Daily Times

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or simply North Korea, three months into 2016, faces a new round of punitive UN sanctions. The long-standing communist regime in Pyongyang that world powers decry as repressive and belligerent to neighbours is being censured for conducting an unverified hydrogen bomb test in January and launching a satellite rocket the following month using banned missile technology. Pyongyang has carried out 10 nuclear and ballistic missile tests over the last decade, each time roundly condemned by the US, Japan and South Korea, and infringing a slew of UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions in the process.

After previously dithering over the scope of new sanctions, Pyongyang’s only friend China concurred with the White House on February 25 apropos “the importance of a strong and united international response to North Korea’s provocations.” Beijing’s wholehearted participation in admonishing North Korea is thought of as key in tempering DPRK supreme leader Kim Jong-Un’s fiery rhetoric, since China is the pariah state’s largest trading partner, and often accused of subverting UNSC obligations to keep the regime afloat. China, though, fears that upending Jong-Un would create a proxy battleground right next door pitting its interests against those of Washington, Tokyo and Seoul.

That said, the international community cracking down on North Korea is not news. A far more novel statistic comes courtesy of the DPRK’s token communist comrade in Indochina, Vietnam. A Pew Research poll last year revealed that 95 percent Vietnamese share an unabashed love for capitalism. In the US, meanwhile, results of the same survey paled by comparison and only 70 percent Americans thought laissez-faire was the ideal economic system. This, lest we forget, in a country where calling someone a socialist can still mean an insult, and where McCarthyism in the 1950s actively sought to purge communists from government and society.

It is profoundly striking how two communist relics of the Cold War, Vietnam and North Korea, have taken such divergent paths to the 21st century. After World War II and eventually ousting their colonial masters France and Japan respectively, both countries became war theatres in the global confrontation between the US and Soviet Union. Washington then viewed communism’s eastward expansion as an existential threat, to the point where a US National Security Council report (NSC-68) from 1950 urged the government to “contain” Soviet ambitions “regardless of the intrinsic strategic or economic value of the lands in question.”

Many factors conspired to defeat US military interventions in East Asia. Not only did Washington underestimate the broad regional blowback against decades of colonial exploitation, it also miscalculated the martial spirit of the natives, especially when coupled with Sino-Soviet training and munitions. Around the mid-1980s, however, Vietnam began searching for an exit lane away from Soviet-style collectivism. Whereas postwar North Korea rapidly industrialised through Stalin-esque five-year plans and indeed outstripped the capitalist South’s per capita output well into the 1970s, Vietnam hobbled from international embargoes and the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979.

Gripped by long bread lines and frequent rationing, Vietnam’s communist leaders finally gave in to free-market temptation in 1986, and began the “Doi Moi” series of mass economic reforms on a war footing. They also amended the constitution in 1992 to spotlight the importance of private sector investment and the Vietnam’s movement towards “a market economy with socialist orientation.” Backchannel diplomacy with Washington for foreign aid, meanwhile, started bearing fruit, especially after Hanoi dropped its persistent demands for war reparations. Successive US governments had previously strong-armed international lending bodies like the IMF to deny Vietnam any reconstruction funds.

With Washington willing to turn the page on acrimony, Vietnam morphed from a starving nation three decades ago to a middle-income economy today that attracted record foreign direct investments of 72 billion dollars in 2008. Between 1991 and 2000, national GDP grew by 7.5 percent per annum on average as Hanoi set in motion economic blueprints that sold off sick, state-owned companies and eased restrictions on private enterprise. The US-Vietnam Trade Bilateral Agreement in 2001 formalised the reboot of two-way relations and with Washington’s support, Vietnam became a full member of the World Trade Organisation in 2007.

North Korea, by comparison, made an about-face into the economic wilderness after communism collapsed in Russia. Whereas Vietnam shelved central planning out of sheer necessity to feed its citizens, the dynastic Kims in DPRK turned their country inwards and adversarial towards the west by peddling paranoia disguised as self-reliance. Thanks to a cult of personality created around the Kim family, the deep-seated culture of ‘gift politics’ and secret slush funds for top officials to keep their loyalty, Jong-Un continues to drive North Korea’s fiscal outlook deeper into the red despite its abundance of mineral resources. Capitalism may breed inequality and class warfare, but as Vietnam discovered, sustainable growth is only possible though individual entrepreneurship and innovation.

The writer is a freelance columnist and audio engineer based in Islamabad