ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, watchers of North Korea have looked for signs that the government in Pyongyang was prepared to undertake practical reforms to rescue its faltering economy and deliver on the promise that its people will “eat rice and meat soup, wear silk clothes, and live in a house with a tiled roof.” Each new initiative-the adoption of a foreign jointventure law in 1984, the signing of reconciliation and nuclear-free agreements with South Korea in 1991, the opening of the Najin-Sonbong foreign trade zone in 1991, the Agreed Framework freezing the North’s nuclear program in exchange for economic and diplomatic rewards from the United States in 1994, and the first inter-Korean summit meeting in June 2000-raised the same question: Is North Korea ready to modify or abandon its totalitarian social system and open its borders to South Korea and the international community?
