North Korea has never been able to produce enough food for its 26 million people. When it shut its border in January 2020, authorities stopped importing grain from China, as well as the fertilisers and machinery needed to grow food.
There’s four stages, they’ve been in the first for seventy-six years.
Doing the math it seems they’ll need another two hundred and twenty-six years to reach the final stage if they got to the second stage tomorrow.
I’m not sure if I have impossibly high standards or thinking it’s reasonable to wait another nearly quarter of a millennium might be incredibly low standards.
Julan Du and Chenggang Xu analyzed the Chinese model in a 2005 paper to assess whether it represents a type of market socialism or capitalism. They concluded that China's contemporary economic system represents a form of capitalism rather than market socialism because: (1) financial markets exist which permit private share ownership—a feature absent in the economic literature on market socialism; and (2) state profits are retained by enterprises rather than being distributed among the population in a social dividend or similar scheme, which are central features in most models of market socialism. Du and Xu concluded that China is not a market socialist economy, but an unstable form of capitalism.