North Korea's Quiet Revolution

In Asia Times, Andrei Lankov has a fascinating account of economic reform in the land of Kim Jong Il. By his telling, "What we have seen in North Korea over the past 10 years can be best described as collapse of what used to be rigid Stalinism from below. In the Soviet Union of the late 1950s and in China of the late 1970s, Stalinism-Maoism was dismantled from above, through a chain of deliberate reforms planned and implemented by the government. In North Korea the same thing happened, but the system disintegrated from below, despite weak and ineffectual attempts to keep it intact."

Needless to say, the process still has a long, long way to go.

[Via Lew Rockwell.]