The name has been almost permanently ruined. Whenever people hear of it, they always think of no food, 1984, worshipping the leader, getting your entire family arrested for not doing so, all that stuff. And if you say otherwise, they just call you a propagandist who is hiding the truth. And even if Korea’s government does anything like build a water park, people say that it is just to “fool the world into believing they are good”. Like they can’t even build an entire village without people saying that they are just building it to deceive people.
At least China is taken seriously by a lot of people.
I was writing about east asian security, particularly in regards to DPRK/South Korea. I was in grad school studying International Relations (specifically International Security) at the time. I am based out of Japan but I spent some time in SK and DPRK both for the research.
It was a while ago, so I am honestly not very confident that if I were writing the same paper today if I would be able to.