North Korean Economy Watch

Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
8/2/2005

One of the few things known about Kim Jong-il in the West, from at least the 1980s, is that the North Korean dauphin is a movie fan, and that for a while he personally led the entire North Korean movie industry.

Indeed, movies titillated Kim Jong-il’s imagination when he was a student at the Kim Il-sung university in the early 1960s; he loved movies. Of course, his choice was not the boring North Korean films about exemplary steel workers and selfless military nurses who recited dreary monologues about their love for the party (not so for the Leader at that stage).

The young dauphin preferred Western movies, mostly imported from Europe or the U.S. via Moscow. Following the then Soviet approach, such ideologically suspicious movies were bought in very small quantities. They were not for public screening, but the private viewing of the top elite. It is well known that Stalin was a great movie fan.

Nothing like it has ever been heard about Kim Il-sung, but it seems that his eldest son spent long hours in a small viewing room of the Film Distribution Center, itself located on the second floor of an unremarkable apartment building in downtown Pyongyang.

This youthful passion for movies influenced his private life. The two major love affairs that Kim Jong-il had were with women from this theatrical-cinematographic milieu. But it also influenced his political career since the first job for the ‘rising son’ was to head the cinema production group in the Party Central Committee.

In a Communist party, the Central Committee is believed to be the center of everything, and the “ideological guidance” of the fine arts is one of its major tasks. In North Korea, following the Soviet prototype, this task was entrusted to the Agitation and Propaganda Department, which had a special arts section. Arts were seen as a part of propaganda, first and foremost. The cinema production group, headed by Kim Jong-il, belonged to this section.

Kim Jong-il assumed his leadership role in September 1967, when the cinema world was in turmoil. In September 1967, the North Korean Politburo, the party- state’s supreme council, held an urgent meeting on the premises of North Korea’s largest cinema studio. Movie industry leaders were subjected to sharp attacks because they allegedly condoned “anti-party activity” by producing a movie about Pak Kum-chol, a prominent statesman who had recently fallen from grace. Needless to say, this is the normal risk of being a movie producer or writer in a Stalinist society. You are required to worship heroes, but you never know if today’s hero will become tomorrow’s villain. The situation looked grim, praising the enemies of the people could not be taken lightly.

According to an apocryphal but perhaps true story, it was during the “studio” meeting of the Politburo that the then 25 year-old Kim Jong-il volunteered to take control of the cinema industry. Whatever his intentions, this decision saved many people in the industry from humiliation and death. Kim Jong-il staged large-scale self-criticism sessions, but more serious punishments were rare.

In fact, Kim Jong-il protected his beloved cinema world during the turbulent years of the “Kapsan purge,” which was probably the last large-scale purge of top leaders and their associates in North Korean history. After 1970, purges were largely isolated albeit frequent events, not large-scale campaigns as before.

Under Kim Jong-il’s guidance, the movie studios were refurbished. He arranged the best equipment to be imported from overseas. This sounds fine until one remembers that this meant the re-allocation of scarce hard currency reserves, which could be used for buying anything else, from medical supplies to new battle tanks. However, the crown prince loved cinema, and nobody dared question his demands. After all, new movie cameras are much cheaper than missile launchers.

Kim Jong-il’s years at the helm were marked by a serious improvement in the technical quality of North Korean cinema. The story lines remained as tedious as before, and perhaps even got worse: in general, the late 1960s was a period of increasing ideological repression in the North. But the same old boring stories of self-sacrificing workers, exemplary farm girls and, of course, selfless guerrillas were delivered with much better technical precision.

Guerrillas were particularly important since many major movies produced under Kim Jong-il’s guidance dealt with the anti-Japanese struggle of the 1930s. Sea of Blood, a guerrilla epic with a story line patterned after Gorky’s Mother, and Flower Girl were major examples of this trend. For Kim Jong-il this was important, since he reminded his father Kim Il-sung about the heroic days of anti-Japanese warfare, and by doing so he positioned himself as his father’s most trustworthy successor.

By the late 1960s, it became clear that a dynastic succession was in the offing, but there were few contenders who wanted to become heirs to the aging Great Leader. Kim Jong-il had the best chance from the very beginning, although he was not without rivals as well. But that is another story…

Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
7/26/2005

One winter day late in 1945 or early 1946, V. Kovyzhenko, an officer in the Soviet 25th Army stationed in Korea, had a chat with a fellow Soviet officer, Captain Kim Il-sung. Kim Il-sung was upset. He had recently been told that he would become the head of the local administration. Kim Il-sung told Kovyzhenko: “I want [to command] a regiment and then _ maybe a division. What is this for? I don’t understand anything and don’t want to do this.”

Kovyzhenko, then the head of the 7th political administration department of the 25th Army, often met Kim Il-sung, and told this story to the present author in Moscow in August 1991. Whether it is true, I know not, but at least it sounds plausible. The tragedy of Kim Il-sung’s life is the tragedy of a person who became an absolute ruler almost against his own will, and who was finally crushed by this immense power.

It is hard to find trace of an emerging tyrant in the Kim Il-sung of the 1920s and 1930s. He was a high school graduate and, back in the Manchuria of 1930, this was a remarkably high level of educational achievement. In those days a high school graduate was roughly as common as a Ph. D. holder is nowadays. His education opened before the young man a way to earthly success, but he chose another path and joined a guerrilla band in the Chinese Communist forces.

We’ll probably never know exactly the motivation behind this fateful decision, but one cannot doubt that these reasons must have been lofty and altruistic, based on a mixture of nationalist and communist idealism. The young man joined the guerrillas to fight for the freedom of his country and for equality for everybody. His long campaign confirmed his loyalty to these ideas.

Until 1945 there were virtually no signs of Kim Il-sung’s future political role. According to people who knew him during his days in the Soviet Army camp in Viatsk, Kim Il-sung was quite content with his life, and hardly expected any great political future for himself.

His promotion in late 1945 was largely the result of happenstance. At the time Kim was the highest ranking ‘authentic Korean’ (that is, Korean educated in Korea, not in the USSR) serving in the Soviet Army. He also had a good rapport with the Soviet officers, spoke comprehensible Russian, and was young, brave, and efficient. In short, he was a perfect choice for the Soviets.

By becoming the head of the North Korean Bureau of the Communist Party in December 1945, and the head of the People’s Committees two months later, Kim Il-sung became the head of the de-facto North Korean government, even if in those days this government was under complete Soviet control. He entered the world of politics, and the future transformation of this idealist fighter once again confirmed an old maxim: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

In a Stalinist state a leader can survive only by staying on top. A loss of power does not normally mean retirement, but rather death after a humiliating show trial. In order to stay on top, Kim needed the support of people he could trust, largely his former guerrillas. Everyone else was dangerous and had to be pushed aside and/or destroyed.

This was the logical result of the forced marriage between indigenous Korean factionalism and imported Stalinist brutality. Actually, I do not think that any other Communist leader would have acted differently. Kim Il-sung was simply the smartest and luckiest of these one-time idealists who under the pressure of their environment had to slaughter one another.

Kim Il Sung began to kill. He misled his enemies and made them fight one another. Skilfully maneuvring between powerful sponsors in Moscow and Beijing, Kim secured full power for himself by the early 1960s, killing thousands and thousands of people in the process.

As usually happens, idealism engendered more bloodshed than Machiavellian politicking. Kim Il-sung was the man who unleashed the Korean War, and likely did so not only because it would increase his own power, but also because it served his leftist nationalist ideals. The result? Devastation and death.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when in full control, Kim introduced a number of projects that fit in with his view of the ideal world. But instead of the expected uniquely Korean paradise, the outcome was a highly regimented, militant, and economically inefficient society where the scale of terror probably exceeded that of the terror in Stalin’s Russia. The economy stagnated, but nobody could argue against even the most irrational and bizarre policies of the god-like leader. Dissent was incompatible with his world vision, and dissent was wiped out, together with the dissenters and their families.

Had Kim Il-sung been killed in the 1930s, he would remain in Korean history as one of the second-tier resistance leaders, worthy of respect but half-forgotten. Had he lost the power struggle in the 1940s and 1950s and become a victim of other purges himself, he would probably be idealized as a martyr, an idealistic Communist who would have lead Korea to a better future (like many of his more prominent victims are seen now).

But Kim Il-sung died in 1994, and he is likely to be remembered as one of the most disastrous rulers in Korea’s long history. It seems that the history of corruption by power was repeated in his family more than once. But that is another story…

Korea times
Andrei Lankov
7/19/2005

Those who joined the Communist movement in its early, heroic stage might have had a lot of shortcomings. They could be (and often indeed were) brutal, manipulative, and over-ambitious. But one cannot deny that they believed in a lofty ideal. They hated the world because of the gross material inequalities they saw first-hand.

They believed that under a capitalist system underdogs were treated unfairly, and they wanted to bring about a great change _ one that would put an end to the sufferings of the poor, and finally establish a society of equality and prosperity.

Contrary to what the early Communists wanted to think of themselves, few of them came from the ranks of the underdogs _ the vast majority of the first generation of Communists were born in comfortable middle class or landowning families. But perhaps this makes them even more worth of respect: after all, these people risked their lives and sacrificed their privileges to bestow a happier life on fellow human beings.

However, history is rich with ironies. Once these youthful idealists took power, they began to change, and the system they created began to re-produce the inequality it was supposed to destroy.

In the early stages of the Communist revolutions in countries like Russia and China, the party cadres indeed led a life not so different from that of the common people. But soon they discovered that maintaining their daily life was time-consuming, especially in a shortage-ridden socialist society. Thus, as a matter of course, the emerging bureaucracy began to distribute more and more perks between its members.

Once a truly manipulative leader (Stalin, a great Machiavellian, is probably the best example) reached power, he began to use these perks to ensure the support of the bureaucracy, corrupting them even further. Very soon, a socialist country developed an extensive network of shops, hotels, service centers, and hospitals for the exclusive use of the elite.

