CAMBRIDGE, England -- We may never know if North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong Il went to Beijing in May, ahead of his historic meeting with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung in June, on his own initiative or at the insistence of Chinese President Jiang Zemin. What we do know is that, very unusually, Jiang divulged at least some of the contents of those supposedly secret talks.
As the leader of one communist dictatorship to another, Jiang gave two specific pieces of advice on how to stay in power in a globalizing world -- a world in which even communists have to come to terms with, and even adopt, capitalist practices in order to stay in power.
The first, not surprisingly, was to crush political dissent resolutely at its first stirrings. The second, and possibly more cryptically for most people, he advised the North Korean leader to establish Special Economic Zones in order to encourage -- and more important, contain -- capitalism.