North Korean Economy Watch

Yonhap
5/30/2007
Kim Hyun

A cover album of North Korean pop songs featuring South Korean singers will be released in Seoul next month based on an unprecedented musical copyright contract between the two Koreas, promoters in Seoul said Wednesday.

Some Northern songs have gained popularity in the South, where they have been circulated illegally. Pyongyang has protested the unregistered circulation through informal channels since it established copyright laws in 2000.

From the Committee to Protect Journalists:

The world’s deepest information void, communist North Korea has no independent journalists, and all radio and television receivers sold in the country are locked to government-specified frequencies. Burma, Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea, and Libya round out the top five nations on CPJ’s list of the “10 Most Censored Countries.”

Patterns that emerge from CPJ’s analysis include:

Total control. Print and electronic media in all 10 countries are under heavy state control or influence. Some countries allow a few privately owned outlets to operate but most of these are in the hands of regime loyalists. In Libya, there are no independent broadcast or print media, an anachronism even by Middle East standards. Equatorial Guinea has one private broadcaster; its owner is the president’s son. In Burma, citizens risk arrest for listening to the BBC in public.

One-man-shows. Most of the countries on CPJ’s list are ruled by one man who has remained in power by manipulating the media and rigging any elections that are held. The media foster a cult of personality. On state television in Turkmenistan, “President for Life” Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov’s golden image is constantly displayed in profile at the bottom of the screen. State-run radio in Equatorial Guinea has described President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo as “the country’s God.”

Use of the “Big Lie.” In North Korea, all “news” is positive. According to the country’s rigidly controlled media, North Korea has never suffered famine or poverty, and citizens would willingly sacrifice themselves for their leader. The official Korean Central News Agency said that leader Kim Jong Il is so beloved that after a deadly munitions train explosion in a populated area, people ran into buildings to save the ubiquitous portraits of the “Dear Leader” before they rescued their own family members.

Zero tolerance for negative coverage. In Uzbekistan, a government crackdown forced more than a dozen foreign correspondents to flee abroad after they covered a massacre of antigovernment protesters in Andijan in May 2005. Reporters covering opposition to Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s recent re-election were jailed and charged with crimes such as “hooliganism.” In Cuba, the government organizes “repudiation acts” for recalcitrant journalists; demonstrators surround the journalist’s home and prevent people from coming or going.

Cynical disregard for people’s welfare. Governments suppress news of the dangers and hardships faced by their citizens. North Korea covered up a famine that affected millions. Burma stifled coverage of the effects of the tsunami that hit the country in December 2004.

“By any international standard, the practices of these governments are unacceptable,” said Cooper. “We call on the leaders of these most censored countries to join the free world by abandoning these restrictive actions and allowing journalists to independently report the news and inform their citizens.”

North Korea has wedded the traditional Confucian ideal of social order to the Stalinist model of an authoritarian communist state to create the world’s deepest information void. All domestic radio, television, and newspapers are controlled by the government. Radio and television receivers are locked to government-specified frequencies. Content is supplied almost entirely by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). It serves up a daily diet of fawning coverage of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il and his official engagements. The country’s grinding poverty or famines are never mentioned. Only small numbers of foreign journalists are allowed limited access each year, and they must be accompanied by “minders” wherever they go.

Lowlight: After a deadly munitions train explosion in April 2004 in Ryongchon near the Chinese border, KCNA reported that citizens displayed the “spirit of guarding the leader with their very lives” by rushing into burning buildings to save portraits of Kim “before searching for their family members or saving their household goods.” The international press, meanwhile, was barred from the scene, where more than 150 died and thousands were injured.

North Korea is promoting energy efficient light bulbs!

From UPI:

North Korean television has aired a program highlighting the benefits of energy-saving light bulbs.  Earlier this month, Korean Central Television showed a six-minute segment titled “Compact Light and Our Life” as part of the “Science and Technology Commonsense” program.

During the show, the announcer spoke of the benefits of energy-saving bulbs and told the audience that “compact light saves a lot more energy compared with normal white glow lamp or fluorescent lamp … compact lamps last longer than white glow lamps or fluorescent lamps.”

