By Tom Fowdy
Since 2014, a "new" bridge has stood on the Yalu River between Dandong in China and Sinuiju in North Korea. This massive white spired bridge, built by Chinese engineering, was intended to deepen economic integration between the two Communist neighbours, having previously relied on the very small, Japanese Imperial-derived railway bridge known as the "Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge." The new bridge was thus to be revolutionary, yet for reasons entirely related to the North Korean side, it didn't open.
Why? Because Pyongyang deliberately refused to finish their side of it. The decision was driven by the internal politics of the DPRK. Kim Jong-un, newly inheriting power at the time, sought to legitimate his rule over the state and part of doing this involved deliberately centralising power by purging pro-Chinese factions in his government and intentionally isolating the country through a path of nuclear confrontation. As Andrei Lankov's work has detailed at length, North Korea seeks to survive through deliberately resisting change to the outside world and political reform. Kim Jong-un therefore literally "burned" bridges with Beijing.
Pyongyang has always been known as an extremely isolated state. This condition is an intentional political choice built on an ideology, known as "Juche" (self-mastery) that emphasizes struggle against the outside world through a maximum emphasis on sovereignty and to force others to engage on its own terms. The DPRK's leadership is subsequently prepared to endorse deliberate human suffering and economic impoverishment than ceding control, precisely because, in their point of view, prosperity cannot come at the price of sovereignty.
However, this week, that "new" bridge on the border has finally opened. Not so long earlier, a similar bridge was also opened linking North Korea's far northeastern region with Vladivostok in Russia. That's one year, two bridges. What is going on here? The answer is that now Kim Jong-un feels completely secure in his rule, enabled by an increasingly favourable geopolitical environment and now he subsequently feels he can re-engage the outside world on his own terms and grow North Korea's economy, in his own way, all while maintaining a fully-fledged nuclear capability.
What has ultimately changed is that amidst their own conflicts with the United States, both Russia and China increasingly, as it were in the Cold War, see North Korea as a strategically important counterweight to Western power. In the post-Cold War era of 1991-2019, North Korea faced massive isolation, first by intentional choice to prevent regime collapse, but suddenly because both Russia and China valued their relationship with America and were willing to cooperate with the United States on UN-led sanctions to try and contain the DPRK's nuclear ambitions.
But now, the global strategic environment has changed so drastically that great powers are now actively competing for advantages, making North Korea an important chess piece again. Attempts to force the country to denuclearise have long been given up, and even Donald Trump himself effectively acknowledges the DPRK as a nuclear power. Save the regime collapsed, this is not reversible, for it is the effective spine of their sovereignty and leverage. Pyongyang subsequently uses it to its own advantage, playing Moscow and Beijing off against each other as it did in the 1960s. If they want the DPRK to keep the peace and not create crisis, they must subsequently give it aid and economic concessions, which is precisely what is happening. No longer is North Korea facing the threat of geopolitical submission to its neighbours, hence again why it chose isolation, but deliberately playing a diplomatic game to maximise its own options and gains. The DPRK sells weaponry, troops and labour to Russia, while it uses China as a nexus to importing goods from the outside world.
The result of this is after years of impoverishment following Kim Jong-un's deliberate, and also political, shutdown of the country's borders amidst the COVID pandemic, is that the DPRK increasingly has money in its coffers and Kim has used this to invest in the "core" of his regime and dramatically redevelop Pyongyang. The DPRK is not really an "egalitarian" communist state at all, but a hierarchical, layered one, whereby the state supports and funds core groups in Pyongyang, while the periphery is left to suffer in poor, rural conditions. This anti-social mobility order is known as "Songbun" where you are judged on a generational scale contingent to your political loyalty.
Thus, the DPRK is profiting from the state of the world. Once a pariah, nowadays it is a nuclear-armed strategic buffer state which must be well funded to stay passive, for China ultimately has a much more lucrative and important relationship with South Korea, as opposed to its old Communist ally which Mao Zedong once described as being close like "lips and teeth." Thus, the DPRK has decided to cooperate on this bridge, after deliberately stalling it for 12years, precisely because it now suits it to do so. Kim Jong un will do whatever it takes to gain on his terms alone, and not anyone else's, and his long-term goal will now be to slowly make it more prosperous (within limits) while also becoming more militarily powerful.
Once deemed a Cold War relic written off by analysts as desperate to collapse, with Victor Cha devoting an entire chapter called "The end is near" in his book "the Impossible State", the DPRK will continue to define the geopolitical dynamics and military flashpoints of North East Asia.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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