Protests in China and Iran come as a surprise. One would have thought those bastions of authoritarian rule would have been the last places on Earth where dissidents would defy the systems in which they exist. The dictators at the top of the ruling structures of both countries count on their security forces to round up the miscreants and on their courts to mete out drastic sentences, including death.
The fact that China’s President Xi Jinping has had to repress demonstrations in the capital, Beijing, and the business and industrial center, Shanghai, would have seemed unimaginable as he began a third five-year term as general secretary of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Now images of the bloody crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing in June 1989 come to mind.
Iran is in even worse trouble. The forces upholding the rule of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have killed several hundred mostly young people in a wave of unrest that’s been going on for months. Ostensibly, the protests were triggered by the fatal beating of a young woman caught violating the strict Islamic dress code. Now the protests have escalated into calls for the end of a regime that’s just as harsh as that of the U.S.-backed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, overthrown in 1979.
In China, outrage focuses on the strict restraints imposed in the struggle to stop the spread of COVID-19. Authorities have quarantined entire communities in their continuing response to the disease, which broke out in Wuhan in 2019. As in Iran, a single episode sparked the protests, the deaths of 10 people who died in a fire in the remote city of Urumqi, in Xinjiang Province, after fire engines were delayed getting to the scene by barriers set up to combat COVID.
In China and Iran, the protests have to be welcomed by Washington. The Chinese aren’t going beyond rhetoric in their claims to the independent island province of Taiwan. President Xi, orchestrating a campaign to repress the protesters, has to focus on problems at home. The sight of signs calling for his ouster shows the weakness of his rule beneath external displays of bravado.
But what about North Korea? How is it that Kim Jong-un has maintained such tight control over his people, many of them hungry and living in poverty as they face another harsh winter? Is there no chance of unrest finally flaring up against his brutal rule?
The answer, as it has been for the entire history of the Kim dynasty, going back to the installation of Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, by the Soviet Union after the Japanese surrender in 1945, is almost certainly no. No one perceives overt hints of opposition to his rule even though some of his impoverished citizens have got to be unhappy. He has been so successful at tightening his northern borders along the Yalu (Amnok) and Tumen rivers with China that we’re not even hearing much from the few defectors who somehow are making it to the South.
In comparison to North Korea, China and Iran seem almost like free countries. It’s virtually inconceivable, given the depth of domestic espionage in North Korea, of colleagues informing on colleagues, of neighbors spying on neighbors, to imagine anyone risking death by breathing a word of protest against the regime.
But aren’t people in North Korea at all aware of what’s happening in China? Don’t they get the news by tuning into illicit broadcasts or highly risky mobile phone connections? Thousands of North Koreans live and work legally, with full authorization, in the Chinese city of Dandong, across the river from Sinuiju, the major North Korean city facing China. Although Chinese authorities are stifling news of what’s happening, some of these people must have gotten wind of trouble in cities elsewhere.
But maybe China’s troubles are good news for Kim Jong-un. Xi and Kim have exchanged messages pledging to work more closely than ever for mutual benefit. Xi may be less likely to pressure Kim into holding off on another nuclear test while worrying about simmering unrest at home. Maybe he’ll throw in more shipments of food and other vital supplies and totally forget about U.N. sanctions against the North for its nuclear and missile tests.
Xi will surely be just as anxious as Kim to stop the disease of civil disobedience from spreading to North Korea. And Kim will keep his fiefdom as tightly shielded from the Chinese as he has been to block the spread of COVID-19 into North Korea since closing his borders at the first sign of the pandemic nearly three years ago.