In the Soviet Union, by the early 1930s, cadres came to live a life that distinguished them from commoners. In the days of the widespread famine they enjoyed a good supply of food. They were attended to by the best doctors, without the need of spending long hours in queues. They were allocated best drugs, unavailable to the lesser folk, and could take holidays in special resorts.

When the Soviet armies took over a large part of the globe in the late 1940s, they exported the then Soviet system wholesale, so in the newly established Communist countries cadres enjoyed considerable privileges right from the beginning.

North Korea was no exception. By the late 1940s, the top officials were receiving special rations that allowed them to eat meat daily, they lived in huge houses, usually appropriated from the former Japanese officials, had servants, and sent their children to special schools that were off-limits for the average Kim family.

I always wonder how the former enemies of all privileges did not notice their own transformation. Perhaps, some of them actually did, but the majority took the new privileges as if they were their due. After all, did not they suffer for the new system? So, it was only just that this system rewarded them for their sacrifice _ or so they believed.

How bad was the inequality? I am afraid this is one of many questions that cannot be answered with any great precision. No Gini coefficient can be calculated, because in a state socialist economy access to goods matters more than money.

On paper, a bureaucrat could easily have the same income as a skilled worker. However, in real life, their living standards would be vastly different since the bureaucrat had access to many goods that a humble worker could not buy (or had to buy at a high black market price).

In the late 1980s, before the collapse of the North Korean state economy, a Party secretary (that is, a CEO) of a large plant received some 250 won a month, while a skilled worker at the same plant had a salary of 100 won. However, the CEO was given rationing coupons for meat, fish, and eggs _ products that were available to a humble worker only a few times a year.

The CEO received rations of beer and filtered cigarettes. He lived in a large comfortable apartment provided free of charge. He could be certain that his children would go to a good college in Pyongyang _ perhaps, even to the Kim Il-sung University. All these were beyond the reach of a worker.

Thus, the difference was far greater than the formal wage differential (100:250) would suggest, but it could not be measured with any precision. One can speculate that this difference was still smaller than it was in most capitalist countries.

This indeed seems to be the case, but even a statement such as this is difficult to prove, since no economic and social indicators can take into account the non-market distribution of goods, so overwhelmingly important in a state socialist economy.

Thus, socialism, built according to Marxist-Leninist blueprints, produced a society where inequality was re-born, albeit in a somewhat diminished form. The system had another bad feature: the ruling elite tended to develop into a hereditary caste, with children of officials becoming officials.

The chances for social promotion in the socialist system diminished as the time went by, and eventually those chances became smaller than would be the case under capitalism. But that is another story…

Korea times
Andrei Lankov
7/12/2005

In 1997, when the North Korean economy began to crumble and the public distribution system ceased to function, the inhabitants of Yognchon County received a special gift from the Dear Leader: everyone was given a pair of nylon socks. Not luxurious goods, of course, but getting something in such a hard time was unusual. Few people knew that those socks were not actually provided by the government. The socks were donated by a Chinese Korean businesswoman, known to us as Mrs. Hwang.

But why did she do it? Why was it necessary for her to provide more or less the entire population of the county with socks?

It is increasingly difficult to see North Korea as a socialist state. The traditional Stalinist economy of the mammoth steel mills, railroads and coal mines, died a painful death in the mid-1990s. Nowadays, the North Korean economy depends on foreign aid, but most actual economic activity is made possible through the efforts of small-scale businessmen and businesswomen.

In order to be successful one has to have access to money. In other ex-Communist countries it is the former bureaucrats and party cadres who were best positioned to start a business simply by stealing the property they once managed as government-appointed officials. The property might be as large as an oilfield or as small as a corner shop, but an ex-bureaucrat always has many more chances to take over than an outsider.

But in North Korea the government is undecided on these issues. It has not (yet?) given the green light to large-scale privatization schemes along the Soviet or Chinese lines. Thus, it is other groups of people who are in position to make money. Paradoxically enough, they often come from groups once were seen as suspicious: repatriates from Japan or China, or local ethnic Chinese and Koreans who have close relatives overseas, preferably in China or Japan.

In this regard, Mrs. Hwang is a very typical case. Recently, Kwon Chong-hyon, an energetic Chinese-based correspondent of the Daily NK paper, interviewed her and got her to relate her life story and exploits. I believe that this is a story worth re-telling, since people like Mrs. Hwang are increasingly common these days.

Mrs. Hwang was born in China, in a mixed marriage, her father being Han Chinese, her mother an ethnic Korean. Like many other China-based families of Korean origin they fled from Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” in the 1960s and moved to North Korea. These days, when people are escaping from the North in their thousands, it is a little difficult to imagine that but a few decades back North Korea was often seen by the Chinese as a land of stability and affluence!

In recent years, Mrs. Hwang has lived in Yongchon County, not far from the border. Like many other Koreans with “Chinese connections” Mrs.Hwang began a cross-border trade business in the 1990s, when government control began to wane. Unlike many others, she had no need to resort to smuggling: having immediate relatives in China she can travel there legally, and in recent years this has become a lot easier. Of course, getting a travel permit might be troublesome, but her money allows her to smooth over the procedure with few kickbacks.

And, of course, her publicity stunt with “Kim Jong-il’s socks” did help a lot. She bought 100,000 pairs of socks wholesale and presented them to the local government for distribution. In doing so the local authorities could win some praise from above and improve their political standing, and in return Mrs. Hwang received powerful political support. And the common people got their socks!

Mrs. Hwang explained her survival strategy to Kwon Chong-hyon: “I know a lot of people in the foreign affairs department of the state security police in North Pyongan Province. Since I have a travel permit [to China], I can go there without trouble as long as I get it stamped by state security. If you have good relations with state security, it’s easy to get travel permits; if you have good relations with police, it’s easy to fight off the criminals; if you have good relations with the Party, it’s easy to do trade”.

The reference to criminals is not incidental. There is a growing lawlessness in the borderland areas, and businesspeople have to pay for their security. Mrs. Hwang said: “The criminal police and state security love tobacco, liquor and good dress very much. Now there are so many thieves and mobsters in North Korea, but once I give a phone call to the police officials whom I know, they always come [to protect me and my merchandise]. ”

Currently, Mrs. Hwang has two houses: one in North Korea and another in China. She prefers to deal with used and second-hand goods, items people in China do not buy any more. Such goods are cheap to buy in China, but when sold in North Korea they bring hefty profits measured in the hundreds of percent!

One of her most successful recent deals took place in late 2004. Mrs. Hwang bought 5,000 pairs of cheap working shoes in China, at 4 yuan a pair. She then re-sold the shoes to North Korean retailers for the equivalent of 13 yuan.

Mrs. Hwang is married, but it seems that her husband is less prominent in business than she. Indeed, the social changes of the last decade have greatly changed the balance of gender roles in the Korean families. But that is another story…

International Journal of Korean Unification Studies
Vol. 14, No.2, 2005, pp 52-84.

PDF Here: transformation of class structure.pdf

Abstract
This study examines how North Korea’s class structure transformations influenced the social transformations, and seeks to understand the structural characteristics of North Korea by examining in detail the existing shape of each social class. This study found that North Korea’s socialist transformation was the process of dismantling every social class, such as the landowners, farmers, commerce and industry, and intelligentsia classes, etc. The 1946 land reform dismantled the landowner class, the 1958 agricultural collectivization dismantled the farmers class, and the 1958 nationalization of commerce and industry did the same to the petty bourgeoisie. The only class remaining in North Korea is the managers of the governing class. There was no class differentiation, only dismantlement. Thus, with social classes dissolved, the governing class remains as the monolithic class monopolizing social, economic, and political power in North Korea, with no other social power to act as a balancer. This type of class structure may constitute the social conditions of political dictatorship in North Korea.

Highlights:
In North Korea, the fundamental ownership relations of the traditional class structure were dismantled in the name of socialist construction. The victims of this construction were the traditional classes of landowner, petty bourgeoisie, farmer, and intellectual.

When the 1946 Land Reform Law was passed, it was enacted in a month.  The law provided for government confiscation of land properties over 5 chongbo (1 chongbo=2.45 acres).  When completed, 1,000,325 chongbo of 1,982,431 under cultivation at the time.  At the time, land owned by the Japanese state, Japanese people, and religious organizations was barely 4%.  the remaining 96% was in the hands of Korean landowners and tenants.  It affected 405,603 of the 1,121,295 registered farming households.  4 in 10 households had land confiscated in part or whole.  Ten years after land reform, many were again prospering, and theor political influence became noticeable.  Kim il Sung sought to reassert control over them.  In 1958, land reform was reversed and farms were colectivised.

Nationalization of industry, traffic, transportation, communications and bank finances, including over 1034 important factories and businesses.  In 1947 80.2% of industry was held in state control.  Private commerce made up the rest.  After the Korean War, private enterprise production consisted of small-scale mills, metal workshops, rubber factories.  by May 1957, the number of private industrial enterprises was 633.  By August 1958, this activity was completely eliminated.

To purge the intellectuals (who were educated in the old ways) Kim il Sung proposed, “we have to speed up the construction of socialism, and fo rthat purpose, we have to fight against the conservatism of the intellectuals.” This started with technicians and economic managers.  Then dissident writers.

All social powers were ousted: Landowners, farmers, businessmen, and intellectual classes.  All menas of production were nationalized and socialiazed, so all became employees of the state, and the state became the sole employer.  North Korea’s new system consists of the rulers and everyone else (two groups).

To prevent remanats of the past from gaining influence, North Korea classified each individual according to their family background, and discriminated on this classification (starting in 1957).

Yunan and Soviet factions were purged in the August Faction Incident in 1956.  Cabinet Decision 149 mandates that ousted individuals be put in area 20km from the sea coast and demarcation line, 50km away from Pyongyang and Kaesong, 20km away fro mother cities and limited residential areas.  These individuals received a special stamp on their ID cards and were registered with the social security agency.

The North Korean managerial (ruling) class is an exclusive group which has institutionalized a system so that it may keep its privileges.  Only the sons and daughters of the core class can become promoted within the managerial class.  Children of Cadres only marry children of cadres.

