North Korean Economy Watch

Daily NK
Kwon Jeong Hyun
1/25/2007

Since last year, North Korean authorities have been attempting to cut off all kinds of capitalist culture. Hence, another extensive hunt for Korean videos and radio broadcasts continues on.

North Korean authorities formed “109 Inspection Team” consisting of authority officials, inspectors from the National Safety Agency and Social Safety Agency, who have been focusing on regulating the major cities for watching and selling foreign VCDs. As of this year, the regions for inspection has extended to the provinces, an inside source informed. The regulations seem to have become an annual event.

The source from North Korea said “About 50 people who were caught watching foreign videos in the district of Woonsan, North Pyongan and now are being investigated” and “The preliminary hearing for about 10 people with no connections or who could not offer bribes, also the people found to be directly circulating the videos has ended and are now waiting a sentence.”

During the 80’s, video tapes were controlled by intercepting with electricity and any family found with videos in their video players were individually restrained. However, many families with video players also had chargers and so this method was ineffective. Now inspector groups consisting of 10~20 people have search warrants to thoroughly check all parts of the home.

The source said “The people sentenced will probably get sent to the labor training corps but of these repeaters if any person has issues with ideologies or are condemned as responsible for selling the videos, then they will be sentenced to jail.” The source added “People who are sentenced to jail because of videos are normally imprisoned for 4~5 years, but many are released after 2~3 years on special occasions like Feb 16th (Kim Jong Il’s birthday) or April 15th (Kim Il Sung’s birthday).”

On a different note, the latest issue of Democratic Chosun (issued on January 13), the government paper, obtained on the 20th stated “Imperial activists are sticking to us from within until death in order to sow the seeds of capitalist” and ordered a firm response “We must stick to them (capitalists) and austerely cut them off.”

Daliy NK
Yang Jung A
1/24/2007

North Korean authorities are requesting “implied” voluntary offerings to be made to the army, placing a greater burden on the North Korean citizens who are battling a tough winter due to the bitter cold and dire food crisis.

The first journalist to report about North Korea Lee Joon said that at a people’s unit meeting held in the rural district of Dancheon, North Hamkyung from January 7th to the 13th, orders were made from the central committee indicating a “severe food crisis amidst the people’s army,” reported Japan’s Asia Press on the 22nd.

Lee Joon is the first underground journalist to work in North Korea and has exposed the daily lives of North Korean citizens through video footages, collections of still life photos and voice recordings both nationally and worldwide.

At the people’s unit, an order was made “The food shortage in the people’s army is severe. With a devoted heart to the nation, every family must voluntarily offer food to the army.” Though the orders imply donations as a voluntary act, it is in fact forced upon the citizens or as it implies otherwise, suffer the consequences.

Lee informed “The exact amount of donations were not specified, though citizens are being pressured to increase their offerings as one person was said to have offered 600kg and another even up to 1tn.”

Lee said “Though the army declares a shortage in food, the cost of rice and corn at the markets has not risen in comparison to late November and early December” and commented “There does not seem to be a great shortage in supply as merchants at the markets sell rice imported from China.”

Contrastingly, Lee explained “From a national perspective, it seems that the supply of food had been considered low as international aid was terminated and crop output minimal.”

In addition to this “As the nation does not have any funds, an order was made for each family to invest their money into banks” and again “Though the exact amount was not specified, this order was indisputably forced” upon the citizens, Lee said.

Lee continued “Even 3 years ago, as a 10 years redemption national loan, the people had to support the nation with their funds” and “As there were many complaints from the people, the idea was changed to a look like a savings account. I believe that forcibly collecting money is no different to the national loan.”

At present, as there are many cases where North Korean banks cannot pay interest or capital from investments, any person that does invest in banks is called as a fool. Even though the government enforces a directive, it is unlikely that the people will invest their money in banks.

Lee said “Each person must gather 2.5tn’s of provisions and offer it to the local farms because a task was assigned to increase the output of fertilizer.” and remarked “It’s something that happens often, but it did come earlier than expected.”

“The poor collect excrement from their homes or public places whereas the rich slip through the cracks by either buying goods from the markets or offering bribes” Lee explained.

Complaints are rising against the government’s frequent tasks of offering goods, though “with feelings of discontent (resulting from international sanctions) the government exploits the people as they cannot make any money” Lee said.

In particular, “There is a general consensus amongst the people who now believe that the government is not trying to change the economy (through openness and reform) but only making their lives more difficult” revealed Lee.

