Yesterday, rumors swept the Internet, primarily via Twitter, that the new leader of North Korea had been assassinated in Beijing:

The claim that Kim, supreme leader of North Korea since the death of his father Kim Jong Il in December, had died apparently stemmed from a message sent out by a man who works near the country’s embassy in Beijing.

He posted on Sina Weibo: ‘Downstairs from the office, the cars at the Korean embassy are increasing rapidly, now there are over 30 cars. It’s the first time I’ve seen this situation, did something happen in Korea?’

This seemingly innocuous question, bolstered by other witnesses who saw an unusual number of cars at the embassy, was magnified by the power of internet gossip into a rumour that Kim had been assassinated by gunmen who burst in his bedroom and were subsequently killed by his bodyguards.

Wilder commentators even spun the supposed assassination in to a broader claim that a coup was underway in North Korea which could depose the Kim dynasty, rulers of the country ever since it split with the south in 1948.

But when ABC News asked U.S. officials for confirmation of the assassination rumours, one simply told them, ‘There’s nothing to this.’

Another official said: ‘Our experts are monitoring the situation and we see no abnormal activity on the [Korean] peninsula and nothing that credits that tweet as accurate.’

It was thought that the death of the elder Kim would herald a period of instability, potentially leading to regime change, but those expectations have not been fulfilled.

A less dramatic but equally bizarre explanation for the large number of cars at the North Korean embassy was suggested by Gawker and Chinese news agency Phoenix.

They pointed out that this month would have been the 70th birthday of Kim Jong Il, and a large number of events including tours of China and North Korea are set to mark the anniversary.

It sounds like a totally implausible story, of course. The idea that the leader of a foreign country could be assassinated in his own country’s embassy in the middle of Beijing and the only news about it would be on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter makes no sense at all. And yet, the story started getting repeated. Then, someone set up a fake BBC News account on Twitter yesterday afternoon that send out a “Breaking News” alert confirming Kim’s death. That story ended up getting repeated by thousands of people, and seen by thousands more. And it was all untrue.

Max Fisher offers an explanation for why people might have found a story like this believable despite the questionable sourcing:

The answer may have something to do with how Americans conceive of the difference between open societies, like ours, and closed societies, like those of China and North Korea. If a Western head of state had been assassinated in a neighboring Western capital, the news would saturate the globe within moments. We understand that information doesn’t work the same way in China or North Korea, that news is controlled and its flow regulated. But the Western imagination often sees Chinese and North Korean societies as something akin to George Orwell’s 1984, when the truth is much more complicated.

Information about what happens inside North Korea is, in fact, rare and often inscrutable. Kim Jong Il had been dead for hours and his country officially rudderless when the news finally broke, something that would likely have been impossible in any other country. Key events are rarely understood by the outside world, if we even find out. Last December, a freight train was derailed in a suspected attack; no one outside North Korea knows why or by whom. The hermit kingdom’s bizarre and Orwellian opacity has long fascinated the world. The images out of the country are so bizarre and hard information so scant that there’s little to prevent our imaginations from running wild. And the status of Kim Jong Un’s rule is still so uncertain (is he really in charge or is the military? does he maintain tight control or is the regime nearing collapse?) that we are ready to believe anything.

But China is not North Korea. Though it still sometimes appears that way in the Western conception, the country has transformed since the days of Mao Zedong, when they really were similar. Though the Chinese state is still one of the world’s most repressive, reliably ranking at or near the bottom of every list of countries by civil liberties or basic rights, Chinese society is vibrant and noisy, especially in the capital, where the “assassination” reportedly took place. Individuals may not be allowed to organize, protest, or discuss sensitive events, but they do it anyway, in small ways they expect will be tolerated. If they do any of them too much, they know, the consequences can be brutal. The Communist Party’s hand is heavy enough to prevent mass gatherings in Tienanmen Square, but not to keep hordes of witnesses to an assassination totally silent.

Beijing has almost 20 million people; maybe about half of its Internet users are on Weibo (the rate is 30 percent nationally). Why did only one of those witness the broad-daylight murder of a visiting head-of-state, who presumably would have been plowing through traffic with an enormous entourage? Why didn’t any of the many Western and other foreign reporters scattered across the city either see or hear anything? And why did no one report the massive security shut-down that Beijing’s army-sized police force certainly would have launched across the city?

These are all questions that a Chinese observer would have known to ask before quickly dismissing the story as an obvious fraud. But far-away Western bloggers and their readers, unfamiliar with the locations of China’s red-lines and perhaps a bit confused about the differences between Beijing and Pyongyang, might be willing to believe that Kim Jong Un’s assassination could really go unreported.

