So...With Kim Jong-il dead...

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What do you think will happen to the region? China take-over? Merge with South Korea? :p Better relations with SK at any rate? With the USA?

volatility, i expect it to be scary time around the DMZ

World War III coming soon.

Ayayay.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McHyLKw5mHc[/youtube]

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What!! ! you never said a bad thing about him. How comes no one is saying a bad thing about him. You are all crazy.

Aspie_Chav, everyone knows Kim Jong-il is an evildoer, and it has already been discussed ad nauseam in any forum at any given time.

What I now fear is what will happen next if Jong-un assumes position. We don't know the young guy yet, and what he can or the bureaucracy of the North Korean government do.

As for reunification, I fear it would cause a huge crisis, similar to or worse than what happened after the reunification of the two Germanies.

"Rown-reeee, I'm so rown-reeeee.........."


I can't think of Kim Jung Il without hearing that in my head.

Hmm, this could very well be a turning point, but what path will be followed?

I see three possibilities:

1. Business as usual

2. Power struggle followed by a revolution

3. WWIII

Same stuff, different faces.

I told a coworker, we should offer $10 billion - no strings attached - and bought citizenship as well as diplomatic immunity somewhere else to any despot willing to hand over his country to our management, at which point we would do our best to sort of 'flip' it at least toward the road of democracy and wealth. It might sound unjust but when you think about it its like buying out a bad CEO, giving em a golden parachutte, and essentially if we can have experts repo a country we're saving ourselves hundreds of billions in both war and then peacekeeping.

I see a range of possibilities:

Likely

1) Peaceful, though drawn-out successful by Kim Jong-eun
2) Peaceful succession by Chang Sung-taek (though not so peaceful for the Great Successor, since it would probably involve a bullet to the brain).
3) A military coup, involving the ouster of the KWP.

Possible, but unlikely

4) Emergence of another KWP insider
5) PRC invasion (unless the new leadership turns its back on Beijing)

Sheer bloody fantasy

6) Disestablishment of Juche and Military First programs.
7) Revolution
Unification

In the short term, I see no potential for revolution. While there are certainly a large number of North Korean emigrants expressing enormous dissatisfaction with the state of the country, they still appear to be a minority in comparison with the size of the army and the population in general. How widespread is discontent in the population? Well I imagine (but cannot know) that hunger and large scale imprisonment of political prisoners has created a widespread malaise. But is that enough to spark revolution? So far as I can see the only organ capable of formenting revolution is the Army. And why should they rock the boat now? Only if the KWP tries to move the system away from "Military First" would be see the interests of the Army threatened.

But (and this is a big, "But") if ongoing crop failures continue to put the food supply in jeopardy, then someone is going to have to bite the bullet and look at further market reforms--in agriculture if nowhere else. And with private interests in business, information will inevitably follow.

Elections are not enough for democracy. Democracy is not enough for individual freedom. If the North Koreans follow the Chinese model, however, and create a degree of economic freedom, they may still be able to maintain their stranglehold on military and political power.

"In contrast, the chosen successor has a thin resume. He attended a German-language public high school in Bern, Switzerland, where he was registered as the son of a North Korean diplomat. His classmates described him as crazy about basketball and computer games." Source

I would not be surprised if he has a really sweet computer with Internet access, and he's addicted to StarCraft 2. It is, after all, a national pastime in South Korea.