Daily NK
Kim Min Se
1/23/2007

What is the gender ratio in Korean People’s Army?

A 28-year old recent defector Kim and a 38-year old former KPA Air Force engineer Choi said that female members of KPA could take up to ten percent of the total armed forces from administrative positions to front battalions.

Kim testified “Most of small-caliber anti-aircraft guns are operated by women and there are even all-female independent brigades and regiments.”

“North Korean authorities encourage women to be enlisted in coastal artillery by advertising ‘recruiting songs.’”

Kim also said that virtually all of the North Korean train tunnels and bridges were guarded by women forces armed with 14.5mm machine gunnery.

Korean People’s Army, according to the South Korean Ministry of Defense’s White Paper, boasts 1.17 million soldiers, and the government in North Korea has increasingly enlisted women since the population shrank in mid-90s.

Kim is a former female member of the KPA 4-25 Training Camp (equivalent to a corps) 331st Brigade 6th Mechanized Battalion. She had served since 1997, the peak of starvation period. At that time many North Korean parents sent their daughters to the army for them to avoid hunger.

Female officers have been mass-recruited since 1995 among women NCOs of proven party loyalty and good family background. They were trained for two years and then stationed in each unit.

For the enlisted, both men and women are conscripted at their age of 17 while the female soldiers receive trainings specialized in anti-aircraft guns.

However, some others, as their male compatriots, are more fortunate, due to their superb ancestral or family background, to be stationed in army hospitals or other more comfortable places than coastal artillery.

“In more recent days,” another defector Choi said, “even aircraft pilots of Soviet-built IL-28 Bombers are filled with women.”

North Korean enlisted women usually serve six to seven years, in contrast with ten to thirteen years of men’s service.

Female veterans automatically become KWP member as they are discharged and enjoy higher chance to be selected as junior party official, but not as preferable marriage partner.

Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
1/22/2007

Old-style Communism had no doubt about the birthrate. Its approach to fertility was simple and straightforward: the higher, the better. There could be no such a thing as too many soldiers or too many workers.

Thus, Communist states went to great lengths to stimulate the birth rate. Of course, material incentives of all kinds were used widely: an additional tax levied on childless people, heavily subsidized kindergartens and creches, long maternity leaves.

Large families enjoyed special access to goods and services, a significant privilege in an economy based on distribution, and plagued by scarcity.

The material incentives were augmented by intense propaganda.

In the USSR from 1944, a mother who raised more than seven children was decorated with a special order and provided with many privileges. The caveat was that it was not enough to just give birth seven times: the decoration could only take place when the youngest of the seven children reached the age of one year.

The same approach was adopted by North Korea in the early stages of its history. Any other policy would be strange: the country suffered huge population losses in 1945-1953, partially due to the war and partially due to the large-scale migration to the South.

The population was believed to be 9.3 million in 1946, but by 1953 it had declined to 8.3 million.

In 1966 the fertility rate in North Korea reached the very high level of 6.5 children per woman. This was higher than the fertility rate in the South where it had already begun to decline, not least due to a government- sponsored campaign.

But then something happened. Around 1970, fertility rates nose-dived in the North, supplying one of the most dramatic reductions in the world’s demographic history. They dropped to 4.5 in 1974 and then to 3.5 in 1976. The crude birth rate, measured in the number of live births per 1000, declined from 35 in 1970 to 18 in 1976, thus halving in merely seven years.

All these figures are quite reliable since demographic statistics are probably the only kind of North Korean statistics decently known to the outside world. We know this through a blunder by the North Korean authorities who, in the early 1990s, invited a group of foreign experts on demographics to the country and provided them with full access to the relevant data. This was done to get their advice on the forthcoming population census.

To make sure that the foreigners would not create any harm, the data was slightly doctored, but the North Korean officials obviously did not realize that demographic data is, by its very nature, remarkably consistent, so an expert can easily reconstruct missing sections. When they understood their mistakes, the authorities tried to prevent the data from being published, but it was too late.

This statistics which became available in the 1990s confirmed what was long suspected: in the early 1970s, North Korea waged a highly intensive and highly successful family planning campaign. The information about this campaign has filtered out through defectors, but few if any experts understood how dramatic and decisive it actually was.

In the early 1970s, abortions were legalized and education about contraceptive procedures became obligatory in all kinds of health centers. Despite increasing difficulties with all kinds of goods, the contraceptive devices were widely manufactured and freely distributed.

