Even as my hosts in Pyongyang in 1989 were assuring me that all was well in paradise, North Korea was in trouble. A visitor, tightly restricted in what he could see while inside the country, could only sense that something was amiss. But evidence was building up outside to show that the regime was failing in its elementary duty of feeding the people.3 That failure threatened Pyongyang’s single-minded efforts to maintain loyalty to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il at a fever pitch. More and more of the Kims’ subjects started to make the connection, as Chung Seong-san did, between economic backwardness and the policies of their top leaders.
The connection came most readily to the minds of North Koreans who, like Dong Young-jun, were stationed abroad, and who thus were exposed to information and viewpoints unavailable to their stay-at-home countrymen. Food shortages worsened to the point where even some elite expatriates feared for their livelihoods if they should return home. Kang Myong-do, son-in-law of a prime minister, Kang Song-san, told the Seoul newspaper Joong-Ang Ilbo that North Korean spies in China, to avoid being sent home, had fabricated and submitted reports setting out a need for them to remain in China. Their specific scam was to tell their Pyongyang masters that South Korean special forces had been sent to kidnap North Koreans in China and take them south. “Kim Jong-il and Kang Song-san still believe that,” Kang Myong-do told the newspaper.4
The story illustrates the fact that China had become more prosperous than North Korea. People living just across the border in China’s Yanbian region were in perhaps the best position to notice that shift. “North Koreans were better off than people in China, including Yanbian, until the early 1970s,” one such person, an ethnic Korean professor at the Yanbian Academy of Social Sciences, told me.5 “During the 1960s lots of Koreans from China went over to North Korea because life there was much better than in China. There was a lot of internal strife in China during the 1960s. From the 1970s, the situation in North Korea started deteriorating because the government spent too much on the military after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam War. Gradually China, including Yanbian, pulled ahead.
The difference was that people in China not only had money; they also had something to spend it on. The North Koreans got their salaries but there was nothing to buy with their money.”
The professor, speaking in 1992, said that people in North Korea had been “hungry although not actually starving, since the mid-1970s. The exception is Pyongyang. I have an aunt in Pyongyang who is the widow of a 1930s martyr in the anti-Japanese struggle. I visited her and found she had plenty. She was well taken care of. She had lots of sacks of rice. For the others, the government has been trying to improve the situation but there’s been no real improvement since the 1970s. Laborers get eighteen kilograms of grain per month; office workers, fifteen kilos. Both China and North Korea distribute food directly to the people as a means of coping with scarcity. The basic principle is: If there’s a scarcity, the state must ration. If there’s a surplus, let people buy it in the stores. There are a lot more side dishes in China, and meat is now very common in China. Chinese can buy meat in stores. In North Korea, the stores’ stocks are very limited. Meat and dairy products there are still rationed by the state, because of their scarcity.”
Still, the professor told me, it would be a mistake to imagine that people’s natural complaints translated into significant active dissent. “I can’t judge the amount of complaining, since it’s suppressed,” he said, “but people do complain everywhere. The government won’t tolerate dissent. People get executed. So an uprising would be next to impossible. It’s important to note that, whatever happens, people do conform to the rules and regulations. They believe in the ideology.”
Not everyone believed, though. There were cynics like Ko Chung-song, who had been an employee of a district office for preservation of revolutionary historical sites before he defected in June 1993.6 The office was all about ideology, but Ko’s job was about food, fuel and other essentials of life. The day I met him in 1994 Ko wore rimless, rectangular glasses, a nice suit and tie, a gold watch. All in all, he looked like a typical young South Korean bureaucrat or corporate official.
Ko told me that as a young student in North Hwanghae Province, he had “basically believed Kim Il-sung was a god, a savior. In high school I thought my uniform had been given to me by Kim Il-sung. ‘He’s educating me for a good life,’ I believed. So I thought very highly of him. All the education is centered around Kim Il-sung. The first thing you say when you wake up is, ‘Oh, Great Leader Kim Il-sung.’ The first thing you learn to say as a baby is ‘Kim Il-sung.’ So how can you not worship him? At the nursery they have a portrait of Kim Il-sung. Before you eat you say ‘Thank thee, thou great Kim Il-sung.’”
In school, “if you don’t get 100 percent on your ideological test you’re a failure.” All the ideological instruction, combined with “volunteer” labor, left little time to study other subjects or have fun. “I did more labor in my school days than after I entered into society” Ko told me. “Out of a year, four months would be spent laboring. All I can remember is toiling away my days. If I had been paid I would have gotten a lot of money. We would study in the morning and work in the afternoon.”
It was a specific incident after he had finished high school, though, that really sparked Ko’s cynicism. “Once the district party told me: ‘We’d like you to volunteer for a very special, high-level mission.’ I thought it was some kind of re-ward, but after I agreed to volunteer I was told to go to the coal mines. I was a diligent, hard worker, so they took advantage of me. I had believed them, and I felt really betrayed.” It sounded, I told him, very much like the classic ploy of the U.S. Army recruiters whose posters urged young men to see the world and learn a wonderful new profession—-which turned out to involve cleaning latrines and peeling potatoes.
