A Capitalist in North Korea

by Felix Abt

  The third social group in this class-society is the “wavering class,” a sort of middle ground between the first two. This one isn’t quite loyal enough to the people’s government, making it highly suspect. When the new class system was introduced in 1970 at the Fifth Party Congress, they were officially banned from staying in Pyongyang as well.

  Living in Pyongyang, then, is a privilege for the “core class” of North Koreans. The city itself is a symbol of revolutionary struggle, having been flattened during a fire-bombing campaign by some 1400 American aircraft during the Korean War. In the 1950s, the capital was rebuilt from scratch with a massive, almost inhumane effort that sacrificed countless lives. The North Korean people were lucky in one way, though, when they began receiving generous economic and technical help from Soviet Russia and other “fraternal” socialist states. This legacy would continue through the Cold War: the DPRK was the biggest recipient of aid from socialist countries until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

  Unlike most foreigners living in Pyongyang, I traveled through large parts of the country and realized that the Koreans living in the capital were, by comparison, very lucky. Food, housing, and infrastructure was substantially better than what I came across throughout the rest of the country. The gap between Pyongyang and other cities was not huge, but distant rural areas had unpaved roads, no bridges, no cars, no railways, no power pylons and no phone masts.

  Indeed, Pyongyang gave off a triumphant air, reminding me of the metropolises in East Europe’s socialist nations in the 1960s. Like them, Pyongyang had wide alleyways and streets, blockish apartment buildings and a welter of revolutionary monuments. Everywhere I looked, the stone faces of memorialized soldiers, workers and farmers stared back at me, self-confidant about the future of their country. The atmosphere undoubtedly made people feel proud to be North Korean.

  An American bomber shot down over Pyongyang during the Korean War. Photo taken at the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang.

  Pyongyang is a city of grandiosity, and the sheer ingenuity of the buildings and monuments overwhelmed me. The Grand Theater, with a surface of 30,000 square meters—an area larger than five American football fields—allows 700 artists to perform in front of 2,200 spectators. The Grand People’s Study House, one of the world’s largest libraries, extends across a space of 100,000 square meters and can hold up to 30 million books.

  North Korea is also known for its two circuses: one run by the military, and another—and some would say even more impressive—troupe that performs on a surface area of 70,000 square meters, holding daily performances in front of up to 3,500 spectators. The Mansudae Assembly Hall, where North Korea’s parliament, known as the Supreme People’s Assembly, holds its sessions, has an area of 45,000 square meters, a stretch equivalent to eight football fields. The Juche Tower, built on Kim Il Sung’s 70th birthday, is covered with 25,550 pieces of granite, each representing a day in the life of the Great Leader.

  The Mangyongdae Children’s Palace is a six-storey building where youngsters can dabble in extracurricular activities like martial arts, music and foreign languages. It’s at the Street of the Heroic Youth, and contains hundreds of rooms that can take in 5,400 children. One iconic luxury building and the second largest operating hotel in the country, the Koryo Hotel, sits in central Pyongyang with a total floor space of 84,000 square meters, comprising of two 143-meter high connected towers with revolving restaurants on top. Up to 1000 guests can stay in 504 rooms on 45 floors—a height that some would consider an urban feat in Pyongyang.

  In addition to the behemoth buildings, I gasped at the surfeit of monuments. The most recognizable shrine—lined across foreign newspapers and photographs of this People ’s Republic—is the 20-meter high bronze statue of the eternal president, Kim Il Sung. His figure stands triumphantly in front of a mosaic on a wall, a dense packing of stones that make up a panorama of Paekdu Mountain, known as the birthplace of the Korean people. That image also has a special meaning in North Korean culture because Kim Il Sung and his guerrillas fought the Japanese colonialists from this mountain.

  In April 2012, authorities revealed a second bronze figure of the late leader Kim Jong Il, positioned next to his father’s statue. Kim Il Sung’s statue was built in 1972 in honor of his sixtieth birthday. According to Confucian tradition the sixtieth birthday is a particularly celebrated event because it closes a sexagesimal cycle, at the end of which the names of the years are repeated in Chinese and Korean.

