I'll let you all in on a little secret...
Nobody is chomping on the bit to reunify Korea and particularly not the Koreans themselves. This isn't remotely like Germany. North Korea doesn't even use the same calendar.
Korea faces trillions of dollars in spending to re-unify the country should the government of the north collapse. East Germany was poor compared to West Germany, but Korea faces reunification costs on a scale never before encountered.
More concerning to Koreans themselves is the state of the North Koreans. Unlike East Germany, North Koreans have been kept in a hothouse isolation environment where most technology has stopped in the early 1960s. North Koreans do not know what a computer is, save for a handful of top scientists, nor do they have exposure to the outside world. Their radios receive just one state-run radio station. They do not have TV outside of Pyongyang, the capital, where the elite live. If you know your geography, here's a night pic of the
lights of North Korea.
North Korea
has about 40 death camps, a constant surveillance society, and a whole lot of people who have never had contact with anyone from outside North Korea. North Korean experts, including people who have had what limited contact is possible, believe that outside of Pyongyang, the average North Korean believes what is told to him or her by the state propaganda machine. There is literally no other media in the country. Things do not leak out or in save through some cross Korean-Chinese contact made by North Koreans living in China who have fled across the Yalu River and attempted the very dangerous return to North Korea to rescue relatives.
The South Koreans are very aware, and quite afraid, of their northern neighbors. While every South Korean professes an idealistic desire for reunification, South Koreans are privately more reticent to admit what they already know: unification will require massive amounts of money, humanitarian aid, cultural and practical education, occupational therapy, medical aid, infrastructure improvement, and environmental clean-up.
China is certainly not eager to see a reunited Korea as that would place a US ally right at China's border, and frankly neither is Japan. While everyone, including the Chinese, would like a more docile leadership, the fact is the Kim boys have done one hell of a job brainwashing their population and maintaining such tight control of the society, that Kim-worship is the closest thing to religion the country has.
There's a good 3-part article about Korean unification
here, but if you have a real interest in North Korea, read
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley Martin. It's long but exhaustive and very thoroughly examines the true origins of Kim il Sung and the Korean conflict through to the current day. A fantastic book for those wondering what it is to live in North Korea, at least as a foreigner in the relatively cosmopolitan Pyongyang, is Michael Harrold's,
Comrades and Strangers: Behind the Closed Doors of North Korea. Yes, I own and have read both and recommend them highly.
If you're of a certain age and have a nostalgia for good old fashion Stalinist propaganda, take a look at the
Korean Central News Agency of the DPRK. What you read as news on that page is what the North Koreans themselves receive as news. It's pretty grim.
