Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  The demonstration in the stadium was, to be sure, a foreigners’ protest. The assumption must be that the North Koreans witnessing it were members of the privileged class of loyalists permitted to reside in the capital, and therefore were unlikely to be inspired to action by the protesters’ signs. Not only did the Pyongyang residents fail to join in the foreigners’ demonstration; foreign residents I talked with said they had seen no evidence of indigenous protests, either. “Oh, they might complain about a policeman who stops their car,” one foreigner said, “but I’ve never heard anyone criticize the policy or the system.” North Koreans insisted, as in 1979, that they enjoyed complete freedom. What about the reports by human rights groups that tens of thousands of citizens were imprisoned for political offenses? “There is no one against the government in our country” a festival guide replied. “It’s a lie.”

  North Koreans also insisted that their country was virtually crime-free. During the festival, uniformed guards carrying automatic weapons continued to patrol both in the cities and at bridges, airstrips, rail-ways and other sensitive sites in the countryside. But checkpoints between the city and its airport were left unmanned, perhaps to give less of an impression of Big Brother–style interference.

  In any case, just as other communist-ruled societies had faced enormous challenges that forced them to deviate from the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Mao, North Korea was experiencing frustrations that in time might turn even avid revolutionaries against their government. Economic problems had continued, and there were some signs that the regime’s handling of the economy had begun to cause popular disaffection. Defectors to South Korea and other countries had complained, for example, that people were exhausted from the almost constant demands for “voluntary” labor and “speed campaigns.”3 At Kim Chaek University of Technology, officials in an interview denied a report from a human rights group that forty students at Kim Chaek and another college campus had been arrested a year before the festival, after posters appeared questioning the regime’s economic policies.

  Electrical power was in permanent shortage, so stores were not switching on their lights except during weekends and on special occasions. The entire period of the youth festival was a special occasion, though, with huge amounts of power used to light up Pyongyang and cool the visitors. The practical effects of the shortage could be seen when trolley buses stopped one morning as the result of an apparent electrical blackout.

  Consumer durables clearly were a problem, although here again the regime sought to counter the impression. During the youth festival the authorities stepped up shipments to the stores. I doubted that the stores shown to foreigners were representative of those where ordinary North Koreans routinely shopped. In any case, the department store displays in 1989 were an improvement over the dreary selection seen a decade earlier. Designs of some goods such as women’s handbags had clearly improved. Clothing, especially women’s garments, showed more color and variety. The improvements, however—-whether real or contrived—had done no more than to bring those stores up to the fairly low standard of department stores in Beijing when I had lived there from 1980 to 1982, before the Chinese economy’s new direction had started to show major tangible results.

  Despite the shipments for the festival, some items were notable for either their unavailability or their poor quality. One currently popular item among North Koreans was a stereophonic portable cassette-tape player, but the shortage was severe. Not a single one could be found in any of three downtown Pyongyang department stores. Instead shoppers were offered tinny-sounding, primitive phonographs. Predictably, those elicited little enthusiasm.

  Department stores emphasized what they had. Piles of buckets, basins, bowls and other plastic house-wares in bright colors occupied the most prominent ground-floor displays. A buyer could select from some twenty-five styles of women’s shoes, all made of vinyl; a shopper insisting on leather shoes would need to come up with some foreign exchange to buy them in a special hard-currency outlet for foreign goods. At the Changkwan Department Store a bicycle was 175 won—a good month’s pay A small North Korean-made refrigerator cost twice that, 350 won. A Daedong River-brand black-and-white television cost 620 won. A Japanese-made National-brand color set was priced at l,400 won, more than the annual salary of a starting North Korean worker (90 won a month).

  Although North Korea on my previous visit had seemed to be ahead of China economically the Chinese since then had benefited from ten more years of economic reform. With no major reform program of their own, the North Koreans had far less to show for the intervening decade than the Chinese had. On paper, still, North Korea remained far ahead on a per capita basis, by comparison with Beijing’s own official economic statistics. The visual evidence suggested, however, that the Chinese had overtaken the North Koreans decisively. (The suspicion that the statistics failed to tell the real story got support at the end of 1992 when an Australian government report challenged the Chinese figures.)4

  Mean-while, traffic remained very light by the standards of other developing countries. High-ways might have five or even seven lanes (the center one reserved for Kim Il-sung, I had heard), but very few vehicles used them. The lack of traffic allowed sweepers to keep both city streets and high-ways spanking clean. City streets lacked the bustle of even a Beijing, with its swarms of people and bicycles and carts; the automotive traffic jams of a capitalist metropolis would have been unimaginable. Aside from a few Soviet and Japanese models, most of the cars in use were Mercedes-Benz and Volvo sedans imported for the elite.

  North Korea did not produce the ultimate consumer durable, civilian passenger cars—but clearly wished it did. I had grasped the symbolism of the automobile during my 1979 visit. When I had asked the Chonsam-ri cooperative farm’s deputy chairman about the lack of private cars on his farm and in North Korea generally, he had minimized their importance. The Chonsam-ri farmers did not need them, because there were plenty of farm trucks and buses. Maybe so, but the eyes of one group of Pyongyang officials who ranked high enough to rate chauffeured imported sedans had lit up during a discussion of the relative merits of various foreign makes. Those officials had listened with evident fascination to my description of South Korea’s fast-developing automotive industry, then assured me that the North one day would have mass-produced private cars.