The three-child family was proclaimed an ideal, and from 1978 the desirable number of children was further cut to two.

Around the same time, the marriage age was increased dramatically. The legal marriage age remained the same, but the public North Korean laws are not necessarily written to be followed.

The actual life of the country is determined by instructions, of which the instructions by the Great Leader himself are by far most important. And the Great Leader said in 1971, and said in no uncertain terms, that the youth should be sacrificed for the sake of revolution, not for raising families. In his wisdom he said that a good time to marry would be when a woman reached 28 and a man reached 30. Needless to say, a wish of the Great Leader became instantly the law of the land.

But it was never stated that all these measures were aimed at curbing birth rates. This was the major peculiarity of the entire campaign: in spite of its huge scale, it remained essentially secret. Perhaps, the North was unique in being the world’s only state which was in position to wage an invisible campaign of this kind.

The existence of very efficient and non-transparent channels of influence created such a unique opportunity: orders could be transmitted through party bureaucracy to every family without attracting anybody’s attention, while incentives could be distributed and punishment could be inflicted without much noise.

It is not clear what made Pyongyang undertake such a dramatic reversal of its earlier policies. From the officially published documents of the 1970s it seems that Kim Il-sung began to worry whether grain production was growing fast enough. Perhaps, it was decided to curb population growth because the government was not sure whether it would be able to feed more mouths in the future.

Perhaps, the impact of the intense South Korean family planning campaign was also felt in the North. Unlike lesser beings, North Koreans leaders have always been careful readers of the South Korean press, and they often imitated their adversaries in everything from dress fashions to ideological trends.

Finally, the changing mood of the developing world may have played a role. The early 1970s was the period when developing countries came to see population growth as a problem rather than an opportunity.

At any rate, the program was remarkably successful. Nothing like it could happen these days, when Pyongyang is gradually loosing its ability to monitor and direct all activities of its subjects. The days of Stalinism with North Korean characteristics are long gone.

Daily Telegraph
Sergey Soukhorukov
1/21/2007

The men who finally made it into the remote highland village of Koogang were greeted by an eerie silence and a gruesome sight.

Lying among the simple wooden huts and burnt remnants of wooden furniture, they found the bodies of 46 North Korean villagers, including women and children, all of whom had frozen to death. Cut off from the outside world by one of the harshest winters in many years, the villagers had suffered a macabre fate that has exposed both the desperate poverty and callous misrule blighting the Stalinist state.

More than 300 people are thought to have perished from cold so far this winter in North Korea’s mountainous north, victims of temperatures as low as -30C and of an arrogant ruling clique.

“Nobody got out of the trap alive,” said an official at the Chinese embassy in the capital, Pyongyang, who confirmed the events of Koogang. “After heavy snowfalls, there was a severe frost. The inhabitants were doomed.”

In a country notorious for its secretiveness, the regime of President Kim Jong-il has made no mention of the deaths. As the rest of the population struggle to stay warm, 50,000 members of his ruling elite continue to live in splendid isolation in a compound in central Pyongyang – enjoying the benefits of hot water, central heating and satellite television.

Elsewhere in the city, though, the scene could have been lifted from the pages of a Charles Dickens novel. The air is thick with the smell of coal dust, as families light fires on the floors of their apartments to keep out the bitter, cold winds that blow south from Siberia.

Outside Pyongyang, the situation is yet more desperate. A six-mile drive from the city, poor farmers trudge through the snow with bundles of brushwood on their backs.

A massive process of deforestation, begun in the 1990s by Kim Jong-il’s father and predecessor, Kim il Sung, has resulted in huge swathes of forest being chopped down to clear land for farming. The disastrous policy led to large-scale soil erosion, believed by many to have been a leading cause of mass famine of the 1990s, when up to three million people starved to death.

It has made the bitter winter, when the temperature in the capital routinely falls to -13C, even more dangerous as the rural poor struggle to gather enough firewood to sustain them.

The inhabitants of Koogang, around 200 miles north-east of the capital, set fire to tables and chairs, even tearing down the wood from their own homes in a desperate attempt to keep warm.

The World Food Programme estimates that North Korea will be 900,000 tons short of the amount of food needed to feed its 23 million population this year. Aid efforts have been complicated by sanctions, imposed after Kim Jong-il’s regime carried out a nuclear test in October last year. Last week, the country held negotiations with US diplomats aimed at re-starting six-party peace talks, which also include China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

Christopher Hill, America’s chief envoy at the talks in Berlin, signalled progress, saying that the US looked forward “to establishing a normal relationship with North Korea”.

