Victor Cha > Quotes

“The North Korean people did not choose to be poor. They did not choose to have scores of windowless buildings and miles of barren farmland through which I had just been driven earlier that morning. North Koreans, I thought, are genetically as capable of producing what I saw from that helicopter over Seoul. Politics prevented them from doing so.”
― Victor D. Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future

“North Korea has survived as the Impossible State because no one on the inside is empowered to overthrow it, and no one on the outside cares enough to risk the costs of changing it.”
― Victor D. Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future

“Goats. This was once thought to be an antidote for North Korea’s economic ills. The terrain in the northern portion of the peninsula is mountainous and not suitable for farming. There are no green plots of grass for grazing cows, and therefore no source of dairy products or meat. So, in 1996, the North Koreans started a campaign to breed goats. These mountain animals are a good source of milk and meat; moreover, they feed on the shrubs tucked away high in the rocky terrain. The goat-breeding campaign led to a doubling of the goat population almost overnight, and tripled it within two years. This solved a short-term problem, but it had long-term consequences that were more destructive. The goats completely denuded the areas they inhabited, chewing up every single shrub in sight. This then had the effect of removing the last line of the land’s defense against the annual massive rains. The result? Annual monsoons led to deluges of biblical proportions, which wiped out the little remaining arable land and flooded the coal mines that were a source of energy. This only worsened the chronic food and energy shortages.”
― Victor D. Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future

“Kim Il-sung was so confident of his position on the peninsula that he sent a secret emissary to Seoul in hopes that he could get Park to join Kim’s revolution. Though the plan did not work (Park said no in the strongest possible terms: he had the emissary executed),”
― Victor D. Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future

“Chinese authorities built green chain-link fences around the perimeter of the U.S. embassy compound in Beijing to prevent defections. Barbed wire was strewn across the tops of the fences and the fences were set a few yards outside the main walls in order to ensure that North Koreans would fall between the newly built fence and the old wall if they tried to jump it.”
― Victor D. Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future