Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being here today.
I have been to North Korea as well, admittedly only by a few inches. I visited the DMZ and the UN building there that straddles the line at the international boundary in 2009. I was there with Prime Minister Harper. He has also seen it. I'll never forget the picture of Prime Minister Harper looking through the window there, right at a North Korean guard, who was looking back at him with binoculars. It was like something out of a B-grade, Cold War-era spy movie. I never thought I'd see anything quite like that in my lifetime.
You could even tell, though, the North Korean guards who were there were probably the healthiest of the North Koreans. They looked visibly different from their South Korean counterparts. They were visibly thinner and gaunter and looked like they needed better nutrition.
I have since then, and before, been perplexed with why China allows this to continue. You both mentioned China. When I first visited China in 1987, it was a country with an average GDP per person of about $250. We now see the miracle that's happened in China in the intervening period. It seems to me that North Korea is the worst advertisement in the world for the communist system. I fail to understand why China doesn't want the same for North Korea as it has been able to do for its own people.
Mr. Kim, you mentioned China keeps the lights on in Pyongyang. Any trade that's done is primarily with China. My understanding is that even more people would starve to death every year in North Korea if food wasn't being supplied by China. They have nuclear weapons. We talked about the possibility of a nuclear accident. China is right next door. That accident could go in their direction, too. Mr. Kim, you talked about North Korea's need for hard currency. I'm concerned. What keeps me up at night is that they might decide that Iran is a good source of that hard currency and sell some of their nuclear technology to Iran, which is desperately trying to build nuclear weapons, or to terrorists from other parts of the world.
What is it about North Korea that China wants to preserve and protect? I'd like to hear both your views on that, and then I'd explore, if we can, more about what Canada can do in terms of trying to convince.... I think, Mr. Kim, you said that we need to convince China that it should change its ways as opposed to putting pressure on China, because it's rather large and difficult to put pressure on. But we have things that they want and we have a good trading relationship. Maybe there are other things that we can do to convince China that they should be changing their policy towards North Korea.
I'll hear both of you. If we just get started with Mr. Kim or....