Core class is 3,915,000 people in 870,000 households.  Wavering is 3,150,000 in 700,000 households.  Hostile is 7,930,000 in 173,000 households.

In the workplace, all indivduals are obliged to be part of one of three organizations: the party, the Youth League, or the Workers Union.

Supplies are divided into special numbers.  1,2,3,4, etc.  Those in higher positions are afforded higher rank in distribution.  “How could Party Secretaries, who don’t do anything,obtian objects of a 4 level?”

Private relationships are only possible through the party.

Self-criticism sessions are carried out every week.  Since these are routine, people know each other and act accordingly.  Becuase everyone has to criticize each other they tend to do so in a modest way.

Peasants most angry.  Laborers and office workers have time to do business on the side, but peasants do not.  Some bright peasants do tend private plots.

People complain openly now.

While the core class focused on inner-systemic solidarity when faced with a crisis, the wavering and hostile classes were the first to enter the black market.  After business expanded in the country side like wildfire the government brought the businesses into the open in July 2002.  The marginalized societies led the change in values.  Reportedly the collude with the regulatory authorities and security guards, borrow and rent vehicles for biusiness.

Only those sub-classified as Manyongdae line (Kim Il Sung’s lineage), Baektusan line (Kim Jong Il’s lineage), and Ryongnamsan line (People who graduated with Kim Jong Il from Kim Il Sung University) are able to receive official government posts.

Of the total population, 10% makes up the power-holding ruling class.  Another 40% make up a lower social rung doing business and making deals.

Los Angeles Times
Barbara Demick
7/4/2005

For most of her life, Kim Hui Suk had spouted the sayings of North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung and never for a moment harbored a doubt: Capitalists were the enemy. Individualism was evil.

But then disaster rained down on her hometown, Chongjin, on North Korea’s remote east coast. Factories ran out of fuel. Food rations stopped. Watching her family slowly succumb to the famine — her mother-in-law, husband and son eventually would die of starvation — Kim realized she had to change.

Once a stickler for following the rules, she bribed a bureaucrat so she could sell her apartment. Then, with no business skills other than the ability to calculate on an abacus, she used the proceeds of the sale to set herself up in a black market business, hawking biscuits and moonshine she brewed from corn.

Kim could have been sent away for life for such crimes. But obeying the rules would have meant a death sentence.

“The simple and kind-hearted people who did what they were told — they were the first to die of starvation,” said Kim, a soft-spoken grandmother who now lives in South Korea and has adopted a new name to protect family members still in the North.

The famine that killed 2 million North Koreans in the mid-1990s and the death of the nation’s founder, Kim Il Sung, in 1994 sparked vast changes across the secretive communist country.

Markets are springing up in the shadows of abandoned factories, foreign influences are breaching the borders, inflation is soaring and corruption is rampant. A small nouveau riche class has emerged, even as a far larger group has been forced to trade away everything for food.

This is the picture of life in North Korea as painted by more than 30 people from Chongjin, the nation’s thirdlargest city. Some are defectors living in South Korea. Others were interviewed in China, which they had entered illegally to work or beg. Accounts of aid workers and videos taken illegally in Chongjin by disgruntled residents were also used to prepare this report.

Although the North Korean regime has a reputation as the ultimate Big Brother, people from Chongjin say the public pays less and less heed to what the government says. There is little that might be called political dissent, but residents describe a pervasive sense of disillusionment that remains largely unspoken.

“People are not stupid. Everybody thinks our own government is to blame for our terrible situation,” said a 39-year-old coal miner from Chongjin who was interviewed late last year during a visit to China. “We all know we think that, and we all know everybody else thinks that. We don’t need to talk about it.”

Kim Sun Bok, a 32-year-old former factory worker who came to South Korea last summer, said the country was “changing incredibly.”

“It is not the same old North Korea anymore except in name.”

Just a decade ago, when people in Chongjin needed new trousers, they had to go to government-owned stores that sold items mostly in drab browns or a dull shade of indigo. Food and other necessities were rationed. Sometimes the government permitted the sale of home-grown vegetables, but even a hairbrush was supposed to be purchased from a state-run shop.

Today, people can shop at markets all over Chongjin, the result of a burst of entrepreneurship grudgingly allowed by the authorities. Almost anything can be purchased — ice cream bars from China, pirated DVDs, cars, Bibles, computers, real estate and sex — for those who can afford the high prices.

The retail mecca is Sunam market, a wood-frame structure with a corrugated tin roof that is squeezed between two derelict factories.

The aisles brim with fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, peaches, scallions, watermelons and cabbage, as shown by rare video footage taken last year by the Osaka, Japan-based human rights group Rescue the North Korean People. Everything else comes from China: belts, shoes, umbrellas, notebooks, plates, aluminum pots, knives, shovels, toy cars, detergents, shampoos, lotions, hand creams and makeup.

Each of Chongjin’s seven administrative districts has a state-sanctioned market. Sunam, the city’s largest, is expanding, and some say it has a wider variety of goods than the main market in Pyongyang. Many vendors wear their licenses pinned to their right breasts while the obligatory Kim Il Sung buttons remain over the heart.

Although markets have been expanding for more than a decade, it was only in 2002 and ’03 that the government enacted economic reforms that lifted some of the prohibitions against them. Most of the vendors are older women such as Kim Hui Suk, a tiny 60-year-old with short, permed hair and immaculate clothing.

She was working in the day-care center of a textile factory in the early 1990s when production ground to a halt. Men were ordered to stay in their jobs, but Workers’ Party cadres at the factory started whispering that the married women, or ajumas, ought to moonlight to provide for their families.

“It was clear that the ajumas had to go out and earn money or the family would starve,” Kim said.

She first tried to raise pigs, locking them in a shed outside her downtown apartment building and feeding them slop left over from making tofu. But the electricity and water were too unreliable to keep the business going.

In 1995, Kim sold her apartment in the choice Shinam district and bought a cheaper one, hoping to use the proceeds to import rice from the countryside. But that too failed when she injured her back and couldn’t work.

The family’s situation became dire. Her husband’s employer, a provincial radio station, stopped paying salaries, and food distribution ended. In 1996, her mother-in-law died of starvation, and her husband the following year.

“First he got really, really thin and then bloated. His last words to me were, ‘Let’s get a bottle of wine, go to a restaurant and enjoy ourselves,’ ” Kim recalled. “I felt bad that I couldn’t fulfill his last wish.”

In 1998, Kim’s 26-year-old son, who had been a wrestler and gymnast, grew weak from hunger and contracted pneumonia. A shot of penicillin from the market would have cost 40 won, the same price as enough corn powder to feed herself and her three daughters for a week. She opted for the corn and watched her son succumb to the infection.

But Kim did not give up. She swapped apartments again and used the money to start another business, this time baking biscuits and neungju, a potent corn moonshine. If buyers didn’t have cash, she would accept chile powder or anything else she could use.

“We made just enough to put food on the table,” said Kim.

Much of Chongjin’s commerce is still not officially sanctioned, so it has an impromptu quality. Money changes hands over wooden carts that can be rolled away in a hurry. Those who can’t afford carts sell on tarpaulins laid out in the dirt.

Fashion boutiques are slapped together with poles and clotheslines, enlivening the monochromatic landscape with garish pinks and paisleys. Some clothes have the labels ripped out and vendors whisper that these items came from araet dongne or the “village below,” a euphemism for South Korea, whose products are illegal in the North.

Shoppers can buy 88-pound sacks of rice emblazoned with U.S. flags, and biscuits and corn noodles produced by three factories in Chongjin run by the U.N. World Food Program — all intended to be humanitarian handouts.

Some people cut hair or repair bicycles, though furtively because these jobs are supposed to be controlled by the government’s Convenience Bureau.

“They will bring a chair and mirror to the market to cut hair,” Kim said. “The police can come at any moment, arrest them and confiscate their scissors.”

Another new business is a computer salon. It looks like an Internet cafe, but because there’s no access to the Web in North Korea, it is used mostly by teenagers to play video games.

More products are available, but inflation puts them out of reach for most people. The price of rice has increased nearly eightfold since the economic reforms of 2002 to 525 won per pound; an average worker earns 2,500 won a month — about $1 at the unofficial exchange rate.

World Food Program officials in North Korea say the vast majority of the population is less well off since the economic changes, especially factory workers, civil servants, retirees and anybody else on a fixed income. But there are those who have gotten rich. Poor Chongjin residents disparage them as donbulrae, or money insects.

“There are people who started trading early and figured out the ropes,” said a 64-year-old retired math teacher who sells rabbits at the market. “But those of us who were loyal and believed in the state, we are the ones who are suffering.”

If Chongjin’s economic center is Sunam market, its political heart is Pohang Square, a vast plaza dominated by a 25-foot bronze statue of Kim Il Sung.

The grass here is neatly mowed, the shrubbery pruned and the pavement in good repair. Even when the rest of the city is without electricity, the statue is bathed in light. Across the street, a tidy pink building houses a permanent exhibit of the national flower, a hybrid begonia called Kimjongilia, named for current leader Kim Jong Il.

Since the practice of religion is barred, Pohang Square stands in as a spiritual center. Newlyweds in their best clothes pose for pictures, bowing to the statue so that their union is symbolically blessed.

When Kim Il Sung died on July 8, 1994, half a million people came to Pohang Square to pay their respects in the pouring rain and stifling heat. But among the adoring multitudes, there were malcontents.

One was Ok Hui, the eldest daughter of entrepreneur Kim Hui Suk. Though she dutifully took her place in the throng, any sadness she felt came from a foreboding that Kim Jong Il would be worse than his father.

“I went day and night along with everybody else. You had to…. But there were no tears coming from my eyes,” recalled Ok Hui, now 39, who did not want her family name published.

Ok Hui worked for a construction company’s propaganda unit, a job that entailed riding around in a truck with a megaphone, exhorting workers to do their best for the fatherland. But she didn’t believe what she preached.

Her father had taught her to doubt the regime. As a reporter and member of the Workers’ Party, he knew more about the outside world than many people and realized how far North Korea lagged behind South Korea and China.