But while there may be signs of a thaw in the country’s frosty relationship with the West, in Pyongyang there is no respite from the sub-zero temperatures.

The electricity supply is notoriously unreliable and as evening falls the city streets are plunged into darkness.

The only constant source of light is the giant illuminated copper statue of Kim il Sung on a hill top overlooking the city – cold comfort for those living through the bleak North Korean mid-winter.

Asia Times
Bertil Lintner
1/18/2007

While the West and Japan have targeted North Korea’s overseas bank accounts to curtail its weapons program, Pyongyang has recently turned to more ingenious ways of maintaining its international businesses through substantial exports of gold, silver and other valuable metals.

Pyongyang has apparently found a willing conduit to global buyers through its many business connections in Thailand, which has recently emerged as the isolated state’s third-largest trading partner after China and South Korea. According to official Thai Customs Department statistics, North Korea shipped 500 kilograms of gold worth 398 million baht (US$11 million) to Thailand last April.

The following month, another 800kg of gold worth 635 million baht landed in Thailand courtesy of North Korea. Also, in June, 10 tons of silver worth 148 million baht was sent from North Korea to Thailand, followed by 12 tons worth 166 million baht last October.

In sum, North Korea exported 1.35 billion baht – or nearly $40 million – worth of precious metals to Thailand last year.

That is a substantial figure for North Korea, a country with an estimated gross domestic product of about $22 billion and whose total exports amounted to just over $1 billion, according to official statistics. Thailand is bound by the international sanctions imposed last October against North Korea by the United Nations in response to Pyongyang’s exploding an atomic bomb.

According to official Thai statistics, the gold and first consignment of silver were shipped to Thailand before the UN sanctions were imposed. But there is nothing illegal in North Korea exporting precious metals, unless, of course, the income from the sale can be tied directly to the country’s controversial weapons programs, which anyway would be extremely hard to prove.

Untapped riches
North Korea’s gold and silver mines remain largely untapped. According to Tse Pui-kwan, a Chinese-American chemist who joined the US Bureau of Mines in 1990, North Korea has significant deposits of copper, gold, graphite, iron, lead, magnesite, tungsten and zinc. When the Cold War ended and North Korea lost large amounts of foreign aid from both the Soviet Union and China, its mining industry fell into disrepair and extraction activities sharply declined.

But with new foreign cooperation, production has resumed, which the recent exports to Thailand clearly demonstrate. North Korea’s main gold mine is in Unsan county in North Pyongan province, about 150 kilometers north of Pyongyang. It was originally opened by a US firm in 1896, when Korea was still an independent and unified kingdom, and was later taken over by a Japanese company when the peninsula became a colony ruled by Tokyo in 1910.

Nearly a century later, consultants from Clough Engineering of Australia in 2001 inspected the same mine under the sponsorship of the United Nations Office for Project Services. They estimated that Unsan held 1,000 tons of gold reserves, which if true would make it one of the world’s major gold mines. Silver is also mined in the same area, while iron ore and magnesite are found in North and South Hamgyong provinces in the northeast.

North Korea’s extraction techniques are sometimes controversial. According to witnesses interviewed by the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea for its 2003 report “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps”, there is a gold-mining labor camp near Danchun in South Hamgyong province, where thousands of prisoners are being held and forced to work under abysmal conditions.

In that same report, several witnesses claimed that “some of the mine shafts dated back to the early days of the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 1900s. Accessing the veins of minable gold required descending and, later, ascending a wooden staircase 500 meters in length, using gas lanterns for light. Deaths from mining accidents were a daily occurrence, including multiple deaths from the partial collapse of mine shafts.”

The first attempt to modernize North Korea’s gold-mining industry was made by an Italian financier and former Foreign Ministry official, Carlo Baeli, who traveled to the country in the early 1990s and claims to be the first Westerner to do business with Pyongyang since the Korean War. He later wrote a book called Kim Jong-il and the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, which was published in Pyongyang in 1990, obviously with official permission as it was printed by the state-owned Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Apart from painting a flattering portrait of the North Korean leader, the book describes Baeli’s first trip to Pyongyang in 1990, of which he wrote, “We were interested in investing in the mining industry, mainly in the extraction of gold and granite.” Baeli later signed a contract for a loan of $118 million to purchase mining equipment, and the goal was to resurrect no fewer than six gold mines across North Korea. The money was to be provided by international banks such as Midland Bank and the Naples International Bank. He also arranged for the mining equipment to be shipped from Italy.

