Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  40. Chung explains, “Per capita income by itself provides no direct measure of how well off the North Korean populace is economically, as it conceals the distribution of income and the portions of national output expended in capital formation and defense” (North Korean Economy, p. 150).

  41. In 1970, for example, vice-premier Kim Il complained of poor quality and variety of consumer goods (ibid., p. 150).

  “[A Japanese study by Fujio Goto calculated that] personal consumption accounted for an extraordinarily low share of North Korean [gross domestic product] in the late 1950s: less than 35 percent of GDP on what economists call an ‘adjusted factor cost basis.’ Just to put that figure in perspective: it would have been over twenty points lower than corresponding estimates for the Soviet Union for the same period” (Nicholas Eberstadt, in Edwin J. Feulner Jr., ed., “Orwell’s Nightmare: Human Rights in North Korea,” The Heritage Lectures No. 394 [Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 1992]). A South Korean scholar calculated that the state budget of North Korea accounted for 70 percent of gross national product, high even for a communist country. He attributed much of this to the emphasis on investment in arms buildup (Cha Byong-gwon, “Financial Structure of North Korea,” Vantage Point [January 1979]: p. 2).

  42. “Kim Il Sung’s New Year .Message,” Vantage Point (January 1979): p. 20.

  43. “Each work-team operates on its own independent accounting system whose balance sheet indicates the team’s performance and supplies the yardstick for material reward and preferential treatment by the Communist Party. Incentives for over-fulfillment of state production plans in farm, livestock and sericulture output are given up to 40 per cent of excess production in the form of products or cash or grain; penalties for failure to fulfill the plans are imposed in terms of products or cash or grain between 10 and 20 per cent of the deficit production. The head of an agricultural work-team receives an additional reward of 10–20 per cent of the reward given to him as a team member if his team has overfulfilled its production plan.

  “In the case of agricultural products, the incentives and penalties are applied to the individual work-teams. If a work-team grows more than one crop, it will receive rewards for those crops whose output has surpassed the assigned production plan; but the work-team must pay a penalty on the other crops whose output falls short of the production target. The penalties for deficit output of products of all types are added to the cooperatives’ collective income.

  “A work-team must fulfill not only monthly production plans but also daily and ten-day production plans. Specific measures concerning production plan implementation are taken by the Party as a result of analysis of so-called ‘production rhythm assurance.’ Thus, a work-team must always maintain its ‘rhythm’ of production performance or pace of work, under the slogan, ‘Let us produce more with existing labour and facilities’” (Kuark, “North Korea’s Agricultural Development” [see chap. 6, n. 41], pp. 86–87).

  Another writer observes, “The Communist regime has set ‘the egoism and individualism’ harbored by the people as the target of attack—a scheme designed to reform the character of the north Koreans. … There is a limit to the efficiency of symbolic compensation such as medals. Therefore, the Pyongyang regime now gives material rewards as well. North Korea, however, is very scrupulous in presenting awards in kind as ‘material awards are likely to have a bad influence on the people. Therefore, material impetus and political and moral impetus should be mixed properly’” (Choe Hong-gi, “Mobilization System and Labor Efficiency” Vantage Point [January 1979]: p. 13).

  44. Kang Myong-do’s interview testimony in JoongAng Ilbo (see chap. 2, n. 7).

  45. As one analyst said, “Insofar as the rates of growth are concerned the so-called law of equal cheating’ may be applied with caution. Theoretically, to the extent that the proportion of falsification, omission, grossness, errors, and the like remains stable, rates of growth would not be affected. … Omission, rather than falsification, tends to be the communist means of concealing any unfavorable development” (Chung, North Korean Economy, p. 174). Chung adds that “North Korean economic data must be scrutinized carefully for their reliability. Although they seem more or less internally consistent, North Korea presents them in an ambiguous manner or withholds them in times of poor economic performance. Physical data tend to be more reliable than those made available only in index numbers. … By and large, North Korean data are usable if handled with extreme care and investigated carefully” (pp. 176–177).

  Another analyst notes that “official statistical information on the economy has become scarcer since the mid-60s and almost non-existent in the 70s (apart from relative indices, which are hard to interpret)” (Foster-Carter, “Development and Self Reliance,” pp. 71–72).

