North Korea is as absolute a tyranny as the human imagination can devise. But its totalitarianism, quasi-religious veneration of personality and literal necrocracy (Kim Il Sung, the head of state, died in 1994) are not just outlandish aspects of an impenetrable state. They are part of a permanent humanitarian catastrophe that threatens to become unimaginably worse. Calls for international diplomacy to alleviate the plight of a threatened, maltreated and starving people are routine and rarely observed. This one must be, and the chances of its succeeding depend on the one state that has potential leverage: China.

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Of all the atrocities of modern history, famine is the least commemorated. It is an agonising mass death sentence imposed, invariably, by a non-democratic regime. With the possible exception of Mao’s China during the Great Leap Forward, no tyranny has acted with greater ruthlessness in perpetuating its people’s sufferings than North Korea. The Times reported this weekend that famine is an imminent prospect in the isolated prison-state. Hunger killed millions of North Koreans in the 1990s, and threatens to do so again.

In the face of impossible odds, a few North Korean labourers sent to earn hard cash in Russia are attempting to flee to political asylum. Some would-be refugees are also attempting to slip over the North Korean border to China. Their fate, too, is desperate. North Korean authorities have ordered any would-be escapers to be shot on sight.

It is a measure of North Koreans’ terror of impending famine that they attempt the journey at all. But they have sound reasons and horrifying memories. Famine is not a natural disaster. In a world of modern communications and transport links, it is preventable — unless a regime is heedless of the fate of the people it terrorises. North Korea is the purest example of such callousness.

Agriculture was collectivised in North Korea half a century ago. But even in states operating similar catastrophic policies — the revolutionary regime in Russia in the early 1920s, or Mao’s China 40 years later — there was some belated retreat, after the death of millions, from the destruction of markets in produce and the seizure of grain. The regime of Kim Jong Il is different. In the 1990s it rejected the notions of allowing private agricultural plots or the selling of foodstuffs in urban areas. Instead it promoted lethal notions of making and distributing substitute foods — any plants or even wood shavings that were to hand. The result was mass annihilation.

The regime only belatedly loosened restrictions a decade ago, when it was far too late. But a botched currency conversion has now destroyed private savings. Even black markets in food have shut down. Rice stocks are running out. The barley harvest is yet to start.

International food aid is essential. But precedent suggests it will be futile unless pressure is placed on the regime to distribute it. This means, above all, that China must exercise the influence that it jealously preserves over the peninsula. In the 1990s it responded to famine by hunting down and repatriating North Koreans who had fled across the border. It appears to be adopting the same tactics now. China’s anger and coercion should be exercised on those responsible for the disaster, and not in blaming the victims.