But heavy flooding in the mid-1990s damaged both the equipment and the mines and, according to a 2006 report in Forbes magazine, Baeli today works as an adviser to the Pyongyang government at a tire-recycling plant. The car and truck tires are imported from Japan, get ground into granulate in North Korea, and are sold to China for road resurfacing, car mats and shoe soles. A lucrative business, perhaps, but not quite the golden dream Baeli had when he first arrived in Pyongyang nearly 17 years ago.

Another unusual partner in North Korea’s gold trade may have been the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. In August 2001, the right-wing South Korean newspaper Munhwa Ilbo published a story claiming that Marcos in September 1970 had deposited 940 tons of gold bars at a Swiss bank in the name of the late North Korean dictator, Kim Il-sung. The report came from a former Marcos aide, and Munhwa Ilbo carried a copy of the bank-account certificate on its front page. The alleged gold bars were part of what a Japanese army general had looted from Asia during World War II, Munhwa Ilbo claimed.

That report was never independently confirmed, but it nevertheless reflects the mystique and speculation that still surround North Korea’s gold industry – and how little the outside world actually knows about it.

Financial pressures
When the US took action against Banco Delta Asia in Macau in September 2005, labeling it a “primary money-laundering concern” for North Korean funds, very little evidence to substantiate the charges was ever produced. North Korea lost $24 million when the accounts it held with the bank in the name of a front company, Zokwang Trading, were frozen. Zokwang, which had been operating in Macau for decades, also closed its office and relocated to Zhuhai province across the border in China proper.

The action against Banco Delta Asia, a privately owned bank that the Macau government later had to prop up to prevent it from collapsing, was the second move against North Korea’s assets abroad. In a much less publicized action, North Korea’s only bank located in a foreign country – the Golden Star Bank in Vienna – was forced to suspend its operations in June 2004. The Golden Star was 100% owned by the Korea Daesong Bank, a state enterprise headquartered in Pyongyang, and was allowed to set up a branch in the Austrian capital in 1982.

For more than two decades, Austrian police kept a close eye on the bank, but there was no law that forbade the North Koreans from operating a bank in the country. Nevertheless, Austria’s police intelligence department stated in a 1997 report: “This bank [Golden Star] has been mentioned repeatedly in connection with everything from money-laundering and distribution of fake currency notes to involvement in the illegal trade in radioactive material.”

Eventually the international pressure to close the bank became too strong. Sources in Vienna believe the US played an important behind-the-scenes role in finally shuttering Golden Star’s modest office on 12 Kaiserstrasse in the Austrian capital. Until then, Vienna had been North Korea’s center for financial transactions in Europe and the Middle East. Visitors to North Korea have noted that euro coins in circulation in the country – the US dollar is not welcome in Pyongyang – invariably came from Austria. (Euro notes are the same in all European Union countries, but coins designate individual member countries.)

Last October, in response to Pyongyang’s nuclear tests, Japan froze a dollar-denominated account that North Korea’s Tanchon Commercial Bank held with an unnamed Japanese bank. The account had a balance of $1,000 and had not been active for nearly a decade, so the move was mainly symbolic: to demonstrate to North Korea that it cannot use banks in Japan for any deposits, big or small.

So it is hardly surprising that North Korea is looking for new ways to manage and maintain its international business interests and for new partners when it is increasingly locked out of most foreign countries. That is where Thailand apparently comes into the picture.

In 2004, trade between Thailand and North Korea for the first time overtook trade between Japan and North Korea. Previously, a string of North Korean-controlled front companies, managed by the Chosen Soren, or the Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, had supplied North Korea with computers, electronic goods and other vital items.

In 2003, North Korea’s total trade volume to Japan was just over $265 million and fell even lower in 2004. At the same time, trade between Thailand and North Korea rose to more than $331 million in 2004. Two-way trade between Thailand and North Korea totaled $328 million in 2005, with Thai exports to North Korea amounting to $207 million and North Korean imports to Thailand totaling $121 million.

During January-November 2006 – the latest statistics available from the Thai Customs Department – trade totaled about $345 million, with Thai exports accounting for $200 million and North Korean imports $145 million. Thai imports of gold and silver have pushed those trade figures higher.

