The conclusion of the book recaps the main arguments, but also examines the recent emphasis of the Kim Jong Un regime on the “improvement of people’s livelihood” and on the development of science and technology. We also draw on the implications of the analysis for thinking about development and catch-up industrialisation more broadly. The conclusion also makes some projections concerning North Korea’s future development.

In chapter three, we examine the impact of the growing geopolitical tensions of the 1960s on the North Korean developmental model. The emerging Sino-Soviet split raised important questions regarding the reliability of North Korea’s socialist allies and further strengthened the impetus towards autonomous heavy industrialisation and the building of a strong independent military industrial sector. Furthermore, these geopolitical challenges were exacerbated by the establishment of a strong military regime in South Korea and the latter’s own national project of catch-up industrialisation. As a result, the negative economic consequences of militarisation became increasingly visible in the 1960s. This chapter also examines the emergence of Juche as the ruling state ideology in North Korea. Here, we engage with the existing literature on the topic by reinterpreting Juche as a particularly intense form of developmental nationalism aimed at legitimising the human mobilisation required to facilitate catch-up industrialisation. From the late 1960s, Juche thought was further transformed as an ideological justification to strengthen Kim Il Sung’s monolithic system, and as such, the previous emphasis on post-colonial catch-up development was diluted. Here, we draw parallels to the voluntarism of Stalinist and Maoist ideologies while highlighting the distinctiveness of this North Korean form of developmental nationalism.

In chapter four, we examine the North Korean regime’s attempts to overcome its secular economic decline through the opening of trade relations with the West in the 1970s. As elsewhere in the socialist bloc, declining growth rates and superpower detente led to growing engagement with the West. However, the collapse of raw material prices in the 1970s and North Korea’s failure to export its manufactures made it increasingly difficult for the country to service its debts and, as a result, Pyongyang defaulted in the mid-1970s. Locked out of world capital markets, North Korea made some attempts to attract FDI investment in the 1980s, though these attempts were limited and largely unsuccessful. As a result of a poor investment climate and continued geopolitical instability, North Korea became increasingly reliant on aid from the Soviet Union and China. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union along with the pragmatic shift in China’s foreign economic policy in the early 1990s immediately exposed North Korea’s excessive reliance on cheap energy imports. The earlier “privileges of backwardness” possessed by North Korea thus quickly became a curse, leading to economic collapse and to mass famine. North Korea’s strong developmental nationalism along with the almost complete elimination of civil society meant instead that the country’s socio-political system was relatively impervious to the transformations elsewhere in the socialist world between 1989 and 1991.

We argue that the North Korean developmental regime can be understood as an outcome of multiple combined historical lineages, including Korea’s history of colonial modernisation under Japanese rule and the imposition of the Soviet model of catch-up industrialisation in the immediate post-liberation era. The factionalised politics of the exiled anti-Japanese resistance movement and the ultimate ascendancy of Kim Il Sung’s Manchurian guerrillas led to a virulent form of postcolonial nationalism that emphasised autonomous national development rather than enmeshment with the socialist international division of labour. Following liberation, the new state underwent a series of "bourgeois democratic reforms” including a rapid land reform that addressed longstanding peasant grievances and ensured a degree of initial popular support for the new regime. The success of the land reform owed much to the fact of national division and that many landlords were able to flee southwards. The democratic reforms also served to integrate the population into the emerging corporatist mass organisations. Understood as a process of what Antonio Gramsci referred to as “passive revolution,” this has significant implications as to the state’s ability to mobilise society around developmental goals and contain any potential opposition to the state and its project of national development.

This introduction sets forth the puzzle of North Korean development trajectory, namely its initial successes, its collapse in the 1990s, and its subsequent recovery since then. It engages with existing theories of development and with the critique of methodological nationalism in the field of Development Studies and International Political Economy. It argues that liberal economic and dependency theory fail to account for the specificity of the country’s experience, or indeed projects of national development in general. We put forward an alternative framework of the ‘development-geopolitics nexus’ through a reinterpretation of the global history of national development, examining three geopolitical moments that have shaped that history, namely colonialism, the Cold War, and the rise of China. The discussion of the legacies of colonialism sheds light on the emergence of developmental nationalisms in the (post)colonial world and how the material legacies of colonialism aided or hindered post-colonial development; the analysis of the Cold War sheds light on how the US and the USSR sought to facilitate late development within their respective spheres of influence; the analysis of the rise of China examines the extent to which China’s influence can be said to reflect a process of neo-colonialism or win-win mutual benefit.

If the elders who forced Hu Yaobang from office had retired from politics, Hu and Zhao Ziyang would have had time and space to deepen economic and political reforms, a scenario that would have reduced the chances of protests and violence in 1989. The two-child policy proposed by demographer Liang Zhongtang would have been less harsh than the one-child policy, but a cultural shift in sexual norms would have been necessary to prevent the traumas experienced by Chai Ling, Lu Decheng, and Wang Qiuping.

Hu Yaobang's death sparked student protests in Beijing, which escalated when protesters felt ignored by officials after Hu's memorial service on April 22, 1989. General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and Premier Li Peng disagreed about how to handle the protests before Zhao left for North Korea on April 23. In Zhao's absence, Li and other officials presented their views to Deng Xiaoping, who labeled the protests "turmoil," sparking a march of approximately 100,000 people disputing this characterization.

The experiences of the hundreds of cities throughout China where Communist Party leaders exercised relative restraint during the protests, blockades, and strikes offer countless alternative paths and show how unnecessary it was for the PLA to open fire in Beijing on June 3 and 4. Student leaders thought that bloodshed in Beijing would spark a nationwide uprising. Enraged protesters did shut down traffic and tried to organize strikes, but failed to bring about regime change. One alternative path in 1989 was 1911-style provincial declarations of independence. But in 1989, local leaders were not inclined to turn against the Party to which they owed their careers and political futures.

Even though some participants predicted that bloodshed in Beijing would mark the end of Communist rule, there was no nationwide uprising in the aftermath of the massacre because killing, arrests, and purges sowed fear and underlined the high costs of direct resistance. Another alternative path many called for in the aftermath of the massacre was for an official re-evaluation (pingfan) of June Fourth. Some victims demand a reappraisal, while others reject the notion that the Communist Party is a legitimate arbiter of Chinese history.

Archival documents from a construction and engineering team show that people went through the motions in a slapdash way when filling out forms detailing what they had done in April, May, and June 1989.

There were many turning points and key moments in spring 1989 that could have pushed events in new directions and led to different outcomes. They included inviting students to attend Hu Yaobang's memorial service, Zhao Ziyang not traveling to North Korea, protesters escalating their civil disobedience through self-immolation, and convening a special session of the National People's Congress (NPC) to rescind martial law. These were all genuine possibilities, but they were made less possible by the realities of old-man politics.

There were many alternatives to shooting unarmed civlians in Beijing. Soldiers or police could have used non-deadly force. Leaders could have ignored the protesters and waited them out. More military officials could have followed the lead of General Xu Qinxian, who refused to carry out martial law, or of He Yanran, who passively resisted on June 4, 1989, and allowed soldiers under his command to disperse. The massacre was not inevitable.

Political opening, romantic freedoms, economic reforms, and such moderate political leaders as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang sparked happiness for many people in China during the 1980s, but their high hopes created heightened expectations that would be dashed by the end of the decade.