In interviews for the program, Yu Yong-hi, chief member of the Ministry of Power and Coal Industries, and Kim Kwang-il, of the Power and Remote Control Institute, spoke highly of the benefits of energy-saving bulbs, and explained how to use them most efficiently and safely.

A video still read: “Electricity saving, about 80 per cent compared with 100watt white glow lamp, about 50 per cent compared with 40W fluorescent lamp.”

Encouraging North Koreans to use energy-saving light bulbs, the program ended with a testimonial to the contribution made by energy-saving bulbs to the cultural lives of the North Korean people.

According to the Donga Ilbo, North Korea is assaying its real estate to establish its commercial value. 

Minju Chosun, published by the Cabinet of North Korea, reported on April 19 that the North Korean government is evaluating the real estate value across the country. The North’s official daily mentioned the on-going evaluation efforts in the editorial, emphasizing execution of this year’s budget set by the Supreme People`s Assembly during its fourth meeting on April 11.

“The government should actively engage in the evaluation process and contribute to generating the country’s financial resources,” the paper stressed.

Donga Ilbo reported on April 13 that North Korea is preparing for an economic reform centered on real estate reform, and that it intends to replenish national finances through real estate leases.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il purportedly ordered real estate reform earlier this year. A source said that the cabinet decision delivered on January 19 was related to Kim’s order on January 4 to lease real estate. Kim made a secret visit on January 10 to southern parts of China, a center of the country’s open and reform policies.

The source also said that the cabinet set the price of buildings and ports based on additional construction costs whereas it decide the price of natural real estate such as mountains and streams based on their use value.

The story of Mr. Shin Sang ok and is wife Choe Eun Hui is pretty incredible.

Here is the full story in Wikipedia.

Here is a clip of his Pulgasari

Here is his obituary in the Economist:

Mr Shin was a South Korean movie director. In 1978, Mr Kim, a movie buff, had him kidnapped and whisked to the hermit kingdom to make its revolutionary film industry less awful.

Before then, Mr Shin was best known for giving South Korean audiences their first on-screen kiss. During the 1950s and 1960s he made dozens of films, several of which depicted Korean women’s struggles against patriarchal convention. His favourite leading lady was his wife, the dazzling Choi Eun-Hee. In the 1970s Mr Shin’s career waned, and it came to an abrupt halt when he upset South Korea’s military government by complaining about censorship. His movie company was swiftly shut down.

Mr Kim, then the unacknowledged heir apparent to the world’s first hereditary communist monarchy, saw his opportunity. First, he had Ms Choi lured to Hong Kong, kidnapped and shipped to a North Korean port. Ever the gentleman, he turned up at the dock to greet her. “Thank you for coming, Madame Choi,” he said, as if she were stepping off a cruise ship.

Although they had recently divorced, Mr Shin was naturally alarmed at his ex-wife’s disappearance. He followed her trail to Hong Kong, where he too was abducted. In North Korea, he was put up in a comfortable guest house, but insisted on trying to escape. One day he borrowed a car, drove to a railway station, hid among crates of explosives and crept aboard a freight train. He was caught the next day, and soon found himself in a hellish prison camp.

Even there, however, he was protected from afar. When he tried to starve himself to death, officials force-fed him through a funnel. A guard told Mr Shin that he was the first attempted suicide he’d ever seen saved—so he must be very important.

After four years, Mr Shin won his release through a series of abjectly apologetic letters to Kim Jong Il and his father, President Kim Il Sung. He was brought to a dinner party in Pyongyang, the capital, and face-to-face with his ex-wife, who had not known until that moment that he was in North Korea. “Well, go ahead and hug each other. Why are you just standing there?” said the Dear Leader, who then suggested that they re-marry. They did as they were told.

At last, Mr Shin’s talents could be put to good use. Mr Kim was worried that films produced in decadent, capitalist South Korea were better than those produced in the North. Perceptively, he explained to Mr Shin that this was because North Korean film workers knew the state would feed them regardless of the quality of their output. In the South, by contrast, actors and directors had to sweat to make films the public would pay to see. Mr Kim wasn’t saying that there was anything wrong with socialism, of course, but he gave Mr Shin millions of dollars, a fancy marble-lined office and more artistic freedom than any North Korean director had ever enjoyed before.

