Is North Korea Getting Any Better?

After more than a month out of public view, the country’s state media report that the young dictator has reappeared:

Last seen on Sept. 3, Kim [Jong Un]‘s lack of public appearances marked his longest span of time away from the public, and while Tuesday’s Korean Central News Agency report may put to rest rumors that Kim had been deposed, he is now walking with a cane. Kim has been dogged by persistent rumors about his ill-health, including reports of gout, diabetes, and an ankle injury. The report contains no mention of Kim’s alleged health problems.

But Mark Stone finds “nothing to prove beyond doubt that the images were taken on Monday.” Zooming out, Andrei Lankov claims that the country, while still “a brutal place,” is a little less of a hellhole than it used to be:

To understand North Korea today, one needs to admit that its economy, while grim, is nowhere near breakdown. In fact, from a nadir in the late 1990s — when state-run industries collapsed and a famine killed an estimated 600,000 people — the economy has grown slowly but steadily. … The world barely noticed a remarkable achievement last year: For the first time in nearly three decades, North Korean farmers managed to produce enough food to meet the population’s basic survival needs. In spite of a drought this spring, preliminary reports indicate that this year’s harvest is likely to be good, too.

Lankov also marshals evidence that North Korea’s gulags are housing fewer prisoners:

This has much to do with the regime’s abandonment of the so-called family responsibility principle. Previously, all immediate family members of a convicted political criminal (so long as they shared his or, far less frequently, her household registration) were deemed to be political criminals as well, and thus were also dispatched to the gulag.

After the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994, his son and successor Kim Jong Il ordered that this approach be applied selectively. A few years later, the authorities were instructed to punish relatives only in cases of especially hideous crimes — such as writing anti-government graffiti. By North Korean standards, this represented a substantial improvement.