  46. “N. Korea Puts Emphasis on English Teaching,” Vantage Point (.March 1979), p. 26.

  47. Leaving aside the question whether North Korean officials had given the Pyongyang-style showcase treatment to the towns and villages along routes traveled by foreigners—something I had no doubt they ’were capable of—I worried at the time that the comparison might be unfair for another reason: My route took me through China’s Tangshan region, site of a devastating earthquake shortly before. Indeed, around Tangshan was where I saw the worst living conditions—many houses made of nothing but woven straw mats, a devastated village of brick houses that looked as if bombs had hit it. But Tangshan was not the only area I passed on that trip. And the year after the trip I moved to China as Beijing bureau chief for The Baltimore Sun. Two years of traveling widely in China seemed to confirm that what I had been permitted to see of North Korean development was in important respects more impressive than the general run of what China had to show at that very early stage of Deng Xiao-ping’s reforms.

  10. Let’s Spread the Pollen of Love.

  1. Author interview with the former official, who insisted on anonymity.

  2. He was born in the camp of the Eighty-eighth Brigade, according to testimony by two Korean women and a Russian interpreter cited in an article by Kim Chan-jong in Seoul’s Dong-A Ilbo in September 1992 and cited in The True Story of Kim Jong Il (see chap. 3, n. 61). The birth is described as an extremely difficult one, the labor continuing through a night and Kim Jong-suk’s life endangered until an unlicensed Russian veterinarian was brought in to assist. That account fits other information that Kim Jong-suk had suffered one miscarriage already and eventually died delivering a stillborn child. There is a timing question about the Dong-A Ilbo account, however. Although Kim Il-sung had been in the USSR since 1940 or 1941, the Eighty-eighth Special Independent Sniper Brigade was only established in the latter part of 1942, according to Yu Song-chol’s testimony carried in Hankuk Ilbo. In that case, if Kim Jong-il indeed was born on February 16, 1942, his birthplace would not necessarily have been the site of the Eighty-eighth’s camp but could have been some other part of the Soviet Union where his parents were temporarily living. There are reports that Kim Il-sung, after being stopped at the border upon his entry into the USSR, was sent to work as a farmer for a time before the activation of the Eighty-eighth in August 1942. Seiler (Kim Il-song 1941-1948 [see chap. 2, n. 18], pp. 31–32) cites a Korea Herald interview with a Soviet Korean in suggesting that Kim may have “spent some time farming in the small Soviet village of Vyatka, some seventy kilometers northeast of Khabarovsk before moving on” to a camp at Okeanskaya, near Vladivostok, and then, from around May of 1942, to the camp where the Eighty-eighth was established. According to a Reuters dispatch from Beijing in Korea Times, July 30, 1994, a book by an official Chinese publishing house (book title translates as The Situation in Each Country and Covering Asia, the publishing company’s name as World Knowledge Press) said in 1994 that Kim Jong-il’s birthplace was faraway Samarkand, in what was then Soviet Central Asia. The spotty evidence uncovered so far undoubtedly makes it easier for Pyongyang to press its claim that the junior Kim was born in a log cabin in a secret guerrilla camp on .Mount Paektu. Fo
r an argument in favor of the regime’s version see Lee Wha Rang, note to “Nurturing the Root of the Revolution: How Kim Jong Il Became the Heir,” a chapter in Lee’s translation of Kim Il-sung’s memoirs, With the Century, on Korea Web Weekly, http://www.kimsoft.com/ war/r-23-9.htm. Further complicating the question of where he was born are persistent claims that Kim Jong-il actually was born February 16, 1941, and that his year of birth was changed when he was chosen as heir so that his major birthdays would be celebrated in the same years as those of his father. See Sohn Kwang Ju, “Focus Analysis Kim Jong Il” (Seoul: Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, 2003, http://www.nknet.org/en/keys/lastkeys/ 2003/12/04.php). Sohn says Kim Jong-il was born in Khabarovsk in the USSR. Sohn says the birth date was changed in 1982 so that father and son could celebrate their seventieth and fortieth birthdays in the same year. Celebration of Kim Jong-il’s fortieth birthday had already been announced in February 1941, Sohn says, but it was not yet the huge holiday it was to become from 1982 and it was possible to announce a second fortieth birthday in 1982 without totally confounding the citizenry. As for why Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-sook would have been in Khabarovsk then, he says in his memoirs that he participated in a Comintern-organized conference that was held there from December 1940 to mid-March 1941 (Kim, With the Century, Lee Wha Rang translation, chap. 23.1, http://www.kimsoft.com/war/r-23-1.htm).

