t explain why they are not all in South Korea as all North Koreans have an automatic right to South Korean citizenship, …


Cha’s problem is that time seems to have stopped for him a generation ago. He still thinks the captured spy ship the USS Pueblo is in Wonsan harbour when it was sailed around the Peninsula to Pyongyang a decade ago. In western terms the North’s regime has little if anything to recommend it. Nevertheless today the citizens of Pyongyang have never had it so good. In the last five years enormous resources have been funneled in to raising living standards in the capital. In the city’s markets almost anything is available at a price. There are 100,000 new apartments. There are funfairs and a new water park and dolphinarium where the denizens leap in unison to North Korean martial music. There are two varieties of credit cards, a million mobile phones and fleets of taxis.

Certainly the privileging of Pyongyang—which is where the people who matter live—has been done at the expense of the rural population, where living standards have marginally improved with the agricultural reforms of 2002 that allowed them to sell production above target in the markets, and without alleviating the dire situation of the inhabitants of the North Eastern “rustbelt” where hunger still stalks the streets, schools and orphanages.

Yet this triage plan has a brutal logic. The new regime of Kim Jong Un has a breathing space to allow it to attempt to suck in investment to its Special Economic Zones (SEZ) and get the economy to recommence the long march back to where it was in the early 1970s as one of Asia’s most successful industrial economies.

The next South Korean President, no matter which of the three candidates win, will look more favorably on Pyongyang than the present incumbent Lee Myung-bak and so we just might see this decade up to half a million North Korean workers commuting daily to produce goods for the South in the Kaeson Industrial Complex. Equally we might see a similar number within the Rason SEZ on the Russian-Chinese border producing for the Chinese and global market.

This could be the North’s Deng Xiaoping moment. Washington will play a key role in either killing or nurturing these possibilities. The first will drive the North back into a dangerous corner, the second will bring sunshine. We just have to hope that the second Obama Presidency has a Director for Asian Affairs who thinks “Back to the Future” is a film and not a policy paradigm.