April 19, 2024
Evergreen

When North Korea almost backed China-style economic reforms

A brief flirtation with Dengist marketization was abandoned - only a few years before the famine

In the 1980s, North Korea briefly experimented with Chinese-style reforms. The project led to great controversy and a round of purges inside the lower echelons of the top leadership.

For a brief time, however, to those who knew what was going on, it appeared as if North Korea might be about to follow China and, tentatively, open up its economy.

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