  What strikes visitors here is the embellishment of the Kims’ features, making their statues look manlier and stronger—in a manner similar to how sculptors emphasized the rakish qualities of Roman emperors. North Korean publications call the Kims the “peerless leaders.” They are presented as benevolent rulers who, according to Confucian belief, have earned gratitude and loyalty. Confucianism was the dominant value system of the Chosun Dynasty from 1392 to 1910, before Korea was colonized by Japan until 1945.

  Although the Korean Workers Party rejected the Confucian philosophy, which stemmed from feudal China, the authoritarian strain from Confucianism did not disappear. Rather, it was transformed by the wave of socialism and Juche, the ideology of self-reliance. In other words, the old Confucian tradition of repaying debts of gratitude with unquestioned devotion is firmly upheld today, shown by the numerous visitors bowing in front of the statues.

  Other effigies take on mythical qualities, drawing on the potency of Korean legend. The statue of the Chollima, the Korean equivalent of a winged horse or Pegasus and the largest of its kind in Pyongyang, is 16 meters high and stands on a 34 meter tall granite footing in a 5,000 square-meter large park. According to a Korean myth this untamed horse could travel 393 kilometers, about the equivalent of the north-south length of the entire Korean peninsula, on a single day. On the back of the horse tamed by the North Korean working classes led by the Korean Workers’ Party, a worker with a message from the Party Central Committee and a female farmer with rice can be seen, flying up to the skies to spread the party’s glorious message all over the country.

  The Chollima symbol has also been used on other occasions, such as to promote rapid economic development with the slogan: “Charge forward with the speed of Chollima!” or simply to make people work hard. The Chollima movement in the 1960s was the Korean version of the Chinese Great Leap Forward movement in the late 1950s. But Kim Il Sung’s economic drive was more successful than the Chinese model: North Korea completed its 1957-1961 five-year-plan two years ahead of schedule, which it celebrated in 1961 by building the Chollima bronze statue.

  A small section of the Pyongyang city map, marking just a handful of its many grand buildings

  Not every building in North Korea is a drab, Soviet-styled block. The People’s Culture Palace and the People’s Grand Study House have impressive traditional Korean tiled roof designs. Parts of the city even have a slight European touch: Greek-style theatres, neo-classical congress halls, and an Arch of Triumph have been built, the final as a tribute to Korean resistance fighters against Japanese colonialism from 1925 to 1945. The arch is similar to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, a testament of national power commissioned by Napoleon in the early 19th century.

  The only minor difference is that it is ten meters higher, but overall it gives an international flair to the narrative of North Korean glory. Other examples aren’t quite façades of antiquity, but give off a more contemporary chic vibe. Wave-like and cylindrical apartment blocks line the relatively affluent neighborhoods along Liberation Street (or, in Korean, Kwangbok Street), located about 8 km west of the city center.

  In 1991, Kim Jong Il coined the term “Juche architecture,” which he defined as the expression of “the harmony of national virtues and the modernity in the design.” It was meant to develop a distinctive national identity, separate from the rest of the world, although Soviet influence was imposed on North Korean edifices. These projects also display a sort of North Korean craft-excellence, the ability o
f the efficient command government to pool together labor and resources, and to impress their imagery on citizens. In most laissez faire economies, scarce resources usually aren’t allocated so quickly and efficiently.

  Gauging at the level of prosperity in Pyongyang, I noticed that more flowerpots—a status symbol in the country—were appearing on balconies over the years.

  Apartment blocks could go somewhat high to 40 floors, a minor feat that places Pyongyang ahead of poor but growing cities like Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Yangon, Burma. Still, while many around the world enjoy the view of a penthouse flat up top, North Koreans preferred, for more practical reasons, modest rooms near the bottom. Elevators frequently broke down thanks to the regular power cuts, a nightmare because they’d have to take a dozen flights of stairs.