  A handmade prototype of a sedan had been displayed at Pyongyang’s Exhibition of the Achievements of Socialist Construction during my 1979 visit. A guide there had said the country hoped to go into mass production. By 1989, the earlier model was gone, replaced by two new handmade prototypes of a car to be called the “Pyongyang”—out-and-out copies of the Mercedes-Benz 190, of-which the country had recently imported a fleet. Production would start soon at a factory then producing military Jeep-type vehicles, said an exhibition guide. I decided not to hold my breath.5

  Enough sophisticated foreign goods were getting into the country to let North Koreans glimpse what they were missing. Pyongyang residents were excited about special shops opened during the festival that sold foreign goods. Even during nonfestival times there was a steady flow of such goods to some North Koreans—particularly to former residents of Japan who had repatriated and whose remaining relatives in Japan kept them supplied. Officials were sensitive about the broadening gap in living standards and tried to persuade foreign journalists to ignore it. “Don’t compare us with the advanced countries,” said one official. “Remember, we had to build everything from the destruction of the war. And we had to do it so that everyone could share the same level. That’s not easy.” But the regime seemed to know it could not sell its economic philosophy forever on the basis of equality only. It would have to offer more of the good life, especially consumer goods.6

  Catching up “would require upgrading technology in such fields as electronics. North Korea did have some people capable of working in high-tech fields. Kim ChaekUniversity of Technology boasted computer rooms equipped with personal and mainframe computers imported fr
om Europe (especially Poland), Japan and Singapore, as well as people who knew how to use them and how they were made. The university exhibited robots constructed in campus labs. But factory production of such high-tech machines would be another matter, and there was little evidence the country was making much progress there. As with automobiles, the North Koreans seemed more successful at taking apart foreign-made machines and building handmade prototypes than at starting mass production.

  At the Exhibition of the Achievements of Socialist Construction, plenty of North Korean–made high-tech machinery-was on display—but on inquiry it turned out in many cases to be prototype equipment from the labs at Kim Chaek or other universities, not production goods.

  Trying to develop at home all the elements of modern technology clearly was out of the question, even for an intelligent, educated population. Obviously it would be hard to meet North Koreans’ rising expectations without importing huge quantities of goods—or, more practically, the foreign technology to produce them. Importing technology would mean a need for joint ventures and other dealings with the capitalist world. A halfhearted and sketchy stab at that, enactment of a joint-ventures law in 1984, had failed to attract much investor interest.

  Business dealings with the noncommunist world remained difficult. North Korea had little or no foreign exchange and could not get credit because it still had not repaid its loans from the 1970s.7 Creditors were particularly exasperated that, before even making much of a gesture toward paying its debts, Pyongyang had spent what some Westerners estimated at the equivalent of four to eight billion U.S. dollars importing materials and machinery for the construction campaign to prepare for the youth festival. That history disposed many foreign companies against any dealings with the North, unless they could see cash up front. The one reliable group of overseas business partners comprised pro-Pyongyang Korean businessmen resident in Japan, who had invested in dozens of joint ventures.

  Despite Pyongyang’s determination to stick with the Stalinist status quo, it was possible to detect a few striking, if relatively modest, changes in attitudes and behavior. The authorities wanted to banish North Korea’s image as an Orwellian horror of brain-washed people. Kim Jong-su complained to me that foreigners kept saying North Koreans were “like machines, answering mechanically and smiling mechanically.” That, he insisted, was “not true. Everybody is different.”8

  I reflected that the regime’s promoters of the “monolithic” philosophy had worked hard to earn for their country the automaton label. But I did notice that people who were cleared for dealings with foreigners appeared to have been permitted to lighten up just a bit. Overall, North Koreans seemed somewhat easier and more relaxed—among themselves and with Westerners, including Americans—than their counterparts a decade before. Indeed, normal human reactions described the biggest change I found. Although North Koreans still sang the praises of juche, for example, they seemed less obsessed than before with giving the impression that everything was Korean-made. At the Taean Heavy Machinery complex near Nampo, when officials conducted a tour of a factory making electrical generators, they identified as foreign-made (Italian, in some cases) many of the machine tools. They offered no excuses.

  Spontaneity, which in some quarters had seemed almost to be considered a sin back in 1979, was much more in evidence. North Koreans I saw smiled and laughed more in the presence of foreigners. In some cases they exuded so much warmth and hospitality as to make almost plausible the government’s goal of increasing tourism several-fold in the next few years—to fill up thousands of hotel rooms that were either newly built or still under construction by attracting groups from the West and elsewhere. It was clear, however, that the officials concerned had their work cut out for them projecting an image of their country that would appeal to masses of foreign tourists.