“He and his friends would stay up at night when my mother was out, talking about what a thief Kim Jong Il was,” Ok Hui said.

Her mother, though, remained a firm believer. “I lived only for the marshal. I never had a thought otherwise,” said Kim Hui Suk. “Even when my husband and son died, I thought it was my fault.”

Ok Hui and her mother frequently clashed. “Why did you give birth to me in this horrible country?” Ok Hui remembers taunting her mother.

“Shut up! You’re a traitor to your country!” Kim retorted.

“Whom do you love more? Kim Jong Il or me?” her daughter shot back.

The regime was probably less beloved in Chongjin than elsewhere in North Korea. Food had run out in its province, North Hamgyong, earlier than in other areas, and starvation rates were among the highest in the nation.

Chongjin’s people are reputed to be the most independent-minded in North Korea. One famous report of unrest centers on the city. In 1995, senior officers from the 6th army corps in Chongjin were executed for disloyalty and the entire unit, estimated at 40,000 men, was disbanded. It is still unclear whether the incident was an attempted uprising or a corruption case.

Chongjin is known for its vicious gang wars, and it was sometimes difficult to distinguish political unrest from ordinary crime. There were increasing incidents of theft and insubordination. At factories, desperate workers dismantled machinery or stripped away copper wiring to sell for food.

Public executions by firing squad were held outside Sunam market and on the lawn of the youth park, once a popular lover’s lane.

In a village called Ihyon-ri on the outskirts of Chongjin, a gang suspected of anti-government activities killed a national security agent who had tried to infiltrate the group, former kindergarten teacher Seo Kyong Hui said.

“This guy was from my village. He had been sent to inform on a group that was engaged in suspicious activities,” she said. “They caught him and stoned him to death.”

Work crews went out early in the morning to wash away any anti-regime graffiti painted overnight, according to human rights groups, but most people were too scared to express their discontent. Badmouthing the leadership is still considered blasphemy.

To discourage anti-regime activity, North Korea punishes “political crimes” by banishing entire families to remote areas or labor camps.

“If you have one life to live, you would gladly give it to overthrow this government,” said Seo, the teacher. “But you are not the only one getting punished. Your family will go through hell.”

Even as Kim Jong Il’s regime weakens, many of its stalwarts are growing richer. Many of Chongjin’s well-to-do are members of the Workers’ Party or are connected to the military or security services. In the new economy, they use their ties to power to trade with China, obtain market licenses, extract bribes and sell bureaucratic favors.

“Those who have power in North Korea always figure out ways to make money,” said Joo Sung Ha, 31, who grew up in Chongjin and now works as a journalist in Seoul.

Joo was the pampered only son of a prominent official, and his family lived in Shinam, in the city’s northern hills overlooking the ocean. By the standards of South Korea or China, the single-family homes with lines of fish and squid drying from the roofs are nothing special. But for North Koreans, these are mansions.

The Joo family had a 2,000-square-foot cement-block house and a walled garden about twice that large. The garden proved crucial in protecting the family against the famine, though they had to contend with hungry soldiers who would scale the walls and steal potatoes and cabbages.

North Korean families like to measure their status by the number of wardrobes they own, and Joo’s family had five — plus a television, a refrigerator, a tape recorder, a sewing machine, an electric fan and a camera. They didn’t have a phone or a car — at that time those were unthinkable even for a well-off family — but they did have a bicycle.

“The appliances were of no use after the electricity ran out,” Joo said. “The bicycle was the most important thing, because the buses and trams stopped running.”

Joo attended the best elementary school in Chongjin, the city’s foreign language institute, and eventually the country’s top school, Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang. He never met a native English speaker in the North, or any foreigner for that matter, but he trained his ear with videotapes of the BBC and banned Hollywood films.

“I sometimes watched ‘Gone With the Wind’ twice a day. Anybody else would have been arrested for watching Hollywood movies,” he recalled.

Joo’s glimpses of Western culture eroded his loyalty to the system. “I saw myself 20 years down the road in the prime of my career and North Korea would be collapsing,” he said.

While many of his classmates went to work for the regime’s propaganda news service after graduating, Joo arranged to return to Chongjin, where he taught high school until he escaped in 2001.

“The people from our neighborhood couldn’t understand,” said Joo, who stays in contact with his family. “They thought I had everything.”

Kim Hye Young, an actress, was also a child of privilege. Her father, Kim Du Seon, was an official of a trading company that sold mushrooms and fish in China. He learned how to navigate the bureaucracy, using his connections with the army and security services.

“If one of [the officials] had a wedding in the family, they would come to me for a couple of cases of wine,” the older Kim said.

As trade with China became more important, the family prospered. They took drives in a company car and ate at Chongjin’s nicest restaurant.

Growing up, Kim showed a flair for theater, and through her acting became a member of the elite in her own right. Her best-known role was in a play called “The Strong and the Righteous,” in which she portrayed a spy who sacrifices her life for North Korea.

When the production won first place in a Pyongyang drama festival in 1996, she got to meet Kim Jong Il. Still breathless with the memory, she said the leader shook her hand and gave her a fountain pen.

“I knew that I, as an actress, had an important role to promote the ideology of my country,” Kim said.

Kim and her sisters were largely oblivious to the famine, and their mother said she took pains to shelter them.

“My daughters don’t know to this day how many children in our neighborhood starved to death,” said her mother, Choe Geum Lan. She also didn’t tell them that their father, as a result of his business trips to China, had become increasingly pessimistic about North Korea’s future.

In 1998, when Kim was home from Pyongyang on vacation, her parents told her the family was going to visit an aunt in Musan, a city near the Chinese border. It was not until they had crossed to the other side that Kim and her teenage sisters, were told they had defected.

Kim, now 29 and advertising toothpaste on South Korean television, is one of the few defectors who says she didn’t want to leave.

“I was content with my life,” she said.

Today, North Korea’s elites are even better off, buying telephones for their homes and even cars.

“For $4,000 or $5,000, anybody can buy a car now. It used to be that you weren’t allowed to register your own car. We couldn’t dream of it,” said Kim Yong Il, a defector from Chongjin who lives in Seoul.

Recently, he arranged to have a computer smuggled from China to his relatives in Chongjin. North Korea’s state-run companies don’t have computers, so they’re eager to hire people who do. “If you have a computer, you can get a job,” he said.

Visitors have been shocked to glimpse the new conspicuous consumption in Chongjin.

Jeung Young Tai, a South Korean academic who was in Chongjin delivering South Korean government aid, noticed a paunchy man standing in front of the Chonmasan Hotel next to a new Lexus.

And at a hot spring in Kyongsong, on the city’s outskirts, he saw a woman carrying a lap dog — a striking sight in a country where there is so little food that the only pets usually are goldfish.

“You get the sense that there is a tremendous gap between rich and poor and that the gap is growing,” Jeung said.

The flip side, of course, is that the poor are getting poorer.

In Chongjin, those at the very bottom of the heap can be found at the train station.

The cavernous building boasts a large portrait of Kim Il Sung above the entrance and a granite-faced clock that rarely tells the right time. In front is a vast plaza crammed with people waiting for trains — sometimes for days, because the trains have no fixed schedules — and people waiting for nothing at all.

These are the homeless, many of them children. They’re called kotchebi, or swallows, because they wander the streets and sometimes between towns in search of food. Many gravitate to Chongjin station, because it is a major hub and the travelers have more to give.

A video shot last year by a military official and sold to Japan’s NTV television captured barefoot children near the station in torn, filthy clothing fighting over a nearly empty jar of kimchi. One boy scooted along the pavement on his buttocks; the narrator said his toes had been eaten away by frostbite.

Kim Hyok knows how easy it is for a child to end up at the station; he spent the better part of two years living there.

“If you can’t find somebody or they left their home, chances are you can find them at the station,” said Kim, now 23 and resettled in South Korea.

Kim’s mother died when he was a toddler, and he was raised by his father, a party member and an employee of a military unit that sold fish in China. During his early childhood, Kim, his father and elder brother lived in relative comfort in a high-rise apartment in the Sunam district.

When the government stopped handing out rations in 1993, Kim’s father used his connections to place his sons in an orphanage 60 miles away.

Kim, who was about 12 at the time, wasn’t sorry to be sent away. It was considered a privilege because the orphanages had food.

In 1997, just before his 16th birthday, Kim “graduated” from the orphanage. He caught a train back to Chongjin, but when he got to his neighborhood, things looked unfamiliar. The electricity was off. Many apartment buildings had no glass in the windows and appeared vacant.

Climbing the eight flights in pitch dark to his family’s unit, he heard a baby crying and wondered whose it might be. Confused and scared, he knocked on the door.

A young couple opened the door and told him his father had moved long ago but left a message: Look for him at the train station.

The phenomenon of vagrancy is testament to how much North Korea has changed. Before the famine, the government controlled people’s movements so strictly that they could not dream of visiting a relative in a nearby town without a travel permit, let alone selling their homes. Not showing up for work could bring a visit from police.

But as people embarked on increasingly desperate hunts for food, families broke apart. With few telephones and a barely functional postal service, parents and children became separated.

“People just started wandering around because they were hungry,” Kim said. “They would sell their apartments for a few bags of rice.”

Kim never found his father. He also never found his brother, who had left the orphanage a year earlier.

With no place to go, Kim ended up at the train station. By night, he slept squeezed into a narrow space designed for a sliding iron gate. By day, he loitered near the food vendors on the plaza. He often worked with a gang of other kids — a few would topple a vendor’s cart and the others would scoop up whatever spilled.

“If you’re not fast, you can’t eat,” said Kim, who even today in South Korea bears the signs of chronic malnutrition, with a head that looks oversized on a shockingly short frame.

Kim began hopping the slow-moving trains that pass through Chongjin on their way to the Chinese border. Once on board, Kim would scramble up to the top of a car, flatten himself to avoid the electric lines above and, using his pack as a pillow, ride for hours.

At the border, he would wade across the river to hawk the items in his pack: household goods on consignment from Chongjin residents, who were selling off their possessions.