North Korea’s trade with Thailand grew mainly under the previous government of Thaksin Shinawatra, who at one point proposed signing a free-trade agreement between the two countries. In August 2005, Thaksin was formally invited by Kim Jong-il to visit Pyongyang. The visit never materialized, and since Thaksin was ousted last year in a military coup, the future of Thai-North Korean relations is very much in doubt.

But gold and silver are highly fungible and North Korea apparently has lots of the commodities. It appears Kim Jong-il has for now found at least one golden path around the international sanctions imposed against his regime’s nuclear tests.

Well, if you are tired of paying all those middlemen for your treasured copies of The Great Leadership for the Victory of Building the Powerful State or The Great Leader Kim Jong Il Gives on-the-Spot Guidance to Various Sectors (Part 11), then www.NKeconWatch.com would like to point out where you can get these and other fine publications right from the horses mouth: Korean Publications (their site is a little slow).

NKeconWatch: I actually agree with Kim Jong Il with this one.  Call me neurotic, but after shaking many peoples’ hands, I head straight for the sink at the first opportunity!

ITAR-TASS
1/17/2007

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has urged his countrymen to abstain from shaking hands and greet people with a traditional Korean slight head bow.

The Rodon Sinmun newspaper published Kim’s article where he wrote in particular, “it is necessary to great each other Korean style. Handshake is a European custom and it is no good hygienically.”

However, a day after the publication many North Koreans, especially males, continued to shake hands as they used to do this before, a Tass correspondent reported from the capital of North Korea Tuesday.

Korea times
Andrei Lankov
1/15/2007

Some time in the late 1940s, a young Russian journalist made a tour of the Mt. Kumgang, accompanied by a local official. The numerous Buddhist temples scattered in the valleys attracted his attention, but the official assured the Soviet visitor: “Do not worry, we will take care of them. We will close most of them, and will find a good use for others _ like, say, resorts for the working masses.”

It is difficult to say what the journalist felt back then, but when he recalled this episode in the early 1980s in his memories, his disdain was palpable. But this is indeed what happened to many _ indeed, most _ Buddhist temples in North Korea.

For decades, the North Korean state was almost unique in its hostility to all forms of religion. Indeed, few if any Communist states ever came close to proclaiming and enforcing a complete ban on all kinds of religious activity _ aside from North Korea, such a ban existed only in Albania, another ultra-Stalinist state (Pol Pot introduced the same policy in his infamous “Democratic Kampuchea,” but he did not stay in power long enough).

In the late 1980s, a very limited amount of religious activity came to be tolerated, but for some 25 years, between 1960 and 1985, North Korea had neither temples nor officially recognized religious groups.

However, if all religions are bad for the North Korean authorities, not all of them are equally bad. Some of them are worse, while others were ranked as marginally more tolerable.

For the North Korean regime in its early years, it was the Christianity that was clearly seen as an embodiment of evil.

This attitude was prompted by the fact that Christianity was a recent introduction, with too, too strong connections to foreign powers, above all, to the United States. It was both “reactionary” (as every religion) and anti-national.

The most acceptable religion probably was Chondogyo, or the Teaching of the Celestial Way. Nowadays, this eclectic cult has somewhat waned and does not play a major role in either Korea, but for a century, from the 1860s to the 1940s, it was a important force in the spiritual life of the country.

Its leaders and activists were prominent in two major outbreaks of the nationalist movement _ the Tonghak Uprising of the 1890s and the March First Movement of 1919, and this tradition made the North Korean authorities somewhat more tolerant towards it.

Buddhism fell somewhere between. It could not boast the nationalist credentials of Chondogyo _ on the contrary, in the colonial era many Buddhists collaborated with the Japanese (as a matter of fact, some colonial administrators saw Buddhism as the “religion of empire” and actively promoted it). At the same time, it did not have Christianity’s close associations with “imperialist” powers.

The land reform of 1946, proclaimed by the North Korean authorities (but actually designed by the Soviet military) inflicted the first major strike on Buddhism, and all land holdings of religious institutions were confiscated. This left the monks without any means of existence and drove many of them from the monasteries.

To keep the Buddhists under control, the Korean Buddhist Union was created in late 1945 as an umbrella organization. It did not so much represent the believers as make them accountable to the emerging state bureaucracy. This was a standard device: Similar bodies were created for other religions as well.

While all Christian churches ceased to function immediately after the Korean War, services were held in some Buddhist temples until the early 1960s. It is even possible, even if not particularly likely, that some services continued through the dark age of North Korean religious history, the period between 1960 and 1980.

