View All Photos
Victor Cha – THE IMPOSSIBLE STATE : North Korea, Past And Future
qrf
qrf
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
qrf
qrf
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
rpt
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO
oznorCO

THE IMPOSSIBLE STATE : North Korea, Past And Future

Victor Cha
LIGHTLY USED, PAPERBACK

RM20.00

Charts How This Monolithic, Dysfunctional And Dangerous State Came About & Discusses Future Implications For The Korean Peninsula

Remarks Free Cover-Pages Wrapping
ISBN 9780062906366
Book Condition LIGHTLY USED
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher HarperCollins Publisher (ECCO PRESS)
Publication Date 23 October 2018
Pages 576
Weight 0.54 kg
Dimension 20.5 × 13.5 × 3 cm
Availability: 1 in stock

Additional information

1 in stock

SHARE:
  • Detail Description

Description

The definitive account of North Korea, its veiled past and uncertain future, from the former Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council
 
North Korea has often been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons – famine, human rights violations, nuclear, or ballistic missile tests, kidnapping, terrorism and military provocations against its neighbors. The mysterious antics of the ruling Kim dynasty also attract endless speculation as to how they maintain their iron grip over this Stalinist relic of a country.
 
There is no society more closed off from the world today then North Korea. Not even Burma or Syria rival the level of control found in the country. From an intelligence perspective, North Korea is one of the hardest to penetrate.
 
What can be seen from satellites is only a small portion of that which is buried deep underground in 11,000 tunnels and caves. With the death of Kim Jong-il in December 2011, it has become more paramount than ever to understand this mysterious country.
 
Former director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council Victor Cha argues that North Korea is in an untenable and combustible situation—one that the next U.S. president will have no choice but to confront.
 
In The Impossible State, seasoned international-policy expert and lauded scholar Victor Cha pulls back the curtain on this controversial and isolated country, providing the best look yet at North Korea’s history, the rise of the Kim family dynasty, and the obsessive personality cult that empowers them.


Much discussed and often maligned, precious little is known or understood about North Korea, the world’s most controversial and isolated country. Victor Cha attempts to pull back the curtain, providing insights into North Korea’s history, and the rise of the Kim family dynasty.
 
The Impossible State illuminates the regime’s complex economy and culture, its record of human-rights abuses, its relationship with its neighbours and the United States, and analyzes the regime’s major security issues; all in the light of the destabilizing effects of Kim Jong-il’s recent death.
 
He illuminates the repressive regime’s complex economy and culture, its appalling record of human-rights abuses, and its belligerent relationship with the United States, and analyzes the regime’s major security issues—from the seemingly endless war with its southern neighbor to its frightening nuclear ambitions—all in light of the destabilizing effects of Kim Jong-il’s recent death.
 
How this enigmatic nation-state—one that regularly violates its own citizens’ inalienable rights and has suffered famine, global economic sanctions, a collapsed economy, and near total isolation from the rest of the world—has continued to survive has long been a question that preoccupies the West.
 
How did North Korea become the “Impossible State”? How has it survived when many others have long since collapsed? How could the leadership have made so many poor decisions? Why don’t people rise up against the injustices? What does the leadership ultimately want? The answers to these questions require complex answers. As Cha explains:
◆ To understand the affection the North Koreans have for the Kim family you must look to the history of the ideology and the cult of personality.
◆ To understand the nuclear weapons threats requires a close look at the bad economic choices that have been made for the past 60 years.
◆ To understand the human rights abuses requires an examination of the intense paranoia of the regime.
 
Part descriptive narrative, part political analysis, and part personal memoir, The Impossible State gathers together much of what is already known about North Korea – officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) – and interprets it intelligently.
 
The author also adds insights on American diplomacy toward the DPRK gathered during his participation in the ill-fated “Six Party Talks” – an attempt to bring together the U.S., Japan, both Koreas, China and Russia in a bid to de-nuclearize the peninsula.
 
Cha reveals a land of contradictions, one facing a pivotal and disquieting transition of power from tyrannical father to inexperienced son, and delves into the ideology that leads an oppressed, starving populace to cling so fiercely to its failed leadership.
 
