NYTimes: “The Rason government will do our best to provide favorable conditions for investment,” said Hwang Chol-nam, the vice mayor in charge of economic development. “Please tell the world.”
A common refrain from a mayor, unremarkable, except for the fact that Rason is in North Korea.
North Korean leaders are slowly opening their isolated nation to foreign investment.
A thrust of their strategy is to develop previously created “free trade and economic zones” on the borders that have languished. Here, about 30 miles from China, the combined towns of Rajin and Sonbong, called Rason, are central to the new push.
…“The policy environment has been improving continuously,” said Zheng Zhexi, 58, the company’s vice president. “It’s moving towards a market economy.”
He pointed to the official tolerance for the bazaar, where merchants rent stalls from the government to sell goods that they buy from Chinese traders. Prices fluctuate and shoppers haggle. The bazaar has proved so successful that it is expanding to six times the current size.
An interesting experiment that one hopes will expand. Don’t expect too much, however, consider this rather amazing survey of Chinese business people and what they say North Korea needs.
The Peterson Institute for International Economics, based in Washington, recently published conclusions from a 2007 survey of 250 Chinese companies doing business in North Korea. The authors found that while nearly 90 percent were profitable, the companies “generally have a negative assessment of the business environment” for reasons like poor infrastructure and lack of rule of law.
Sadly, it won’t last a minute beyond the point the regime feels more threatened by capitalist prosperity than by communist poverty.
Except since the North Korean regime’s ideology has little to do with communism or anti-capitalism (except in the minds of Westerners) it won’t have much impact.
So what?
The core of the issue is that NK regime is paranoid up to the sky, fixated on exercising as total control over every person on their territory as they can get, and introduction of any private enterprise is incompatible with that.
You’re apparently thinking of some other North Korea.
It doesn’t take long for my finger to get sore once I begin stuffing genies back in bottles.
I wouldn’t exactly call it “free trade” when North Korea is exchanging goods with China, of all people.
They say that they will do their best but it’s false.. They won’t try it !
Communist Poverty can not be enforced forever. Cuba did open up in spite of the tallest living revolutionary King Fidel Castro has been fuming, fretting and kicking all over.
Let us hope the North Koreans will be free at last and able to make sense of their lives.
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