Watching titanic in Pyongyang: what the first systematic survey of North Korean refugees tells us about life inside the Hermit Kingdom, and about whether the regime might be ready to fall.

• Author: Cain, Geoffrey

Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea

by Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland Peterson Institute for International Economics, 256 pp.

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Ever since the founding father of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, unexpectedly died of a heart attack in 1994, pundits and policymakers have announced the same news every year: the collapse of the world's most repressive and recondite government is imminent. In the middle of a famine in 1997, for instance, a CIA panel concluded that the regime of Kim Jong Il would fall within five years. Seven years later, near the Chinese border, an explosion ripped through a train station Jong Il had traveled through just eight hours earlier. Some Korea watchers proclaimed that the blast was an assassination attempt, and a precursor to insurrection. The explosion, it turned out, was caused by a chemical leak.

Even though the world's most militarized country has not yet disintegrated, analysts were prudent to warn that the conditions for sudden ruin were in place. In the past two decades, North Koreans have struggled through famine, floods, political prison camps, and a slipshod currency reform. Now they're faced with an increasingly volatile Kim Il Sung, who, while in poor health, is attempting to prove to North Koreans that his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, will be the country's next strong and unifying leader. Today, living in an economy that is still in shambles, North Koreans typically have three choices: scurry for goods on the black market, starve, or flee the country.

By most conservative estimates, more than 100,000 North Koreans have chosen the last option, making the perilous trek across the Chinese border and sometimes into Thailand, Vietnam, and Mongolia, where they attempt to enter the safety of South Korean consulates. The lucky ones start new lives south of the border. Their less fortunate compatriots, many of whom wander around China unable to set down roots, are sent home by Chinese police to face torture, imprisonment, and worse.

These exiles may just be the world's best resource for understanding what is happening in North Korea. In their recent book, Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea, political economists Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland present the first-ever methodical study of public opinion among North Korean refugees. For a field in which most studies are limited to anecdotes, interviews, and oral histories, the statistics in Witness to...