So perhaps people need to realize that Mao doesn’t rule China anymore, and that they need to learn a little bit more about Asia.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced this afternoon that the timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is being accelerated:

BRUSSELS — In a major milestone toward ending a decade of war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said on Wednesday that American forces would step back from a combat role there as early as mid-2013, more than a year before all American troops are scheduled to come home.

Mr. Panetta cast the decision as an orderly step in a withdrawal process long planned by the United States and its allies, but his comments were the first time that the United States had put a date on stepping back from its central role in the war. The defense secretary’s words reflected the Obama administration’s eagerness to bring to a close the second of two grinding ground wars it inherited from the Bush administration.

Promising the end of the American combat mission in Afghanistan next year would also give Mr. Obama a certain applause line in his re-election stump speech this fall.

Mr. Panetta said no decisions had been made about the number of American troops to be withdrawn in 2013, and he made clear that substantial fighting lies ahead. “It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be combat-ready; we will be, because we always have to be in order to defend ourselves,” he told reporters on his plane on his way to a NATO meeting in Brussels, where Afghanistan is to be a central focus.

The United States has some 90,000 troops in Afghanistan, but 22,000 of them are due home by this fall. There has been no schedule set for the pace of the withdrawal of the 68,000 American troops who will remain, only that all are to be out by the end of 2014.

Mr. Panetta offered no details of what stepping back from combat would mean, saying only that the troops would move into an “advise-and-assist” role to Afghanistan’s security forces. Such definitions are typically murky, particularly in a country like Afghanistan, where American forces are spread widely among small bases across the desert, farmland and mountains, and where the native security forces have a mixed record of success at best.

The defense secretary offered the withdrawal of the United States from Iraq as a model. American troops there eventually pulled back to large bases and left the bulk of the fighting to the Iraqis.

This isn’t necessarily a surprise, of course. The President had previously announced that American forces would be out of the country by 2014, and there has been pressure from other participants in the NATO mission such as France to bring the mission to an end as soon as possible. Moreover, the war itself remains as unpopular here at home as it has been for a long time. Add into this the increasing tensions with Pakistan ever since the raid that got Osama bin Laden and last year’s mistaken drone strike that killed Pakistani soldiers, and this is probably the wisest decision at this point.

The Daily Mail reports that Kim Jong-Un and his underlings are punishing citizens perceived not to have sufficiently mourned the death of his father:

North Korea’s hardline regime is punishing those who did not cry at the death of dictator Kim Jong-il, according to reports.

Sentences of at least six months in labour camps are also apparently being given to those who didn’t go to the organised mourning events, while anyone who criticised the new leader Kim Jong-un is also being punished.

Those who tried to leave the country, or even made a mobile phone call out, were also being disciplined, it has been claimed.

Daily NK says a source has claimed that ‘criticism sessions’ – which began after the official period of mourning – have now finished and tough sentences are being given out.

The informant from North Hamkyung Province told the website: ‘The authorities are handing down at least six months in a labour-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organised gatherings during the mourning period, or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn’t seem genuine.’

The source claimed the criticism sessions created a ‘vicious atmosphere of fear’, which meant the new leader, Kim Jong-un, was being accused of preying on the people now that he has taken power.

It is unclear how many people face incarceration but the figure could be many thousands.

Along with criticism sessions, the regime is also ramping up its efforts to enforce the cult of personality of the new leader.

The source told Daily NK: ‘Every day from 7am until 7pm they have vehicles for broadcast propaganda parked on busy roads full of people going to and from work, noisily working to proclaim Kim Jong-un’s greatness.’

Intensive sessions, to teach groups including the Union of Democratic Women and workers in factories and schools about the greatness of the new leader, were leaving people ‘exhausted’, the source added.

It all sounds insane, unbelievably so. This is North Korea, however. Insane has been a way of life there for 60 years.

Photo of “mourning” North Korean children via The Daily Mail and Reuters

WASHINGTON — A nearly two-month lull in American drone strikes in Pakistan has helped embolden Al Qaeda and several Pakistani militant factions to regroup, increase attacks against Pakistani security forces and threaten intensified strikes against allied forces in Afghanistan, American and Pakistani officials say.

The insurgents are increasingly taking advantage of tensions raised by an American airstrike in November that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers in two border outposts, plunging relations between the countries to new depths. The Central Intelligence Agency, hoping to avoid making matters worse while Pakistan completes a wide-ranging review of its security relationship with the United States, has not conducted a drone strike since mid-November.

