ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to the question of whether China’s developmental approach offers a partial solution to the human rights problem in North Korea. It examines the domestic politics of human rights in North Korea and the degree to which the political system and its political conditions enable and constrain the possibility of applying the China model of human rights to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The chapter uses a novel “supply-and-demand” approach to explain the limited development of human rights in North Korea and the potential of the China model. The human rights problem in North Korea, we show, is a struggle between the state and its citizens over the optimal level of rights that should be available and enjoyed. The human rights that are supplied in North Korea have distinctive philosophical bases, but in practice the regime has tightly restricted access to the types of rights that would threaten its rule. At the same time, North Korean citizens, informed by nationalistic sentiment, also seem to prefer reform over regime change. The regime has undertaken a modest degree of reform, with a view to pre-empting and co-opting discontent, and dissuading calls for thorough reform. These efforts have resulted in modest improvements in the rights available to ordinary North Koreans, but the China model could be a far more effective means of reducing the gap between the supply of and demand for human rights in North Korea.