  When there was no electricity to operate the water pumps, residents carried empty buckets and tubs to taps on the street, or they fetched their water from rivers for cooking and washing. In the countryside, where everyday life remains starkly different from that of the capital, people get water from simple old village wells. During the wintertime, people carry water from downstairs as water pipes are bound to freeze, at least in the upper floors of unheated buildings.

  Regardless of power supplies, I had to get used to the fact that we didn’t have running water all the time. I had to adjust to my new schedule, as a privileged foreigner, in which I could enjoy running water only three times a day in tandem with meals: between 7 and 8 am, at noon time for an hour, and from 6 to 8 pm.

  Having water did not necessarily mean we had hot water either, so I got used to cold showers in its frequent absence. I felt more healthy and fit, particularly in winter. Cold showers did not only activate my immune system, according to folklore, but led to a life free from cold, flu and running nose. Average Koreans, however, were not as lucky as me. My home, unlike theirs, was almost always heated. This sad reality came back to me in a very direct way, when I realized there was a reason behind soaring sales in winter time of cold, flu and respiratory tract infection medicine produced by my pharmaceutical company, PyongSu.

  Neighborhood units dominate every apartment block, guarded by volunteers who are usually elderly women or men sitting at the entrance. Their duty is to greet and keep an eye on every visitor to “prevent undesirable elements from gaining a foothold,” as described by local media. Such “undesirable elements” include people with a potential political agenda, vendors and burglars. The citizens, called dong mu (a comrade at the same level or below the speaker) and dong jie (a comrade at a higher rank than the speaker), are from time to time reminded in newspapers and through propaganda posters to, according to one poster I saw, “heighten revolutionary vigilance.”

  Whenever passing by and seeing the old guards, one of the most famous claims I came across in foreign media came to my mind: Pyongyang, some newspapers alleged, had been “cleansed” of old people—along with the handicapped as well as pregnant women—who were relocated to the countryside to gentrify the city. If this were really the case, the rules must have been relaxed after I arrived in Pyongyang.

  The residents were also responsible for keeping their neighborhoods clean. Indeed, the order and cleanliness of Pyongyang is exemplary. On my walks around the capital, I observed locals, mostly women of various age, cut and yank out the grass sprawling chaotically on streets and pavements. Since the city authorities didn’t have lawnmowers, the same manual procedures were applied at parks. Hedges were always neatly trimmed. Not only were streets and pavements spotless, but the pavement edges and trees were painted a very pure and clean white and surrounded by small stones. The rivers running through the city did not have rubbish floating around, and unlike other poor Asian cities such as Manila and New Delhi, I never came across garbage dumps.

  Because of the difficulty using nonfunctioning elevators, the elderly lived in apartments on the first few floors of the buildings, while stronger, younger people were expected to live on higher floors. Those who were rich by North Korean standards and who owned a bicycle carried it up and down the stairs, which was no easy task for residents in buildings with 20 or 30 floors. While bicycles were safe in the apartments, thieves took them quickly on the ground floor.

  This does not mean that violent crime is rampant, although petty wallet and bike thefts happen. To give one example of the atmosphere, North Koreans never leave shoes in front of their doorways. A Korean joked to me that if they did, the shoes would “walk away all by themselves.” Over the years, I observed iron bars being erected outside windows and balconies of lower-storey apartments, a sign that either thefts were on the rise or people were becoming less trustful of each other. Or both.

  This picture of Pyongyang I took from the top of the TV tower where there is a bar and a restaurant. At a distance Pyongyang looks impressive with its high rise buildings.

  The many propaganda posters, coming across in such a quantity and intensity, added color to an otherwise rather white and bland city. On the posters, the colors were dramatic and included references to fire—the dynamic and purifying element of the Socialist revolution. But, to be fair to the Pyongyang authorities, both new and old buildings were soon painted with more colors from the mid-2000s onwards. That’s thanks in part to a newly established paint factory set up by North Korean and Chinese businessmen. The roofs of markets, for example, became light blue, and some buildings started appearing in green and orange.

