The following article is a column by Aidan Foster-Carter, an honorary senior research fellow in Sociology and Modern Korea at Leeds University in England.

North Korea has always been inward-looking. Never more so than now, as it battens down the hatches against COVID-19.

Domestic concerns, the economy above all, dominated last month’s Party Congress. Official rhetoric has long preached self-reliance, but now that drumbeat grows louder than ever.

Yet this misleads. No country is an island, not even the DPRK. This is true in two senses.

First, the rhetoric is a lie. North Korea is not self-sufficient. Never has been, never