Diplomats and intelligence analysts say the pause in C.I.A. missile strikes — the longest in Pakistan in more than three years — is offering for now greater freedom of movement to an insurgency that had been splintered by in-fighting and battered by American drone attacks in recent months. Several feuding factions said last week that they were patching up their differences, at least temporarily, to improve their image after a series of kidnappings and, by some accounts, to focus on fighting Americans in Afghanistan.

Other militant groups continue attacking Pakistani forces. Just last week, Taliban insurgents killed 15 security soldiers who had been kidnapped in retaliation for the death of a militant commander.

The spike in violence in the tribal areas — up nearly 10 percent in 2011 from the previous year, according to a new independent report — comes amid reports of negotiations between Pakistan’s government and some local Taliban factions, although the military denies that such talks are taking place.

A logistics operative with the Haqqani terrorist group, which uses sanctuaries in Pakistan to carry out attacks on allied troops in Afghanistan, said militants could still hear drones flying surveillance missions, day and night. “There are still drones, but there is no fear anymore,” he said in a telephone interview. The logistics operative said fighters now felt safer to roam more freely.

Over all, drone strikes in Pakistan dropped to 64 last year, compared with 117 strikes in 2010, according to The Long War Journal, a Web site that monitors the attacks. Analysts attribute the decrease to a dwindling number of senior Qaeda leaders and a pause in strikes last year after the arrest in January of Raymond Davis, a C.I.A. security contractor who killed two Pakistanis; the Navy Seal raid in May that killed Osama bin Laden; and the American airstrike on Nov. 26.

Pakistan ordered drone operations at its Shamsi air base closed after that airstrike, but C.I.A. drones flying from bases in Afghanistan continue to fly surveillance missions over the tribal areas. The drones would be cleared to fire on a senior militant leader if there was credible intelligence and minimal risk to civilians, American officials said. But for now, the Predator and Reaper drones are holding their fire, the longest pause in Pakistan since July 2008.

And the longer they do, the more the militants will be able to further entrench themselves.

A few people over at Reddit have discovered an odd detail from photographs of yesterday’s memorial service for Kim Jong-il:

At the Wire today, Dashiell Bennett highlights the North Korean state news agency’s apparently random manipulation of an image from yesterday’s funeral procession for Kim Jong Il — a crude photoshop job done, Bennett notes, “in such a minor and pointless way that it underscores the paranoid insanity of totalitarian regimes.” Meanwhile, over on Reddit, a user links to an Imagur upload of another photo containing a remarkable detail: what appears to be a member of the military in the back row of an orderly formation of mourners, as Kim’s funeral procession passes near the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang, standing at least nine feet tall.

The original photo is at the link, the photo above is an enhancement of the center-right portion of the rank of soldiers that appears to show a giant towering over everyone else. The original photo comes from a western news agency and was ever in the custody of North Korea’s press agency.

So what are we looking at here? A genetic oddity? A new breed of supersolder? Most likely, as J.J. Gould’s readers have opined, it’s this guy.

The funeral of Kim Jong-il on Wednesday called to mind the best stage-managed Communist state productions: the falling snow, the wailing mourners, the perfectly spaced limousines and rows of chest-beating men.

So perhaps it was because the scene was so nearly impeccable that someone — an overzealous North Korean photo editor? — appears to have taken issue with an errant group of men, barely noticeable in a sweeping photograph of the procession in central Pyongyang, and removed them.

According to an analysis by The New York Times and the digital forensics expert Hany Farid of Dartmouth College, a photograph distributed by North Korea’s state news agency and transmitted by the European Pressphoto Agency was altered using Photoshop to remove the men after the picture was shot.

Another photo, taken from the same high vantage over the funeral route only seconds earlier by Kyodo News, a Japanese agency, and distributed by The Associated Press, revealed the changes.

The photograph in question happens to be the one that I used in yesterday’s post about the funeral:

Now here’s the photograph released by the North Korean government:

If you compare the two photos, the difference should be easy to spot, but just in case it isn’t:

In the Kyodo photograph, which appeared in Wednesday’s Pictures of the Day, six men are standing near a camera behind the assembled crowds. In the North Korean photo, the men — as well as the camera and their tracks in the snow — are gone.

It also appears that the government photo has been altered to make it appear that it was a brighter, less dreary, day in Pyongyang than the Japanese photo makes it seem to be. As the analysis also goes on to show, it appears that the government photo also makes it appear that there is more snow on the ground in the area where the six men were standing then there actually was. Why might they do that? Well, here’s one reason:

One of the myths surrounding Kim Jong-il was that he could control the weather and state media has reported unusually cold and wild weather accompanying his death.

