The stage was set when in May 2010 when, unbeknownst to us all, Kim Jong-il visited a Suguo supermarket in Yangzhou, just an hour away from Nanjing, during one of four visits (read “shopping trips” given his taste for luxury goods) made during the last two years of his life. The website of Suguo’s owners, China Resource Vanguard Co., afterward quoted the North Korean leader as saying, “Well done!” during his browsing of the convenience store.
For now it is coming to light the late leader’s awareness of the need to save his country in his final days, and so it appears he was using his not inconsiderable political skills to deftly lay the groundwork for his son as successor by ushering in a new, two-pronged focus on the economy along with defense.
In what is very reminiscent of China in the late 1980s and early 1990s North Korea appears to be opening up, inch by inch, to western shopping practices, albeit those from their more left of centre comrade across the border. In North Korea today, the Pyongyang Department Store No.1 offers a checkout lane for foreigners in which they can change their sparkly dollars to North Korean Won. Not so long ago, Shanghai’s No.1 Department Store was one of the few places foreigners could officially shop, and then only with the Foreign Exchange Certificate (FEC), effectively a separate currency. Away from such shops, and away from Pyongyang and Shanghai, much of the countries remain, or remained, impoverished.
Just as with Shenzhen 30 years ago, it lying across the border from Hong Kong, so the China-North Korea border towns are first to benefit from the new nod to socialist market economy practices. There, the Chinese are shipping in their own consumer goods along with those of other countries, be they pirated or real, along brand new roads built expressly for the purpose, and at the Chinese expense.
In the capital of Pyongyang the unprecedentedly step has also been taken of allowing a foreign entity controlling stake in a new shopping mall. The Kwangpok Area Supermarket in the west of the city held its grand opening on 5th January this year as a joint venture between North Korea’s T’aesong General Trading Corporation and China’s Feihaimengxin Trading Company, in which the latter holds a 65% controlling share. It was at the almost complete store where Kim Jong-il reportedly made his last public appearance in mid December last year.
The irony lies in that it may well be thanks to China that North Korea finds a way to open itself up to internationalism leading to the trade and cash flow its economy so badly needs. For the communist allies can at least find common ground in the kind of sanctioned commerce that leaves the state largely in control, a thought that must have been not so far from the back of Kim Jong-il’s mind as he wandered the aisles of that little Suguo in Yangzhou.
