Late January is a time when we can celebrate the fifth anniversary of the ignominious failure of the North Korean currency reform. This is indeed something to be celebrated: The failure of the reforms demonstrated that the average North Korean can sometimes win over the seemingly invincible forces of bureaucracy in an authoritarian state.

In the early 1990s, the North Korean state socialist economy, once patterned upon Stalin’s Russia, began to fall apart. Factories stopped operating and food rations were not delivered anymore. A few hundred-thousand people perished in the famine, but many more survived – and nearly all of