Jonathan Cheng

And certainly their way of life and their system, the system of rule that they have, why would they give that up?

It's worked for so long.

So I definitely think that that is one area where the misunderstanding is very deep.

Well, I think this commitment to not ever liberalizing is quite a bold one.

If you look again at China, you look again at the USSR, when pressures built up in their system, even these autocratic authoritarian systems felt like there was a need to let off some steam, to have a safety valve so that people who were dissatisfied could express that.

That's never happened in North Korea.

And that's a bold gamble because one could see these frustrations perhaps being bottled up and boiling over at some point.

And yet perhaps it's because of the size of the country.

It's smaller than the USSR.

It's smaller than China, has far fewer people.

Perhaps it's simply that repression works and they've learned that and aren't about to deviate from it.

Why change the blueprint if the blueprint is working?

And I think the commitment to this cult of personality is total.

Unlike Khrushchev coming after Stalin and saying we need to rename Stalingrad and we need to pull down some statues of Stalin.

We need to de-Stalinize.

Unlike Deng Xiaoping coming along in China and saying we need to go in a different direction.

We need to take down some of these Mao statues.

We need to de-Mao-ify.

There's never been any such process like that taking place in North Korea.

And if they were to look back at