In 1998, Kim was arrested by Chinese authorities, who do not recognize North Koreans as refugees. He was sent back to North Korea and spent two years in a prison camp before escaping again in 2000 to China, where he was eventually taken in by missionaries and brought to South Korea.

For every homeless person who survived, many more likely died. Kim Hui Suk recalled a particularly ghoulish scene at the train station.

“Once I saw them loading three bodies into a cart,” Kim said. “One guy, a man in his 40s, was still conscious. His eyes were sort of blinking, but they still were taking him away.”

Although the ranks of the homeless have thinned since the height of the famine, North Korean residents say their numbers are still considerable.

“If somebody disappears, you don’t know whether he dropped dead on the road or went to China,” the coal miner said.

About 100,000 North Koreans have escaped to China in the last 10 years. Many have ended up returning to North Korea, either because they were deported or because they missed their families. They often bring back money, goods to trade and strange new ideas.

Smugglers carry chests that can hold up to 1,000 pirated DVDs. South Korean soap operas, movies about the Korean War and Hollywood action films are among the most popular. Even pornography is making its way in.

This is a radical change for a country so prudish that until recently women were not permitted to ride bicycles because it was thought too provocative. Seo Kyong Hui, the kindergarten teacher, said that when she left North Korea in 1998, “I was 26 years old, and I still didn’t know how a baby was conceived.”

Even today, women are prohibited from wearing short skirts or sleeveless shirts, and both sexes are forbidden to wear blue jeans. Infractions bring rebukes from the public standards police.

But it is a losing battle to maintain what used to be a hermetic seal around the country. Just a few years ago, ordinary North Koreans could make telephone calls only from post offices. Dialing abroad was virtually impossible. Now some people carry Chinese cellphones and pay for rides to the border to pick up a signal and call overseas.

Smugglers also bring in cheap Chinese radios. Unlike North Korean radios, which are preset to government channels, the Chinese models can be tuned to anything, even South Korean programs or the Korean-language broadcasts of Radio Free Asia.

In the past, being caught with such contraband would land a person in political prison. Nowadays, security personnel will more likely confiscate the illicit item for personal use.

When a policeman caught Ok Hui, the entrepreneur’s daughter, with a Chinese radio in 2001, the first question he asked was, “So how do you work this thing?”

She wrote down the frequencies for South Korean radio stations.

“Don’t you have earphones so you can listen without anybody hearing you?” the officer then demanded.

North Korea instructs its citizens that the country is a socialist paradise, but the government knows outside influences can puncture its carefully crafted illusions.

“Bourgeois anti-communist ideology is paralyzing the people’s sound mind-set,” warns a Workers’ Party document dated April 2005. “If we allow ourselves to be affected by these novel ideas, our absolute idolization for the marshal [Kim Il Sung] will disappear.”

Among those who make it to China, many describe a moment of epiphany when they find out just how bad off North Koreans are.

Kim Ji Eun, a doctor from Chongjin, remembers wading across the partially frozen Tumen River in March 1999, staggering to a Chinese farmhouse and seeing a dish of white rice and meat set out in a courtyard.

“I couldn’t figure it out at first. I thought maybe it was for refrigeration,” recalled Kim, who now lives in South Korea. “Then I realized that dogs in China live better than even party members in North Korea.”

Many Chongjin residents who are caught trying to flee the country end up back in the city, behind the barbed wire of Nongpo Detention Center.

It sits near the railroad tracks in a swampy waterfront area. Prisoners are assigned back-breaking jobs in the nearby rice paddies or brick factory, where the workday begins at 5 a.m.

Ok Hui was one of those who served time in Nongpo. A rebel by nature, she had become fed up with North Korea and a difficult marriage.

In September 2001, during one of several failed attempts to escape, she was arrested in Musan and brought back to Chongjin by train. Guards tied the female prisoners to one another by tightly winding shoelaces around their thumbs.

In Nongpo, the inmates bunked in rows of 10, squeezed so tightly together that they had to sleep on their sides. Newcomers sometimes had to bed down in the corridor near overflowing toilets. Meals consisted of a thin, salty soup, sometimes supplemented by a few kernels of raw corn or a chunk of uncooked potato.

“The walls were very high and surrounded by wire,” Ok Hui said. “One woman tried to climb the wall. They beat her almost to death. You can’t imagine. They made us stand and watch.”

One day, when she was assigned to work in the fields, she spotted an old woman. She took off her underwear and offered it to the woman in exchange for sending a message to her mother. Underwear is scarce in North Korea, so the woman accepted and agreed to send a telegram to Ok Hui’s mother.

With her market earnings, Kim Hui Suk bought 10 packs of cigarettes for a security official to arrange her daughter’s release.

Some days later, the prison administrator came to talk to Ok Hui and other female prisoners who were picking corn. They were all due to be freed shortly, and the administrator urged them to resist the temptations of capitalism and imperialism, and to devote themselves to North Korea.

Then, he asked for a show of hands: Who would promise not to run away again to China?

Not a single woman raised her arm.

“We were all just thinking that our whole lives we had been told lies,” Ok Hui recalled. “Our whole lives, in fact, were lies. We just felt this immense rage toward the system.”

The prison administrator looked at the women squatting sullenly in silence in the cornfield.

“Well,” he said, “if you go again to China, next time don’t get caught.”

Forty days after her release, Ok Hui escaped again to China and made her way to South Korea. She used $8,000 in resettlement money from South Korea’s government to pay a broker to smuggle her mother out of North Korea. Today Ok Hui works in a funeral home and her mother as a housekeeper.

Korea Times
Andrei Lankov
4/12/2005

Who is the best choice for a spouse in North Korea? Someone with equal or better “songbun,’’ of course! And who can get a good job? Someone with an appropriate songbun! And who will never be allowed to reside in Pyongyang? Someone with bad sogbun!

But what does songbun mean? Essentially, this is a hereditary group to which every North Korean belongs. The first attempts to classify the entire population according to the people’s origin and, thus, perceived political reliability took place in the late 1950s, but the current system was developed between 1964 and 1969, when specially appointed groups undertook painstaking research of every adult North Korean’s family background and origin. With some minor changes, this system has been functioning to the present day.

The whole population of the DPRK is divided into 51 groups, which, in turn, forms three strata or classes: the “main’’ (kibon kyechung), the “wavering’’ (tongyou kyechung), and the “hostile’’ (choktae kyechung).

In order to make the readers feel better about North Korean bureaucracy, I’d rather name some of the groups that are included in these strata.

Let’s start from the top. The main stratum includes 12 groups: 1) workers who come from working families; 2) former farmhands; 3) former poor peasants; 4) the personnel of state organizations; 5) KWP (Party) members; 6) the family members of deceased revolutionaries; 7) the family members of national liberation fighters; 8) revolutionary intelligentsia (that is, those who received their education after liberation); 9) the families of civilians who were killed during the Korean war; 10) the families of soldiers who were killed during the Korean war; 11) the families of servicemen and 12) heroes of the war.

The “uncertain’’ stratum includes nine groups _ whose descriptions I probably omit. But as one might expect, the enemies make the longest list. The bad ones are: 1) workers of complicated origin, that is, people who had formerly been entrepreneurs and officials; 2) former rich peasants; 3) former small or medium merchants; 4) former landlords, that is, people who before the reform of 1946 had more than 5 hectares of land; 5) people who participated in pro-Japanese or pro-American activities; 6) former officials in the Japanese colonial administration; 7) families of people of good social origin who fled to the South during the war; 8) families of people of bad origin who fled to the South during the war; 9) Chinese Koreans who returned from China in the 1950s; 10) Japanese Koreans who returned from Japan in the 1960s.

I’ll stop here _ the complete list of the “recommended suspects’’ is way too long. Among others, it includes practicing Protestants, Catholics and Buddhists, descendants of shamans or courtesans, families of prisoners, and the like.

There is considerable variation in rights and privileges not only between strata, but also between different groups within each stratum. Of course, it is not as bad to be a grandson of a rich peasant than the son of a political criminal. The position of Korean Japanese is even more controversial: the authorities keep them away from some sensitive jobs and watch them closely while courting them in order to extract money and expertise from the friends and relatives they once left behind in Japan.

A person’s fate is determined by his group, by his songbun. It influences his chances of getting a good job and higher education, of being allowed to live in Pyongyang and other major cities, and, hence, his standard of living, punishment in case of a criminal persecution, and many other things. Thus, members of the “hostile stratum’’ normally have no chance to study in prestigious Pyongyang colleges.

It is sometimes possible to improve own station: say, an exemplary military service will vindicate a lad who was unlucky enough to be the grandson of a Protestant minister. These things happen, but the songbun often lasts for generations.

It is impossible to determine the number of people in each group _ even approximately. The existing (and oft-cited) estimations are often patent nonsense. Perhaps we will never learn the truth until the collapse of the DPRK. Nonetheless, it is clear that the economic turbulence of the last decade greatly damaged the system. But that is another story…

The BBC offers a summary of economic conditions in the DPRK:

The focus of the international community’s alarm over North Korea is the isolated nation’s nuclear arsenal, and its refusal to talk about it.

An aspect that is sometimes overlooked is the dire state of its economy, and yet this could be at the heart of the nuclear crisis.

The regime, with few allies in the world, cannot appeal to the sort of humanitarian emotions that African or South Asian nations have in the past.

To ensure the flow of food and oil, it must have a bargaining chip, and its nuclear arsenal is that chip.

Therefore Pyongyang’s diplomatic bluster is inextricably linked to its need to keep what remains of its economy propped up by donations.

North Korea has recently attempted limited reforms to its economy, but these have not been comprehensive or well-enough planned to work.

Pushed into reform

North Korea became an independent state in 1953, and has operated a rigid centrally planned, or “command” economy based on that developed by Stalin in the USSR.

Industry and agriculture are planned on a five-year basis, all farms are collectivised, volume is praised over value and most foods and goods are rationed.

This model initially allowed for rapid industrialisation and rebuilding, but it failed to deliver sustainable growth or raise living standards.