Weird, I know. But, this is North Korea. Weird is their business.

The official State Funeral for Kim Jong-il was held in Pyongyang earlier today, and it was about as bizarre as you’d expect something from that country to be:

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Jong-un, the designated dynastic heir to power in North Korea, walked alongside the hearse of his deceased father, Kim Jong-il, through snow-covered downtown Pyongyang on Wednesday, leading a state funeral that provided early glimpses of who is serving as guardians of the young untested leader.

The extensive funeral was closely watched for signs of shifts in power in the country’s enigmatic leadership. Mr. Kim’s two elder brothers, Kim Jong-nam and Kim Jong-chol, were nowhere to be seen.

Leading the funeral alongside and behind Mr. Kim were a familiar mix of military generals and party secretaries, including elderly stalwarts from the days of Kim Jong-il and his father, the North’s founding president, Kim Il-sung, and younger officials who expanded their influence while playing crucial roles in grooming the son as successor under the father’s tutelage.

Most prominent were the two men whose names seldom fail to pop up when North Korea watchers tried to dissect the palace intrigues in the capital, Pyongyang: Jang Song-taek, Kim Jong-un’s uncle and vice chairman of the powerful National Defense Commission, and Ri Yong-ho, head of the North Korean military’s general staff.

(…)

On the surface, the funeral appeared to proceed with a totalitarian choreography.

Kim Jong-un walked with one hand on the hearse and the other raised in salute. Neat rows of soldiers in olive-green uniforms stood, hats off and bowing, in front of the Kumsusan mausoleum, where Kim Jong-il’s body had been lying in state since his death was announced on Dec. 19.

When the funeral motorcade stopped before them at the start of a 25-mile procession through Pyongyang, they gave a last salute and a military band played the national anthem. Mr. Kim and other top officials did not walk the entire route; from inside their limousines, they watched crowds of citizens and soldiers wailing along the boulevards under a cold, gray sky.

Soldiers appeared to lead the outpouring of grief. They beat their chests in tears, footage broadcast on state television showed. They flailed their hands, stomped their feet and shouted “Father, Father,” as the limousine carrying a gigantic portrait of a smiling Kim Jong-il on the roof crawled past the crowds, followed by the hearse bearing his coffin draped with a red flag. A phalanx of soldiers carrying various party and military flags followed.

In one scene, soldiers rushed to keep mourners from spilling onto the road. But even among the crowds, the intensity of grief — thus loyalty to the regime — seemed to vary; those standing farther from the road seemed less emotional.

The funeral lasted for three hours. A national memorial service will take place at noon on Thursday, state media said.

The North reported that Kim Jong-il died of a heart attack on Dec. 17. He left behind a country gripped by chronic food shortages but armed with nuclear weapons and a successor in his 20s whose control on military generals and party secretaries remains a subject of intense speculation among outside analysts.

The funeral, and the mourning, appeared to have been meticulously choreographed by the government to strengthen the cult of personality underpinning the Kim family’s rule. State television and radio announcers exhorted North Koreans to uphold the family with their lives. They even attributed the heavy snow fall ahead of the funeral to the “heaven’s grief” over Kim Jong-il’s death.

There really isn’t much to say about this entire bizarre affair, I think the video speaks for itself:

Like I said, just bizarre.

BEIJING – China’s biggest provincial borrowers are deferring payment on their loans just two months after the country’s regulator said some local government companies would be allowed to do so.

Hunan Provincial Expressway Construction Group is delaying payment on 3.11 billion yuan ($490.5 million) in interest, documents governing the securities show this month. Guangdong Provincial Communications Group Co, the second-largest debtor, is following suit. So are two others among the biggest 11 debtors, for a total of 30.16 billion yuan, according to bond prospectuses from 55 local authorities that have raised money in capital markets since the beginning of November.

As local governments delay payments for projects commissioned as part of the stimulus to ward off recession in 2009, less money is available for bank lending even as China is taking steps to inject more into the economy. The central bank has held interest rates at 6.56 percent since July to boost the economy, while the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan have kept benchmark rates near zero since 2008.

“When companies start to roll over debt they’re not retiring debt, and banks aren’t retrieving their capital, so you’re crowding out new lending,” Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said in a Dec 13 interview. “This is a problem that’s going to start to bite next year.”

More at the link, but it does look like things could be coming to a head in the Middle Kingdom. If that’s the case, then the world economy could be in for another bumpy ride in the coming year.

