Eric's Beijing Diary

Last night I went to the Bookworm for a lecture night with Jasper Becker. I haven't really read much of Jasper Becker's stuff, because he tends to see the dark side of things, so it's kinda depressing. Still, he is one of the most widely published of the old China hands, and this time I had to cut him a little slack, because his latest book is about North Korea, and I am a bit of a pessimist myself on that subject. Pretty hard not to be.

I asked him what he thought of the current six-party talks. He said he didn't think that anything substantial would be accomplished. I told him that my frustration with the situation is that the whole thing boils down to repeated attempts by the Kim regime to extort money from the West to support a system that seems incapable of generating capital, because of failed economic policies. In other words, North Korea, the only Marxist economy left in the world, is forced to hold the West hostage to it's demands because, as every other Marxist economy has discovered, Marxism doesn't work.

This evening, I met a guy at the coffee bar who had just come from North Korea. Apparently they have opened up the border to Americans for a few weeks. I told him that I planned to go, but that I could not go now. He told me it was the strangest tour he had ever been on. Of course, it is well known that anyone going into Korea is escorted everywhere. And they hold your passport. But what he also told me is that there seem to be others around him that are somehow operating in an undercover capacity. For example, he met waitress in a restaurant who had been a flight attendant on his flight into the country, but she had a different name tag, and refused to acknowledge that she was the same person.