What is Up With North Korea

Forgive my mirth, but it is difficult for me to think of North Korea as any different from an episode of South Park. Kim Jung-un is an inexperienced, 28 year old pipsqueak certainly not equal to grasping the levers of power of an iron-fisted absolutist dictatorship designed by the ultimate authoritarian Kim Il-sung. Fortunately for stability's sake, Jang Song-thaek is the veteran, wily fox behind the throne.
There is some thought that the South Park refugee, having being heeled in the decadent western society, will bring economic reform (a la Chinese Communist Party) by seizing control of the government from the military. I would not bet your next paycheck on this, even though I am reasonably sure that the Kim family firmly controls the military.
On the good side, here is one of the most positive things about the South Park Dictatorship the I have read recently from Reuters:

Beijing leaders are thought to have been pressing Pyongyang to do more to reform the economy, worried that a collapse of the North could send refugees streaming across its border, and cause the loss of a strategic buffer to South Korea and the large contingent of U.S. troops which help protect it. 

It would make me happy if this bit of optimism were true, but somehow I doubt it. In the true tradition of hereditary dictatorship, it will be the same-old-same-old. From the Red-Chinese-Communist point of view, N Korea is a useful loose cannon, the looser the better. If the issue in the article really was true, Hu Jintao would simply close the border: problem solved.