Films fit for Cannes
Mr Kim did not want Mr Shin to make crude propaganda. Oh no. He wanted films that would win awards at international festivals. And although the tubby tyrant had previously argued, in his book “On the Art of Cinema”, that good movies should glorify the party, the system, his father and himself, he realised that this was not a fail-safe formula for wowing the judges at Cannes.

So he let Mr Shin shoot some watchable films, including “Pulgasari”, a Godzilla-inspired affair about a metal-eating monster who helped 14th-century peasants overthrow their feudal lords. The director and his wife were obliged to give a press conference explaining that they had willingly defected to North Korea, but otherwise they were treated far better than most of the Kim dynasty’s hapless subjects. Mr Kim must have thought that was good enough to keep them loyal, for he allowed them to travel. As soon as they saw a chance to dodge their bodyguards, during a promotional trip to Vienna in 1986, they fled to the American embassy and sought asylum.

Mr Shin was at first reluctant to go home, for fear that South Korea’s security police might disbelieve his fantastic tale and suspect him of communist sympathies. Fortunately, he and his wife had made, at mortal risk, clandestine tape recordings of conversations with Mr Kim. These, and the couple’s memoirs, are among the most useful accounts we have of the secretive (and now probably nuclear-armed) Dear Leader’s personality: charming, shrewd, quirky, malevolent.

Mr Shin continued to make films until shortly before he died. His last years were frail; he had a liver transplant in 2004. Ms Choi survived him, and his last film, about an old man with Alzheimer’s, is yet to be released.

This new book could be interesting: Art Under Control In North Korea

Jane Portal’s book is the first to be published in the West which explores the role of art in North Korea, a role that has been based on pronouncements made by the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung and his son the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, about what the State expected of its artists. Portal makes comparisons with those of other, similar, regimes in the past, and finds a clear connection between North Korean art and the socialist realism of the Soviet Union and China. She places North Korean art in its historical, political and social context, and discusses the system of producing, employing, promoting and honouring artists. Painting, calligraphy, poster art, monumental sculpture, architecture and applied arts are included, together with a review of the way in which archaeology has been used and even created for political ends, to justify the present regime and legitimize its lineage. Jane Portal thus reveals much about art made under totalitarian rule, as well as how the art subverts the regime.

Here are two sites that have good examples of the DPRKs socialist-realism paintings:

http://www.northkoreapropaganda.com/

http://northkorea-art.com/ (Pyongyang Art Studio run by out friends at Koryo Tours)

From the LA Times:

More than 100 pages of written lectures smuggled out of North Korea this year reveal that the leadership is in a state of near-hysteria about outside influences seeping across the nation’s once hermetically sealed borders. The spread of “unusual lifestyles,” the lectures warn listeners, could render them “incapable of following revolutionary thoughts and sacrificing their lives” for Kim.

The documents also underscore the extent to which anti-Americanism gives meaning to the country and its people. More than 50 years after the end of the Korean War, the United States is blamed for all of North Korea’s woes, from food shortages to the infiltration of foreign culture.

In the last several years, trade between North Korea and China has surged, much of it not approved by North Korea’s leaders. Along with food and consumer goods, traders smuggle in DVDs, tapes, books and Bibles, radios and mobile phones. Once considered taboo, T-shirts with English lettering are pouring into North Korean markets from Chinese garment factories.

The regime fears not only critical material but depictions of other nations that would make North Koreans realize how poor they are in comparison.

“The enemies use these videos and specially made materials to beautify the world of imperialism … and to [spread] a fantasy of the free world,” one lecture says. North Koreans are urged to steel themselves against such corrupting influences by eating traditional foods, wearing traditional clothing and keeping their hair tidy.

