Dictators, said Winston Churchill, ''ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.'' Two medium-size nations of east Asia, both military dictatorships, both allies of China, and both traditionally Buddhist societies, are taking diametrically opposite courses in dealing with their hungry tigers.
One is tightening its grip around the tiger's neck; the other is challenging Churchill's dictum by attempting a delicate dismount.
On the one hand is North Korea under its new leader, Kim Jong-un. He is attempting a third-generation dynastic transfer of power in a supposedly communist state.
Kim is easy to pick out in any photo of regime officials. Not because he wears an elaborate military uniform or dresses with Gaddafi-esque flamboyance, but because he is the only fat one. The pudgy-faced son of Kim Jong-il appears to be the only person who eats whatever he pleases in a country in a permanent state of self-inflicted famine.
Kim plans to formalise his accession to the leadership this month with ceremonies in Pyongyang and a missile test masquerading as a satellite launch.
On the other hand is Burma, where a former general took the presidency a year ago as a civilian. President Thein Sein was the first civilian to be made full president - as opposed to an interim one - in 49 years.
The slight, bespectacled 66-year-old, who was an army bureaucrat rather than a combat commander, looks more like a senior UN bureaucrat than a military dictator.
He declared a sweeping program of democratic liberalisation and economic opening, which no one believed at first. The acid test was his treatment of the regime's nemesis, the much-persecuted Aung San Suu Kyi, the last person to win a fair and free election in Burma.
At the weekend, 22 years after ignoring Suu Kyi's landslide election victory, and after three near-successful efforts to kill her, the government allowed her to contest an election for a seat in the national parliament. On the early evidence, she won.
Even if her National League for Democracy party wins all the seats up for grabs in the weekend by-elections, she would control only 48 of the 664 seats in parliament.
But the symbolism is towering and the expectations unleashed are phenomenal. Suu Kyi is not a garden variety politician: ''Her presence is electrifying. It's not just a Nelson Mandela, a Gandhi, an Obama but it has an element of Marilyn Monroe and a rock star,'' the Jakarta Globe quoted Maung Zarni, a Burmese expert and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, as saying.
And the government is promising a general election in 2015. The world, after initial scepticism, is now taking Burma's reforms very seriously. Thein Sein is trying the much rarer tiger management technique of tyrants, a delicate dismount.
Why? An expert on south-east Asia at the Australian National University, Nicholas Farrelly, says that there is no ''good, crisp explanation - we don't understand most of what goes on in Burma, much less at the very top of the leadership.
''But my best guess is that, after many years, Burma's old military dictators were tired of the international perception that they were a despicable bunch - they saw themselves as nationalists trying to do their best to keep a potentially anarchic situation under control.''
At the same time, because of Burma's membership of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, the military dictators got to travel frequently to other capitals in the region and saw the prosperity and success in Singapore, Jakarta, Bangkok and elsewhere. They ''grew more comfortable'' with the concept of political power-sharing and economic liberalisation, he posits.
''They came to the realisation that they could engineer a new compact among the country's political elites, inviting Aung San Suu Kyi and her forces into some place of power while keeping overall control for themselves.''
The result is described by a Burmese historian and former UN official, Thant Myint-U, as an ''historic compromise''. But what happens next? What if her party threatens to win the 2015 election?
The Lady, as she's called, recently cautioned that ''ultimate power still rests with the army … we cannot say that we have got to a point where there will be no danger of a u-turn.'' A coup, in other words, to extinguish the liberalisation.
The success of the economic reform program is likely to be critical. This, after all, is how the tiger can be fed and mollified. Already, state pensions for nearly a million people, mostly poor, have increased dramatically. Microfinance, the system for giving tiny loans to the very poor to allow them to start small ventures such as breeding chickens or opening stalls, has been legalised. Trade unions, long banned, have been legalised, and censorship largely lifted.
Foreign investment is to be liberalised and a reformed foreign exchange law was introduced yesterday that will allow market forces greater play. The millions of expatriate Burmese who fled in fear will be invited to return, bringing their capital and know-how home.
''This is so, so, important,'' says the ANU's Farrelly. ''Burma is such a poor place.'' Its income per head of about $US1300 a year makes it the 169th richest nation, out of 190. North Korea is in the same league at 160th.
Farrelly predicts that, with the right reforms, Burma could readily zoom to China-speed - annual economic growth of 10 per cent. ''In only a matter of a few years, the country would be so much wealthier and be able to offer its people the sort of living standards that get governments elected and re-elected.'' By pressing on with economic reform, Thein Sein evidently hopes that he could be politically competitive even against the sainted Suu Kyi.
It's a daring experiment. Thein Sein should be rewarded by the outside world with a swift removal of sanctions, just as Australia, the United States and the European Union are promising. We have to hope that Burma's spring succeeds, at least as much as we hope that North Korea's oppressive winter fails.
Peter Hartcher is the international editor.
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