“In North Korea,” he told me, “money begets power.”
CHAPTER 7
BETTER TO BE FEARED THAN LOVED
“Our service personnel and people will never pardon all those who dare disobey the unitary leadership of Kim Jong Un.”
—KCNA, December 13, 2013
KIM JONG UN KNEW THAT IT WOULD NOT BE ENOUGH TO ALLOW people to toil in the market economy and work their way to a slightly better standard of living. He also had to make sure they knew they could lose everything—and he meant everything—if they dared cross him.
He had to embody the dictum laid out five centuries earlier by the Italian politician Niccolo Machiavelli in his book The Prince: that it is better to be feared than loved.
In the first years of his reign, Kim Jong Un put the country, already the world’s most isolated, on lockdown. He had security along the river border with China further reinforced. He had patrols stepped up. His efforts to thwart attempts to escape were much more draconian than his father’s. The Great Successor wasn’t taking any chances with the flow of information and people across the river into China. He cracked down on anything and everything that could challenge his fledgling rule.
The Kim regime had endured for seven decades by trapping the entire population inside the country and repeatedly drilling into them, starting from kindergarten, the myth that they lived in a socialist paradise and were the happiest people in the world.
Kim Il Sung constructed this narrative, but he clearly knew that the farce was going to be a hard sell, because he also built a surveillance state that still, to this day, monitors and controls every aspect of every North Korean life. Officials check how deeply citizens bow before statues of the leaders, how ardently they listen during compulsory ideology sessions, how often they try to skip out of sweeping the road at dawn. In this police state, anyone can be an informant or be turned into one: a wife, a colonel, a vegetable seller, a teacher, a coal miner, a child.
Long after the Soviet Union’s glasnost, and long after China creaked open its doors, the North Korean regime still tries to enforce a near-total information blockade. By denying the citizens access to the outside world, the Kim regime has been able to perpetuate its myths.
To punish anyone who dares question the leadership, the Great Leader also stole Stalin’s notorious gulag system. Huge concentration camps in remote regions, often with bitter climates, housed anyone who dared to dissent—and often their whole family, for good measure.
It’s hard to exaggerate the all-encompassing nature of the regime fictions. “It’s like a religion,” Dr. Yang, a physician from the border city of Hyesan, told me. “From your birth, you learn that the Kim family are gods, and you are taught to be absolutely obedient to them. It’s a reign of terror. The Kim family uses terror to keep people scared.”
Every home, every school, every hospital, every public building, and even every subway car must contain framed photos of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, which must be cleaned every day with a special cloth that is kept in a special box. Placards and billboards through towns and cities, and even messages carved into mountainsides, extol the greatness of the Kim regime.
Every television channel is devoted to regime propaganda. The movie theaters show only North Korean films, with catchy titles like the sixty-two-part Nation and Destiny. Every household has a radio attached to the wall that can never be turned off and can never be tuned to a different station.
Open a North Korean newspaper, and you will see story after story about the genius and beneficence of Kim Jong Un. There is nothing the Brilliant Comrade does not know, according to the universal fiction of North Korea. He dispenses advice on catfish farming and livestock breeding, at greenhouses and tree nurseries, at construction sites and shipyards. He inspects production lines for shoes, face cream, and bean paste and has wise instructions to impart at every turn. He has thoughts on music, architecture, and sport. He is a military genius who has guided the progress in the nuclear and missile programs as well as commanding conventional drills at sea and on land.
There is no alternative point of view. And, for all but a handful of the elites who get Kim Jong Un’s explicit permission, there is no internet access. Cell phones are not connected to the outside world. There are no underground newspapers. There is no graffiti. In fact, there isn’t a single known dissenter in the entire country.
The regime begins the process of indoctrination early.
During one trip to Pyongyang, I went to a nursery with a sign across the front saying “Thank you, Respected General Kim Jong Un.” Inside, it was decorated with cartoon racoon soldiers holding rocket-propelled grenade launchers and sailor ducklings with machine guns. The toddlers posed with plastic Kalashinikovs while visiting reporters took photos.
Min-ah’s daughter was in kindergarten when she first learned about Kim Jong Un. She was four. She and her classmates were given sweets, shown a photo of the new leader, and told what a special leader he was. She has one abiding memory of that time. “His face was fat like a pig,” she recalled a couple of years later from the safety of Seoul.
As Kim Jong Un was settling into leadership, the education department ordered high schools across the country to teach a new course devoted to him. The curriculum amounted to eighty-one hours of lessons on Kim Jong Un, in addition to the ones focused on his father, grandfather, and grandmother.1 Additional history classes told high schoolers about American soldiers cruelly thrusting bayonets through North Korean babies during the Korean War, and the economics lessons taught about how, thanks to the juche philosophy, North Korea could be self-reliant.