Alex Massie passes along this quote from Simon Winchester’s column (£) in today’s (London) Times:

The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please.

India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.

The “faults” of North Korea, of course, include being the most totalitarian state on the planet, if not in all of human history. A state where those who are not part of the party and military apparatus are mere cogs in a machine. Where each home has a loudspeaker that broadcasts propaganda into the home every morning and and every night. Where people starving to death is considered a cost of doing business by the Korean Workers Party. Leaving aside the notion that Winchester’s claim that there is something more authentically Korean about a slave state ruled by a family of megalomaniacs than the prosperous, relatively free society to its south is simply false, the authors willingness to white wash totalitarianism ranks him right up there with the apologists for Hitler, Stalin, and Mao that populated the world in the 20th Century. It reminds one of Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize winner New York Times reporter who reported as fact the propaganda Moscow was spreading about the Ukrainians dying as a result of Stalin’s forced farm collectivization program. It’s wrong, it’s disgusting, and it quite honestly reveals a man whose sense of morality is so perversely warped that one wonders why The Times even gives him columns space.

Massie comments:

Newspapers, of course, are free to publish whatever they like but one does wonder if anyone at the Times paused to think, “Hang on, we don’t have to publish a piece that doesn’t just defend the Kims from their detractors but actually makes some kind of fucking “case” for them.”

Plucky little North Korea going it all on her lonesome? Please. Get a grip.

Indeed.

I’m willing to bet that Winchester has never been to North Korea, because if he had, he would have seen what Christopher Hitchens did:

North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as “duck.” One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn’t tell me the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn’t seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there. (In a Pyongyang restaurant, don’t ever ask for a doggie bag.) Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine—some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone—but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him. Kim Jong Il, incidentally, has been made head of the party and of the army, but the office of the presidency is still “eternally” held by his adored and departed dad, who died on July 8, 1994, at 82. (The Kim is dead. Long live the Kim.) This makes North Korea the only state in the world with a dead president. What would be the right term for this? A necrocracy? A thanatocracy? A mortocracy? A mausolocracy? Anyway, grimly appropriate for a morbid system so many of whose children have died with grass in their mouths.

(…)

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men’s room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it’s almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn’t like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.

There’s a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there’s no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn’t be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It’s 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn’t moved in years; it’s a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. “Under construction,” say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.

Hitchens, of course, was a man who never avoided an opportunity to speak truth to power, often bluntly so. One wonders how he was able to restrain himself during his visit to Pyongyang all those years ago, as am matter of fact. Winchester, on the other hand, appears to be either an idiot or a man so filled with moral cowardice that even from the comfort of wherever it happens to be that the writes his column he does not dare speak to the truth. Hopefully, the world has more Hitchens’ than it does Winchester’s.

If a report from Reuters is to be believed, Kim Jong Un will not have the same power over the DPRK that his father and grandfather did, at least not for the time being:

(Reuters) – North Korea will shift to collective rule from a strongman dictatorship after last week’s death of Kim Jong-il, although his untested young son will be at the head of the ruling coterie, a source with close ties to Pyongyang and Beijing said.

The source added that the military, which is trying to develop a nuclear arsenal, has pledged allegiance to the untested Kim Jong-un, who takes over the family dynasty that has ruled North Korea since it was founded after World War Two.

The source declined to be identified but has correctly predicted events in the past, telling Reuters about the North’s first nuclear test in 2006 before it took place.

The comments are the first signal that North Korea is following a course that many analysts have anticipated — it will be governed by a group of people for the first time since it was founded in 1948.

Both Kim Jong-il and his father Kim Il-sung were all-powerful, authoritarian rulers of the isolated state.

The situation in North Korea appeared stable after the military gave its backing to Kim Jong-un, the source said.

“It’s very unlikely,” the source said when asked about the possibility of a military coup. “The military has pledged allegiance to Kim Jong-un.”

North Korea’s collective leadership will include Kim Jong-un, his uncle and the military, the source said.

Jang Song-thaek, 65, brother-in-law of Kim Jong-il and the younger Kim’s uncle, is seen as the power behind the throne along with his wife Kim Kyong-hui, Kim Jong-il’s sister. So too is Ri Yong-ho, the rising star of the North’s military and currently its most senior general.

The younger Kim, who is in his late 20s, has his own supporters but is not strong enough to consolidate power, analysts said.