“High blood pressure kept me out of the army,” Ko said. “I asked my brother to get me exempted at the time of the August 8 [1976] axe-killing incident at the Demilitarized Zone.” After falling for the “special mission” bait-and-switch maneuver, Ko said, “I protested for a year, refusing to work in the mines, and then was sent to do forced labor on a farm near Pyongyang.”
I was surprised to hear he had managed to hold out for so long before being punished. “Luckily I had good family connections,” Ko explained. “I got out of the forced farm labor quickly thanks to my uncle. When you’re sent for a job you need a munkwan—party permission document. Once you’re sent to forced labor, without strong backup you can’t leave. But my uncle got my munkwan changed. I went to work in the Hwangju irrigation office, and then from 1984 to 1987 I worked in Kanggye Military Factory No. 26, which made missiles for anti-submarine warfare, and rockets. It had a false name, ‘Kanggye Tractor Co.’”
But Ko told me he had “still felt rebellious. Lots of my relatives were high officials, and I had attended a specialized school. So until I was betrayed by the government with that ‘special mission’ trick, I’d held high hopes for my career. Now there was forced labor on my record, and that goes against you. I never trusted the authorities again. I was sick of the brain-washing and started listening to South Korean broadcasts.
“In 1987 I went to work for the Kanggye Food Supply Department. The food shortage then was worse than usual. When I arrived things were already in a pitiful state, but in 1989 the situation started getting far worse still. It gets worse and worse each year. To meet North Koreans’ food requirements, about six million tons of rice are needed. But only about four million tons are produced. That means two million tons should be imported. In Kanggye there are 400,000 people. Kanggye is a mountainous area that can’t grow its own rice. We got it all from North Pyongan Province, or it was imported—say from China. We were always behind in distributions by two months or so. The average worker supposedly is entitled to 700 grams a day. For unemployed people, it’s 300 grams. But the authorities said they needed to store up rice for use in case of war, so we had to take some out of the ration. S
o the actual supply was about 530 grams. Around 1989 and 1990, while I was there, we were providing about 530 grams.”
That food-supply job, Ko told me, put him where the power was at a time when ordinary people had begun to turn to theft and scavenging to fill their stomachs. “In North Korea right now, food is equivalent to money. In rural areas, if you want to buy things like appliances you have to pay in food instead of money. I never stole, but generally to sustain life in North Korea you have to steal. If you work in a pencil factory you have to steal pencils, which you then trade in the black market for food. I didn’t have to steal because I could fix up the documents to supply me enough food. In North Korea any job having to do with food was a high position. Sons and daughters of high officials liked to work there.”
I told Ko about the youth festival helper who had asked me for $100 to buy goods at the special store selling foreign goods. “To earn $100 a North Korean would have to work 10 years. That guide is probably quite a rich man. One month’s salary is about 60 won, while $100 equals 7,500 won or so. You made a wealthy man there.” I asked Ko whether the man might have been instructed by the regime to ask for foreign exchange. “Of course he did it on his own,” Ko replied. “The North Korean government is too proud to make those workers ask Americans for money.” (I pointed out to Ko that the regime was not too proud to make its diplomats smuggle drugs and pass counterfeit bills for hard currency.)
When Ko left the Kanggye Food Supply Department he continued to be involved with food. His new job was supplying food, coal and so on for the forty-five people or so—workers and management—in the Chagang Province Preservation Office for Historical Monuments, in Kanggye city. Chagang province is close to Manchuria—Northeast China—and includes much of the route of Kim Il-sung’s storied boyhood journey for learning. There is, for example, the inn whose keeper back in 1923 gave Kim Il-sung an extra blanket at no charge. The high command during the Korean War was in what later became Chagang Province, and Kim Jong-il spent part of his childhood in Kanggye.
The preservation office was in charge of historical monuments including “slogan trees.” “In the mountains during the struggle against Japanese rule some people peeled back the bark of trees and scratched praise of the ‘great general Kim Il-sung’ in the wood. A couple of those kuho (inscribed trees) are authentic, but others later popped up all over North Korea—put there by the authorities. I haven’t personally seen it done, but I’ve seen the evidence of their work. A committee established by the party proclaimed, ‘We’re totally faithful to Kim Il-sung, so we’ll go to the mountains to find the inscriptions.’ They reported the ones they had ‘found’ and I went to look at them. I could tell they had just cut into the trees a few days before—not decades before. They’re propaganda to make people worship Kim Il-sung.”7
It was a similar story with other “historical” monuments, Ko said. “Kim Jong-il was born in the Soviet Union, but they made a monument on Mount Paektu saying he was born there. In Mangyongdae, Kim Il-sung’s birthplace, you can find markers for the place where Kim studied, the place he played and so on. Well, the authorities have put up the same sort of monuments for Kim Jong-il, in Kanggye. ‘Here’s where he thought about the revolution. This shows why he must be the leader.’ ‘Here’s where he played.’ Actually, Kim Jong-il stayed only three months or so in Kanggye, then went to China with his sister, Kim Kyong-hui. But they still made the monuments. The whole district of Hankye-ri in Kanggye city is one big ‘historical’ monument.”
