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Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea
What happens when a dictator wins absolute power and isolates a nation from the outside world? In a nightmare of political theory stretched to madness and come to life, North Korea's Kim Jong Il made himself into a living god, surrounded by lies and flattery and beyond criticism. As over two million of his subjects starved to death, Kim Jong Il roamed between palaces staffed by beautiful girls and stocked with expensive international delicacies. Outside, the steel mills shut down, the trains stopped running, the power went out, and the hospitals ran out of medicine. When the population threatened to revolt, Kim imposed a reign of terror, deceived the United Nations, and plundered the country's dwindling resources to become a nuclear power. Now this tiny bankrupt nation is using her nuclear capability to blackmail the United States.
Veteran correspondent Jasper Becker takes us inside one of the most secretive countries in the world, exposing the internal chaos, blind faith, rampant corruption, and terrifying cruelty of its rulers. Becker details the vain efforts to change North Korea by actors inside and outside the country and the dangers this highly volatile country continues to pose. This unique land, ruled by one family's megalomania and paranoia, seems destined to survive and linger on, a menace to its own people and to the rest of the world. But should the nations of the world allow this regime to survive? That's the question with which this book concludes.
Veteran correspondent Jasper Becker takes us inside one of the most secretive countries in the world, exposing the internal chaos, blind faith, rampant corruption, and terrifying cruelty of its rulers. Becker details the vain efforts to change North Korea by actors inside and outside the country and the dangers this highly volatile country continues to pose. This unique land, ruled by one family's megalomania and paranoia, seems destined to survive and linger on, a menace to its own people and to the rest of the world. But should the nations of the world allow this regime to survive? That's the question with which this book concludes.
306 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
6 people are currently reading
148 people want to read
About the author
Jasper Becker
21 books25 followers Jasper Becker is a British journalist who spent 30 years covering Asia including 18 years living in Beijing. His reporting on uprisings, refugees and famine in China, Tibet and North Korea garnered him many awards and he is a popular speaker and commentator on current events in Asia. He now lives in England and has just finished his tenth book, tentatively called The Fatal Flaw. Earlier books such as Travels in an Untamed Land, Hungry Ghosts or Rogue Regime had described the devastating impact of Communism on the peoples of Mongolia, China and North Korea. In City of Heavenly Tranquility, he laments the destruction of old Peking and the building of the new Beijing while The Chinese and Dragon Rising set out to portray the different sides of contemporary China. In Hungry Ghosts, the author had exposed for the first time the true madness and horrors of Mao’s secret famine during the Great Leap Forward. The new work digs into the flawed economic theories which lay behind Communism’s collapse and describes the economic theorists who got it right and the Western economists who believed the bogus statistics put out by Moscow and Beijing. He has also researched family histories of the early Shanghai capitalists who became textile magnates in Hong Kong. Under the pen name Jack MacLean, he has published an engrossing thriller set amid the drone wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan called Global Predator. Four of his earlier books on Asia have just been updated and re-released as kindle books.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 19, 2010
Becker has some good insight and has certainly done his research when it comes to the political causes and consequences of events in North Korea. His writing is not the best, as frequent sentence fragments and missing words can lead to confusion for the reader, and he occasionally diverges from the topic to discuss other issues, almost as if he is attempting to use irrelevant research so it doesn't go to waste. Other than the writing skills, though, this book is a great resource for anyone interested in the North Korea problem.
September 4, 2018
Very good, it gives one an insight of the life in North Korea. Always portrayed as a hard, mysterious and threatening, Jasper Becker helps to explain why.
September 18, 2012
The author, Jasper Becker, is a British reporter in China who has interviewed many North Korean refugees that have entered China. There are two million ethnic Koreans in Northeast China, in the provinces of Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang. Many Korean refugees escape to these Chinese provinces, but are often repatriated by the Chinese, who fear having too many immigrants. China has theoretically promised to go to war to protect North Korea from attack, but it is not clear whether the present Chinese leadership would actually do that.
In the 1990s North Korean refugees escaping to China claimed that there was a massive famine in North Korea. Because of restrictions on foreign journalists reporting from North Korea, it was difficult to verify their claims. The government did not allow either peasants or city dwellers to have private plots to grow food to feed their families, because such activity would be egotistical. Peasants were forbidden to sell the food they grew in private markets, because all of the harvest belonged to the government.
The famine reached its peak in 1997. Not only peasants, but even many soldiers starved to death (not the officers, of course). Rough estimates are that 2-3 million people starved to death during the 1990s. Kim Jong Il blamed the peasants for the famine, claiming that they were hoarding grain. First Stalin and the Ukraine, then Mao and the Great Leap Forward, and finally Kim Jong Il in North Korea. The communists leaders blame the failure of farm collectivization on the farmers hoarding grain.
