Jonathan Cheng
speaker
201 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 1 Jun
Jonathan Cheng’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Unfortunately,
I think that ship has sailed.
I don't know that that is a possibility anymore.
And I think this is where it fits together with the cult of personality that the Kim family has developed.
In the same way that you have nuclear weapons to forestall any sort of an external attack,
The internal threat is neutralized in large part by the fact that you have such loyalty to this family that has run North Korea without interruption and without any liberalization for now more than eight decades.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
Certainly compared to South Korea, North Korea is lagging very, very, very far behind.
Now, there was a time when the two Koreas were roughly at parity, but that would have been back in the 70s and the 80s, because the strength of a Stalinist system did allow North Korea to make some advances in the early years.
But by the 80s and the 90s, it was not a close battle anymore.
And today, South Korea is far, far, far ahead of North Korea.
That said...
In the capital, Pyongyang, where Kim Jong-un is and where the elites live, there are pockets of wealth there.
And there are places where the elite can feel comfortable and can say to themselves, maybe our standard of living is not up to what it might be in other countries, but it's pretty good.
And it's good enough that I don't feel a need to run away or to rebel or to try anything foolish like that.
I have enough buy-in in the system.
Now, if you're on the edges of society in North Korea, I think it's a woeful and miserable experience indeed.
And I don't know that I would recommend it to anyone.
But I do think that partly because they simply don't have much of an awareness of where they stand relative to other countries around the world.
Showing 121–140 of 201 · page 7 of 11
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