  The colors of the national flag are full of symbolism. The star in red stands for socialism, the red band symbolizes revolution, and the small white bands stand for purity, strength and dignity. The blue bands represent sovereignty, peace, and friendship.

  A freshly repainted building in pink.

  The best buildings in Pyongyang and other cities are built along main streets. In the “backyards,” small buildings in poor shape line the streets. The Pyongyang People’s Committee, the official name for the city government, is trying hard to replace these, although it has few resources to do so.

  Shoddy buildings in “backstreet areas” are surrounded by walls, so not so much can be seen from the street. The backstreets in Pyongyang are mostly unpaved. New four and five-story buildings that emerge in these areas are usually constructed without mechanization, the impact of which is clearly visible because the quality standards aren’t consistent.

  Around the time I arrived, the North Korean government had set the year 2012 to be a milestone for the development of Pyongyang. Mr. Pak, who was vice director of the country’s leading design institute and who helped construct the building for one of my co-founded companies, explained the rationale to me: “Our great founding leader and president, comrade Kim Il Sung, will then be one hundred years old,” he proclaimed. “In his honor, we will make a huge effort to modernize our capital and build new buildings.” The plan was a partial success, but only because of the scarcity of resources.

  Renovation and construction work being done in downtown Pyongyang, seen from the balcony of my office (left). A new People’s Theater and high-rise buildings with three-room-apartments behind it were finished in 2012 (right).

  He explained to me that 100,000 apartments in high-rise buildings should be built by 2012, and that each flat should be at least 100 square meters (1076 square feet) with what sounded like Western–style kitchens and bathrooms. On the balconies, the units would even have storage areas for kimchi jars, a vital part of the daily diet.

  I thought this was an excessively bold plan, taking into account the country’s dearth of resources like steel, cement and scaffolding. I followed the developments with interest from a distance, as by the time they were to be completed, I would not be living in Pyongyang anymore. But I would surely see any results on my future visits. Despite resource scarcities, it turned out that, in a true North Korean fashion, thousands of able bodied workers were “mass mobilized.” Universities, for instance, were shut down in 2011 so students could work on construction sites until April 2012.

  It w
as truly a remarkable spectacle of the ability of this government, and its people, to so swiftly get things done. The government called it the “New Pyongyang Speed Battle,” in a reference to the massive reconstruction campaign after the Korean War. The state cleared out land with short notice and evicted residents to their relatives’ and other apartments. With hundreds of laborers putting efforts into each edifice on rotating shifts, a new floor popped up every two days.

  On the other hand, the facelift had an underbelly. The number of fatalities among untrained workers has probably not been small, although the exact numbers go unreported. And the quality of new buildings has sometimes visibly suffered from the hasty construction. I occasionally noticed cracks on walls and ceilings, or paint dripping down onto window glass. Then, there’s the very visible strain on the capital’s aging infrastructure, which has created regular interruptions of the supply of power, water and heating.

  But for the government, this revolutionary project gets the job done. Visitors are often taken back at the city’s modern façade, belying the common description of this capital being stuck in a terrible Stalinist age.

  The Ryugyong Hotel building spanning 105 stories and rising to a height of 330 meters (1,080 ft), is the most prominent feature of Pyongyang’s skyline. The company began constructing it in 1987 and, according to the plan, it should have been finished in 1989 for the 13th World Youth Festival, a gathering of mainly left-leaning intellectuals and artists, heavily subsidized by the communist bloc of countries. It was an answer to the successfully hosted Summer Olympic Games in rivaling South Korea a year earlier. Due to a lack of funding, construction halted in 1992. If it had been finished before 2009 when the Rose Tower in Dubai was inaugurated, it would, as originally intended, have become the world’s tallest hotel. It’s set to partially open in July or August 2013.