WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- Sweeping changes are taking place in North Korea as authorities are losing their grip on information flows and more ordinary North Koreans are engaging in some form of free-market enterprise.
In a briefing session before members of Congress on Wednesday, Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea said six trends are bringing unprecedented changes to the reclusive country, Voice of America reported.
Park said capitalism, information flows, informal networks, corruption, defectors and a new generation of North Koreans are factors that are combining and taking the country in a new direction.
In the past decade, markets trading goods have grown as North Korea has slowly moved away from a planned economy.
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South Korean news agency Yonhap reported the rapid growth of informal or gray markets inside North Korea is visible in satellite images. Past images of the port city of Wonsan showed dramatic changes between 2002 and 2009 that indicated growing wealth was leading to the construction of new buildings in the city.
The surge in free market enterprise is taking place at the grassroots level, Park said, and North Korean authorities are unable to regulate the activities of North Korea's new generation of entrepreneurs.
Authorities also are not capable of controlling the large of amounts of information about the outside world reaching ordinary North Koreans, Park said.
Information flows have become increasingly deregulated and improvements in communications technology, and word-of-mouth updates about the world outside North Korea are growing, Park said.
North Korean social interactions are changing in the absence of government control, and informal networks that routinely resist the regulation of authorities are increasing, according to LiNK research.
North Korea's re-emergence from a devastating famine in the 1990s has also unleashed a new generation of young North Koreans, or millennials, who never really had any experience of socialism, according to Park.
These trends, along with rampant corruption inside the country and remittances from defectors in the South are creating long-term changes in North Korea that are weakening state control over the population, said Park.
