Once again, the bright shining light of your ignorance.
You purport to be a commie and you don't even know commies. Actually, North Korea has imposed its isolation on itself, with the policy promulgated by Kim Il Sung of
Juche, or "self-reliance", which he described as "independence from great powers, a strong military posture, and reliance on Korean national resources." That, plus a nearly pure socialism, is what has caused the backwardness, extreme poverty, and mass starvation in north korea, alleviated only by frequent humanitarian food shipments from advanced capitalist countries.
Once again, as with the Ukraine, a big lie about famines is used to push an imperialist agenda.
When India was a British colony, famines were common; now thanks to socialist policies, it does not have a problem with food, even though the population is far higher.
Ditto China.
I do not think that you are the correct person to lecture me on Juche, providing a simplistic erroneous analysis from a complex situation.
"...After Mao's death, the policies of Maoist autarchic peasant-based socialism were phased out in China. Deng Xiaoping launched the Four Modernizations program in 1978 and opened China to sweeping economic reforms that incorporated elements of the market economy. Deng Xiaoping Theory was officially instituted in the 1980s. Despite relatively cordial Beijing-Pyongyang relations in this period, the North Korean regime was reluctant to adopt the Chinese open-door policy and model of economic modernization, because its leadership feared such reforms would compromise the Juche ideology and result in political destabilization and events similar to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (Lee, p. 1998, 1999 ). After the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc between 1989 and 1991, with the consequent loss of economic aid, North Korea began to undertake cautious, experimental, and selective emulation of the Chinese model.
The Joint Venture Law of 1984 was, however, among the first Deng-inspired North Korean attempts to attract foreign capital within the programmatic orientation of Juche doctrine. This was followed by emulation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. North Korea established its first capitalist SEZ in 1991, the Rajin-Sonbong Economic Special Zone. The 1998 Juche constitution was also written with provisions to defend private property and joint venture enterprises with capitalist countries, making possible the establishment of the Pyongyang-based Research Institute on Capitalism in 2000, and allowing for the price and wage reforms of July 1, 2002. Deng Xiaoping Theory accepts marketization of the Chinese economy as "socialism with Chinese characteristics" or a "socialist market economy," and the North Korean Juche ideology rationalizes such reforms under the concept of "socialism of our style."
...
Since North Koreans with Juche idea of chaju (Independence in politics) and the charip (self-sustenance in the economy) principles, which are the two of the three fundamental principles that Kim Il-sung outlined in 1965, they isolated themselves from rest of the world and hardly opened up for diplomatic relationships with other countries until the pressure that came with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The charip idea of self-contained economy was unlike other countries that withdrew themselves from the economy of the world. For example, "Albania in the socialist world and Burma in the capitalist world, two countries that "withdrew" to no apparent purpose as their economies idled along or got worse, North Korea never idled but always raced.".[21] The North Koreans withdrew for a purpose of development of their economy and country. By being able to sustain their own economy, they would be independent of other countries and would be self-reliable. However, they had to rely on USSR and China to sustain their livelihood. In 1986, Kim Il-sung set the goal of ten million tons of grain production. Yet the plan failed and they produced only four million tons of grain and the North Korea had to rely on foreign aid to provide them with two million tons of grain. The six million tons of grain they managed to get a hold of was the bare minimum of to feed their population.[22] The economic crisis continued to be visible even in the 1990s. "Most of the blame was attributed not to North Korea's ponderous socialist system but to "the collapse of socialist countries and the socialist market of the world," which "shattered" many of P'yongyang's trade partners and agreements.".[23] The fall of the socialist market and trade partner lead North Korea into a crisis that was not simply manageable with their current system. As result, paradoxical to the Juche philosophy of autarky, North Korea established the Najin-Sonbong free economic and tradezone during the mid-1990s. Investors from firms in Hong Kong, Japan, France, South Korea, and the United States are some of the countries that opened manufacturing facilities in the DPRK. The Shell Oil Corporation (in 1995) is one example of the big firms that invested in this open trade area.[24] Near the parallel, North Korea also opened the city of Kaesong for exports until 2010 when South Korea issued a economic sanction after the sunk South Korean warship incident.[25]
The third principle of the Juche idea, chawi (self-defense in national defense), caused North Korea to spend much of its capitals for military purpose, thus decreasing the amount of capital that can be used for developing economy (it is estimated that 25 percent of the annual budget goes to the military). Kim Jong Il has explicitly expressed his "army first" policies since the mid-1990s.[26]
Although in 1949 common objects such as a pen or a watch was rare in North Korea, by the mid 1960s North Korea's economy grew faster than the South. In 1957-1961, the five year plan placed reconstructing and developing the major industries destroyed by the war on the top of the priority list and placed consumer goods at the bottom of the priorities. This bias toward rebuilding major industries, "combined with unprecedentedly large amounts of aid from the Soviet bloc, pushed the economy forward at world-beating growth rates in the 1950s and 1960s".[27]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche
Comrade Sta Lin
As for china, the disastrous results of maoist economic policies, eg the starvation created by the Great Leap Forward, are well known and not even contested by most liberals. When the chinese adopted large scale capitalist elements into their economy and tossed the Mao book, life got immeasurably better for them.