  One new tourism facility was the Pyongyang Golf Club, the first and only one in the country, built in 1987 to serve mainly foreigners and overseas Koreans from Japan. Caddies, young Korean women, chirped the Japanese-English compliment “Nice shotto” as the golfers teed off. Kang Kyong-chul, thirty-seven, wiry and tanned, had been a tennis coach before going to Japan for two months in 1986 to learn golf in preparation for becoming the course’s pro. He told me his handicap was 10. Golfing had not really caught on—an average of only seven foreigners and overseas Koreans and three North Koreans played each day, according to Kang’s figures, and he said those did not include any high-ranking Korean officials. “Our country is divided, as you know,” Kang explained. “There are many things to do for our people if our country is unified. At that time we will expand golf and other sports to larger scale.”

  After rummaging through Pyongyang’s arts-and-crafts and souvenir shops, I had to conclude that Western tourists would find little to inspire shopping sprees. Typical of the offerings was a landscape painting in traditional East Asian style, on sale in a downtown Pyongyang gallery. It depicted the breathtaking gorge, the autumn leaves, the waterfall—but also the highway bridge supporting a gleaming tour bus conveying happy masses of sightseers smack through the middle of the scene. As jarringly, an embroidery picture of a girl in flowing traditional garb swinging on the traditional high swing also showed, in one corner, a modern concrete park bench. I suppose such touches made sense in the North Korean context. After all, Kim Il-sung’s juche philosophy celebrated man as the “master” of the earth, so why hide the evidence of man and his creations? (Pictures were done without shading, and I guess that also fit with the ideology.)

  A visible change of questionable significance was construction of the first Protestant and Catholic churches permitted to operate in Pyongyang in decades. In the early days of the North Korean communist regime, all the churches had been closed. (The authorities claimed that American bombs destroyed every last one of them during the Korean War.) According to human rights groups, religious people had been persecuted as members of the “disloyal” class. Churches were regarded as symbols of imperialist oppression.9 At the Korea Feature Film Studio lot during that same visit I saw a large gothic church structure, built—obviously for use in propaganda films— in 1980, when the country had no real church buildings. The regime accorded special treatment to Chondoism, an indigenous, patriotic religion founded by a former independence fighter who was said to have “prayed to the mystical wonders of Nature on Mount Paektu to deal out divine punishment to the Japanese and bless the Korean nation.”

  At the Protestant Pongsu Church on a Sunday during the youth festival, Korean and foreign cameramen snapped away as worshipers sang “Jesus Loves Me,” in Korean. Many of them appeared to know it by heart. Then a pastor, The Rev. Li Song-bong, prayed “in the name of Jesus Christ” for the success of the festival, under its “banner of anti-imperialist solidarity.” Later, Li preached on the need for removal of nuclear weapons from the peninsula and prayed for Korean reunification—all in all, a heavier political than spiritual agenda.

  Although people involved with the church thus he-wed to the official North Korean political line, perhaps the more striking fact in such a tightly controlled society was that they showed less than full participation in the Kim Il-sung personality cult. The church was in Mangyongdae District, birthplace of the Great Leader himself, but there were no portraits of Kim or his son on the church walls and congregation members during services did not wear the miniature Kim portraits on their breasts. Perhaps this was for the benefit of us foreign visitors. I watched one man walk up the hill toward the church, wearing his Kim badge. Near the gate, he turned his back and made a motion as if he were reaching for a pack of cigarettes. When he turned again, the badge was gone, discreetly pocketed.

  No church members or clergy were members of the Kims’ ruling Korean Workers’ (communist) Party, a clergyman explained, because “we Christians believe in God.” People attending church denied human-rights groups’ reports that they suffered discriminatory treatment in economic benefits and legal treatment, but I thought most of those people had a ha
ggard look that suggested their lives had been less than easy. There may have been unconscious irony on that festival Sunday as the congregation opened blue-bound hymnals and sang, in Korean, “We’ve a story to tell to the nations that shall turn their hearts to the right.”

  Previously only home church services had been possible for the still-faithful remnants of the old church memberships, I was told; Protestants who did not attend the Pongsu Church services still practiced home worship. Among both the Pongsu Church worshippers and a home-worship group I visited on a different Sunday, participants under forty were rare. Worshippers told me they found it difficult to attract their own children to the faith of their fathers. They did not have to explain the reason. The young ones, after all, had been indoctrinated from shortly after birth, in state nurseries, kindergartens and schools, to worship the Kims. They revered Kim Il-sung as “more than a god,” as a non-Christian student interpreter for one of the foreign visitors to Pongsu Church described the president to me.

  In an atmosphere so overwhelmingly hostile to competing religions or other different ideas, it was but a small change to have church buildings— not so much a real shift in domestic policy as a cosmetic ploy to influence public opinion abroad. Several years later, in a similar effort, Kim Il-sung was to receive American evangelist Billy Graham in Pyongyang, after conceding in his memoirs that many Korean Christians of times past “were respectable patriots,” like Kim’s benefactor, Sohn Jong-do.10

  This attempt to show a tolerant attitude toward Christianity was intended to improve Pyongyang’s standing in the West. North Korea at the time it built the churches was involved once again in a campaign to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, in hopes of triggering the withdrawal of the some 40,000 U.S. troops that were still in South Korea.