Based on Tatsuya Kato’s Sankei Shimbun column, this article examines the regime crisis that the coronavirus pandemic may create in North Korea. It discusses economic deterioration under sanctions, shrinking trade with China, food shortages, Kim Jong-un’s possible extraction from elites, and alleged Chinese cash support brought by Xi Jinping, revealing North Korea’s dependence on China and the instability of its regime.

April 7, 2020
It is believed that the tens of millions of dollars in cash that Chinese President Xi Jinping brought with him when he visited North Korea in June 2019, risking criticism for violating sanctions, were used to cover the construction costs.
The following is from Tatsuya Kato’s regular column, published in today’s Sankei Shimbun under the title “The Regime Crisis in the North Created by the Coronavirus.”
As the world remains on alert over the spread of the novel coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, interest in North Korea has recently been low.
North Korea is trying to show its presence by firing short-range ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan.
But there is too great a difference in scale between test-firing missiles and the novel coronavirus, which has already caused nearly 70,000 deaths worldwide and still shows no prospect of ending.
There are many who point out that North Korea, whose business model of staging crises, attracting attention, and converting that situation into profit has ceased to function, is now in a situation in which anything could happen to the regime at any time.
In particular, this year is the final year of the “five-year strategy for national economic development” that Kim Jong-un presented at the party congress in May 2016.
But far from “development,” the outlook is completely dark.
He has poured the treasured resources for governance into tourism resources, steel mill development, and housing supply, only to produce policies that have instead updated the worst-case situation.
To whom, and how, will he make others pay the price for these failures?
If North Korea’s domestic politics and diplomacy become unstable in the future, that will be the key point.
Even so, just how bad is the North Korean economy, which is said to be exhausted by sanctions?
According to South Korea’s central bank, the Bank of Korea, North Korea’s real gross domestic product in 2018 decreased by 4.1 percent from the previous year.
It was the second consecutive year of negative growth.
This was the lowest level in 21 years, since 1997, when the effects of the “Arduous March,” in which several million people died from starvation and other causes, appeared, with a negative 6.5 percent.
The biggest problem lies in the shrinking trade with China, which holds the power of life and death over North Korea.
North Korea’s trade volume in 2018 was 2.843 billion dollars.
This was half that of the previous year, and exports to China, which account for 95 percent of its trade, also decreased by 88.2 percent from the previous year.
A Foreign Ministry official points out that “United Nations sanctions struck directly.”
Meanwhile, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, and the World Food Programme, WFP, estimated this year that grain production from November 2018 to October 2019 decreased by 12 percent from the previous year to 4.85 million tons.
By this calculation, 40 percent of the population lacks food.
However, the North Korean side claimed that the harvest during the same period was “a great bumper crop.”
In recent years, however, North Korea has instructed its people to raise herbivorous livestock.
In other words, they are being told to raise rabbits for food.
The fact that people are again being instructed to solve the food problem by themselves in this way is something not seen since the Arduous March.
The real situation can be easily imagined.
Regarding North Korean agriculture, one should mention a peculiar development being watched by American intelligence agencies.
It is the newly built phosphate fertilizer plant in Sunchon City, South Pyongan Province.
“Kim Jong-un visited it this year as his first on-site guidance of the New Year, and it is his highest-priority economic project. But it is believed that the tens of millions of dollars in cash that Chinese President Xi Jinping brought with him when he visited North Korea in June 2019, risking criticism for violating sanctions, were used to cover the construction costs,” according to a U.S. government source.
It is a good example of how the North survives on China’s money.
For the North Korean economy to remain alive, a complete restoration of the movement of people and goods between China and North Korea is indispensable.
But the Kim Jong-un regime, fearing the inflow of the virus, will not fully accept China, the source of the outbreak, for the time being.
A defector who was formerly a North Korean officer explained this to the author.
“The worsening economy and the prolongation of the coronavirus crisis will bring economic hardship even to Kim Jong-un, who lives in luxury. Kim Jong-un will absolutely not lower his standard of living, so the only remaining option will be extraction from the elites.”
There, three extraction measures are presented to Kim Jong-un.
First, increasing the amount of tribute paid to Kim Jong-un.
Second, strengthening arbitrary anti-corruption campaigns in order to justify confiscation of assets.
Third, a “food for loyalty” program, in which food distribution routes are manipulated to tame people into showing loyalty.
Until now, it has been said that North Korea’s leaders gave rare goods to the elite class and received loyalty in return.
But is the system now about to become one in which the elites must both give up property and show loyalty?
The novel coronavirus, which is spreading calamity on a global scale, could become the fuse that ignites hatred of Kim Jong-un among North Korea’s elite class and a crisis for the regime.