  3. Testimony of Li Jae-dok, Kim Jong-il’s former nurse, in JoongAng Ilbo, October 4, 1991, cited in True Story of Kim Jong-il, p. 11.

  4. Choe Pyong-gil, “Yu Song-chol’s Testimony,” Hankuk Ilbo, November 4, 1990, translated in Seiler, Kim Il-Song 1941–1948.

  5. True Story of Kim Jong-il, p. 28.

  6. Yu Song-chol’s testimony, Hankuk Ilbo, November 8, 1990. According to one account, Han by then had become estranged from her non-communist second husband. She explained to Kim that she had not come forward earlier to reveal to him her whereabouts and new identity because of her shame at having submitted disgracefully to the Japanese authorities’ demands. Kim thereupon pulled from his pocket a foot cover that she had woven of strands of her own hair to protect him from frostbite. He said he carried it always and had never forgotten her for a moment (Lim Un, Founding of a Dynasty [see chap. 2, n. 59], pp. 48–50). Han Song-hui is not recognized in North Korea as Kim Il-sung’s wife. Although Lim asserts that Han was indeed his “wedded wife,” one defector (who asked for anonymity when discussing the Kims’ personal lives) told me his understanding was that the two had been engaged but never formally married.

  Intriguing to note are strong similarities between her story and the story of Han Yong-ae, the female Harbin comrade of the early 1930s whose picture Kim said he still gazed upon. Possibly the Han Yong-ae story, whether or not important details are fictionalized, is told partly in an attempt to suggest that the story of Han Song-hui is wrong in important details—got the wrong Miss Han, perhaps—and particularly to refute widespread gossip in Pyongyang’s elite circles to the effect that Kim resumed relations with his first wife and set her up in a mansion despite her remarriage to another man.

  Consider: Kim Il-sung says that Han Yong-ae, while carrying out his assignments, “was arrested by the police in the autumn of 1930”—a decade before the reported arrest of Kim Hye-suk/Han Song-hui. In prison, Han Yong-ae (unlike Han Song-hui) bravely refused to submit, Kim writes. She declined a chance to better her lot by cooperating with a Japanese scheme to persuade Kim Il-sung to submit to the authorities. (In evaluating this claim, it is useful to recall that Kim Il-sung in 1930 was only eighteen years old and a small fish, years away from making such an impression on the Japanese that they would mount “submission” campaigns against him personally.) After her prison term, she eventually went to Seoul, married “belatedly” and “buried herself in her family life,” Kim says.

  “I inquired after Han Yong-ae s whereabouts in the homeland after liberation,” Kim writes, “but she was not in the northern half of the country.” During the Korean War, when North Korea briefly controlled much of South Korea, she took charge of a women’s organization in the Seoul area, where her husband had been active in the underground work of the Korean Workers’ (communist) Party, he says. The husband was “murdered by the enemy during the retreat in the Korean war.” After that, Han Yong-ae “came to Pyongyang with her children to see me. But she could not meet me and, on the night of the 14th of August 1951, she and her two children were tragically killed in an enemy bombing raid.”

  True or false, this story of a woman so devoted to Kim and the revolution that she would never submit fits the pattern of North Korean propaganda heroes and heroines far better than would the story of Han Song-hui and the human weakness reported to have led her to abandon both her husband—Kim Il-sung— and the revolution. “Revolutionaries, even on a solitary island, should, like Han Yong-ae, not lose faith or abandon their conscience,” Kim Il-sung writes.

  The account in his memoirs, implicitly denying the reports that Kim had been married to another before Kim Jong-suk, may have been seen in Pyongyang as helping to clear up any doubts about the pedigree of Kim Jong-suk’s son, Kim Jong-il, as Kim Il-sung’s eldest legitimate child. Besides, for public consumption it simply would not do to tell of a woman who had been married to the incomparable Sun of the Nation but then went off to take up with some ordinary farmer.