Although there were some natural disasters, the famine was primarily man-made, due to the low productivity of collectivized agriculture of North Korea, the transfer of much of the food to the military and government elite.
The United Nations gave North Korea food aid, but was prevented by the North Korean military from distributing food aid to the starving peasants itself. Instead, the army took the food from the donors when it arrived in the port. Many peasants claimed they never saw any foreign food aid. It was hard for foreign reporters to verify what was happening in the countryside, because the reporters were under constant supervision by the government, who showed them only model villages. It was a serious crime for a North Korean person to talk to a foreigner without government permission. Non-communication was a two-way street: North Korean officials inspect people's homes to make sure they are not listening to foreign radio broadcasts. Non-Governmental Organization tried to help, but they knew if they told the truth about what was happening in North Korea, or disobeyed government restrictions, they would be expelled.
The famine also had an economic cause, namely reduced demand for its weapons exports. During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, North Korea had made lots of money selling arms to Iran, in particular, missiles. During the 1990s, North Korea made money by counterfeiting currency and selling drugs abroad. In particular, it supplied Japan with methamphetamine.
Even before Kim Jong Il officially took over the reins from his father, Kim Il Sung, the younger man was effectively running the country and controlling all communication to and from his father. During the 1980s and 1990s, the son greatly increased the size of the system of forced labor camps that had been created by his father in the 1950s. The product of the slave labor went to support the military and the spoiled party elite. There were actually two prison systems, a larger one for political prisoners and a smaller one for common criminals.
Having experienced American air power and bombing during the Korean War, Kim Il Sung created a vast military-industrial complex in underground tunnels in mountains. The workers live, work and sleep in these huge city-like tunnels. The North Korean military has many planes and even Navy ships hidden in these underground fortresses. The books discusses the Clinton administrations consideration of a military attack on North Korea. What actually happened is that former president Jimmy Carter brokered a deal where the North Koreans received aid in return for promising not to develop nuclear weapons. But the North Koreans later broke the agreement and did develop nuclear weapons.
In the 1990s North Korean refugees escaping to China claimed that there was a massive famine in North Korea. Because of restrictions on foreign journalists reporting from North Korea, it was difficult to verify their claims. The government did not allow either peasants or city dwellers to have private plots to grow food to feed their families, because such activity would be egotistical. Peasants were forbidden to sell the food they grew in private markets, because all of the harvest belonged to the government.
The famine reached its peak in 1997. Not only peasants, but even many soldiers starved to death (not the officers, of course). Rough estimates are that 2-3 million people starved to death during the 1990s. Kim Jong Il blamed the peasants for the famine, claiming that they were hoarding grain. First Stalin and the Ukraine, then Mao and the Great Leap Forward, and finally Kim Jong Il in North Korea. The communists leaders blame the failure of farm collectivization on the farmers hoarding grain.
Although there were some natural disasters, the famine was primarily man-made, due to the low productivity of collectivized agriculture of North Korea, the transfer of much of the food to the military and government elite.
The United Nations gave North Korea food aid, but was prevented by the North Korean military from distributing food aid to the starving peasants itself. Instead, the army took the food from the donors when it arrived in the port. Many peasants claimed they never saw any foreign food aid. It was hard for foreign reporters to verify what was happening in the countryside, because the reporters were under constant supervision by the government, who showed them only model villages. It was a serious crime for a North Korean person to talk to a foreigner without government permission. Non-communication was a two-way street: North Korean officials inspect people's homes to make sure they are not listening to foreign radio broadcasts. Non-Governmental Organization tried to help, but they knew if they told the truth about what was happening in North Korea, or disobeyed government restrictions, they would be expelled.
The famine also had an economic cause, namely reduced demand for its weapons exports. During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, North Korea had made lots of money selling arms to Iran, in particular, missiles. During the 1990s, North Korea made money by counterfeiting currency and selling drugs abroad. In particular, it supplied Japan with methamphetamine.
Even before Kim Jong Il officially took over the reins from his father, Kim Il Sung, the younger man was effectively running the country and controlling all communication to and from his father. During the 1980s and 1990s, the son greatly increased the size of the system of forced labor camps that had been created by his father in the 1950s. The product of the slave labor went to support the military and the spoiled party elite. There were actually two prison systems, a larger one for political prisoners and a smaller one for common criminals.
