Roll Over, Kim Il Sung.(North Korea)(Brief Article)

The Buick assembly-line tour was not the most startling part of Kim Jong Il's unannounced trip to Shanghai last week. After all, the shock- haired North Korean leader has a well-known love for big, fancy cars. But what would the late dictator Kim Il Sung have said about his son's enthusiastic visit to the Shanghai Stock Exchange? For that matter, what would the son himself have once said? The last time he traveled to Shanghai, back in 1983, young Kim went home loudly scandalized by the "revisionism" he had seen--and those were the days when Deng Xiaoping's capitalist reforms had barely begun. This time Kim brought along a whole entourage of top officials for the express purpose of emulating China's success.

No one can be sure that North Korea's secretive leader will follow Deng's reformist path. But some of the sharpest analysts in Beijing and Seoul are convinced he's going to try. Last week South Korea's president, Kim Dae Jung, publicly remarked that North Korea "seems to aim at becoming a second China." Such a dramatic shift would reverberate around the world. One of the most troublesome foreign- policy challenges facing the Bush administration is to accurately assess North Korea's missile threat--along with Kim Jong Il's unprecedented peace moves, such as last year's historic North-South summit and Pyongyang's warm welcome to Madeleine Albright, the then U.S. secretary of State.

Kim is no democrat. On the contrary, he seems determined to keep North Korea's monolithic power structure intact. "He's changing because he has to," says a Western diplomat in Beijing. "His economy is a catastrophe." A senior Chinese government adviser says Kim regards the Chinese model as North Korea's only hope. "Kim Jong Il wants to be like Deng, who brought China out of isolation and lifted the state's grip on the economy while maintaining the party's political power," the official says. "He now believes he can copy China, introducing capitalism and outside contacts without risking democracy."

Kim has yet to unveil his blueprints for the job. But according to the Chinese adviser, who has high-level contacts with North Korean leaders and has been briefed in detail on their plans, the economic renovation would phase out collective farms, allow North ...