The ‘soft’ version of the mad thesis simply asserts that north Korea is
unknowable and therefore uninterpretable because, it is alleged, there is no
reliable information about the country. Marcus Noland, for instance, in what
has become a benchmark article on the DPRK, states baldly that ‘there is an
acute lack of information [about north Korea]’ and, in the same article, that
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‘virtually all economic and social data are regarded as state secrets’. Robert
Scalapino points to the DPRK as a ‘mystery’ while at the same time arguing that
it ‘would be a serious mistake to assume that…we know nothing about the
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DPRK’. The eighteen-page report on ‘North and South Korea’ in the Under-
standing Global Issues series states that in any discussion of north Korea ‘lack of
hard information is a constant problem’ (before going on to present a perfectly
adequate account of north Korean politics and the economy, along with source
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references in the document itself!). This is not to say, of course, that the
DPRK is an open polity with a Freedom of Information Act just around the
corner. It is to say, however, that such a perspective denies in principle the
knowability of north Korea and, more recently, has not acknowledged the
successes of the aid community in achieving inroads into DPRK impenetra-
bility.
Perhaps the least subtle accounts in this genre are those which argue that the
DPRK is such an expert in deception that critical evaluation of DPRK politics
is almost impossible. This assumption is largely based on the contention that
even when the DPRK went so far as to plan a war against south Korea in 1950,
absolutely no evidence could be found of a premeditated invasion of the south
in captured Central Committee files when the US-led UN forces captured
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Pyongyang. This shows the ‘regime’s devotion to strategic secrecy’, even to the
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extent of hiding its intentions from its own senior officials. Even, therefore, ‘the
formal evidentiary record of officially revealed DPRK pronouncements and
actions…must be treated as problematic’. This is a state that is ‘preternaturally
secretive’. The DPRK, so the argument goes, has retained a commitment to
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Noland, ‘Why north Korea will muddle through’, quotes on pp. 105 and 107 respectively. Charitably,
one could argue that Noland exaggerates to make the point. That this is so is borne out by his own
research, where he uses available data in a rigorous manner to draw certain conclusions about the north
Korean economy. See Marcus Noland, Sherman Robinson and Tao Wang, Famine in north Korea: causes
and cures, Working Paper no. 99–2 (Washington DC: Institute for International Economics, 1999). What
he probably wants to argue is that the data available are sometimes unsatisfactory and he would like more
of them, something that could be argued about many countries of the world. This more nuanced
message would not, however, help to build a picture of a singularly unknowable DPRK.
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Robert A. Scalapino, ‘Introduction’, in Suh and Lee, eds, North Korea after Kim Il Sung, p. 1.
Richard Buckley, ed., North and south Korea: the last ideological frontier (Cheltenham: Understanding Global
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Issues, 1998).
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Quotes in this paragraph are from Nicholas Eberstadt, ‘North Korea’s unification policy: 1948–1996’, in
Kim, ed., North Korean foreign relations in the post-Cold War era, pp. 236–9. That the lack of such evidence
might warrant a different interpretation from the standard account is not acknowledged. For an
authoritative account of the outbreak of the Korean war, see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s place in the sun: A
modern history (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 260–4. The north Koreans have yet another view. See the
self-explanatory title of Ho Jong Ho, Kang Sok Hui and Pak Thae Ho, The US imperialists started the
Korean war (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1993).
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Eberstadt, ‘North Korea’s unification policy’, p. 237. The irony that the lack of reliable evidence does
not seen to stop this author from drawing some very strong conclusions indeed about DPRK policy
seems lost.
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