With rare personal anecdotes from the author’s time in Pyongyang and his tenure as an adviser in the White House, this engagingly written, authoritative, and highly accessible history offers much-needed answers to the most pressing questions about North Korea and ultimately warns of a regime that might be closer to its end than many might think—a political collapse for which America and its allies may be woefully unprepared.
 
First Cha points to the untimely leadership succession brought about by Kim Jong-il’s death in December of 2011. His replacement is Kim Jong-un, his third son – a Swiss-educated man in his late-20s, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his grandfather and erstwhile official Head of State (his death in 1994 notwithstanding), Kim Il-Sung (known as the “Great Leader”).
 
However, we know practically nothing about his abilities as a statesman or personality, except trivia such as his passion for American basketball and so forth (though we do not know if he enjoyed playing “Mario Kart” or listening to the Beach Boys alongside his father .
 
As Cha notes: “this is all very amusing and mysterious, but lack of information about North Korea is deadly serious .” The new leader faces some formidable challenges in perpetuating the “impossible state.” Untried and untested, and despite his recent promotion to Marshall of the Korean People’s Army – though he apparently lacks any military experience – he faces something of a “mission impossible” in keeping his troubled regime afloat and successfully piloting its future course.
 
The main dilemma is as follows: the national economy has been untenable for decades and the regime appears impervious to advice from Beijing to undertake desperately-needed economic improvements.
 
The same goes for the political edifice of North Korea, which is being slowly undermined from within and outside, by a failure to provide for its people, and by a trickle of information reaching its hapless citizens from neighboring countries.
 
Cha asserts that Kim Jong-un “needs reform to survive, but the process of opening up will undeniably lead to the end of his political control ” Instead, desperate to retain absolute authority the leadership has staked all on its Songun or “military first” policy, including its nuclear weapons program, both to repress internal dissent and deter outside intervention.
 
As hinted at in the book’s title, Cha identifies an atavistic return to past glories embodied in what he calls a “neo-juche” policy. In recognition that its best days of “juche” or national self-reliance (which occurred around the third-quarter of the C20th) are behind it, and with no prospect for future achievement, the regime seeks to retreat into the glory days of the past in order to sustain itself.
 
Ultimately, this engagingly written, authoritative, and highly accessible history warns of a regime that might be closer to its end than many might think—a political collapse for which America and its allies may be woefully unprepared.
 
——————————————————–
KIRKUS REVIEW :
 
From the former director of Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, an eye-opening view of the closed, repressive dictatorship of North Korea.
 
Cha (Foreign Service/Georgetown Univ.; Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia, 2008, etc.) first visited North Korea during George W. Bush’s second term with then-governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson to try to defuse nuclear-testing tensions.
 
The author was amazed at the chasm between party haves and everybody else, confirming all that he knew about the authoritarian country. Cha aims to get at some of the pressing questions since Kim Jong-il’s death and the succession of the utterly unknown younger son, Kim Jong-un—e.g., what happened to this once-vigorous dictatorship, and why does the populace do nothing about it? How can the West know so little about what really goes on there?
 
For Cha, the key that unlocked the regime’s secrets was its nostalgia for the good old days of the 1950s and ’60s, when China and the Soviet Union were bolstering North Korean industry and military, while the South was still an agrarian backwater.
 
American aggression during the Korean War left a lasting bitterness, and while the South was grappling with American ambivalence toward its leaders, the North under Kim Il-sung embraced the ideology of juche, or self-reliance, and the cult of the Great Leader.
 
As a result, writes Cha, the North Koreans are simply too oppressed to revolt—not to mention the devastating effects from “Olympic envy” of trying to catch up to Seoul’s 1988 hosting, and the terrible famine of the mid ’90s.
 
The author looks closely at the Kim family, the terrible economic decisions that plunged the country into poverty, the shocking gulag system, its paranoid nuclear proliferation program and the tenuous relations with South Korea. A useful, pertinent work for understanding the human story behind the headlines.
 
——————————————————–
About the Author :
 
Victor Cha served in the White House as Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007. He currently holds the D. S. Song-KF Chair in Government and Asian Studies at Georgetown University and is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
[ --- Read more --- ]
You've just added this product to the cart: