REPRESSIVE, crazy, isolationist and a nuclear danger are some of the epithets which normally come to mind when Westerners think of North Korea.
But spend a few days with the people of Yanbian on the border across from North Korea, visit a North Korean-Chinese joint venture karaoke bar, dine on delicious North Korean seafood presented on Mickey and Minnie Mouse tableware, talk to Chinese traders who are making a killing by doing business with North Korea, or browse in the markets for smuggled North Korean antiques (the biggest buyers of which are South Koreans), and that dark image of Kim Il-sung's totalitarian outpost begins to take on a lighter hue.
It isn't that the Chinese necessarily see North Korea through rose-coloured glasses. They know that North Koreans do not have enough to eat, that Pyongyang is a Potemkin capital, and that the North Korean people's lives are regimented to a degree which Chinese people would no longer tolerate. Yet, where the rest of the world sees evil, the Chinese find quaintness when they look across the border. What everyone else sees as threatening, people here discern to be mere posturing.
Instead of seeing a country turning in on itself, the Chinese find the beginnings of a new opening up process akin to China's own emergence from isolationism in the late 70s. It is, for the Chinese, a bit like looking in a mirror and finding a country which looks like China during the Cultural Revolution.
Just as China opened up, North Korea is destined to moderate its politics and integrate with the world community.
This transformation is possible, Chinese officials say, only through increased economic contact with North Korea, not sanctions, which the United Nations threatens to impose because of Pyongyang's failure to allow international inspection of nuclear facilities.
Though the term is not used here, in the context of North Korea, the Chinese are very clearly firm proponents of ''peaceful evolution'' - the term Beijing normally reserves for the efforts of foreigners to change China through non-violent, largely cultural and economic means.