Of course, the former Buddhist monks were subjected to strict surveillance and numerous restrictions were placed on their social advancement. However, it seems that they fared better than former Christian activists and priests.

The Buddhist Union was quietly disbanded in 1965 _ at least, for years nothing was heard about this body for nearly a decade, and in all probability it fell out of existence for some time. However, from around 1975 the representatives of the North Korean Buddhist Association were again seen at international gatherings where they scorned the U.S. imperialist warmongers and their South Korean puppets, all the while explaining how happy the masses in their country were to be led by the “Great Leader.”

The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a large-scale restoration of old Buddhist temples, and these days there are 63 officially recognized temples in North Korea. Some of them are allegedly used for religious services, but it is not clear when the services are real and when they are nothing but carefully staged performances for the sake of foreign visitors. It is known that nowadays there are some 300 monks in the North, all receiving their wages from the state and taking care of the temples.

Thus, by the standards of North Korean religious policy, the treatment of Buddhism was not particularly harsh. However, it seems that Buddhism is not positioned to experience a dramatic revival in future. It appears that the North will eventually go Christian, and this Christianity is likely to be of a radical, nearly fundamentalist, variety. At least this is what can be guessed from the study of the events of the recent decade.

Christian Science Monitor
Robert Marquand
1/3/2007

North Koreans are taught to worship Kim Jong Il as a god. In a manner unique among nations, the North exerts extraordinary control through deification – a cult ideology of complete subservience – that goes beyond the “Stalinist” label often used to describe the newly nuclear North.

While outsiders can see film clips of huge festivals honoring Mr. Kim, the extraordinary degree of cult worship is not well known, nor that programs promoting the ideology of Kim are growing, according to refugees, diplomats, and others who have visited the Hermit Kingdom.

In fact, in a time of famine and poverty, government spending on Kim-family deification – now nearly 40 percent of the visible budget – is the only category in the North’s budget to increase, according to a new white paper by the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy in Seoul. It is rising even as defense, welfare, and bureaucracy spending have decreased. The increase pays for ideology schools, some 30,000 Kim monuments, gymnastic festivals, films and books, billboards and murals, 40,000 “research institutes,” historical sites, rock carvings, circus theaters, training programs, and other worship events.

In 1990, ideology was 19 percent of North Korea’s budget; by 2004 it doubled to at least 38.5 percent of state spending, according to the white paper. This extra financing may come from recent budget offsets caused by the shutting down of older state funding categories, says Alexander Mansourov of the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.

It has long been axiomatic that the main danger to the Kim regime is internal unrest. That is, Koreans will discover the freedoms, glitter, and diversity of the modern outside world, and stop believing the story of idolatry they are awash in. “It isn’t quite realized [in the West] how much a threat the penetration of ideas means. They [Kim’s regime] see it as a social problem that could bring down the state,” says Brian Myers, a North Korean expert at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea.

Since the poverty and famine of the late 1990s, everything from CDs and videos, South Korean radio, and cellphone signals from China, new styles and products, and new commercial habits have seeped in, mostly across the Chinese border, in a way that might be called “soft globalization.” Such flows feed a new underground system of private business, information, bribery, and trade that exists outside the strict party-state discipline and rules.

Yet rather than accept such penetration as an inexorable threat, Kim is putting up a serious fight to slow and counter it – by increasing his program of cult-worship.

Kim Worship 2.0

Like a computer software firm updating program versions, the North is steadily updating its ideology to make it relevant. This practice of mass control by in-your-face ideology has been laughed off in much of the world, including China. But North Korea is increasing its ideological cult worship. The scope of the current project outdoes even the cult of personality during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, according to a 2005 doctoral dissertation by Lee Jong Heon at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. Mr. Lee visited North Korea several times for his research.

After the Oct. 9 nuclear test, for example, banners sprang up over North Korea stating “We are a country with a nuclear deterrent.” Kim’s test feeds a national pride that is part of the propaganda drilled into Koreans from birth: that Kim alone can fend off the US and Japanese enemies. A US diplomat in Asia says such pride may prohibit Kim from giving up his nuclear program in the current “six party talks” – and those talks stalled again in late December in Beijing.

“The cult of personality campaign is more extensive today than in 1985,” says former South Korean foreign minister Han Sung Joo, who visited Pyongyang this past October, and in 1985. “Unlike the Stalin and Mao personality cults, there is a deification and a religious emotional element in the North. The twinned photos of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are everywhere. Every speech says Kim Il Sung is still alive. I think if I stayed another two weeks, I might even see Kim Il Sung. The country worships someone who is deceased, as if he is alive.”

