Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea (review)

Book Reviews Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea, by Adrian Buzo. St. Leonards, New South Wales, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1999. 336 pp., $50.00 hard cover; $35.00 paper. In 1975 Australia became the first, and to this day the only, major Englishspeaking country to establish diplomatic relations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea). Some six months later diplomatic ties were severed, and have yet to be renewed. Fortunately for the field of Korean studies, during this brief period of Australia-DPRK relations Adrian Buzo was stationed at the Australian embassy in Pyongyang, and after a long stint writing on North Korea for the Far Eastern Economic Review, Buzo has written the most comprehensive book in many years on the politics and history of the DPRK. For those of us who have long sought a useful and up-to-date text on North Korea, this book makes a valuable contribution to the field. Guerilla Dynasty is more important for its synthesis of existing work than for any ground-breaking research. Buzo does an admirably thorough job of reading secondary sources and journalism on North Korea, both by outside scholars and from the DPRK itself. He has, for example, read more issues of People's Korea, the pro-DPRK periodical published in Japan, than anyone should be required to read in a lifetime, and his bibliography seems to have assembled every significant book or article on North Korea available in English. Unfortunately, by relying completely on English-language sources the author misses out on the rich and rapidly expanding work on North Korea produced by Japanese and South Korean scholars today, nor is there any evidence of primary research in the Russian or Chinese documents that have recently become Korean Studies, Volume 23. ©1999 by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved. BOOK REVIEWS143 available, to say nothing of Korean-language material. While Buzo has managed to include most of the scholarship based on these sources that has been translated into English, this still leaves important gaps. For example, the main thesis that gives the book its title, that North Korea since 1945 has been fundamentally shaped by the experience of Kim Il Sung and other DPRK leaders in anti-Japanese guerilla warfare during the 1930s, was first fully explored by Wada Haruki in his pioneering 1992 study Kin Nichisei to Manshu konichi senso (Kim Il Sung and the Manchurian Anti-Japanese War), in which Wada referred to the DPRK as a "guerilla-band state" (yugekitai kokka). Yet nowhere does Buzo refer to Wada's work or engage with Wada's somewhat different view of North Korea's guerilla legacy. Buzo argues that the political culture ofthe DPRK is basically a variation of Stalinism filtered through the experience of Manchurian guerilla warfare, shaped above all by the idiosyncratic world view of Kim Il Sung. As such, the DPRK represents a fundamental break with Korea's political traditions, and Buzo is highly critical of scholars who find elements of Chosön dynasty practices in contemporary DPRK politics. Unfortunately, not long after making a revolutionary break with the past, the DPRK became itself highly resistant to change. North Korea was the victim of its own success, creating a political economy that (for the first twenty years or so of the DPRK) produced remarkable rates ofeconomic growth, alongside a rigidly oppressive political system that became increasingly incapable ofreform, even after the economy showed signs of serious decline and dysfunction. The author locates the beginning of economic stagnation at about 1970 and traces a depressing downward slide that the collapse of North Korea's communist trading partners accelerated toward disaster. Buzo also convincingly argues that Kim Jong Il represents continuity with the policies of Kim Il Sung and the first generation of guerilla revolutionaries, not generational change, and that Kim Jong Il's rise to power "accelerated the DPRK's decline" (p. 130). The author offers little hope for systemic reform from within and foresees the possibility of "instability and convulsive change" (p. 247) with unpredictable consequences for the Korean peninsula and the region. Whether or not the DPRK possesses nuclear weapons—which the author insists it does...