Ko worked for the historical office from mid-1991 until he defected in June 1993. “From the moment I started working there I felt it was all fake,” he told me. “No one talked about it. You could have your own feelings about it, but you couldn’t openly talk about it. I’m pretty sure a lot of people felt that way but they didn’t dare express it clearly.” As for the reaction of the general public, “In the past, all those historical monuments had great effect,” Ko said. “People went to those places and studied the inscriptions. But now they don’t pay any attention. People started changing two or three years ago [1991 or 1992], expecially in the elite classes. University students got stirred up. With the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, people were starting to think, ‘Maybe there’s something wrong with communism.’ Also, there was no more aid coming from the Russians. So the economy declined terribly. People today no longer care about ideology— they only care about their survival. People think something is bound to happen in North Korea. That’s what I meant by saying the students got stirred up. Members of the elite believe that North Korea will be influenced by international changes.”
Ko told me he had “felt some of this before starting to work in the monuments office. I began listening to radio—KBS from South Korea, radio from Yanbian, the Radio Moscow Korean-language service. From around 11 P.M. to early morning, you can tune in the KBS social education station well. I started listening in 1985 and began doubting the regime in 1989. The state doesn’t know, but people listen to secretly imported radios.” He had bought his radio, a Sony short-wave model, from a man he met on a business trip. Maybe 5 to 6 percent of the population had radios capable of receiving at least AM—medium wave—transmissions at the time he left, he estimated. He guessed that a third of those with the equipment—perhaps 2 percent of the population—listened to foreign stations.
“My friends and I would even get together to listen to the South Korean broadcasts and debate what we had heard,” Ko said. “Kim Il-sung was saying in his speeches that in order for us to have a lavish life and prosper we must reunify. I wanted to learn the prospects for reunification. On the radio I heard about the downfall of foreign socialism and about the virtual capitalism rampant in China. I wanted to find out the prospects for Korea. I ultimately defected because I came to believe the regime could not survive for long. It’s bound to fall. Everybody believes something is going to happen in a couple of years. When friends get together, they debate how North Korea will change. Someone might say ‘What do you think about the collapse of the USSR? Do you think capitalism or socialism is better? What about Chinese-style, free-market socialism?’ The regime’s propaganda backfires. On North Korean news they show footage of students demonstrating in South Korea. Ordinary people say ‘Oh, society must be very harsh there.’ Educated people think, ‘To have such demonstrations, they must have a very democratic society’ Other issues people talk about in these private discussions include oil. The oil supply that the Soviet Union used to provide is now cut and oil from China drastically reduced. So what is the future of North Korea?”
I asked him what people thought was the answer to that question. “Everybody believes a war will break out sooner or later,” he said. “A hundred percent want war to occur. The food shortage is terrible. Distribution is halted, so people figure they will die of hunger or die in war. They’re even prepared to die in a nuclear war. A hundred percent believe that North Korea would win, so they support war. They were brought up to worship Kim Il-sung. No matter what changes occur, they always worship Kim Il-sung. They’ve been so brain-washed since birth that they’re willing to die for the country.”
So was it the case that the people did not connect Kim’s rule to their problems? “They don’t blame Kim Il-sung, but they do blame Kim Jong-il,” Ko said. “The moment Kim Jong-il came into power the problems started, they think. All North Koreans believe Kim Il-sung is a war hero who brought about the independence of Korea. They worship him. Even though I betrayed North Korea, I still revere Kim Il-sung, think very highly of him. Probably all the defectors here think that way It’s such a closed society.”
Ko had found, he said, that “people in South Korea are not alert enough. I know that Kim Jong-il is brutal enough to start a war. Most people in North Korea believe the reason North and South cannot reunify is that the U.S. military is stationed here. And if the U.S. moves out, they think, reunification is only a matter of time. But removing U.S. troops won’t bring about reunifi
cation. Kim Il-sung knows that if free markets and other foreign influences come in, his regime will collapse. I support economic sanctions. But for economic sanctions to work China would have to give up its socialist ideal.
Without that change we can’t have change in North Korea, because the regime has the support of the Chinese.”
I told Ko about Washington’s plans for Radio Free Asia broadcasts in Korean and asked if he thought those could help open the society. “That’s an exciting idea!” he said. “A lot of people listen to the radio so it has a high chance of disrupting the regime. It would be effective. Most North Koreans don’t know what’s happening in North Korea. When I was living there I was waiting for someone to tell me what I should do. No one ever did. On those broadcasts, defectors should talk and persuade their friends in North Korea—let them know we’re alive. Maybe that would inspire them. Put it in terms they can understand. Instead of having someone say that South Korea is experiencing an economic boom, get defectors on the radio to give examples of-what can be bought down here.” As a percentage of the respective average incomes, “the price of a Hyundai Sonata II here, for example, is equivalent to the price of a suit in North Korea.”
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Page 58