Assuming this is to be believed then two thing would seem to be true. First, Kim the Youngest is not powerful enough to assume control by himself, especially in the face of  Workers Party and military leaders who are much older and more experienced than he is. At the same time, neither the military nor other elements of the Party can afford to take power on their own, largely because they have invested the past 63 years creating a cult-like following around the Kim family. Cutting the self-appointed heir of the Dear Leader off at the knees so soon after his fathers death simply wouldn’t be possible. Give it time, though, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see a power struggle. It’s all positively medieval, as if we’re witnessing a replay of struggles between families with names like York Stuart, Tudor, and Plantangenet. Of course, this time there’s a million man army, enough artillery power to turn Seoul into a burning apocalypse, and, oh yeah, nuclear weapons.

I’d also note that dictatorships ruled by committee seldom stay that way for long.

The protests that resulted in the effective takeover of a Chinese fishing village by protesters upset with their local government have come to an end:

WUKAN, China — Villagers who had carried out a prominent protest against what they called land seizures by officials and business people agreed on Wednesday to halt their demonstrations after more than 10 days of keeping Communist Party authorities out of their village. The protests ended after a leader of the villagers met on Wednesday morning with senior officials from coastal Guangdong Province in southern China.

The provincial officials agreed to the meeting after residents here threatened to march on Wednesday to government offices in the nearby city of Lufeng. In the meeting, which lasted for more than an hour outside Wukan, two senior provincial officials spoke to Lin Zuluan, 65, one of the villagers’ main representatives. Mr. Lin said after the meeting that the officials had agreed to three conditions set by the protesters, including freeing several villagers who had been detained, though the issue of the land sales remained unresolved.

“I was satisfied with how the meeting went,” Mr. Lin said. “Now they’ve opened up a new channel of communication, and it will help to build a closer relationship between the two sides.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Lin and other village leaders met to discuss their options and decided to call off the public protests and to reopen access to the village. It was unclear whether party officials who fled earlier would return and resume their jobs.

After that conclave, the village leaders held a rally with more than 1,000 residents in a public square and told the audience about the new agreement. When the villagers then dispersed, they took down protest banners hanging up near the square

(…)

The standoff between the village and outside authorities began when protesters furious over word of Mr. Xue’s death mobbed the headquarters of Wukan’s village committee. The last of the committee’s nine members fled after thousands of protesters beat back an effort by the local police to retake the village.

The villagers — once numbering 13,000, but now down to about 6,000, one protester said — have set up their own governing body and issued demands that their land be returned and that a new village committee be democratically elected.

Outside authorities responded by detaining two Wukan officials — the village Communist Party secretary, Xue Chang, and the head of the village administrative committee, Chun Shunyi — for interrogation by the party’s disciplinary officials. The action is tantamount to arrest.

Official statements also say that roughly 67 acres of village land, a tiny fraction of the amount sold, has been recovered. The reports do not indicate what was done with the property.

It’s unclear exactly what the villagers got out of this deal, but there’s at least some indication that news of the protests had leaked to other parts of China:

News of the Wukan protest has been all but banned from the Chinese media and Internet sites. But there were indications that word of the dispute was nevertheless spreading. Posts on Chinese microblog services reported protests in three other villages in Shanwei Prefecture, which includes Wukan, apparently over other land disputes. Three people were arrested Sunday in Guangzhou, a Guangdong Province metropolis, after a protest in sympathy with the Wukan villagers.

Another microblog post on Tuesday, with photographs, described a violent clash between police officers and thousands of people in Haimen, a township in Shantou, a major Pacific coast city about 90 miles from Wukan. People in Wukan said Wednesday morning that Haimen’s streets appeared quiet, but the riot police were still out in force.

The Internet posts stated that the Shantou demonstrators, some of whom were hospitalized, were protesting plans to build a power plant, fearing that it would add to pollution and damage the local fishing industry. Other microblog reports told of related protests in two nearby villages.

Whether this will spread or not remains to be seen, but the seemingly peaceful end of the Wukan demonstrations may dampen the fervor elsewhere.

Today’s New York Times notes the extent to which the death of Korea’s reclusive “Dear Leader” reveals how little we know about what really goes on inside the modern day Hermit Kingdom:

WASHINGTON — Kim Jong-il, the enigmatic North Korean leader, died on a train at 8:30 a.m. Saturday in his country. Forty-eight hours later, officials in South Korea still did not know anything about it — to say nothing of Washington, where the State Department acknowledged “press reporting” of Mr. Kim’s death well after North Korean state media had already announced it.

For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.

Asian and American intelligence services have failed before to pick up significant developments in North Korea. Pyongyang built a sprawling plant to enrich uranium that went undetected for about a year and a half until North Korean officials showed it off in late 2010 to an American nuclear scientist. The North also helped build a complete nuclear reactor in Syria without tipping off Western intelligence.