Choson Ilbo
12/5/2005

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, a reputed film buff, has reportedly vowed his impoverished country’s movies will win the competition with U.S. films. The Washington Times on Sunday said the remarks were quoted by Kim Man-sok, the head of overseas sales at North Korea’s Pyongyang Film Studio.

The paper said the dear leader made the statement to encourage North Korean filmmakers during a visit on location. “We are not competing with U.S. and European films. We have to beat U.S. films,” it quoted him as saying. The daily concluded the North’s “first potential international blockbuster already is in the pipeline.”

Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
9/20/2005

North Korea is a country of portraits _ portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, that is. The portraits are ubiquitous. They are to be placed in every living room, in every office, in every railway (and, by extension, subway) carriage but, for some reason, not on buses or trolleybuses. The portraits adorn the entrances of all major public buildings, railways stations and schools. Reportedly, in the late 1990s, the largest portrait of Kim Il-sung within the city limits of Pyongyang graced the first department store in the very center of the North Korean capital. The portrait was 15 meters by 11 meters.

North Koreans have been living under the permanent gaze of the Great Leader for more than three decades. In the late 1960s, North Koreans were ordered to place these icons in their homes and offices. By 1972, when Kim’s 60th birthday was lavishly celebrated, North Korea had much greater density of portraits than could ever be found in Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China _ the two countries that bestowed this peculiar fondness for the Leader’s portraits on Korea.

In the late 1970s, the North Koreans received another set of instructions. They were ordered to display the portraits of Kim Jong-il, the heir designate. This had to be done “unofficially.’’ The propaganda insisted that there was a widespread movement of North Koreans who, purely out of love for the son of their ruler, began to adorn their dwellings with his portraits. Only in the late 1980s did Kim Jong-il’s portraits appear in public space, and from the early 1990s on they have been the same size as those of his father and they are put together in rooms and offices.

All portraits are produced by the Mansudae workshops that specialize in making images of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and their relatives. They are framed and glassed (and only the best glass and timber will do!).

In different eras, the Kims were depicted in diverse manners, and these changes tell a lot about changes in ideology and policy. In the 1960s and 1970s, Kim Il-sung wore a Mao suit, stressing the austerity and quasi-military character of the regime. In the mid-1980s, these portraits were replaced with new ones, depicting Kim Il-sung in a Western-type suit. This signalled the relative openness of the regime in the late 1980s. After Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, the new portraits also showed him in suits (incidentally, these portraits were called a “depiction of the Sun’’ since in his lifetime Kim was “The Sun of the Nation’’). However, from early 2001, Kim Il-sung has appeared in newly issued portraits in the military uniform of a generalissimo.

Kim Jong-il’s portrait also underwent similar changes. Initially he was also depicted in the dark-coloured Mao suit, once his favourite. However, the 2001 version showed him in the grandeur of a Marshal’s uniform. This once again confirmed the importance of the “army-first policy’’ proclaimed by Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s Glorious Marshal who _ unlike a vast majority of North Korean males _ never served in the military himself.

Even within private houses, the portraits are treated with the greatest of care. They are put on one of the walls, and that wall cannot be used for any other images or pinups. There are rules prescribing how exactly these icons should be placed. When a North Korean family moves to another place, they must start by hanging the Kims’ portraits on the wall. Random checks are conducted to make sure that proper care of the portraits is taken.

In the military, the portraits are hung in all rooms in permanent barracks. When a unit departs for a field exercise (as North Korean units do often), the portraits are taken with them. Once the platoon prepares its tent or, more commonly, its dugout, the portraits are placed there, and only after this ritual is the provisional shelter deemed suitable for life.

Oftenl the portraits become an important part of ritual. In schools, students are required to bow to the portraits and express their gratitude to the Great Leader who, in his wisdom and kindness, bestowed such a wonderful life on his subjects. The portraits feature very prominently in marriage ceremonies as well. The couple has to make deep bows to the portraits of the Great Leaders. This tribute is very public and serves as a culmination of the wedding ritual. It does not matter whether the wedding ceremony is held in a public wedding hall or at home.

The portraits are jealously protected. Even incidental damage of the portrait might spell disaster for the culprit. But that is another story…