Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea Paperback – January 10, 2011

Witness to Transformation is an enormously important book in that it marks the first methodical study of public opinion among North Koreans. This of course is practically impossible given the level of repression in North Korea, but Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland have nevertheless mined gold from surveys of refugees who've fled to China and South Korea. The leading scholars of the North Korea famine of the 1990s, Haggard and Noland find a decade later a populace focused on trying to feed themselves through their own market activity, ignoring the regime's attempts to restore the socialist system. Although the North Koreans surveyed were reluctant to criticize Kim Jong Il, or even to make jokes, the majority listened to foreign media and resisted in their own quiet way -- by living their own lives with as little interference as possible from the regime. --Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Witness to Transformation breaks new ground in presenting the first comprehensive portrait of North Korea based on the experiences and views of the growing number of defectors who have fled the country. They describe an inhuman system that is steadily eroding, and a population that is beginning to awaken from a long night of totalitarianism. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned about the suffering of the people of North Korea and the prospect for peace on the divided Korean peninsula. --Carl Gershman, President, National Endowment for Democracy

Marcus Noland is deputy director and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. His work encompasses a wide range of topics including the political economy of US trade policy and the Asian financial crisis. Noland's books include Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (2007), The Arab Economies in a Changing World a 2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title, Korea after Kim Jong-il (2004), Industrial Policy in an Era of Globalization: Lesson from Asia (2003), Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas (2000) -- which won the 2000-01 Ohira Memorial Award, and Pacific Basin Developing Countries: Prospects for the Future (1990). Stephan Haggard is a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor at the University of California, San Diego Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He has been a consultant to AID, the World Bank, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and the OECD and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author or coauthor of The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (2000), Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (2007) and Development, Democracy and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia and Eastern Europe (2008).