TOKYO ? A rare North Korean parliament session closed Tuesday without the announcement of economic policy changes that many outside experts had predicted. The silence immediately tempered expectations about the impoverished state?s pace of reform.
Analysts, as well as government officials in Washington and Seoul, had been watching for concrete evidence of a policy shift under leader Kim Jong Eun that would allow farmers to keep more of their crops and sell surpluses in capitalist-style markets.
Such a policy change, which would echo Chinese reforms of the late 1970s, had been widely reported by media outside North Korea over the past month, but was never confirmed by Pyongyang.
The North had fanned expectations of a big announcement by holding a meeting of its rubber-stamp parliament, the Supreme People?s Assembly, which convenes only rarely. But a state news agency report released after the meeting on Tuesday said only that the North?s parliament had authorized a few low-level personnel changes and extended the country?s compulsory education period from 11 years to 12.
Outside experts who study the opaque totalitarian state said the North might simply be reluctant to publicly state its new economic policies, because a formal announcement would make it harder to later back away from any changes or crack down in some other way. In 2002, the last time the North experimented briefly with economic reforms, the country only mentioned the news in a pro-North Korean Japanese publication, according to South Korea?s Yonhap news agency.
?Just because there?s no official announcement does not mean reforms are not taking place,? said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Seoul?s Kookmin University.
?Such reforms are bound to be introduced by low-key, semi-confidential methods,? like in Workers? Party speeches delivered in local meetings, he said. ?The idea of keeping it low-key is basically just to say, ?Look, our system has always been perfect, we are making just minor adjustments.? ?
Despite decades of food shortages, the North Korean government still channels much of its money to weapons and its 1.2 million-person military. Its state-run rationing system hasn?t functioned in years, and citizens ? particularly in rural areas ? depend on illicit market trading for goods and food.
Since taking power following the death of his father last December, Kim Jung Eun has given hints that he wants to improve the North?s economy. Kim Jong Il long resisted such changes, because he feared that any economic opening would erode the tight state controls that helped keep his family in power.
This week?s meeting marked just the third time in nearly two decades that the assembly gathered more than once in a single year. It also met in April to appoint Kim as the first chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission.
According to a report earlier this week from the Associated Press, which operates a bureau in Pyongyang, the North is rolling out changes that will allow farmers to keep surpluses after they?ve fulfilled state quotas. That?s a change from the current system, which requires farmers to relinquish almost everything.
Other reports, from various news organizations that employ North Korean defectors and maintain contact in the North, take it a step further, and suggest that the North will buy produce at market prices, as opposed to a state-fixed rate.
The North?s nascent reforms resemble those of China or Vietnam, said Koh Yoo-hwan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.
?The North is taking very cautious steps,? Koh said. ?For North Korea, economic reform is not a choice, but a matter of speed or scale.?
Yoonjung Seo, in Seoul, contributed to this report.
Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=ba1be967697bdb6b4bb730557eb7b6a6
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