As the United States and its allies confront a perilous leadership transition in North Korea — a failed state with nuclear weapons — the closed nature of the country will greatly complicate their calculations. With little information about Mr. Kim’s son and successor, Kim Jong-un, and even less insight into the palace intrigue in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, much of their response will necessarily be guesswork.

“We have clear plans about what to do if North Korea attacks, but not if the North Korean regime unravels,” said Michael J. Green, a former Asia adviser in the Bush administration. “Every time you do these scenarios, one of the first objectives is trying to find out what’s going on inside North Korea.”

In many countries, that would involve intercepting phone calls between government officials or peering down from spy satellites. And indeed, American spy planes and satellites scan the country. Highly sensitive antennas along the border between South and North Korea pick up electronic signals. South Korean intelligence officials interview thousands of North Koreans who defect to the South each year.

And yet remarkably little is known about the inner workings of the North Korean government. Pyongyang, officials said, keeps sensitive information limited to a small circle of officials, who do not talk.

“This is a society that thrives on its opaqueness,” said Christopher R. Hill, a former special envoy who negotiated with the North over its nuclear program. “It is very complex. To understand the leadership structure requires going way back into Korean culture to understand Confucian principles.”

It isn’t just the United States, Japan, and South Korea that had no idea that Kim had died until the news was announced yesterday, but it seems fairly clear that the Chinese weren’t aware of it either, although it’s probable that the North Koreans may have informed their contacts in Beijing before releasing the news to the rest of the world. In fact, it’s worth point out the fact that we don’t really know that Kim really died on Saturday morning, or that he really died on a train trip. He could’ve died hours or days before that, and the interim time has been taken up with forces inside the country shoring up power and preparing the inevitable propaganda barrage of mourners, which seemed to erupt conveniently quickly yesterday.  Undoubtedly, the North Koreans know that they are being observed from all sides and have already taken steps to limit communication over channels that can be monitored from outside the country. Additionally, Kim has been ill for at least a year now and it’s likely that contingency plans were already in place for his death (Communists love plans, remember). Executing that plan when Kim did die would have been relatively straightforward given the closed nature of the Kim regime.

Despite the fact that the only thing we really know about North Korea is that we don’t really know much about North Korea, that hasn’t stopped all manner of speculation about what the rise of Kim Jong-Un, who has already been given the title “Great Successor” despite being about the same age as people in the United States who barely out of college, means for North Korea and the rest of the world. One of the most popular theories yesterday seemed to be that the young Kim would have a difficult time consolidating power, that he would become a puppet of the advisers his father left behind to guide him, or that the end of the Pyongyang government was near. Michael Hirsh, meanwhile, pointed out that anyone who counts the Kim regime’s days as numbered may be sadly disappointed:

There is, perhaps, no totalitarianism in the world that is as all-embracing as North Korea’s. Something like it hasn’t existed since Stalin died (and with him a personality cult very much like that which surrounds the Kims). I have spent time in other police states, but even in some of the most vicious of them, an undercurrent of dissent ran like a subterranean stream through the back rooms of restaurants, bars and private meeting rooms. Even under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi cab drivers would glance around when pressed and spit out their hatred of the dictator. Dissidents in Myanmar, during the worst of the crackdown, would whisper their fealty to democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. In Vietnam, Saigon residents would raise their eyebrows and snort at the central planners in the North. In China, after Mao’s death, there was a reappraisal of his policies, and the Communist Party ultimately allowed that some elements of “Mao Zedong Thought,” like the disastrous Great Leap Forward of the ’50s or the Cultural Revolution of the ’60s, had not been successful.

But in North Korea, long after Stalinism has become a yellowing chapter in the history books elsewhere—and despite intermittent reports of a power struggle at the top– there is little evidence that dissent among the public exists at all, even today. The effects of the Arab Spring seem to have reached China, and possibly Russia. But there are no reports of any democracy movement in North Korea. Very few people yet seem willing to question whether the Kim family dynasty might be to blame for an economic slide that took the North from parity with South Korea, as recently as the 1960s, to one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world and the death of hundreds of thousands of people from starvation.

It is too simplistic to attribute this mindset to a mere fear of repression or self-censorship.