Having experienced American air power and bombing during the Korean War, Kim Il Sung created a vast military-industrial complex in underground tunnels in mountains. The workers live, work and sleep in these huge city-like tunnels. The North Korean military has many planes and even Navy ships hidden in these underground fortresses. The books discusses the Clinton administrations consideration of a military attack on North Korea. What actually happened is that former president Jimmy Carter brokered a deal where the North Koreans received aid in return for promising not to develop nuclear weapons. But the North Koreans later broke the agreement and did develop nuclear weapons.
July 26, 2007
And I thought the Republicans were cynical neo-fascists masquerading as heroes of the common man. Holy f-ing shit. "Looming" a threat this place is not, and it's places like these that really give Anarchism some cache as an ideal. Well, I doubt this post will ever get me a visa to what seems to be the freakiest place on earth that I've always wanted to see. I always wondered what took people so damned long to not only roll their eyes and cringe their faces in disgust at Kim Jong Il. And now there's a book in English that does just that.
This was the first page-turner I'd picked up in awhile. Despite its dense subject matter, the book is very readable and enjoyable. Becker evidently conducted scrupulous research and his first hand accounts of working on the Chinese-North Korean border are fascinating. I will highly recommend this book; it is not recondite, and is very clear and presented engagingly in only a way that a respected journalist can. Stylistically the work is simply superb, and it is quite informative.
This being said, alas, despite its gripping nature there are some lamentable lapses in content. Very unsatisfyingly, Becker fails to come up with a serious solution to the North Korea problem. To be fair, he says as much in the intro., trying to say his point is to raise awareness of the scope of the problem. Nevertheless, including some serious consultations with analysts and experts about this, rather than simply rehashing the engagement/Neo-Con debate, would have given a sense of completeness to the book.
Perhaps because of its emotional and charged tone, the book struck me as sympathetic to the Bush team's ambiguous North Korea policy. Whether Bush has, despite his personal distaste for Kim, actually commandeered a viable strategy viz. the North remains doubtful. Becker also takes a hold-no-prisoner stance twards the Kim dynasty, the Korean War, the UN, and the recent sunshine policies of South Korea. Some of his criticisms, especially of the UN, are well taken but also seem to pay little more than lipservice to the need to help the North Korean people. He also quotes the now disgraced John Bolton as an authority on the Korea question and draws heavily from the memoirs of defectors and tabloid-esque memoirs of former Kim associates.
Though these are minor quibbles in Becker's resolute indictment of a state that has become a living hell, this 4-thumbs up book has a few other serious flaws: Becker ignores the increasing role played by the EU and Japan with North Korea. Japan's vehement distaste and fear of North Korea is largely washed over, giving Tokyo too little credit for influencing Washington's approach to this problem. Secondly, Becker curiously fails to mention that Pyongyang now has embassies in London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Ottawa and other traditional Japanese/American allies. By ignoring this recent development, Becker's treatment risks being portrayed as overly one-sided in rejecting the hypothesis that Kim seeks to give North Korea a more prominent and stable international role.
This was the first page-turner I'd picked up in awhile. Despite its dense subject matter, the book is very readable and enjoyable. Becker evidently conducted scrupulous research and his first hand accounts of working on the Chinese-North Korean border are fascinating. I will highly recommend this book; it is not recondite, and is very clear and presented engagingly in only a way that a respected journalist can. Stylistically the work is simply superb, and it is quite informative.
This being said, alas, despite its gripping nature there are some lamentable lapses in content. Very unsatisfyingly, Becker fails to come up with a serious solution to the North Korea problem. To be fair, he says as much in the intro., trying to say his point is to raise awareness of the scope of the problem. Nevertheless, including some serious consultations with analysts and experts about this, rather than simply rehashing the engagement/Neo-Con debate, would have given a sense of completeness to the book.
Perhaps because of its emotional and charged tone, the book struck me as sympathetic to the Bush team's ambiguous North Korea policy. Whether Bush has, despite his personal distaste for Kim, actually commandeered a viable strategy viz. the North remains doubtful. Becker also takes a hold-no-prisoner stance twards the Kim dynasty, the Korean War, the UN, and the recent sunshine policies of South Korea. Some of his criticisms, especially of the UN, are well taken but also seem to pay little more than lipservice to the need to help the North Korean people. He also quotes the now disgraced John Bolton as an authority on the Korea question and draws heavily from the memoirs of defectors and tabloid-esque memoirs of former Kim associates.
Though these are minor quibbles in Becker's resolute indictment of a state that has become a living hell, this 4-thumbs up book has a few other serious flaws: Becker ignores the increasing role played by the EU and Japan with North Korea. Japan's vehement distaste and fear of North Korea is largely washed over, giving Tokyo too little credit for influencing Washington's approach to this problem. Secondly, Becker curiously fails to mention that Pyongyang now has embassies in London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Ottawa and other traditional Japanese/American allies. By ignoring this recent development, Becker's treatment risks being portrayed as overly one-sided in rejecting the hypothesis that Kim seeks to give North Korea a more prominent and stable international role.
