Excerpt From Economic Report “Pulling North Korea To The Brink” (#13)

Since the end of the last Korean War (1953), for similarly structured communist China, North Korea has been a convenient buffer State on its border, against the ideologically opposed, capitalist, democratic, combined alliance of South Korea and the United States. After the collapse of communist Russia, China has continued to be the sole and steadfast patron of this increasingly isolated, dysfunctional and desperate nation. China has been supplying North Korea with critically needed food and monetary assistance, and with political protection, to keep it propped up, and help it survive in spite of its moral and economic bankrupt reality.

But times and global dynamics have changed significantly for North Korea because in the last 20 years China changed. While still committed unflinchingly and determinedly to a single communist party rule, China realized that to prevent its own inevitable  economic collapse, Soviet Union style, it will have to abandon its ‘Marxist/Leninist/Mao’ economic model, and embrace the heretofore vilified capitalist system, modified to its own particular political reality, but a capitalistic style system nevertheless. Over the last few years, China tried to convince North Korea to adopt similar economic reforms and curtail its nuclear ambitions, but was rebuffed by the paranoid, control obsessed regime. China continued to support North Korea as it served a dual purpose of being a convenient communist buffer State, and a small but vicious pit bull that could, on command, make life difficult and worrisome for its ideological and economic competitors, South Korea, the United States, Taiwan and Japan. But then something else changed...