Trainer of North Korean entrepreneurs says change to be slow

Bloomberg

In 2016, Geoffrey See was jolted awake on a flight run by North Korea’s national carrier as smoke swirled through the cabin. Passengers sensed that the aircraft was descending
rapidly, yet their panic was met with preternatural calm by a crew who insisted nothing
was amiss.
The travellers sat in white-knuckled fear as the plane made an emergency landing. Hours later, they were forced to make their own alternative plans to continue the journey, with no compensation or explanation offered. The lack of communication didn’t surprise See, who was flying on state-run Air Koryo from the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.
For See — who runs Choson Exchange, a non-profit group that trains North Koreans on entrepreneurship — the experience was an illustration of the lack of transparency and accountability commonplace in the hermit kingdom. It’s also a sign of hurdles awaiting investors in the Asian nation as Kim Jong-un seeks to overhaul one of the world’s poorest economies in the wake of a historic summit in Singapore with US President Donald Trump.
“North Korean officials typically only give you the information they think you need, and not what you seek,” said See, who got the idea for his organisation in 2007 after a trip to Pyongyang. “This needs to change when the market opens up. There’s always that cultural gap, and given its paranoia, the country will take a long time to adjust to the way of doing business in the outside world.”
See, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and received a masters from Yale University, conceived Choson Exchange after meeting a North Korean student who said she aspired to enter the business world to show that women can be good leaders. Since 2009, his group has brought more than 100 North Koreans to Singapore for them to learn more about modern and developed economies.
Kim said Trump offered to lift sanctions against his regime when they met on June 12 in Singapore, state media reported, a claim that contrasts with the US president’s rhetoric that the strictures that have squeezed the Asian nation’s economy would remain.
Even if trade restrictions are loosened and the economy gradually opens, challenges abound for potential investors. The country’s ranked one of the lowest in the Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International. New York-based Human Right Watch says that the government maintains an environment of fear and control via arbitrary arrests, torture in custody, forced labour as well as public executions.
A 2014 United Nations Commission of Inquiry report on North Korea said that systematic and widespread human rights violations committed
by the government included
enslavement, amongs others,
and constituted crimes against humanity.
Yet the regime — run by the Kim family for several decades — hasn’t stamped out its citizens’ entrepreneurial spirit, according to See.
He recalls meeting the student on his first trip to Pyongyang in 2007, when he asked her what she would like from abroad. She asked for an economics textbook.
“I went in there with thoughts that it’s a communist country, that people were not interested in business, that it was a state-run economy,” said See.