  7. My source for the location of Han’s secret mansion is a former member of the elite who also confirmed other aspects of her story: “It’s true that Kim Il-sung located her in Kangwon-do after Liberation and took her to Pyongyang as head of the Democratic Women’s Party, then put her into a secret mansion to hide her away. … She had children by Kim Il-sung, but I can’t remember the names.”

  8. Yu Song-chol’s testimony, Hankuk Ilbo, November 8, 1990.

  9. Lim Un, Founding of a Dynasty, p. 49.

  10. See Yu Song-chol’s testimony, Hankuk Ilbo, November 8, 1990; and Lim Un, Founding of a Dynasty. The story is told that Kim Jong-suk died literally on account of her jealousy of the secretary, Kim Song-ae. Suffering a stillbirth, Jong-suk began bleeding profusely. But she refused medical attention while waiting to see whether her husband would come to show his concern for her. A doctor could have saved her, but she refused to open her door. Kim Il-sung did not arrive, and she died in the room of excessive bleeding on September 22, 1949, only thirty-two years old. This is from the testimony of Kang Myong-do, compiled in a series of articles by Tae Won-ki in JoongAng Ilbo (Central Daily News, Seoul), April 1995. According to a 1993 South Korean report, rumors at the time of Kim Jong-suk’s death were that that she had shot herself to death, or had been poisoned, “but the official announcement was that she died of a heart attack” (see The True Story of Kim Jong-il, p. 31). The information that the child was stillborn comes from the Japanese communist newspaper Akahata, September 28, 1949, as cited in Suh, Kim IlSung (see chap. 2, n. 35), p. 51.

  11. Yu Song-chol’s testimony, Hankuk Ilbo, November 8, 1990.

  12. Baik II (see chap. 4, n. 24), p. 447.

  13. The defector is Kim Jong-min, who told me his characterization was based on his having met Kim Il-sung many times for both official and non-official occasions. “As for personally drinking and talking with him, I’ve done that about fifteen times.” He told me he had “a watch given by Kim Il-sung with my name inscribed on it.”

  14. Hankuk Ilbo, November 7, 1990.

  15. See, e.g., Deane, I Was a Captive (see chap. 4, n. 49), p. 229.

  16. Hankuk Ilbo, November 7, 1990.

  17. This source insisted on remaining anonymous. He said he feared that those at the top of the regime, either before or after reunification, might find a way to avenge the ultimate betrayal: exposing the Kims’ private lives.

  18. Yoo Sok-ryol, “The Rise of Kim Jong-il and the Heir-succession Problem,” pt. I, Vantage Point (November 1987): p. 7.

  19. Ibid., pp. 6, 7.

  20. These identifications come from high-level defectors and also from Yoo, “R
ise of Kim Jong-il,” p. 7. There are some discrepancies among the various sources regarding the precise positions of several of these relatives, but the sources agree that all have been well placed in the regime.

  21. University of Hawaii scholar Dae-Sook Suh, who visited Pyongyang in 1989 and spoke with several high-ranking officials, observed afterward that Kim’s old partisan buddies had formerly exercised influence, but they had died off. “In North Korean politics today, it’s mostly Kim Il-sung’s relatives who are in charge,” Suh said.

  22. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2) (see chap. 6, n. 104).

  23. Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea (see chap. 2, n. 28), p. 663.

  24. Cited in Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 439.

  25. Kim Ik-hyon, The Immortal Woman Revolutionary (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1987), p. 15.

  26. The diplomat does not wish to be identified further.

  Consider Byoung-Lo Philo Kim’s discussion of Confucianist influence: “The values of .Marxism and Leninism in North Korea have brought about radical changes in the nature of society. Loyalty to one’s family or lineage has been largely extended to loyalty to the nation as a whole, a shift from an extreme particularism to a limited universalism. Nationalism is expressed through the ideas of juche, which stresses national and cultural self-reliance and independence. Yet the Five Relations of Confucian culture are well retained in communist North Korea. There is no concept of privacy, self-determination, or the rights of the individual. According to Confucianism, what makes people human is not their freedom or individuality, but their acceptance of social roles that integrate them into a preestabilished, collective whole, a notion coincident with the collective spirit of communism emphasized in North Korea. Family-based politics, the succession to rule of the leader’s son, and the extraordinary veneration of Kim Il Sung are the Confucian legacies” (Kim, Two Koreas in Development [see chap. 1, n. 2], pp. 179–180).