The economy began to collapse, and by the mid-1990s the country was in a state of famine. The industrial base and the agricultural sector have been in decline ever since. Beijing, North Korea’s only real ally, decided to act in October 2001 with an economics lesson for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

He was shown round a GM plant and a hi-tech factory in Shanghai, and received a lecture about the benefits of Chinese-style reform.

The Chinese were effectively telling Mr Kim that it was time for change – and that they were fed up with the growing number of refugees fleeing over the Chinese border, and increasing demands for aid.

Mr Kim realised he needed to keep China close, and in June 2002 announced a series of economic reforms.

Pyongyang partially ended rationing and reformed the wages and pricing system.

Retail prices shot up – rice by 55,000%, corn 5,000%, electricity 143% and public transport fares 2,000% – but average wages increased by just 1,818% – from 110 won to 2,000 won (US$22) per month.

It also allowed private farmers’ markets to expand – to provide more goods for the consumers this monetary liberalisation had created.

Another major plank of the reforms was the new investment zone in Sinuiju – and another one in Kaesong, agreed as part of Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy.

These investment zones used foreign investment to create new economic ventures.

But neither the wage and pricing reform, nor the investment zones, have worked.

Scarce resources

The government had hoped that inflation created by the reforms, if kept under control, would “kick-start” the economy.

But this theory assumed there was a mass of underutilised resources waiting to be kick-started. Twenty-five years of decline meant that these resources were now scarce.

More food found its way into the farmers’ markets, but at prices ordinary people could not afford.

This effective legitimisation of private farming and smuggling across the border from China only succeeded in increasing the availability of goods to the elite – those whose wages were protected or had access to foreign currency.

As for the economic zones, Sinuiju’s position, opposite China’s flourishing economic zone in Dandong, annoyed Beijing.

It consequently arrested the Chinese businessman hired to run Sinuiju, imprisoning him for 18 years for tax evasion and effectively ending the project.

Kaesong survives but all the ventures are foreign-owned, with little benefit, therefore, for North Korea.

By the end of 2002, economic growth was estimated at just 1.2% at best, with the average citizen’s purchasing power severely eroded.

For most ordinary North Koreans, the end result of the reforms was further impoverishment and the eroding of any savings they may have been able to build up.

So, in light of the reforms’ failure, North Korea’s alleged announcement in October 2002 that its country was pursuing an enriched uranium programme could be interpreted as a return to its old bargaining tactics.

The international community responded to the announcement by setting up six-party talks in August 2003.

But the diplomacy is failing because North Korea, with no allies but the increasingly exasperated Chinese, and little prospect of economic revitalisation, needs to ensure a continued drip feed of aid.

That means a hard bargaining process, and Mr Kim has one bargaining chip – his nuclear bombs.

Already twice, as far as we know, Beijing has managed by persuasion, and perhaps a little economic pressure, to get Pyongyang back to the table after talks have stalled.

Now Beijing is trying again. Perhaps what Pyongyang wants most is a serious package of economic aid from China.

China may provide it to get the talking started again.

But the price Beijing will need to demand is that Pyongyang restarts economic reform in earnest, and moves away from the continual brink of collapse that forces it to make desperate diplomatic gambles such as the current crisis.

As for the economy today, it has to all intents and purposes collapsed.

The reforms were limited, and benefited just the elite of the country rather than ordinary people.

The basic structure remains in place and continues to erode the economy.

However, as long as the regime can keep the country isolated, it can survive on this drip-feed indefinitely.

The endgame is simple – regime survival. It is a long-term strategy using diplomatic belligerence and military threat to secure enough aid to maintain power and isolation.

The regime may survive, and may under pressure begin another round of tentative reform, but it seems unlikely that life will improve for ordinary North Koreans any time soon.

Read the full story here:
Economy root to N Korea crisis
BBC
Paul French
2005-4-12

Asia Times
Andrei Lankov
4/6/2005

A defector from the North, a typical tough Korean auntie with trademark permed hair, smiled when asked about “men’s role” in North Korean families: “Well, in 1997-98 men became useless. They went to their jobs, but there was nothing to be done there, so they came back. Meanwhile their wives went to distant places to trade and kept families going.”

Indeed, the sudden increase in the economic strength and status of women is one of manifold changes that have taken place North Korea over the past 10 or 15 years. The old Stalinist society is dead. It has died a slow but natural death over the past decade and, in spite of Pyongyang’s frequent and loud protestation to the contrary, capitalism has been reborn in North Korea. The old socialist state-managed economy of steel mills and coal mines hardly functions at all, and the ongoing economic activity is largely private in nature.

But the new North Korean capitalism of dirty marketplaces, charcoal trucks and badly dressed vendors with huge sacks of merchandise on their backs demonstrates one surprising feature: it has a distinctly female face. Women are over-represented among the leaders of the growing post-Stalinist economy – a least on the lower level, among the market traders and small-time entrepreneurs.

This partially reflects a growth pattern of North Korean neo-capitalism. Unlike the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union or China, the “post-socialist capitalism” of North Korea is not an affair planned and encouraged by people from the top tiers of the late communist hierarchy. Rather, it is capitalism from below, which grows in spite of government’s attempts to reverse the process and turn the clock back.

Until around 1990, the markets and private trade of all kinds played a very moderate role in North Korean society. Most people were content with what they were officially allocated through the elaborate public distribution system, and did not want to look for more opportunities. The government also did its best to suppress the capitalist spirit. The rations were not too generous, but still sufficient for survival.

And then things began to fall apart. The collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics brought a sudden end to the flow of the Soviet aid (which was, incidentally, happily accepted but never publicly admitted by the North Korean side). This triggered an implosion of the North Korean economy. In the early 1990s people discovered that the rations were not enough for survival, and thus something had to be done. In a matter of years acute shortages of food developed into a large-scale famine, and in 1994-96 the public distribution system ceased to function in most parts of the country.

But men still felt bound to their jobs by their obligations and rations (distributed through workplaces). Actually, rations were not forthcoming, but this did not matter. Being used to the stability of the previous decades, the North Koreans saw the situation as merely a temporary crisis that soon would be overcome somehow. No doubt, they reasoned, one day everything will go back to the “normal” (that is, Stalinist) state of affairs. So men believed that it would be wise to keep their jobs in order to resume their careers after eventual normalization of the situation. The ubiquitous “organizational life” also played its role: a North Korean adult is required to attend endless indoctrination sessions and meetings, and these requirements are more demanding for males than for females.

Women enjoyed more freedom. By the standard of the communist countries, North Korea has always had an unusually high percentage of housewives among its married women (for example, in the northern border city of Sinuiju, up to 70% of married women were estimated to be housewives in the 1980s). While in most other communist countries women were encouraged to continue work after marriage, in North Korea the government did not really mind when married women quit their jobs to become full-time housewives.

Thus when the economic crisis began, women were first to take up market activities of all kinds. This came very naturally. In some cases they began by selling those household items they could do without, or by selling homemade food. Eventually, this developed into larger businesses. While men continued to go to their plants (which by the mid-1990s had usually ceased to operate) women plunged into market activity. In North Korea such trade involved long journeys in open trucks, and nights spent on concrete floors or under the open skies; they often bribed predatory local officials. And, of course, women had the ability to move heavy material, since the vendor’s back tends to be her major method of transportation.

This tendency was especially pronounced among low- and middle- income families. The elite received rations even through the famine years of 1996-99, so the women of North Korea’s top 5% usually continued with their old lifestyle. Nonetheless, some of them began to use their ability to get goods cheaply. Quite often, the wives of high-level cadres were and still are involved in resale of merchandise that is first purchased from their husbands’ factories at cheap official prices. It is remarkable that in the case of North Korea such activities are carried out not so much by the cadres themselves, but by their wives. Cadres had to be careful, since it was not clear what was the official approach to the new situation of nascent capitalism. Thus it was assumed that women would be safer in such undertakings since they did not, and still do not, quite belong to the official social hierarchy.

But for the cadres’ wives, these market operations were a way to move from being affluent to being rich. The lesser folks had to do something just to stay alive.

Perhaps, had the state given its formal approval to nascent capitalism (as did the still formally “communist” state of China), the men would be far more active. But Pyongyang officialdom still seems to be uncertain what to do with the crumbling system, and it is afraid to give to unconditional approval to capitalism. Thus men are left behind and capitalism is left to women.

This led to a change in the gender roles inside families. On paper, communism appeared very feminist, but real life in the communist states was an altogether different matter, and among the communist countries North Korea was remarkable for the strength of its patriarchal stereotypes. Men, especially in the more conservative northeastern part of the country, seldom did anything at home, with all household chores being exclusively the female domain. But in the new situation, when men did not have much to do while their wives struggled to keep the family fed and clothed, many men changed their attitude that housework was something beneath their dignity (at least this is what recent research among the defectors seem to suggest). As one female defector put it, “When men went to outside jobs and earned something, they used to be very boastful. But now they cannot do it and they become sort of useless, like a streetlight in the middle of the day. So a man now tries to help his wife in her work as best as he can” to keep the family going.

Recently, when it is increasingly clear that the “old times” are not going to return, some men are bold enough to risk breaking their ties with official employment. But they often go to market not as businessmen in their own right but rather as aides to their wives who have amassed great experience over the past decade. Being newcomers, males are relegated to subordinate positions – at least temporarily. Or alternatively, they are involved in more dangerous and stressful kinds of activity, such as smuggling goods across the badly protected border with China. As one woman defector said: “Men usually do smuggling. Men are better in big things, you know”.

Economic difficulties and change in money-earning patterns as well as new lifestyle and related opportunities in some cases led to family breakdowns. In South Korea the economic crisis of 1998 resulted in a mushrooming divorce rate. In the North, the nearly simultaneous Great Famine had the same impact, even if in many cases the divorce was not officially recognized.

Of course, we are talking about a great disaster here, and a large part of the estimated 600,000-900,000 people who perished in those years were women. Of the survivors, not all women became winners, bold entrepreneurs or successful managers: some were dragged into prostitution, which has made a powerful comeback recently, and many more had to survive on whatever meager food was available. But still, it seems that years of crisis changed the social roles in North Korean families. For many women, the social disaster became the time when they showed their strength, will and intelligence not just to survive, but also to succeed.