Outside of school, North Korean children between the ages of nine and fifteen had these messages further drilled into them at obligatory Young Pioneer Corps meetings. Being admitted to the Young Pioneers is often considered the most momentous day in a child’s life, with membership conferred in a ceremony held at schools on a regime anniversary, like Kim Il Sung’s birthday or Foundation Day. Parents attend, and the child often gets a gift-wrapped present like a pen or a schoolbag. North Koreans don’t celebrate their own birthdays, just that of their leader, and for many children, this is the only time in their lives they ever get a present.2
Man-bok was in his second year at university when his class was told that Kim Jong Un would be the next leader of their country. Since kindergarten, through school, during military service, and then once he started studying science at college, Man-bok had grown up with Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il looming over his studies. Students at his university had to endure ideological education for ninety minutes every day. Over and over again, they were told about the glorious history of the North Korean revolution led by Kim Il Sung with the help of his wife Kim Jong Suk, carried on by their son Kim Jong Il.
Man-bok was sick of it; he wanted to learn about science, not about these supposed comrades. He was fed up with a life of doublethink.
Then, one day soon after that first announcement, he saw the heir apparent on TV, a chubby kid his age, surrounded by old generals who were addressing him using a very respectful Korean word for “offspring.”
The student thought it was a joke. “Among my closest friends, we were calling him a piece of shit,” he told me. “Everyone thinks this, but you can only say it to your closest friends or to your parents if you know that they agree.”
But it was no joke. With the ascent of Kim Jong Un, Man-bok came to realize that this system had spawned its third-generation leader. Given his youth, this man might be around for a very long time.
Elsewhere around the country, during compulsory military service, in factories and mines and government ministries, and at Women’s Federation and neighborhood watch meetings, other North Koreans were being taught about the Genius Among Geniuses.
To support his claim to the leadership, Kim Jong Un had North Korea’s ten commandments revised in 2013. Kim Il Sung had developed these Ten Principles on the Establishing of the Monolithic Ideology of the Party almost forty years earlie
r in an attempt to provide some heft to the personality cult.
Every single principle contains the leader’s name and makes reference to his absolute authority and the need to believe in it unconditionally. Principle Two demands “accepting the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung’s thought as one’s own belief and taking his instructions as one’s creed.” And Principle Four is “highly revering the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung is the noblest duty of the revolutionary warriors who are endlessly loyal to the great leader.”
When he took over, Kim Jong Un apparently decided they needed updating. He had the principles revised to include venerations of his father, Kim Jong Il, and provide a closer link between the system and himself. “The Great Comrade Kim Il Sung and Comrade Kim Jong Il are extraordinary patriots, great revolutionaries and loving parents of the people. They dedicated their everything to their fatherland, revolution and people,” the revised version states.
But Kim Jong Un stopped short of having his own name added or his portrait installed in every home. Careful not to overreach, he concentrated instead on elevating his father, hoping that would bolster his legitimacy as the scion of this glorious system.
North Koreans are required to memorize the principles and be able to recite them on demand.
They have the updated principles drilled into them at the ideological education sessions held twice a week in their neighborhood groups or in their workplaces. In these compulsory sessions, they must sit through the latest descriptions of the leader’s greatness and the United States’ iniquity. This is how many first heard about the astounding feats of the Comrade General Kim Jong Un in 2009.
Every Saturday, and sometimes more often, citizens must also attend self-criticism sessions, where they are required to detail their own shortcomings of the previous week and often offer up those of the people around them. These are often exercises in going through the ideological motions: citizens describe how they could have worked even harder, until their fingers bled or they fainted, in the service of the Great Successor. But they can also be forums for condemning rivals or retaliating against an annoying neighbor.
Even hairstyles are strictly controlled in North Korea. Women are not permitted to dye their hair, although perms are common among married women. A story went around in the outside world that shortly after Kim Jong Un took over, he had ordered all men to get his pompadour. That was not true, but it is true that North Korean men must have short hair. A range of recommended styles adorns the walls of barber shops, including, yes, several with very short sides and very high tops. It’s not compulsory, but an astute North Korean would know that there’s no better way to show his loyalty to the leader.
Even those sent abroad legally to earn money for the regime are not exempt from these education and self-criticism sessions. In fact, because these people are catching glimpses of the real world, the regime goes to great lengths to try to keep them ideologically uncontaminated.
“We would hear about how Kim Jong Un was working so hard for the party and for the nation and for the people,” said Mr. Song, who was a construction worker in Russia, earning foreign currency for the North Korean regime and a little bit for himself, when Kim Jong Il died. “He had done this and this and that, and Kim Jong Un was working so hard for all of us. It just didn’t make sense. Anybody who had served in the military knew that it was ridiculous to say a young child could shoot a rifle or even see over the dashboard of a car,” he said. But he couldn’t say anything about it at the time.
No one in North Korea can say that this young emperor has no clothes and expect to live.
But almost everyone knows it, for the state once called the Hermit Kingdom is hermetic no more. Despite the regime’s extreme efforts, it has not been able to completely shut out the rest of the world.
