[KS] Re: first message

[Stephen Epstein]

I fwd the following from Chungmoo Choi, who is experiencing some e-mail
difficulties with the list at the moment:

>------------------------------------
>
>Dear Thomas Zeh,
>
>I concur with David McCann and David Kang.  I think what the specialists of
>Germany oversee is the fact that North Korea has survived for the past
>fifty years under the US imposed economic sanction which according to some
>scholars is the most severe of its kind.  One must consider the kind of
>resilience that North Koreans might have developed under this unimaginably
>dire situation.  Even then they managed to achieve certain level of
>industrialization from the ashes of the Korean War.  North Korea also
>managed to claim political autonomy and relative independence out of the
>dispute between the USSR and China in the 1960s.  Actually resilience of
>the North Korean leadership has developed since the Japanese colonial
>period.  In this sense North Korea's historical experience should be
>distinguished from that of Germany.
>
>Northern part of Korea is 70% mountains and the residents there have long
>persevered chronic shortage of food.  The landfills on the west coast have
>changed the coast line over the past decades but that is not enough.  In
>addition they have built the sea-lock at the estuary of the Taedong River
>for irrigation and stripped the hills for cultivation.  The natural
>disaster of the past several consecutive years exacerbated the situation.
>But as you might have read recently North Korea also is making significant
>adjustment revising its constitution to attract foreign investment and
>developing tourism for quick income with relatively little investment, etc.
> It may be naive to think that North Korea will collapse any day because of
>the famine and poor economy.
>
>Chungmoo Choi
>




%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%