Atlantic Monthly
B. R. Myers
9/1/2004

You’ve just finished your life’s work, a bold new history of the Watergate burglary in which you manage to prove that the White House was out of the loop, but the ink is hardly dry when an eighteen-minute tape surfaces in a Yorba Linda thrift shop, and soon the whole country is listening to Nixon gangsta-rap about how he personally jimmied the door open. It’s every revisionist’s nightmare, but Bruce Cumings, a history professor at the University of Chicago, has come closest to living it. In a book concluded in 1990 he argued that the Korean War started as “a local affair,” and that the conventional notion of a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the South was just so much Cold War paranoia. In 1991 Russian authorities started declassifying the Soviet archives, which soon revealed that Kim Il Sung had sent dozens of telegrams begging Stalin for a green light to invade, and that the two met in Moscow repeatedly to plan the event. Initially hailed as “magisterial,” The Origins of the Korean War soon gathered up its robes and retired to chambers. The book was such a valuable source of information on Korea in the 1940s, however, that many hoped the author would find a way to fix things and put it back into print.

Instead Cumings went on to write an account of postwar Korea that instances the North’s “miracle rice,” “autarkic” economy, and prescient energy policy (an “unqualified success”) to refute what he calls the “basket-case” view of the country. With even worse timing than its predecessor, Korea’s Place in the Sun (1997) went on sale just as the world was learning of a devastating famine wrought by Pyongyang’s misrule. The author must have wondered if he was snakebit. But now we have a new book, in which Cumings likens North Korea to Thomas More’s Utopia, and this time the wrongheadedness seems downright willful; it’s as if he were so tired of being made to look silly by forces beyond his control that he decided to do the job himself. At one point in North Korea: Another Country (2004) we are even informed that the regime’s gulags aren’t as bad as they’re made out to be, because Kim Jong Il is thoughtful enough to lock up whole families at a time.

The mixture of naiveté and callousness will remind readers of the Moscow travelogues of the 1930s, but Cumings is more a hater of U.S. foreign policy than a wide-eyed supporter of totalitarianism. The book’s apparent message is that North Korea’s present condition can justify neither our last “police action” on the peninsula nor any new one that may be in the offing. It is perhaps a point worth arguing, particularly in view of the mess in Iraq, but Cumings is too emotional to get the job done. His compulsion to prove conservative opinion wrong on every point inspires him to say things unworthy of any serious historian—that there was no crime in North Korea for decades, for example—and to waste space refuting long-forgotten canards and misconceptions. Half a page is given over to deriding American reporters who once mistook Kim Il Sung’s neck growth for a brain tumor—talk about a dead issue.

Cumings is even harder to take when he’s in a good mood. By the time he has noted a vague resemblance between Kim Jong Il and Paul Anka, sniggered about “horny” Korean housewives, and mocked both a tour guide’s English and an African man’s surname (“I dissolved in hysterics”), most readers, with no photograph of the author to go on, will find themselves mentally exchanging his professorial tweeds for a very loud leisure suit. Most offensive of all is the book’s message that we shouldn’t be too hard on the dictatorship in Pyongyang, because human rights aren’t as important to Koreans as to the rest of us.

Does this system promote human freedom? Not from any liberal’s standpoint. But from a Korean standpoint, where freedom is also defined as an independent stance against foreign predators—freedom for the Korean nation—here, the vitriolic judgments do not flow so easily. This is a cardinal virtue among a people that has preserved its integrity and continuity in the same place since the early Christian era … After all, there is one undeniable freedom in North Korea, and that is the freedom to be Korean.

It seems to have slipped the professor’s notice that many countries manage to stay independent without dragging children off to gulags, and that North Korea is a place where a lot of characteristically Korean behavior—speaking bluntly, for example—is punishable by execution. The only significant part of the culture that can be freely indulged under Kim is its ethnocentric streak, which is what Cumings all but reduces it to; confusing cause and effect, he sees propaganda as the reflection of the popular soul instead of (to use Stalin’s metaphor) the engineer of it. The Korean people have always been more outward-looking than their insecure leaders, and for centuries this was especially true of those in the northern part of the peninsula. Even in the months after our disgraceful bombing campaign during the war—a campaign that Cumings rightly calls a holocaust—diplomats in Pyongyang noted no signs of indiscriminate xenophobia.

This was soon to change. Throughout the 1950s the regime resorted to crude racism in its anti-American propaganda, often treating inset eyes, big noses, and other Caucasian features as the manifestation of villainy. To the consternation of the diplomatic community, little effort was made to enlighten people about the existence of friendly big-noses, even though—as this spring’s Cold War International History Project bulletin makes clear—North Korea’s cities were rebuilt and its people fed and cared for with enormous amounts of assistance from Eastern Europe. “They expect foreign countries,” one Hungarian diplomat noted, “to give them everything.” Reading the CWIHP bulletin has the odd effect of making one realize what a relatively sensible bunch of people the Soviets were. In the mid-1950s they opposed Kim Il Sung’s brutal collectivization of agriculture; Kim brushed off their advice, only to demand food aid when a murderous famine ensued.

The more the regime evinced its incompetence by relying on foreigners, the more it needed to restrict the people’s contact with them. By the 1960s the party line had taken a turn that reminded a Soviet diplomat of Nazi Germany, as citizens who married Europeans were banished to the provinces for “crimes against the Korean race.” A diplomatic report translated in the CWIHP bulletin shows how the masses finally got into the spirit of things. In March of 1965 the Cuban ambassador was driving his family and some Cuban doctors around Pyongyang when they stopped to take pictures. Hundreds of adults and children quickly swarmed the diplomatic limousine, pounding it with their fists, tearing the flag off, and ordering the occupants to get out. Their rage and insults, directed mainly at the ambassador “as a black man,” abated only when a security force arrived to beat back the mob with rifle butts. (Not for nothing did Eldridge Cleaver say that the North Korean police made him miss the Oakland police.)

“The level of training of the masses is extremely low,” a party official later admitted to the ambassador. “They cannot differentiate between friends and foes.” In other words, everything was going as planned. The regime went on to blur the distinction further by excising all mention of outside assistance from the history books, even as it continued to squeeze billions of dollars from its cash-strapped allies. For decades a foreign proletariat toiling in dingy factories from Vladivostok to Karl-Marx-Stadt helped bankroll Pyongyang’s transformation into a proud monument to ethnic self-reliance, so that someday a Bruce Cumings could boast that it is anything but the ugly Communist capital one might expect. Well into the 1980s Kim was telling leaders of aid-donating states that he was having trouble meeting the basic needs of his people. If South Korea’s dictatorships were America’s running dogs, then North Korea was the Eastern bloc’s house cat: intractable, convinced of its superiority, and to some observers a more independent creature, but never much good at feeding itself—even after the can openers started falling silent in 1989.

The question of where Europe ends and Asia begins has troubled many people over the years, but here’s a rule of thumb: if someone can pose as an expert on the country in question without knowledge of the relevant language, it’s part of Asia. Europeans hoping to lay claim to North Korea should therefore brace themselves, because Bradley Martin’s publisher is touting Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader (2004) as the definitive work on its subject, though it belongs squarely in the “a puzzled look crossed the faces of my guide and interpreter” tradition of monoglot scholarship. Although hardly definitive, it is still an excellent book, well researched and lucidly written. It is especially refreshing to find someone showing serious interest in North Korean propaganda instead of merely hooting at it.

The problem is that the official translations on which Martin was forced to rely do not always reflect the original. Kim Il Sung’s title Eobeoi Suryeong means not “Fatherly Leader”—a common rendering that encourages Martin to exaggerate the influence of Confucianism on the personality cult—but “Parent Leader,” the most feminine title the regime could get away with. As the country’s visual arts make clear, Kim was more a mother to his people than a stern Confucian patriarch: he is still shown as soft-cheeked and solicitous, holding weeping adults to his expansive bosom, bending down to tie a young soldier’s bootlaces, or letting giddy children clamber over him. The tradition continues under Kim Jong Il, who has been called “more of a mother than all the mothers in the world.” His military-first policy may come with the title of general, but reports of his endless tour of army bases focus squarely on his fussy concern for the troops’ health and comfort. The international ridicule of his appearance is thus as unfair as it is tedious. Anyone who has seen a crowd of Korean mothers waiting outside an examination hall will have no difficulty recognizing Kim’s drab parka and drooping shoulders, or the long-suffering face under the pillow-swept perm: this is a mother with no time to think of herself. When it comes to the Workers’ Party, the symbolism is even more explicit, as in this recent propaganda poem:

Ah, Korean Workers’ Party, at whose
breast only
My life begins and ends
Be I buried in the ground or strewn
to the wind
I remain your son, and again return to
your breast!
Entrusting my body to your
affectionate gaze,
Your loving outstretched hand,
I cry out forever in the voice of a child,
Mother! I can’t live without Mother!

It’s easy to imagine what Carl Jung would have made of all this, and he would have been right. Whereas Father Stalin set out to instill revolutionary consciousness into the masses (to make them grow up, in other words), North Korea’s Mother Regime appeals to the emotions of a systematically infantilized people. Although the propaganda may seem absurd at a remove, it speaks more forcefully to the psyche than anything European communism could come up with. As a result, North Korea’s political culture has weathered the economic collapse so well that even refugees remain loyal to the memory of Kim Il Sung.