Kim Jong Il has upgraded his deification strategies to strengthen the family cult system. Western reports often detail Korea’s unique “juche ideology” – a theology of Kim worship, repeated hourly and daily, reminding Koreans they are insolubly bound to the Kim family and must erase foreign influence from their minds.

Yet juche is a subcategory of a far more encompassing umbrella of deification known as woo sang hwa, or idol worship. In North Korea, woo sang hwa contains all the aspects of cult worship. Kim broke away from orthodox communism, for example, in a program called “our style socialism.” While Marxism-Leninism demands fealty to “nation,” “party,” and “serving the people” – Kim’s “our style [Korean] socialism” does no such thing. It makes “family loyalty,” with Kim at the head, the supreme good – a major deflection from communism.

During the late 1990s famine, a “Red Banner” campaign for unconditional loyalty and harder toil began. Then came “Kangsong Taeguk” in the late 1990s – a project to push economic and military ideology. This project culminated in the 1998 Taepodong-1 rocket launches, which thrilled North Koreans, frightened Japan, and started a whole new military mindset in Tokyo.

The North uses “ideology rather than physical control,” Lee says, whenever possible. The current variation of the program is called “military first.” It is intended to bolster North Korea’s nuclear efforts. Military First started as a campaign to support juche, and as a slogan designed to remind Koreans that the nation is at war. It came packaged with a rallying cry called “dare to die,” say refugees and Kim experts. (There’s a dare-to-die pop song, and a dare-to-die movie. Recent internal memos brought by defectors indicate “dare to die” is urged on local officials due to a feeling in Pyongyang that young people aren’t showing enough zeal to make such a dare.)

A new military focus

Yet Military First may now be a tool for evolving a significant structural change – a new ruling elite in day-to-day affairs. For years, the North Korean state was ruled by the workers’ party. Under Kim Il Sung the party was the driving force in Korea – the main route to achievement and pay. Everyone wanted to join. (Party members in China and Vietnam are 5 percent of the population; a 1998 Korean Central report put Korea’s membership at 5 million, or 22 percent, though it may be lower.)

“The outcome of the Military First policy replaces the workers as a main force,” says Haiksoon Paik, a North Korean specialist at the Sejong Institute outside Seoul. “North Korea’s party has not been functioning as well as it is supposed to … several positions in the Politburo have not been reappointed. Kim is not depending on the party, but a smaller more streamlined military apparatus. This is due to his politics as a result of the nuclear crisis brought by the Americans.”

“Military First is not aimed at building up the military, which is already quite built up and strong,” says Lee, whose dissertation is titled, “A Political Economic Analysis of the North Korean Regime.” “It is about replacing the old party – First Rice – structure of senior Kim. If the party is unwieldy, the military will control the people on behalf of the leader.”

Tellingly, on New Year’s Day, Kim Jong Il visited the shrine where his father was interred. He has gone there only four times since he came to power in 1995. Each visit has taken place in a year following major accomplishments. According to South Korean media, for the first time, Kim visited the shrine without party or government officials. This time, only key military officials were in attendance. On Tuesday, North Korean papers heralded the visit, and the Oct. 9 nuclear tests as “an auspicious event in the national history.”

Kim-worship in the North is a vivid – and inescapable – spectacle to behold, say visitors. Thousands of giant “towers of eternality” to Kim scatter the landscape. Special “Kimjongilia” crimson begonias are tended in family gardens. Kim’s media calls him variously the “Guardian Deity of the Planet,” and “Lodestar of the 21st Century.” In 2002, Korean mass dances known as Arirang, featured 100,000 flag wavers (and was described in state media as the “greatest event of humankind.”) Many loyal Koreans bow twice daily to Kim pictures that sit alone on the most prominent wall of their homes.

Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of the Korean cult project is its recent veering toward race and ethnic solidarity, say Kim watchers. His main appeal to his people today, a push that rarely gets attention outside the North, is to the racial superiority of a people whose isolation and stubborn xenophobia supposedly makes their bloodlines purer. Mr. Myers notes that festivals of 100,000 flag wavers is not a Stalinist exercise, but a celebration of “ethnic homogeneity.” Since the 1990s Kim has more fervently claimed lineage to the first ancient rulers of Korea, a move intended to place him in a position of historical, if not divine, destiny as leader of the peninsula.