Indeed, one only needs to listen to this seven minute description by the late Christopher Hitchens (and how unfortunate is it that he did not live long enough to learn of the death of one of the world’s worst dictators?) of his own trip to Pyongyang:

The North Korean people have lived under this regime for half a century now, and by all accounts those who have defected to China or South Korea are genuinely shocked to learn that the things they were told about the outside world and the DPRK’s place in it is untrue. It’s worse, it seems, than the culture shock that defectors from the Soviet Union would experience. Under those conditions, the prospects for a “Pyongyang Spring” seem rather unlikely unless accompanied by an utter collapse in the government itself and, since everyone in a position of power knows that their personal survival depends on keeping the government in power,  the likelihood of that happening may not be as high as those of us who wish the North Korean people to be free would hope.

As for Kim Jong-Un himself, the Wall Street Journal suggests that he may actually be worse than his father:

North Korea’s new leader is depicted in U.S. intelligence assessments as a volatile youth with a sadistic streak who may be even more unpredictable than his late father, according to U.S. officials.

U.S. intelligence officials say they have limited information about Kim Jong Eun, the youngest son of Kim Jong Il and his anointed successor. The U.S. has had few direct contacts on which to make a “conclusive assessment” of Kim Jong Eun’s nature and character, a senior U.S. official said.

(…)

The portrait of Kim Jong Eun that emerges in his U.S. profile is that of a young man who, despite years of education in the West, is steeped in his father’s cult of personality and may be even more mercurial and merciless, officials said.

A senior U.S. official said intelligence analysts believe, for instance, that Kim Jung Eun “tortured small animals” when he was a youth. “He has a violent streak and that’s worrisome,” a senior U.S. official said, summing up the U.S. assessments.

(…)

A further detriment to the younger Mr. Kim’s outside reputation outside North Korea, were two North Korean assaults on South Korea last year, which U.S. officials have said appeared to have been instigated by Mr. Kim’s son to prove his credentials.

“His temperament is not good,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, citing the attacks.

I tend to agree with Daniel Drezner’s take on this in two respect. First, as he puts it, we have “no friggin’ clue” what’s going to happen next. Second, Kim Jong-Un, or whoever is going to be guiding him from behind the scenes, is likely to last longer than some might think. That second part is bad for the North Korean people most of all, who will continue suffering under what is undoubtedly the worst tyranny on the planet today, and quite possibly the most totalitarian regime that has ever existed. The first is bad for the rest of us. We saw last year what can happen when the North Koreans act unexpectedly when they sank a South Korean naval ship and shelled a South Korean island, raising tensions on the Peninsula twice in less than six months.  As it turns out, both of those exercises may have been related to efforts to enhance the military reputation of the youngest Kim (I have been tempted more than once in this post to refer to the new leader of the DPRK as “Lil’ Kim”). What happens next is anyone’s guess, and that may be the biggest cause for concern.

A tumblr blog.

Stephen Green observes:

What’s interesting is that every picture is identical, in that there is nothing to see — no people, no activity, no nothing — outside of the Dear Leader, his entourage, and his immediate focus.

Much like whatever it is Dear Leader happens to be looking at, the rest are all just props.

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry today released the following statement regarding the death of Kim Jong II:

“The death of vicious dictator Kim Jong Il provides some cause for hope but does not automatically end the reign of inhumane tyranny he and his father constructed. Twenty-three million people still live under North Korea’s isolationist, inhumane and tyranical policies. North Korea remains a nuclear power, and there is a great threat that those weapons might fall into the wrong hands if civil war breaks out.

“At the same time, Jong’s death is an opportunity to reunify the peninsula if the situation is handled effectively. Kim Jong-un is an unknown quantity, and may not be able to maintain power. The United States must now strongly reaffirm our commitment to Asian allies, particularly South Korea, and maintain a strong military, diplomatic, and economic presence in the Pacific region during this period. We should also engage with China, and encourage Beijing to work towards a peaceful transition from a grim dictatorship to a free Korea.”

As much as the end of the Kim dictatorship is something we can all agree on, the idea of Korean unification is so far down the road, and such a reckless idea to suggest at this point in time, that it’s barely worth discussing. Korean reunification would make German reunification seem like a cakewalk, and that took at least ten years to balance itself out. Suffice it to say it’s not really on South Korea’s radar at the moment. Not to mention the fact that the Chinese are going to have something to say about this.

Via Jazz Shaw on Twitter

These videos from North Korean State Television that have been released since Kim Jong-il’s death was announced are, in a word, bizarre.

First up, here’s the official announcement from state television:

And here’s footage of North Koreans “overcome with grief” in Pyongyang:

It all looks remarkably similar to what we saw in 1994 when his father died, right down to the news reader herself:

One would like to think that this is all an act, but I don’t think it necessarily is. More likely, it’s a sad example of what happens to the human mind when it lives under abject tyranny.