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Dear Leader: My Escape from North Korea?
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China would likely move south in order to expand their borders and create some sort of buffer zone. They would also secure their border to contain refugees. They are not fond of North Korean civilians. This book talks about it, as the guy escaped and travelled through China to get to South Korea, all while being hunted by authorities who would have sent him straight back to the North.
This is an incredible book on this exact subject. The author worked in the heart of the propaganda machine and was responsible for coming up with the stupid, mythological stories about the amazing feats of the Dear Leader that are taught to North Korean kids as fact. He knew it was all nonsense but his life was relatively great so it wasn't in his interest to rebel. He did start to doubt the regime though, inevitably, and eventually escaped.
I read this book in about two sittings - I couldn't put it down, it's so gripping! What was incredibly fascinating was how he explained the ascent of Kim Jung-il, the son of Kim il-Sung. Kim Jung-il hated his father and wasn't actually chosen to succeed Kim il-Sung, as it's commonly believed. Kim Jung-il orchestrated a power grab before his father's death using his relatively low-level job in the propaganda office. In his job, he realised the true potential of propaganda and how it could be used to manipulate and control. He used his position to control the flow of information to his father before eventually cutting him off completely. This allowed him to set up an alternative centre of power around himself, the real power, alongside the pretend power of his father. Fascinating stuff.
Amazon link to the book. If you "look inside" and search for the word "paper", on page 3 it says,
> After [Kim Il-Sung's] death [...] the status of novelists changed. Poetry became the literary vogue. This was not due solely to Kim Jong-Il's preference for the form. The phenomenon was reinforced, if not triggered, by a shortage of paper when the North Korean economy collapsed and people scrambled just to survive. When there wasn't even enough paper in the country to print school textbooks, not many people could afford to own a hefty revolutionary novel. With poetry, however, the necessary tenets of loyalty to the Kim dynasty could be distilled potently into a single newspaper page. Thus poetry emerged as the dominant literary vehicle through which Kim Jong-il exercised his cultural dictatorship.
Of course, it's probably not easy to independently confirm Jang Jin-Sung's version of events. Someone with more knowledge of North Korea than me should probably answer that.
Making it through China to the South Korean embassy without means to support you is quite difficult, and as others have mentioned, you can't just walk in.
I'd recommend reading the book Dear Leader for more background information on this. The book is about someone who worked for North Korea's United Front Department who later fled the country and defected to South Korea.
Let me cross check my library when I get a little more awake but off the top of my head you HAVE to read Dear leader by Jang Jin-sung who now runs New Focus international. He was a poet laureate with access to outside media and let one of those pieces get caught on a citizen who shouldnt have had access to it. It led to both them fleeing and ill leave the rest for you to read. I STRONGLY suggest you get it. Most NK books are hard for me to put down, but this was one so hard to put down I believe it was read over 2-3 days.
The rest of your list seems close to mine, I know I have read 15 books on NK, so let me cross check and see what we have read jointly vs. the differences and we can compare. I also have (like the Hidden Gulag) various reports written that may or may not interest you.
I highly recommend reading "Dear leader" by Jang Jin-Sung...
http://www.amazon.com/Dear-Leader-Escape-North-Korea/dp/1476766568
Ignoring Trump for a second.
Could it be the case that Kim Jong-un inherited the dictatorship from his father and is slowly realizing he doesn't want his people to suffer anymore?
I read a book Dear Leader: My Escape from North Korea which gave a fascinating insight into North Korea. I can't see how the current model is sustainable for them.
The gullibility and smarmy naivete in this thread is just pathetic. Yes. War is bad. What a revelation. Why hasn't anybody else thought of that before?
If you want to feel all warm and fuzzy inside go buy a Hallmark card or go browse /r/aww.
People living in the real world understand that geopolitics is a game of advantage that you can't circumvent by pleading for everyone to join hands and sing Kumbaya. When you appease dictators and cede ground to them you simply enable and embolden their behavior. Furthermore, the South Korean president is hugging and holding hands with a mass murderer who has enslaved over 20 million people, condemning them to a live a life of near starvation and physical/psychological imprisonment. You're the leader of an extraordinarily prosperous, democratic country; have some dignity. You're meeting a piece of human excrement who is feeling on top of the world right now. You shake the man's hand for diplomacy's sake. You don't hug and caress him.
It's just so god damned pathetic how naive people are. What's happening here is that South Korea learned to live under a nuclear DPRK a long time ago. What they can't abide is constantly ratcheting up brinksmanship that is eagerly stoked by a senile reality tv star with the strongest military in the history of the world at his beck and call.
China, RoK, and DPRK have cooked up this appeasement scheme to dupe Trump into thinking he's quelled the DPRK threat. DPRK will keep its nuclear weapons (the announcement that they've completed their nuclear weapons program and no longer need the facility they're shutting down should have been a good indicator of DPRK's intentions for people that were too blind to them up until now) and as we can see here, the Kim regime gets boatloads of photo opportunities, diplomatic prestige, increased security internally, increased legitimacy externally and inevitably sanctions relief. China will benefit from further DPRK stability and increased trade opportunities (and leverage on Trump as well). And South Korea gets to see the sabre-rattling cease and they receive the same benefits China does from prolonged security for Kim regime. They don't want to deal with that humanitarian crisis either. Trump gets a plaque on his wall that says "Best Negotiator Ever" and a polaroid of a North Korean testing facility with a "closed" sign on the gate.
But don't let me get in the way of everyone "awwwwww"ing over this like it's a picture of a cat hugging a golden retriever. Bunch of rubes.
edit: Can't wait to see all the memes come out of this. Kim Jong Un is gonna have his image rehabilitated the same way GWB did lol... But I don't want this to just a useless rant yelling at silly people. So, before you guys start memeing up KJU let me give you guys a short reading list of DPRK books I've greatly enjoyed (I've been fascinated with DPRK for at least a decade):
Dear Leader: My Escape from North Korea. This is a great firsthand account of an "inner" party member who lived the relatively high life in Pyongyang as a propagandist.
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea Exactly what it sounds like: biographies of normal people who live(d) in DPRK over the last 30 years. This book is shocking, sickening, heart wrenching, triumphant, and any other superlative descriptor you can think of. Can't recommend it enough.
Aquariums of Pyongyang. Nothing to Envy describes gulag life in detail but this book delves into it exclusively and I found myself enthralled but revolted at the same time. You'll have to take breaks to process the horror and atrocities it describes.
So yeah, check any of those books out then come back here and see if you're still inclined to "oooo" and "awww" and talk about how sweet this is.
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