The Yangs, for example, are former Party members who recently defected to the South with their two boys. As part of a campaign to prevent the formation of a refugee ghetto in Seoul, the family was resettled in Mungyeong, a charmless sprawl of apartment blocks and love hotels a few hours to the southeast. I visited them there in May. As we sat on the floor of their tiny living room, I told them how a young refugee once shrank from my approach because—as she later explained—I looked like the stick-nosed Yankee effigies she used to run knives into after school. “Yes, you do have …” the mother shouted over the general laughter, but she caught herself in time. Turning to the older boy, who is sixteen, I asked what wisdom he could remember from the Parent Leader. “Man is the master of his own destiny,” he said shyly, his voice trailing off. What about his parents? “We didn’t memorize sentences,” the mother said, embarrassed, so I asked her to explain Kim Il Sung’s ideology of Juche for me in her own words. “The main thing is, man is the master of his destiny,” she said briskly. “And?” I asked. Silence. “Well,” I said, “if people are the masters of their destiny, why do they need a leader?” The younger boy came to his mother’s aid: “It was something about flowers needing the sun to grow.” Everyone frowned at my pen scratching away; they were letting the Parent Leader down. “It wasn’t so much what Kim Il Sung said,” the father blurted out at last.

This is of course true. Expanses of tautological prose have been ghostwritten to fatten the spines of the two Kims’ collected works, but few people ever read them. North Korea is a unique socialist country in that its ruling ideology is conveyed through what is written about its leaders, not by them, and the message could hardly be simpler: Foreigners bad, Koreans good, Leader best. “The most important thing to us was that Kim Il Sung suffered for the people; he fought for us,” the boys’ mother said. With a start I realized that this elegant fortyish woman, who now sells American cosmetics for a living, had tears in her eyes. “The Leader would sit on the ground with farmers, just like we’re sitting here now. And if he shook someone’s hand, that person would be happy forever. Of course, Kim Jong Il is not like that.” Conversation turned to the railway explosion in the North at the end of April, and to the regime’s immediate focus on the material damage. “It’s because Kim Jong Il never suffered,” the father said bitterly. “What does he know about the common people?”

It would appear that Kim knows just enough. The border with China remains so porous that even children often sneak back and forth, and yet no more than three or four percent of the population has chosen to flee for good. The regime obviously did the smart thing by publicly acknowledging the food shortage and then blaming it on American sanctions, instead of pretending there was no food shortage at all, as Stalin used to do. The Dear Leader has also deftly exploited the tradition according to which Koreans care for their parents in old age: the masses are told that it is their job to feed him, not the other way around, and his famed diet of “whatever the troops are eating” is routinely invoked to shame everyone into working harder. Never has a dictator been such an object of pity to his people, or such a powerful source of guilt. In 2003 North Korean cheerleaders, living it up on a rare visit to a sports event in the South, responded to a rain-soaked picture of Kim by bursting into a hysterical lament that baffled their hosts.

To concede the effectiveness of the personality cult is not to agree with Selig S. Harrison’s startling assertion, in Korean Endgame (2002), that Koreans have a “built-in readiness … to accept as truth what is dispensed from higher authority.” No regime ever needed to subject its citizens to a lifetime of brainwashing in order to make them follow their natural inclinations. What must be acknowledged is that Kim Jong Il has evinced a genius for propaganda ever since managing the efflorescence of his father’s cult in the 1960s. Even so, he cannot cover his lack of charisma completely; it’s as if Hitler died and left the Third Reich to Goebbels.

Kim must also be aware that the infantilization of the people has come at a price. Away from Pyongyang’s carefully monitored tourist sites, North Korea is a much more raucous place than any dictator could be comfortable with. “One surprising thing,” Michael Breen writes in Kim Jong Il: North Korea’s Dear Leader (2004), “surprising because you expect robots, is … how frequently fights break out.” According to refugees, even women fight out their differences, and young female teachers are said to hit children the hardest. This lack of restraint is a problem for many North Koreans trying to adjust to life in the South. Social workers complain that the refugees pick fights with strangers, and storm off jobs on the first day. “I’d have thought they’d be better at controlling themselves, coming from a socialist system,” is a common lament.

In short, the conventional Western view of North Korea’s official culture as a stodgy combination of Confucianism and Stalinism—two ideologies that prize intellectual self-discipline above all else—could not be further from the truth. Fortuitously enough, this view has so far encouraged Americans to stay cool in the face of Kim Jong Il’s missile-rattling. But misperceptions of hostile regimes are inherently dangerous, especially when Uncle Sam is doing the misperceiving, and this one has as much potential to excite tensions as to reduce them. On August 18, 1976, a detail of U.S. and South Korean soldiers at the DMZ were pruning a tree when People’s Army soldiers demanded that they stop. The Americans refused, prompting the North Koreans to wrest away their tools. In the ensuing clash two American officers were killed. Unable to conceive that Communist troops could act out of spontaneous rage, Washington assumed that Kim Il Sung had ordered the incident. Troops were set on high alert, and nuclear-capable B-52s dispatched to skirt North Korean airspace. Luckily for everyone, the Parent Leader issued an apology for his children on August 21. As the Americans saw it, of course, Kim had “backed down.”

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about the nuclear accord brokered by Jimmy Carter in 1994 is the decade of crowing it set off in North Korea. A high-school textbook remembers, “The Great Leader dragged the Americans, who had fallen into a state of extreme terror and unease, to the negotiating table … All problems discussed during the talks between America and Korea were resolved to Korea’s advantage, and the intense nuclear standoff ended in our victory.” This is evidently sincerely believed; if it weren’t, the North Koreans would not still be so enamored of Carter and Robert Gallucci, the chief U.S. negotiator back then. Both men—and this must thrill them no end—are praised in propaganda literature as fervent admirers of Kim Il Sung.

It is reassuring, then, to read in Harrison’s book that the agreement actually represented a victory of high-ranking North Korean “doves” over their hardline colleagues. I just wish he had explained why even the most hawkish propagandists remember it so fondly. What bothers me more is the author’s insistence on interpreting the two Kims’ every act as part of a rational pursuit of national security. We are told, for example, that the deployment of atomic weapons in South Korea in 1958 frightened Pyongyang into starting its own nuclear program. As the CWIHP bulletin makes clear, however, Eastern European diplomats in the early 1960s were aghast at the North Koreans’ assertions that a nuclear confrontation was nothing to be afraid of, and that the time had come for another invasion of the South. It is by no means certain that this sort of adventurist thinking has been abandoned. In a propaganda novel set in 1993, Kim Jong Il and his generals regard a likely American air strike on the Yongbyeon nuclear facility as the perfect opportunity for a “sacred war” (seongjeon) of reunification. Harrison ignores such things, which may well be better than overreacting to them; but to approach North Korea as if it were the détente-era Soviet Union is asking for trouble. When he gets his next update on the hawk-dove struggle from officials in Pyongyang, a city where most foreigners count themselves lucky to learn their tour guide’s name, he should perhaps keep in mind that North Korea has always viewed the existence of similar factions in Washington as the manifestation of a ludicrous disunity. No one under Kim Jong Il would describe his government in such terms to a Yankee visitor unless the goal were to extract more concessions from the outside world.

Considering that for decades the North Koreans refused to listen to their own allies, it seems naive for the author of Korean Endgame to assume that what Washington does “will largely determine what the North … will do.” The Juche regime has received substantial U.S. aid since the famine, but the dominant slogans of anti-American prop-aganda remain “A hundred thousand times revenge” and “A jackal can never become a lamb.” In other words, even as the regime tells the outside world it wants nothing but better relations with Washington, it tells its own people that better relations are neither desirable nor conceivable. In January of 2003 Pyongyang issued a taunting poster of a missile attack on the Capitol.Later that year, with the six-party talks in progress, an old tale of murderous missionaries was reprinted in four North Korean magazines, complete with racist caricatures.

Still, the thrust of Harrison’s book is valid.

The goal of the United States should be to disengage its forces gradually … over a period not longer than ten years, whether or not this can be done as part of a negotiated arms-control process … The stage would then be cleared, as it were, with the initiative left to Seoul and Pyongyang. Washington would have its hopes and its advice but would recede into an unaccustomed posture of detachment, ready to let the two actors make their own mistakes.

This is excellent counsel. Far from being a stabilizing factor on the peninsula, the U.S. presence serves only to rally the North Koreans around their military-first government. As Harrison makes clear, this is no time to get sentimental about our old ally. Seoul asks that U.S. troops stay, but at the same time it poses as a neutral mediator of the resulting tensions, often playing down the nuclear threat just as Pyongyang seems bent on playing it up; a disastrous miscommunication among the three parties seems all but preordained. It is a shame that Harrison does not place greater stress on the need to extricate our troops even if the arms-control process fails, because it’s hard to see how it can succeed. Kim Jong Il refused to let South Korean doctors tend to blinded children after the North’s railway explosion last spring; such a pathologically secretive man must be expected to balk at an early stage in the verification of nuclear dismantlement, no matter what agreement he has signed. Washington will then renege on its part of the bargain, prompting Seoul to voice regret over American “intransigence.” This, in turn, will embolden the North to demand a re-negotiation of the point in question, and we will all be right back where we started, albeit with even more nukes to worry about.

In the meantime, anything can happen. Having predicted the speedy downfall of the regime back in 1994, Pyongyang-watchers now predict that it will be around forever, but North Korea is already well into a precarious post-totalitarian phase. Thousands of citizens in border regions chat with refugees by smuggled cell phone, and millions more enjoy illegal access to television broadcasts from outside the country. The majority of the population has bought and sold things at open-air markets, and many young people in rural areas have simply stopped attending school and political meetings. The personality cult will find it hard to adjust to this kind of change without routine recourse to anti-American alarmism, and if there are no grounds for confrontation, Kim Jong Il can be expected to create them. All the more reason, then, for America to heed Harrison’s advice and pull out. But will we do so? Our patriotic dash into the Iraqi quagmire hardly inspires confidence that we wouldn’t follow our own Dear Leader into a new conflict in North Korea, especially since the WMD really do look like a “slam dunk” this time.

The only comfort to be had from the new batch of Korea books is provided by Breen’s biography of Kim Jong Il, which details a hedonistic streak as wide as the DMZ. Apparently the dictator lives in a huge palace stocked with Paradis cognac, and every summer a fresh “Joy Brigade” of high school beauties gets to admire the ceiling. Breen waxes indignant about this, but would he rather Kim were sharing a tent with a mountain goat and a well-thumbed Koran? We can all breathe a little easier knowing that our most formidable adversary wants his virgins in the here and now.