Kim followed up his speech with a highly publicized guidance visit to an amusement park in Pyongyang, where, clearly unamused, he scolded officials for its derelict state. Fixing the park, Kim said, "should be made an occasion of removing outdated ideological point of view from the heads of officials and ending their old work-style." Kim then tapped the cabinet premier and a senior military figure to personally supervise the renovations. The park is now a demonstration project for Kim's demand that officials be "creative and enterprising."
Criticizing the dilapidated state of a funfair is just one of many examples of Kim's acknowledgment of domestic problems, refreshingly frank by North Korean standards, and could portend a major shift in governing philosophy.
The international community witnessed the North's new realism in April, when Pyongyang admitted failure of a rocket launch. Under Kim Jong-il, long-range rocket tests had been declared a complete success despite having fallen short of their targets. But this time, with CNN reporting live from Kim Il-sung Square, Pyongyang anticlimactically conceded that the launch had failed for technical reasons.
The global media herd raced off to their next story. But inside North Korea, this admission was just the beginning of a new spirit of acknowledging problems. It's not glasnost yet, but Kim has talked openly about North Korea's food problem, consumer goods problem and the importance of "fully solving the problems arising in developing the economy and improving the people's living standards."
Kim even drew attention to official connivance in selling off mineral wealth to the first Chinese buyer, complaining in a speech on land management that, "Some people are now attempting to develop the valuable underground resources of the country at random on this or that excuse to export them for not a great sum of foreign exchange." In that late April speech, he also raised the problem of the military's need to be "self-supporting," suggesting military spending cuts in order to focus on the "people's economy."
Although Kim is not yet talking about "market socialism," so far, he's leaving the small private markets alone, encouraging special economic zones and sending officials abroad for economic learning trips. Along with the new guest-worker program that will reportedly allow tens of thousands of North Koreans to go earn better wages in China, economic policy shows signs of increasing pragmatism, experimentalism and transparency - hallmarks of China's epic shift from Mao to Deng.
The foreign policy implications of this budding Deng-ist spirit in Pyongyang are not yet clear. Besides, Seoul, Washington and Beijing are preoccupied by their own upcoming presidential elections and party congresses. As the dust of domestic politics settles over the course of this year, a clearer picture will emerge of whether Kim Jong-un's creative and enterprising spirit can breathe new life into stalled efforts to bring prosperity to North Korea and peace to Northeast Asia.