In the wake of the famine, when food and clothes came in over the Chinese border, so, too, did information. People who had snuck across the river came back talking about what they had seen: a country where people have so much to eat they didn’t finish everything on the table and where dogs ate better than North Koreans.
Gradually, more sophisticated forms of information began to arrive.
Traders now smuggle flash drives and micro-storage SD cards into North Korea, often buried in sacks of rice or bags of batteries, to sell secretly in the markets. These small storage devices are easy to hide from the authorities and to share among friends.
Activists in South Korea try to help with this by putting USB drives in huge balloons that they float across the border when the winds are right or in bottles that they float up the river when the currents are favorable. Most are loaded with action movies and soppy soap operas. Some contain books and encyclopedias. Others hold peppy South Korean K-pop. Some contain porn.
All of it is gobbled up by North Koreans hungry for information.
“When you go into the market, you say to the vendors, ‘Do you have anything delicious today?’ or, ‘Do you have any good beer?’” Mrs. Kwon told me of her former life in the northern city of Hoeyrong. “Then you say, ‘OK, fill it up to the max.’ That means that you want one with lots of movies on it.”
DVD players with USB drives have become hot-ticket items in the markets. Small portable DVD players called “notels”—a combination of “notebook” and “television”—are particularly popular. They have a DVD drive as well as USB and SD card ports and a built-in TV and radio tuner and can be charged with a car battery. They sell for about fifty dollars, and maybe half of urban households have one.3
When she went to the market, Mrs. Kwon would sometimes take old USB sticks to swap, or she would just buy new ones. A sixteen-gigabyte flash drive cost less than two dollars and would contain a wealth of outside information.
“I loved looking at their houses; I love looking at how they were living, everything,” she recalled, telling me how she particularly loved My Name Is Kim Sam-soon, an old rom-com centered around a chubby, forthright woman who finds and then loses a heartthrob doctor. “It was like a fantasy,” Mrs. Kwon said. “Of course I wanted to live like them, so I dreamed about that kind of life and about coming to South Korea.” Although she does not live a fairytale existence in the South—she has a small apartment in a satellite city outside Seoul—the spark came from those glimpses of the real world.
The glimpses of fridges, sofas, TV sets, cars, and the rest of daily life in the South undermine one of the core myths of Pyongyang’s propaganda—that South Korea is a destitute and desperate place and that North Koreans have a happier life.
The smallest details in these movies and dramas could be hugely influential on people who have never watched anything other than regime media. The smallest detail could expose the biggest lies.
Watching social interactions in the South can also be illuminating. Young North Koreans, particularly women, noticed how people in the South would often use polite language to each other, using levels of Korean that denoted respect. It was a stark difference from the talking down to younger people and women that was commonplace in the North.
Jung-a, who should have been at high school but was instead selling homemade tofu, remembered her surprise when she watched a film called Ninja Assassin that was on one of the flash drives she got in the market. The high-action, often bloody martial arts film was American, but it starred a muscled South Korean pop star called Rain. It was eye-opening for her.
“At school in North Korea, we were taught that South Koreans look different from us,” she told me. “But when I saw this movie, I saw that they looked just the same as us and spoke the same as us.”
She particularly loved K-pop songs. “North Korean songs all sound the same, and the words are all strong and tough. I was used to songs that were about Kim Il Sung and the generals and patriotism,” Jung-a said. “Then all of a sudden I heard these songs that were in Korean but sounded totally different.”
This kind of information had percolated throughout North Korea and had undermined the faith that people might hav
e had in the third-generation leader, Dr. Yang, a gruff man in his forties, told me during a break from seeing patients at the hospital in Seoul where he now works.
“People don’t expect anything from this young leader,” he said. “I think more than seventy percent of people are dissatisfied with the Kim Jong Un regime. They know that Kim Jong Un is not a capable person.”
In North Korea, he was technically a doctor, working in a big provincial hospital. But the hospital had no medicine, and the doctor earned practically nothing—3,500 won a month, not even enough to buy two pounds of rice—so his real job was smuggling. He would pick medicinal herbs from the mountains—something North Korean doctors are good at since they don’t have actual pharmaceuticals and are instead forced to take “herbal vacations”—and sell them in China. With the proceeds, he would buy home appliances like rice cookers, portable DVD players, and LCD monitors and bring them back into North Korea.
Because of this work, he knew the regime propaganda for what it was.
“They told us that the reason we were poor was because of sanctions,” he said. “But I lived near the border, so I knew that the reason that North Korea didn’t develop was because there was no reward for anybody to work harder. They were going to have to work for free either way.”
Why, then, if so many North Koreans know about the outside world, and know that the regime is lying to them, has the system survived? The answer lies in the unparalleled brutality of the regime, which has no compunction in meting out severe punishments for the smallest hint of disaffection.
To enforce the lie that he’s the best man for the job, Kim Jong Un has perpetuated North Korea’s political caste system with zeal, rewarding those deemed most loyal to him and ruthlessly punishing those who dare question him.
The Great Successor Page 13