Read
June 11, 2009 This book, although it was published in 2005, created an introduction that predicted an event that is inevitable. It stated that a war between North Korea and South Korea was drawing near. As we know of in current events, the tension between the two countries is rising and there is only so little time until North Korea uses its destructive weapons. Jasper Becker, the author of the book, reveals the secrets of North Korea and how one man could change the lives of a country. Kim Jung Il II is revered as a God by North Koreans, but foreigners like us view him as a tyrant. He is responsible for the malnourishment of millions, the low-paid or unpaid labor of young children and adults, the creation of nuclear weapons and the largest army in the world, and the isolation of the country from the whole world. Some people consider the situation in North Korea as something insignificant. Because it is not the country they were born in or lived in,they feel that there is no reason to care. This book made me realize that once South Korea gets into a war with North Korea, it marks the end of the world. Countries such as the United States would get involved in a nuclear war and there is only so much destruction caused by nuclear weapons. Innocent civilians like me would one day die from nuclear radiation. Before things get worse, it is imperative that we do everything to prevent the two brother countries from falling to war.
June 3, 2008
The author Jasper Becker really sparked the meaning of the many crisis in North Korea in modern and history days. By reading his book I learned a rich investment into his story of North Korea and all problems this great country is suffering from. It showed me how the rise of one simple man with a evil mind can rule and turn the whole country into a disaster. North Korea is facing serious problems such as the economic crisis of low food, salvation of children and adult leading to the deaths and malnourishment of millions, isolation from the world, genocide, nuclear attempts, its rogue state, and how it threathens the relation with South Korea, its only cousin. To tell you the truth these are the issues within the state but the outside world is building tension with the threat of North Korea. You have to read to believe!
Everyone should read this book because there is not one person that would not be affected if a nuclear explosive goes out. The problematic situations in the country is severe and its threat is among the many. I can connect this book to my own knowledge of knowing North Korea and how the country is still suffering as its population dies in the millions. As for myself I would take a stand and help the North Koreans in need. And you should read to understand and help.
Everyone should read this book because there is not one person that would not be affected if a nuclear explosive goes out. The problematic situations in the country is severe and its threat is among the many. I can connect this book to my own knowledge of knowing North Korea and how the country is still suffering as its population dies in the millions. As for myself I would take a stand and help the North Koreans in need. And you should read to understand and help.
December 14, 2010
With North Korea being one of the most secretive countries in the world, any author that tries to shed some light on its inner workings must be commended. Becker definitely did his research and cites many credible sources, although his mild adoration for the neo-con movement in the US shines through a bit too much at times (citing Bush, Wolfowitz and Bolton several times). However, Becker has one big handicap: he absolutely can't write. He has a lot of information to share, but his story is all over the place and is narrative meanders from one topic to the other. As other readers here have observed, Becker might have been helped by creating a strict outline before writing his book. This fact, which seriously undermines the book and the reading process, is also the result of a failing editor, who has missed many many typo's and sentences that miss words.
All in all: a very interesting endeavour, but this book is a tough read, and not just because of its subject.
All in all: a very interesting endeavour, but this book is a tough read, and not just because of its subject.
July 24, 2007
Good intro to some info about North Korea. Would be very skeptical of the introduction (possible future of a war) piece. Also seems to repeat paragraphs occasionally, probably due to cutting and pasting.
May 26, 2008
Really poorly written. This author would benefit from making an outline before he starts to write so he can stay on topic. That said, the later chapters were more interesting than the initial chapters. Korea now makes more sense to me.
June 24, 2008
First book I have ever read for class which has made me both laugh and cry; also the first book I ever read for class which I was unable to put down! (Thanks to being unable to put it down, I finished it on time for class...) This author deserves a lot of recognition for this book.
August 13, 2010
I highly recommend this book for a in-depth look at the history and present relationship with the rogue state of the DPRK. It may be a few years old now but much of the solutions are still viable and pertinent.
October 8, 2014
A chilling account of the recent history of North Korea and its strange dictators. This seems to have been hastily written and edited, with numerous grammatical mistakes and passages cut-and-pasted from one section to another.
October 3, 2007
Very informative. The author definitely editorializes, but there's still a great deal of useful information for anyone who wants to understand the Axis of Evil a bit better.
Read
January 4, 2011Solid info on the Kim's iron grip on the DPRK.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews