The Authoritarian Public Sphere: Legitimation and Autocratic Power in North Korea, Burma, and China *****Pre-publication version of abstract & introduction chapter***** Please cite according to published version: Dukalskis, Alexander (2017) The Authoritarian Public Sphere: Legitimation and Autocratic Power in North Korea, Burma, and China. New York: Routledge Abstract Autocracies craft and disseminate reasons, stories, and explanations for why they are entitled to rule. To shield those justifications from criticism, authoritarian regimes also censor information that they find threatening. While committed opponents of the government may be violently repressed, this book is about how the authoritarian state keeps the majority of its people quiescent by manipulating the ways in which they talk and think about politics. It argues that the legitimating messages of an authoritarian regime situated within a circumscribed public sphere limit political discussion, channel political imagination, and narrow public discourse to inhibit the formation of political alternatives. An authoritarian public sphere therefore augments the power of autocratic regimes. Yet no regime, regardless of its power, can completely stifle every criticism that citizens have and therefore relatively autonomous spaces furnish potential opportunities for people to transform private complaints into collective challenges to the regime's ruling ideology. 1
Transcript
The Authoritarian Public Sphere:
Legitimation and Autocratic Power in North Korea, Burma, and China
*****Pre-publication version of abstract & introduction chapter*****
Please cite according to published version:
Dukalskis, Alexander (2017) The Authoritarian Public Sphere: Legitimation and Autocratic Power in North Korea, Burma, and China. New York: Routledge
Abstract
Autocracies craft and disseminate reasons, stories, and explanations for why they are entitled to rule. To shield those justifications from criticism, authoritarian regimes also censor infor-mation that they find threatening. While committed opponents of the government may be vio-lently repressed, this book is about how the authoritarian state keeps the majority of its people quiescent by manipulating the ways in which they talk and think about politics. It argues that the legitimating messages of an authoritarian regime situated within a circumscribed public sphere limit political discussion, channel political imagination, and narrow public discourse to inhibit the formation of political alternatives. An authoritarian public sphere therefore aug-ments the power of autocratic regimes. Yet no regime, regardless of its power, can com-pletely stifle every criticism that citizens have and therefore relatively autonomous spaces furnish potential opportunities for people to transform private complaints into collective chal-lenges to the regime's ruling ideology.
This book evaluates these arguments in contemporary North Korea, Burma (also called Myanmar), and China. It explains how the authoritarian public sphere shapes political dis-course in each context and examines three domains for potential subversion of autocratic ide-ologies: the shadow markets of North Korea, networks of independent journalists in Burma/Myanmar, and the online sphere in China. In addition to making a theoretical contri-bution to the study of authoritarianism, this book draws upon unique empirical data. From 2011 to 2016 the author conducted fieldwork in the region, including semi-structured inter-views with North Korean defectors in South Korea, Burmese exiles in Thailand, and Burmese in Myanmar who stayed in the country during the military government, as well as an aca-demic trip to North Korea and several visits to China. When analyzed alongside state-pro-duced media, speeches, and legislation, interview evidence allows for a rich understanding of how ideologies influence everyday discussions about politics in the authoritarian public sphere.
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Introduction: Legitimation & Authoritarianism
On 18 September 1988, the people of Burma were greeted with a message from
something called the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). After months of
anti-government protests against the regime of Ne Win, who had ruled for 25 years, and an
intense six-week period of contention after he resigned in late July of 1988, the military had
apparently had enough. It declared martial law and in its first communiqué to the population,
delivered as Announcement No. 1/88 of the State Law and Order Restoration Council, it
provided a simple, matter-of-fact, justification for why it was seizing power and what it
planned to do:
1) In order to effect a timely halt to the deteriorating conditions on all sides all over the country and for the sake of the interests of the people, the Defence Forces have assumed all power in the state with effect from today so as to carry out the following tasks immediately:
a. to restore law, order, peace and tranquility;
b. to provide security and to facilitate transport and communications;
c. for this organization to do the utmost to ease the people's food, clothing, and shelter needs, and to render as much help as possible to the cooperatives and the private concerns;
d. to stage democratic multiparty general elections after fulfilling all the above-stated responsibilities
….
Signed: General Saw Maung, Chairman of the SLORC.
Authoritarian regimes like the SLORC almost always give some reason, story, or
explanation for why they are entitled to rule. Some leaders may argue that they need non-
democratic power in order to save the country from economic ruin, to stave off the threat of
an armed opposition, or to protect the people from a menacing external enemy. Others may
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justify their rule by providing a utopian vision of state and society that will be realized only
through a period of dictatorship. Still others point to the special – even mystical – qualities of
the dictator him or herself to legitimate the wisdom of allowing him/her to rule by decree.
Appeals to ethnic or national solidarity may be used to justify non-democratic power in order
to reassert the group's glory and its rightful place vis-a-vis another group or other states. Ideas
that justify autocratic rule come in different forms, but autocratic leaders must say something
to justify their supremacy.
A realist view of politics understands these arguments as epiphenomenal, or as
reflections of underlying distributions of power. Authoritarian regimes, after all, have
weapons and agents of repression at their disposal to enforce their will. They can also provide
material rewards to induce loyalty. Legitimating ideas become merely “window dressing”
that has little or no impact on the resilience of authoritarian regimes. Autocratic leaders, on
this account, rule because they are powerful or clever enough to do so and the justifications
that they provide for ruling are mainly reflections of the coercive underpinnings of their rule.
The realist perspective is both intuitively and empirically seductive. Autocracies often
violently repress their opponents, forbid individuals from organizing for political change,
deal harshly with internal dissenters, and privilege their supporters. Authoritarian leaders
enjoy significant material and status benefits along with their political power and therefore
have incentives to remain in office. Furthermore, it is often difficult to believe the claims
made by dictators to justify their rule – one need only think of the personality cults
surrounding Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong – and so we have reasonable grounds to
understand outward displays of agreement with these claims as motivated by an entirely
rational fear of harsh punishment.
Yet there are also good reasons to complicate this understanding of the role of
ideology in authoritarian regimes. If a regime's legitimation is merely a manifestation of
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underlying power capabilities, then why bother with such messages at all? If authoritarian
leaders are rational and if efforts at legitimation have little effect on bolstering their power,
then it seems strange that they would so persistently err in devoting resources to developing
and disseminating such messages and blocking alternative influences. Part of the answer to
this puzzle is that authoritarian leaders are not mistaken or irrational when they disseminate
an ideology and repress alternative viewpoints. Indeed, this book will argue that authoritarian
states that control the public sphere and craft legitimating ideologies entrench their power by
influencing the ways that their citizens think and talk about politics.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1978: 48) famously argued that “the strongest is never strong
enough to be the master forever unless he transforms his force into right and obedience into
duty.” In other words, although repression can suffice for a short period of time leaders
cannot maintain sustainable control solely by force and must legitimate their authority in the
eyes of their subjects. If people believe the messages of the ruler, then maintaining power is
made easier and cheaper since the ruler does not have to violently coerce obedience on a
constant basis. Yet an emphasis on authority and belief may overstate the case for the power
of autocratic legitimation since we know that individuals in authoritarian regimes frequently
question and doubt the claims of the state and that states often censor or repress ideas that
they find threatening. The former intimates that authoritarian ideologies are not fully and
uniformly convincing while the latter suggests an implicit recognition that many efforts at
authoritarian legitimation are too flimsy to withstand serious scrutiny. In other words, the
strongest cannot rule by force alone, but neither can the weakest rule by persuasion alone. As
Schedler (2013: 55) notes, it is not easy for contemporary autocracies to do this:
Modern authoritarian regimes are post-traditional and post-transcendental. They cannot ground their right to rule on secure claims of tradition or divine will. Ideologically homeless, lacking a secure roof of legitimacy over their exposed heads, they have to tap non-religious sources of legitimacy: nationalism, socialism, Asian values, whatever. Even when, longing for the comforts of pre-
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modern legitimacy, they invoke timeless sources of authority, they have to invent them, like the Arab monarchies.
This book is an effort to understand the role of the public sphere, legitimation, and
ideology in contemporary authoritarian regimes. More depth will be provided throughout
subsequent chapters about the central concepts of this book and their theoretical
underpinnings, but brief definitions will help clarify some key terms before going further.
The book understands the public sphere to be a realm in which people discuss issues of
political importance and acquire or circulate politically-relevant information. It is a collection
of physical or social sites in which people communicate with one another either face-to-face
or via media. In its ideal form this sphere features free and open discussion unencumbered by
the state's dominance. This book will illuminate ways in which authoritarian states dominate
political discourse to preclude a democratic public sphere of this sort from emerging and how
this strategy contributes to the power of autocracies.
It understands legitimation as the efforts that elites make to justify their power.
Legitimating messages are therefore communications that contain information meant to
validate the regime’s power while obscuring information harmful to its power. Such messages
are not limited to textual media or direct arguments about policy, but may also be
communicated through visual propaganda, symbols, education curricula, speeches, official
ceremonies or parades, and so on. Legitimating messages portray the state's existence, agents,
and actions in ways that highlight some aspects of reality and obscure others with the intent
of amplifying the legitimacy of the autocratic coalition and marginalizing critical
perspectives. This book understands ideology as a set of ideas and formulations in which
legitimating messages are situated. An ideology operates at a higher level of abstraction than
any particular legitimating message but also serves to legitimize the power of the elite. In this
sense, this book is consistent with Gill’s distinction in the Soviet case between “ideology” as
a somewhat complex set of political ideas and “metanarrative” as the ways in which political
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elites communicated system-legitimating ideas to the population (Gill, 2011). The analysis
that follows is concerned primarily with the legitimation function of ideology –
operationalized as legitimating messages – rather than with the intellectual coherence of a
given ideology or the finer points of its theoretical claims.
The legitimating messages and ideology of an authoritarian state are located in what
this book calls the authoritarian public sphere. If an ideal democratic public sphere is one in
which free political discussion can take place between citizens and critical information can
circulate openly, an authoritarian public sphere approximates the opposite. It is a realm of
political discussion and information that is dominated and manipulated by the authoritarian
regime and/or its allies. The authoritarian public sphere is characterized by the state’s efforts
to establish its foundations, delineate its boundaries, and monitor its content. The state does
this by saturating the public sphere with its legitimating messages and guarding against any
unwanted intrusion by potentially dangerous alternative perspectives. Put differently, there
are ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ dimensions to a state’s efforts dominate and control the public
sphere. Positive efforts include crafting and actively disseminating messages legitimating the
regime while negative efforts include blocking, censoring, or undermining viewpoints that
might be threatening to the state’s narrative. When combined ‘positive’ legitimation and
‘negative’ repression form what this book will call the authoritarian public sphere. The result
is an inversion of the very meaning of a genuine public sphere.
The cumulative effect of legitimating messages situated within a circumscribed and
manipulated public sphere is that they contribute to the ability of rulers to maintain
authoritarian power.1 Of course if people actively believe in the ideology and the legitimating
1 While recognizing that there are various typologies of non-democratic regimes, unless otherwise noted, this book will use the terms “authoritarian,” “dictatorship,” “autocratic,” and “non-democratic” interchangeably to avoid repetition for the reader. The classic typology of Linz (1975) and Linz & Stepan (1996) ascribes ideology causal power in “totalitarian” regimes, but not in “authoritarian” regimes. This book argues that such a distinction misses the extent to which non-democratic regimes of all types use some form of ideology to legitimate their rule. Other notable regime typologies include a four-part typology of single-party, personalist, military, and monarchical dictatorships (Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, 2014), a dichotomous typology of democracies and non-democracies (Przeworski et al., 2000), and an effort to set aside descriptive labels in favor
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messages being proffered by the state, then this argument is self-evident, but an authoritarian
regime's dominance of the public sphere contributes to its power even if people are
ambivalent about the specific content of the state’s legitimation efforts. An authoritarian
public sphere limits political discussions, channels political imagination, stunts political
discourse, and amplifies pro-regime voices such that mounting arguments against the regime
and elaborating alternatives to its power become more difficult. It follows that an
authoritarian public sphere can bolster autocracies even when the question of citizens' active
endorsement of the regime's legitimating messages is set aside. Dictatorships violate
individual rights to freedom of information and expression with depressing regularity, but
they do even more than this by manipulating the information environment in which people
live such that aspects of reality prioritized by the state seep into interactions among citizens
even when the state's repressive agents are not obviously present.
We may never know for sure the extent to which autocratic rulers genuinely believe in
the content of their ideologies or legitimation claims. This book sets aside the “true believer”
question and instead blends strategic and discursive approaches to legitimation: leaders wish
to maintain power and see controlling and manipulating the public sphere as one way to help
them do so. By controlling public discourse, authoritarian leaders hope to stop the complaints
that individuals will inevitably have about the government from entering the public sphere
and finding common ground with the grievances of others. If individuals manage to find
autonomous public spaces in which to speak about the government, authoritarian leaders
hope that the legitimating messages which they promote shape and direct the discussions that
take place. Authoritarian regimes aim to isolate the ideas of people with doubts or complaints
about the regime's rule by blunting the potential for critical messages to resonate, thereby
ultimately bolstering authoritarian power. While committed opponents of the regime may be
of measuring specific dimensions of authoritarian politics (Svolik, 2012). These approaches largely bracket out ideology although recent efforts have attempted to incorporate legitimation into regime typologies (Kailitz, 2013) and specific regime types (Levitsky & Way, 2013), of which more will be said below.
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targeted for repression, this book is about how the authoritarian state tries to keep enough of
the rest of the people quiescent by manipulating the ways in which they think and talk about
politics.
Sometimes ordinary citizens do manage to pierce the dense controls on public
discourse by taking advantage of autonomous spaces or networks to articulate and discuss
their ideas, and in some cases mount serious opposition to a nondemocratic regime. The
argument developed here is that an authoritarian public sphere makes these activities
immensely challenging, although by no means impossible. After explaining and assessing
strategies of authoritarian regimes, this book rotates its perspective and explores examples of
the methods that ordinary citizens of authoritarian states may use to maneuver within the
often-suffocating strictures of authoritarian political discourse. By paying attention to spaces
in which people operate at a greater distance from state surveillance than in official settings,
the importance of both regime legitimation and potentially subversive political discussion
become clearer: the former is meant to undermine the latter but can have difficulty containing
the spontaneous critical viewpoints that may emerge from less encumbered discussion.
The empirical material of this book consists of three case studies woven throughout
the subsequent chapters: North Korea, Burma (or Myanmar), and China. The analysis that
follows devotes more and somewhat different empirical attention to North Korea and
Myanmar because it draws on fieldwork from 2011 to 2016 and interview evidence collected
by the author from of people who lived in the extremely closed environments of those two
societies under authoritarian rule and in some cases helped contribute to the government’s
legitimation efforts. While in-depth primary interview data is presented on North Korea and
Myanmar, there is much to learn theoretically by comparing and contrasting these cases with
different types of evidence from the more influential and well-researched case of China. The
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case of China will therefore rely more on the voluminous secondary literature as well as
primary documents where available.
Taken together the three cases present a useful continuum for heuristic case studies on
the influence of the authoritarian public sphere on the power of autocratic regimes (see
George and Bennett, 2005: 75). Widely used typologies in political science classify these
regimes in different ways.2 Geddes, Wright, and Frantz (2014) code North Korea as a “party-
personalist” regime, Myanmar under the SLORC/SPDC as a “military” regime, and China as
a “party-based” regime. Kailitz (2013) categorizes both North Korea and China as
“communist ideocracies” because of their emphasis on a utopian ideology and Myanmar as a
“military autocracy.” For Weeks (2014), North Korea is ruled by a relatively unconstrained
“personalist boss” while China is a more collective party-based “machine” and
SLORC/SPDC Myanmar is a “junta” because it was a non-personalist military regime. For
Levitsky and Way (2013) China and North Korea would both be “revolutionary regimes”
because they came to power in revolutions while SLORC/SPDC Myanmar would not. In the
classic formulations of Linz (1975) as well as Linz and Stepan (1996), North Korea would be
a “totalitarian” regime, Myanmar an “authoritarian” regime, and contemporary China perhaps
a candidate for a unique type of “post-totalitarian” regime.
These and other differences are useful for analysis. North Korea is the contemporary
world’s most extreme case of authoritarian control while China is a reformed Leninist state
that employs increasingly sophisticated methods to channel political discourse in a less blunt
way than the DPRK. Myanmar is useful analytically not only because it is an example of a
non-communist military authoritarian regime, but also because in 2011 it began to undertake
liberalizing reforms which throws the policies of the pre-2011 military regime into sharper
relief. Myanmar’s liberalization also allows for clearer analysis of the limits of the
authoritarian public sphere as well as the connections between the efforts of the regime to 2 For critical interrogation of current typologies, see Roller (2013) and Wahman, Teorell, and Hadenius (2013).
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control political discourse and the contours of the transition away from direct military
authoritarian rule. As Myanmar’s politics evolves, the military government’s decades-long
effort to control the public sphere weighs heavily but also illuminates ways in which the
authoritarian public sphere can be transcended.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or
North Korea) features the most densely controlled authoritarian public sphere in the
contemporary world. Since the 1940s, the North Korean state under three successive dictators
has gone to tremendous lengths to make ideology a part of everyday life and to block
alternative influences. North Korean politics has undergone changes since the 1940s and up
to the present (Smith 2015), including in the content of its ideology (Armstrong, 2013b;
Kwon & Chung, 2012), the regime's relationships with the external world (Armstrong,
2013a), its economic structures and capacity (Joo, 2010), its bureaucratic politics
(McEachern, 2010), the role of its military (Woo, 2014; Roehrig, 2013), and the everyday
lives of citizens (Choi 2013). Furthermore, in the mid-1990s North Korea experienced a
devastating famine in which up to 1 million people died of starvation and related causes
(Haggard & Noland, 2007).
The DPRK government is a consummate survivor in a constantly changing world and
theoretically informed attention to its thoroughly dominated public discourse enriches
explanations for how it has lasted so long in spite of its poor performance in delivering public
goods. Interviews with North Koreans reveal the extent to which the DPRK’s authoritarian
public sphere inhibits substantive political discussion and channels the political imaginations
of its citizens. Recently however, the regime's control has sometimes appeared tenuous as the
socio-political norms of everyday life so assiduously cultivated by the DPRK for over 65
years are increasingly in flux (Choi, 2013). Among the many challenges in studying North
Korea is to bear in mind that it is not a static place in which citizens are devoid of agency, but
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rather that existing data can help us understand changes, their implications, and the role of
citizens in the DPRK (Armstrong, 2016). Because the state-directed socialist economy now
demonstrably fails to provide for most of its citizens, North Koreans rely on the mostly illegal
but sporadically repressed “shadow economy” to procure the food and goods they need to
survive. In social sites like shadow economy markets, the DPRK regime confronts new
challenges to maintaining a rigidly controlled public sphere in an increasingly fluid and
interconnected world. North Korea's shadow economy illuminates the limits and contours of
state control, but does not yet signal an immanent anti-regime uprising from below
(Dukalskis, 2016; Joo, 2014).
In Burma/Myanmar3, military-dominated nationalist governments that have worked to
assert control over Burma's centrifugal political tendencies and impose a vision of a
centralized, disciplined state. Military governments in Burma have been highly repressive of
political dissent but impotent to deliver effective economic and social policy (Leider, 2012).
In 1962 General Ne Win shunted aside a feeble parliamentary democracy in a military coup
and was able to rule Burma until a popular uprising in 1988 (Boudreau, 2004; Schock, 2005).
While it briefly appeared that Burma's authoritarianism may give way to a more pluralistic
form of politics, the military reasserted its control through juntas known as the State Law and
Order Restoration Council (SLORC) and later the State Peace and Development Council
(SPDC) (see Dukalskis, 2009). From 1988 to 2010 the SLORC/SPDC maintained a strict
authoritarian public sphere, repressed a major non-violent movement, jailed or exiled its
internal enemies, and wrought violence in many areas of the country through its counter-
insurgency tactics, all while promising to lead Myanmar toward a peaceful and democratic
future (see Charney, 2009: 170-200). 3 In 1989 military government changed the English name of the country from Burma to Myanmar. The name change was controversial because, many argued, the military government did not have the right to make the change since it was not elected. ‘Myanmar’ derives from the written form of the Burmese language while ‘Burma’ derives from the spoken form. While almost all official communications use ‘Myanmar’ now, consistent with many other academic publications, this book will use both names interchangeably. For more, see Dittmer (2008).
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In 2010 the military began to liberalize on its own terms and facilitated a transition
from a military authoritarian government to a quasi-civilian government with significant
power and privileges reserved for the military elite and their allies (see Morgenbesser, 2015;
Egreteau, 2014; Holliday, 2011; Pedersen, 2011; Williams, 2011). This transition included an
amnesty for any crimes committed by state agents during the junta period, which has thus far
precluded legal accountability for human rights violations (Dukalskis, 2015). Reforms have
been difficult and Myanmar may yet slide back into the more draconian authoritarianism of
previous regimes, but the transition has opened political space in ways not seen in Burma for
many years. Indeed, in a result that was difficult to imagine during the SLORC/SPDC period,
in 2015 the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) won in a landslide election
over the pro-military party and a host of ethnically-based parties and was allowed to govern
starting in 2016 (see Thawnghmung, 2015).
The impact on Myanmar’s authoritarian public sphere after reforms began to take root
in 2011 and 2012 under the administration of Thein Sein was palpable as newspapers,
political discussion, and international linkages reemerged and proliferated. Yet during the two
decades prior to this liberalization, the military worked to circumscribe and distort Burma's
political discourse such that it could eliminate challenges to its vision of “disciplined
democracy” overseen by the armed forces. Important in this regard were the regime’s efforts
to tightly control political discourse surrounding the drafting and promulgation of Myanmar’s
2008 constitution, a document which enshrines control of important ministries for the
military and which stipulates wide discretionary powers for the armed forces to assert
themselves politically. Control was not perfect, however, and working in the interstices of the
SLORC/SPDC's severe constraints a network of independent journalists managed to produce
and disseminate a modicum of factual reporting and analysis about issues of public
importance. This network was thus well placed as the SLORC/SPDC began to liberalize
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because journalists already had a foundation from which they could report on transitional
developments and exert at least some pressure on the new government to loosen restrictions
on the press.
China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a case of authoritarianism in
which the government attempts to pro-actively reform and adjust to challenges that may
threaten its power. Unlike both Myanmar and North Korea, the CCP was able to marry
authoritarian control with economic prosperity and thereby use its increased resources to
develop more sophisticated and adaptable methods of authoritarian control. Broad sectors of
society were thus co-opted into developing an interest in the perpetuation of CCP rule
(Wright, 2010). Unlike its communist counterpart in North Korea, China reformed its
economy beginning in the late 1970s and eventually moved politically to a less personalistic
brand of politics than its Korean neighbor. Yet the CCP remains in power without serious
alternatives and along with North Korea and a handful of other states, stands as a challenge to
the common assumption that communism collapsed along with the Soviet Union (Dimitrov,
2013; Saxonberg, 2013).
The CCP intensively studied the demise of the Soviet Union and among its
conclusions were the need to adopt a flexible ideology and to regularize leadership transitions
at the apex of the party-state (Shambaugh, 2008). Key aspects of the party's staying power
since that time have therefore been the ability of elites to coordinate leadership succession,
2009). Legitimating messages operating in an authoritarian public sphere do not explain
autocratic power completely, but legitimation certainly has more of a role to play than current
scholarship suggests.
Milan Svolik (2012) usefully divides the study of autocracy into two distinct
problems. The “problem of authoritarian control” is concerned with the conflict between the
dictator and, broadly speaking, the people. The dictator employs the methods and tools at
his/her disposal to keep the people from frustrating his/her intentions or ultimately
overthrowing him/her. The “problem of authoritarian power-sharing” concerns how the
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dictator coordinates between elite actors in the regime to avoid coups and internal mutinies. If
the first problem is one of the regime-versus-people, the second is one of faction-versus-
faction within the regime. Put another way, an authoritarian regime faces both lateral threats
from within and vertical threats from below (Schedler, 2013: 35). While it is likely that an
ideology perceived as legitimate by regime elites helps to maintain intra-regime cohesion and
therefore contributes to authoritarian resilience (e.g. Schedler and Hoffmann, 2016; Kailitz
and Stockemer, 2015; Levistky & Way, 2013; Moghaddam, 2013), this book focuses its
attention on the regime-versus-people dimension of authoritarian rule, which includes the
regime's efforts to promote the perception that it is unified and monolithic vis-a-vis its
population. As Schedler (2013: 47) puts it, “the management of threats involves the
management of threat perceptions,” meaning that authoritarian leaders project an image of
elite unity to deter both lateral and vertical challenges. Promoting elite unity can be done with
propaganda, for example, which signals the strength of the regime to meet existing or
emerging social challenges (Huang, 2015).
Most authoritarian leaders are ultimately deposed by someone from within their own
ruling coalition (Svolik, 2012; Ezrow and Frantz 2011), but the problem of keeping their
populations quiescent is a serious one for dictators, as recent scholarship on the relative
success of non-violent resistance to authoritarianism suggests (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011;
Nepstad, 2011). When a regime insider deposes the dictator and establishes a new
dictatorship him or herself, the problem of authoritarian control persists and the new leader
must present some justification for why the new regime is legitimate.
One way for dictators to solve the regime-versus-people problem is to resort to
repression. Many studies on state repression conceive of elites who, faced with challenges
from the population, will “carefully weigh the costs and benefits of coercive action” and
“consider the alternative mechanisms for maintaining control, as well as the probabilities of
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successful application” (Davenport, 2007: 4). Repression is often thought of as a last resort
for autocratic leaders clinging to power (Josua and Edel, 2015, p. 290). Ultimately a unified
military that is willing to use force if the population appears threatening is a powerful and
effective tool for authoritarian rulers (Bellin, 2012). Indeed, research on non-violent uprisings
suggests that if the security forces remain unified against anti-regime threats, then it is
extremely difficult for the challengers to succeed in overthrowing the incumbents (Nepstad,
2011). The logical extension of repression-centered explanations of authoritarianism is the
argument that “naked power is what keeps the masses downtrodden in dictatorships”
(Moghaddam, 2013: 3).
There are compelling reasons to add analytic depth to repression-centered accounts of
authoritarian power. The empirical record suggests that military-dominated autocratic
regimes, which ought to be specialists in using force and violence, typically have shorter
lifespans than other types of autocracies (Geddes, Frantz, & Wright, 2014; Kailitz &
Stockemer, 2015; Hadenius & Teorell, 2007).4 Furthermore, a civilian dictatorship has good
reasons to prefer not to use direct force to repress the population. Notwithstanding the
material and reputation costs associated with repression, by summoning the security forces to
use violence on the population, the dictator is taking a risk by emboldening the state's
repressive apparatus to seek greater autonomy and/or power (Svolik, 2013). If called on
enough times to subdue widespread challenges, the security forces may eventually realize
that they hold the power and can rule themselves without the inconvenience of an
intermediary autocrat. In other words “the very resources that enable the regime's repressive
agents to suppress its opposition also empower them to act against the regime itself” (Svolik,
2012: 124).
4 But see Knutsen and Nygard (2015) for the argument that there is no significant difference in the lifespans of military and single-party regimes once the degree of democracy is accounted for.
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This implies that if possible the regime would prefer to use softer methods of
repression to ensure that full-fledged opposition movements are smothered before they can
ever make it to the streets.5 Because military officers are more likely to defect from the
regime if they sense that an uprising from below may be successful, it is important for
authoritarian leaders to prevent their soldiers from confronting a disaffected population
(Magaloni & Kricheli, 2010: 137). A strategy that entails circumscribing the public sphere via
censorship, saturating it with legitimating messages, and monitoring the population for signs
of deviation is one that dictators employ to avoid relying too heavily on their repressive
agents. This ‘upstream’ strategy is not successful all of the time, but when it is it works to
keep an individual's private complaints about the regime just that – individual and private –
and helps to prevent them from coalescing into overt and public critiques with mobilizing
potential.
In addition to repression-centered accounts a focus on the functions of authoritarian
institutions, or the rules of the political game, has become perhaps the dominant perspective
to explain autocratic power in contemporary political science (see Pepinsky, 2014). Paying
attention to institutions locates explanations for authoritarian persistence or breakdown in
formal and informal regularities of political behavior typically within the regime itself (Art,
2012: 352). Legislatures in authoritarian regimes, for example, may help rulers stave off
threats from the population by helping to incorporate regime outsiders into the ruling
structure and to provide a venue where compromises can be negotiated without being framed
as acts of subversion or betrayal (Gandhi & Przeworski, 2007). Dominant political parties
could help authoritarian regimes stay in power by institutionalizing agenda setting and
dispute resolution such that potential elite splits can be effectively mitigated (Brownlee, 5 The distinction between “hard” and “soft” repression (Gerschewski, 2013) or between “high intensity” and “low intensity” forms of repression (Levitsky & Way, 2010) typically revolves around the use of violence: the former violates the personal integrity of the person through activities such as torture, disappearances, imprisonment, or extrajudicial killing while the latter involves less visible forms of coercion such as censorship, surveillance, administrative harassment, and so on. For more discussion on these themes, see Josua and Edel, 2015.
20
2007), providing a structure and human capital to mobilize the population (Magaloni &
Kricheli, 2010), and/or by creating enough sunk costs that lower-level members of the ruling
party are encouraged to remain loyal in order to reap eventual rewards as they ascend the
ranks (Svolik, 2012). Furthermore, elections in authoritarian regimes may contribute to
durability by helping rulers allocate spoils to supporters, gather information on patterns of
loyalty, divide opposition forces, and provide international and domestic legitimacy (Gandhi
& Lust-Okar, 2009).
Yet elite co-optation carries its own potential danger for the dictator insofar as
distributing spoils or power to strategically important actors could empower them to
eventually challenge the regime (Kailitz & Stockemer, 2015; see also Fukuoka, 2015). What
a focus on legitimation principally adds to institutional explanations is an emphasis on the
importance of maintaining the perception of elite unity and thereby undermining potential
challenges from below or from within the regime (Schedler & Hoffmann, 2016; Schedler,
2013: 47-49). It also helps explain how authoritarian regimes marginalize potentially
threatening groups so that they do not have to spend the time or resources to co-opt them into
the governing coalition. For example, if a perceived opposition threat induces the regime to
co-opt some opposition elites into its legislature, this begs questions of how the opposition
threat arose in the first place, how it was understood as a threat, and why the regime failed to
squelch or marginalize it before it became threatening.
A focus on co-optation through institutions sometimes obscures important aspects of
how dictatorships maintain control by centering its analysis disproportionately on intra-
regime dynamics. An institutional co-optation perspective helps explain how dictators
distribute rewards, coordinate intra-regime actions, and remain cohesive vis-a-vis their
populations, but says little about how a regime legitimates itself or why it bothers to construct
an ideology or engage in censorship. While some studies in this vein do focus on information
21
dynamics in autocracies, this is not typically done with legitimating information in mind, but
rather economic or technocratic information (see Boix & Svolik, 2013). A focus on
authoritarian institutions is useful and has markedly advanced understanding of
authoritarianism, but like any approach it is incomplete.
Partly in response to these concerns, some scholars have made recent attempts to
reincorporate ideology and legitimation into explanations of authoritarian politics (e.g.
Grauvogel & von Soest 2014; Gobel 2011). In his regime typology Kailitz (2013: 41), for
example, argues “what both members of the elite and the ordinary people believe about the
ruler's right to rule are important reasons why a political regime is able to survive for a long
period of time” (see also Gilley, 2009). On this account, legitimation is much more than
epiphenomenal of underlying power distributions and can be an independent causal factor in
explaining the robustness of authoritarian rule. Indeed, Kailitz and Stockemer (2015: 2)
“emphasize the regime’s legitimation as the most important mechanism for survival.” A
useful distinction can be drawn between legitimation claims, or what a regime says about its
right to rule, and legitimacy itself, or the capacity of the regime to instill belief (von Soest &
Grauvogel, 2015). All governments make claims to legitimation but the resonance and effect
of those claims is far from guaranteed.
When integrated as one of three dimensions of autocratic stability alongside
repression and co-optation via institutions, legitimation can contribute to a comprehensive
understanding of authoritarian resilience (Gerschewski, 2013). While recent scholarship on
authoritarianism has emphasized repression and co-optation, explanations of autocratic
resilience remain incomplete when legitimation is left out. When legitimation is understood
broadly as seeking “to guarantee active consent, compliance with the rules, passive
obedience, or mere toleration within the population” then it bears directly on the durability of
autocracies (ibid.: 18). Legitimation efforts should not be seen as the only force keeping
22
autocracies in power but they should be taken seriously as a causal factor in reifying
autocratic power. Nevertheless there is more analytical work to do in conceptualizing and
analyzing the effects of legitimation and authoritarian ideologies (Gerschewski, 2013: 20-21),
an endeavor to which this book aims to contribute.
This book can be seen as an effort to take seriously the role of legitimation,
ideologies, and the authoritarian public sphere in reifying contemporary autocratic power.
The pages that follow provide a theoretically-informed framework to compare different
authoritarian ideologies, qualitative empirical assessment of how authoritarian ideologies
operate in three contexts, and a discussion of how public discourse ought to be understood in
studies of authoritarianism. This adds texture to our understanding of authoritarian regimes
while also systematizing the way we understand how legitimating messages contribute to
authoritarian power.
Plan of the Book
After explaining the details of this study's semi-structured interview data at the end of
this chapter, the remainder of the book proceeds in six chapters. The next chapter argues that
a heavily circumscribed public sphere in which a regime's legitimating messages receive
disproportionate attention fosters resignation and acquiescence to the regime's rule, makes it
more difficult to imagine alternative political futures, and therefore contributes to
authoritarian power. To make this case, the chapter elaborates the concept of an authoritarian
public sphere and examines the state infrastructure typical in its construction. To illustrate the
state infrastructure required to construct an authoritarian public sphere, the chapter presents
examples from contemporary China. In discussing the effects of the authoritarian public
sphere, this chapter draws on 75 semi-structured interviews conducted with North Koreans
and Burmese. Interviews are a rich source of data to explain the day-to-day interactions that
23
are influenced by a government’s efforts to control the public sphere. The picture that
emerges is one in which state leaders interested in maintaining power work to discipline the
public sphere through repressing information and placing their ideological version of reality
in a dominant position. Public discussion about political issues suffers in these environments
and inhibits citizens from being able to participate in shaping their own political future.
Chapter 3 elaborates a theoretical framework to understand how authoritarian
ideologies operate to manipulate and circumscribe public discourse. It proposes a structure of
six elements of authoritarian legitimating messages that can facilitate comparison across a
range of contexts. Concealment elements erase inconvenient or unseemly aspects of despotic
rule from public discussion. Framing elements package particular events or issues so that
they are consistent with the regime's ruling ideology and legitimacy. Blaming elements
attribute responsibility for undesirable outcomes to one or several non-state groups, entities,
activities, or individuals and thus deflect potential blame away from the state. Inevitability
elements portray a ruling power that is unified, entrenched, and will rule in perpetuity.
Mythologized origin elements are backward-looking and link the current regime to the
legitimacy of founding figures, wars or popular uprisings that either brought the regime to
power or to which it traces its origins. Promised land elements are forward-looking because
they direct the population toward a better future and link the dominant's continued rule to that
future.
Chapter 4 examines these elements in the contexts of North Korea, Myanmar, and
China. Analysis of how the six elements of legitimating messages operate in each case shows
the ‘positive’ dimension of the authoritarian public sphere by explaining what kind of
messages are crafted and disseminated. Explanations of all three cases draw on relevant state
media, speeches, legislation, and secondary literature, while the chapter supplements analysis
of the North Korean and Burmese cases with the author's interview evidence. Analysis of the
24
ideological elements in Myanmar and North Korea will be comprehensive and address a
variety of challenges and issues for authoritarian resilience. Because of the scope and
complexity of the Chinese case, analysis of the CCP will more narrowly focus to one
theoretically pertinent issue for explaining authoritarian power: leadership transitions.
Leadership succession is a persistent problem for authoritarian regimes generally and is also a
central issue in scholarship on the resilience of the CCP specifically. This chapter will
examine the ways the Chinese government deploys these elements surrounding leadership
transitions specifically, which are sensitive points of potential rupture. The chapter concludes
with a discussion of how the ideological elements interact with one another to bolster or
potentially undermine authoritarian rule and with broader remarks on situating ideologies in
the authoritarian public sphere.
While the previous three chapters focus on the state's efforts to control and manipulate
the public sphere, Chapter 5 attempts to understand how ordinary citizens and opposition-
minded individuals navigate within those strictures. In each empirical context, the chapter
looks to potentially autonomous discursive spaces that may be sites for the development of
critiques of authoritarian rule and the discussion of alternative political futures. The realities
of each case dictate that different domains are relatively autonomous and thus potentially
politically salient: the shadow economy in North Korea, a network of independent journalists
in SLORC/SPDC Burma, and the internet in China. Each domain was chosen for its political
relevance to its context. For example, the internet was only peripherally politically salient in
North Korea or SLORC/SPDC Myanmar but of serious political importance in China, while
otherwise ordinary economic activity is politically salient in the DPRK precisely because it is
illegal in ways not relevant in China or Burma.
Thus while there are context-specific reasons to focus on the particular domains, they
each speak to more general dynamics of semi-autonomous political spaces within the
25
dominance of an overarching authoritarian public sphere. In the North Korean case, the
chapter examines the potential role of the shadow economy as a site for anti-regime
discussion and, based on secondary literature and interview data with former market
participants, finds that the shadow economy is unlikely to have straightforward regime-
weakening political consequences. In the case of Myanmar, the chapter draws on interviews
with independent and former government journalists conducted just as the SLORC/SPDC
regime was beginning to liberalize its media policies. The data reveals the techniques that
journalists used evade the censors in order to communicate important news to their readers
and to journalists outside the country. In a heavily regulated and circumscribed public sphere,
this helped provide factual information that could be used to cut against the dominance of the
state's narrative and eventually helped facilitate more openness once Burma’s transition got
underway. Finally, in the case of China the chapter looks to the increasingly important role of
internet communication in acting as a semi-autonomous space in which citizens can criticize
and question the party. Drawing on secondary literature, it highlights the dynamics of a
regime trying to adapt its control mechanisms with an online population that is increasingly
connected. The chapter concludes with an assessment of what these three different domains
tell us about the role of critical discussion in contemporary authoritarian contexts more
generally.
Chapter 6 consists of three brief plausibility probes (Odell, 2001). The aim is to assess
the general applicability of the authoritarian public sphere framework by deploying it in a
number of different cases outside the scope of post-Cold War Asia. First, the chapter
considers a case of anti-communist, right-wing authoritarianism in South Korea from 1961 to
1979. Given the political context, this case should resemble other similarly legitimated
dictatorships of the era, such as Taiwan and Indonesia. The chapter then extends the
applicability of the book's arguments by applying them to two non-Asian cases of
26
contemporary authoritarianism. In discussing, secondly, how Cuba adjusted its ideology after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the book examines the applicability of the argument to a
Latin American case. Third, by examining how Iran responded to the 2009 “Green
Movement” the book enlarges its empirical scope farther by considering a non-Asian, non-
communist, and non-military dominated regime. The Iranian case also allows for an
examination of a contemporary authoritarian regime in which elections feature prominently.
Ultimately the purpose of a plausibility probe is not to make strong causal claims, but rather
to assess the potential for a theory to “travel” by deploying it in cases thought to be relatively
amenable to its contours (Odell, 2001).
Chapter 7 concludes the book with a discussion of its applicability to the study of
contemporary autocracy. It makes the case for paying more attention to the role of the
authoritarian public sphere in our understanding of how authoritarian regimes maintain their
power and, further, how that power can be undermined. It examines how the concept can help
us understand three theoretical issue areas important to the study of authoritarianism, namely
nonviolent resistance, state repression, and the advent of social networking and the internet.
Ultimately, attention to the role of the authoritarian public sphere will help round out our
understanding of dictatorship and its future, but of course leaves open many questions. The
conclusion attempts to highlight these.
Semi-Structured Interview Data
Some of the evidence used throughout this book comes from semi-structured
interviews conducted by the author with North Koreans and Myanmar citizens. Semi-
structured interviews with people who have lived in North Korea and Myanmar, and in some
cases helped produce or actively oppose the state's ideology, allow for better understanding of
how the authoritarian public sphere works. Interviews help ground the ideological
27
pronouncements of the government in daily reality, provide a window into how people
discuss political issues in the public sphere, and alert us to how the state influences political
discussion even if people dissimulate or disguise their true beliefs in public. Semi-structured
interviews are an excellent source of “detail” and “depth” and are most appropriate when the
researcher wishes to attain a “middle ground” between the open-ended nature of an
ethnographic interview and the narrow strictures of a close-ended survey (Beech 2002).
Evidence for the Chinese case does not include interviews, but given that it is relatively more
open and well-researched with publicly available evidence, and that the case functions in this
book as a comparative touchstone, this limitation is manageable.
In a semi-structured interview, the researcher has a number of topics to cover for a
given interview, but also has the flexibility to adjust the questions to the responses,
experiences, and characteristics of the interviewee and the context (Mason, 2002: 62). If the
respondent is an opposition activist, the researcher may ask about the methods by which s/he
sought to overcome the state's ideology or repression and reach people with alternative
messages, while if the respondent is a teacher the researcher may ask what kinds of things
s/he was asked to teach about the state at particular times in its history. The aim of this
method is to draw on the experiences of each individual with directed but open-ended
questions so that the analyst can evaluate answers together to examine larger patterns of
interactions and processes. This method provides rich and fine-grained source material about
everyday life while also allowing the researcher to structure the inquiry around specific
research objectives.
In total this book draws on 75 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2011 and 2012
as well as subsequent fieldwork in South Korea and Myanmar that included further
interviews in 2015 and 2016, respectively. In September and October of 2011, the author
conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with North Koreans in Seoul, South Korea, as well
28
as a number of expert interviews with those who research North Korean issues. While an
imperfect substitute for conducting interviews in North Korea proper – an impossible activity
at present – interviews with those who have left the DPRK still allows for a picture of
everyday life under the regime to emerge.6 In June 2012, 10 additional semi-structured
interviews, also in the Seoul area, supplemented this original sample. The second set of
interviews focused more on resistance to state ideology, including operating in shadow
market contexts, which helped provide the data for chapter 5 of this book. Some of these
interviews were used as a source of primary data to analyze North Korea’s shadow economy
and its relation to the DPRK’s authoritarian resilience (see Dukalskis, 2016). Fieldwork and
interviews in East Asia in May 2015 with additional defectors and experts on North Korea
supplemented the main sample but are not reported systematically here as no quotations are
drawn from them. Rather, they were used for validation, crosschecking, and to learn about
new developments.
In November and December of 2011, 27 interviews were conducted with people from
Burma living in Chiang Mai, Thailand and Mae Sot, Thailand shed light on the
SLORC/SPDC. This situation is different from that of North Koreans in Seoul because some
of those who live in Thailand were able to return to Burma, and some traveled back and forth
fairly frequently, albeit secretly. During fieldwork, the Burmese government was beginning to
open slightly, and so some interviewees could return relatively freely, and indeed many of the
interviewees have since repatriated to Myanmar. In June of 2012, 13 interviews in the Yangon
area in Myanmar proper supplemented the original sample. When this project began it was
difficult to foresee that it would be possible to safely conduct interviews in Burma, but
ultimately the state’s post-2011 liberalizing measures facilitated conditions in which one
6 Indeed many rigorous and well-regarded studies of North Korea utilize interviews, surveys, and testimonies of defectors. See, for example, Fahy, 2015; Joo, 2014; Choi, 2013; Haggard & Noland, 2011; Hassig & Oh, 2009; Lankov & Kim, 2008. The recent landmark commission of inquiry and subsequent report by the United Nations Human Rights Council (2014) also used as evidence information from 240 interviews with North Korean defectors.
29
could organize open, frank, and safe interviews. In this second round of interviews,
journalists were disproportionately interviewed to gather material for chapter 5 five of this
book. Fieldwork in Myanmar in 2016 allowed me to conduct interviews about the country’s
liberalization and to speak with members of the former military regime, which would have
been difficult while it was still in power.
To secure an appropriate group of interviewees for the original sample, a purposive or
intentional sampling strategy was used. With this strategy, the researcher selects groups or
categories of interviewees based on their relevance to research questions and the arguments
being advanced (Mason, 2002: 124). For this study, relevant characteristics for North
Koreans were age at defection, year of defection, home province, and in particular the
respondent’s occupation in North Korea.7 Of 35 North Korean interviewees, the average age
when exiting North Korea was 29 years old, with a range from nine to 52. All respondents
were at least 18 years old at the time of the interview. The average time that that the
interviewees left North Korea was mid-2004, with a range from 1996 to 2011.8 Nineteen
respondents were from North Hamgyeong Province, while four each were from Kangwon
and Pyongyang, three each from South Pyongan and South Hwanghae, and one each from
North Hwanghae and Ryanggang Provinces (see Figure 1 for a map). While in North Korea,
12 respondents were youth or students, seven were teachers, three were market vendors, two
each were soldiers, restaurant workers, factory workers, unemployed, professors, librarians,
and one each were in 10 other occupations, ranging from a miner to an athlete for a national
sports team. Many respondents had multiple occupations over time in North Korea, so more
than 35 responses are recorded (see Table 2 for details). In the North Korean samples,
7 See Dukalskis (2016) for a similar but condensed discussion and presentation of this North Korean interview data. 8 All of the interviewees spent time in China between leaving North Korea and arriving in South Korea. The dates reported here denote when the respondent left North Korea, not when s/he arrived in South Korea.
30
teachers are purposely over-represented because they were tasked with disseminating the
state's ideology on an everyday basis.
Relevant characteristics for the Myanmar sample were age at defection and year of
defection for the interviews taking place in Thailand, home state/division, ethnicity, and
occupation while in Burma. For those who had left Burma, the average age at defection was
29 while the average time that they had left was 2003. Again, all interviewees were at least 18
at the time of the interview. For the 13 interviews that took place in Burma, most had not left
during the period of dictatorship. In terms of geographical distribution, 19 were from the
Yangon area, ten were from Shan state, three from the Irrawaddy Division, two each from
Kayin state and Sagaing Division, and one each from Mandalay, Pago Division, Kachin State
and Mon State (see Figure 2 for a map). Twenty-three were of Burman ethnicity, eight
identified as Shan, three Mon, two identified as mixed, and one each as Kachin, Karen,
Paulung, and Chin. Nine of the interviewees were journalists, eight worked in the NGO or
civil society sector, five were teachers, three were farmers, and one or two each had a variety
of occupations during the dictatorship, from doctor to money changer to prisoner (see Table 3
for details). Unlike North Korea, in Burma there was an active, albeit circumscribed, civil
society and independent press during this period, meaning that in addition to some teachers it
was possible to interview people involved in these oppositional or quasi-oppositional
activities. This was useful because they had to confront the state's legitimating messages and
manage severe censorship and thus articulate their political demands in opposition to the
state's ideological vision. For this research, former university students and monks are useful
individuals with whom to speak in the Burmese context because they have been at the center
of political opposition in pro-democracy protests and thus have been carefully watched by the
state.
31
For most North Korean interviews, a trained translator provided assistance. Thirty-
two out of 35 North Korean interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, while for the
remaining interviews only notes were taken. For the Burmese sample, interpreters assisted
with 13 interviews and 27 interviews were conducted in English. Thirty-six out of 40
interviews were recorded. In both samples, each respondent was asked if s/he was
comfortable with being recorded and were only recorded after giving explicit permission. All
respondents from both samples offered informed consent.
Some interviews face a special inferential challenge because the respondents had left
their home country for economic or political reasons. Since these people have chosen to
“exit,” they have already displayed their displeasure with conditions the regime has created
and thus cannot necessarily be seen as holding opinions representative of the broader
population. Furthermore, to the extent that people may leave each state disproportionately
from particular geographical areas (e.g., border areas), the researcher’s job is made even more
difficult.
Three strategies were used help mitigate these potential limitations. First, interviews
focused on experiences of the respondents rather than their opinions of the regimes. This
helps to establish how processes operate rather than measuring the attitudes of the
respondents toward the relevant political system, which is almost universally negative in this
sample. Second, interviews focused on interactions that respondents had with others rather
than on their inner mental states. This entailed asking questions about process (e.g., “what
happened at your morning work meetings?” or “if you wanted to access illegal media, how
would you do it?”) and interactions (e.g., “with whom would you have conversations about
topic X?” or “what kinds of things would you discuss in context X?”). This strategy allows
for constructing an account of how typical interactions and processes operate. Third,
experiences are reported in this book only when they broadly cohere with other respondents
32
and with other sources. This helps to ensure that, although each person's experiences will
differ in some ways, idiosyncratic events are not reported as representative. Particularly in the
case of North Korea given its level of isolation, this book is careful to indicate where its
interview data corroborates or deviates from the secondary literature and from other reports
that use interview data from defectors (e.g. Fahy, 2015; UN Human Rights Council, 2014;
Choi, 2013; Haggard & Noland, 2011; Daily NK, 2011; Human Rights Watch, 2008).
[[[Table 2 around here]]]
[[[Table 3 around here]]]
[[[Figure 1 around here]]]
[[[Figure 2 around here]]]
33
Table 1: Authoritarian Spells in East Asia, 1945-20159
Country Beginning End Regime Type DurationNorth Korea 1949 ? Single Party & Personalist 66 and counting
China 1950 ? Single Party 65 and countingVietnam 1955 ? Single Party 60 and countingMalaysia 1958 ? Single Party 57 and countingTaiwan 1950 2000 Single Party 50
Singapore 1966 ? Single Party 49 and countingLaos 1976 ? Single Party 39 and counting
Cambodia 1980 ? Single Party 35 and countingIndonesia 1967 1999 Military, Personalist, and Party 32
South Korea 1962 1987 Military 25Myanmar 1963 1988 Military & Personalist 25Myanmar 1989 2011 Military 22Cambodia 1954 1970 Monarcy 16Indonesia 1950 1966 Personalist 16Thailand 1958 1973 Military & Personalist 15
Philippines 1973 1986 Personalist 13Korea South 1949 1960 Personalist 11
Thailand 1977 1988 Military & Personalist 11Thailand 1948 1957 Military & Personalist 9
Cambodia 1971 1975 Personalist 4Cambodia 1976 1979 Single Party 3Thailand 1945 1947 Personalist 2
Myanmar 1959 1960 Military 1Thailand 1992 1992 Military 1Thailand 2007 2007 Military 1Thailand 2015 ? Military 1 and counting
Table 2: Details of DPRK Interview Sample
Number of Interviews10 35
9 Data drawn from Geddes, Wright, and Frantz (2014). The data codes the beginning year of an autocratic spell as the January 1st the year after the regime attains power, which explains why, for example, China is coded as beginning in 1950 despite the fact that the People's Republic was declared on October 1, 1949. States were chosen for inclusion in ‘East Asia’ based on Gilley’s definition, which includes: China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. South and North Vietnam are excluded in the table above and only unified Vietnam is included (Gilley 2014). The author added the most recent instance of Thailand's military rule and designated 2011 as the ending date of Myanmar’s SLORC/SPDC military spell because the Geddes, Wright, and Frantz dataset ends in 2010.10 Interviews with two North Korean defectors conducted in May 2015 not included in this sample. These interviews were used for validation and cross-checking purposes.
34
Dates Interviews Conducted September & October 2011 and June 2012
Average Age When Exiting Home
Country
29 years oldMax: 52Min: 9
Average Time Exiting DPRK
Mid 2004Most Recent: 2011Most Distant: 1996
Provinces of Origin
North Hamgyeong (함경북도) – 19Kangwon (강원도) – 4
Pyongyang (평양직할시) – 4South Pyongan (평안남도) – 3
South Hwanghae (황해남도) – 3North Hwanghae (황해북도) – 1
Ryanggang (량강도) – 1
Occupations before leaving North Korea11
Youth/Student – 12Teacher – 7Military – 2
Restaurant business – 2Factory worker – 2Unemployed – 2
Homemaker, Poet/writer, Athlete for National Sports Team, Telephone Operator, Secretary
11 Some respondents reported multiple occupations, so there are more than 35 total responses reported here.
35
Table 3: Details of Myanmar Interview Sample
Number of Interviews 40
Dates Interviews Conducted November & December 2011 (Thailand) and June 2012 (Burma)
Average Age When Exiting Burma (if
relevant)
29 years oldMax: 57Min: 16
Average Time Exiting Burma (if
relevant)
Late 2003
Most Recent: 2011Most Distant: 1988
States/Divisions of Origin in Burma
Yangon and surrounding areas – 19Shan State – 10
Irrawaddy Division – 3Karen/Kayin State – 2Sagaing Division – 2
One each – Mandalay, Pago Division, Kachin State, Mon State
Ethnicities
Burman – 23Shan – 8Mon – 3Mix – 2
One each – Kachin, Karen, Paulng, Chin.
Occupations in Burma12
Journalist – 9NGO/Civil Society – 8
Teacher – 5Farmer/Agriculture – 3
Two each – Doctor, Monk, Truck Driver, Opposition Activist/Guerilla, Prisoner, Miner
One each – Money Changer, Copy/Print Shop Attendant, Professor, Lawyer, Government Soldier
12 Respondent's occupations are from when they were Burma, but, unless otherwise specified, not in Thailand. Several respondents had multiple occupations, so the total of reported jobs is more than 40.
36
Figure 1: North Korea with Interviewees' Hometowns
