These people are very different from the Communist bloc refugees who arrived in the West during the Cold War. Cold War refugees from the Eastern bloc tended to be well educated and were usually motivated by political convictions—at least partially. Conversely, most North Korean refugees are women from impoverished areas along the border who were looking for a better income and security rather than for the realization of some lofty political ideals. Elite refugees exist, but they are well below 10 percent of the total. With a touch of somewhat frivolous generalization, a typical refugee of the Soviet Union in the 1970s might be described as a young, brilliant, Jewish chess player. In contrast, the average refugee from North Korea is a rural housewife in her 50s.
It is important to mention, however, that refugees remain in touch with their families back home. It helps that most refugees come from borderland areas whose population can cross the border more easily. People frequently call their families using Chinese cell phones, which work perfectly well on the North Korean side of the border. From around 2003, a number of relay stations were built just on the border and this greatly increased mobile phone coverage (signals can be received miles away). This being the case, Chinese cell phones have become common among more affluent North Koreans in the borderland, most of whom earn an income through legal and not-so-legal trade with China. Monetary remittances from South to North Korea constitute a blatant violation of both South Korean and North Korean laws, but nonetheless seem to be fairly frequent: a majority of refugees in the South use brokers to send money back to their impoverished native villages and towns. Brokers charge 25 to 30 percent per transaction, but the system is remarkably reliable and fast. The total annual amount of such transfers has been recently estimated at some $10 million—by no means an insignificant sum for the tiny North Korean economy.13
ARRIVAL IN PARADISE, AKA CAPITALIST HELL
The fate of refugees in South Korea does not bode too well for the post-unification population of North Korea (assuming that unification will happen one day). Most of them will find themselves in a low-income bracket, often the object of discrimination by their newly found brethren.
North Korean refugees are eligible for aid that is quite generous by the standards of South Korea, a country where the social welfare system remains underdeveloped as compared with Europe and the United States. For the first few years, refugees are paid a small stipend—not enough to live on but still of help. They are also provided with subsidized rental housing and scholarships for vocational training. Those who are young enough can apply for university admission. They do not compete with South Korean high school pupils. Rather, they sit for their own, easier, exams.
That said, the statistics are discouraging. In December 2010 research confirmed that the average income of a North Korean refugee in the South is merely 1.27 million won ($1,170), that is, roughly 50 percent of the average South Korean salary. Unemployment is high—depending on which of a few different studies you believe and how you define “unemployment,” it is estimated to be between 10 and 40 percent. Even the most optimistic estimates are depressing at best if one takes into account that South Korea has one of the lowest unemployment rates among countries in the developed world. Only 439 defectors (merely 4 percent of all employed defectors) were working in skilled jobs, while 77 percent were employed in unskilled jobs.14
Furthermore, North Koreans discover that mainstream South Korean society looks upon them with a measure of suspicion. A sad story was recently told to me by a North Korean acquaintance. In 2011 a South Korean television company wanted to make a TV show about North-South couples (i.e., North Korean refugee women married to South Korean men). Participants were promised significant monetary rewards and thus many female refugees initially agreed to the proposal. A few days later, however, most of the candidates called back the program’s producers to say that they would not participate in the program regardless of how much money was offered. It was their husbands who decisively opposed the idea. They did not want their neighbors, coworkers, and social contacts to know they had married a North Korean woman. My North Korean female interlocutor said: “You know, here in the South it is sort of assumed that only down-and-outs, people who can’t get a proper South Korean woman, marry mail-order brides from South-East Asia or North Korean refugees.”
Surprisingly, even refugees with elite educations can face big challenges in the South. Unless their job directly relates to dealing with the North (and the supply of such jobs is limited), they have great trouble finding any prestigious job. This is partially a result of suspicions that most employers have about their skills and partially because of their inability to use the extended personal networks that are so central to success in South Korean society. These networks usually unite people from the same region, members of the same clan, or graduates of the same university. North Korean refugees usually do not belong to any of these groups.
Last but not least, the graduation rate for refugee university students is low: a majority of those who enter university drop out. Even though the dropout rate in South Korean universities tends to be very low, North Korean students often discover that they lack what is considered to be basic knowledge and social skills—advantages their South Korean peers possess. Added to that, many of them have to work to make a living, unlike their South Korean classmates who usually work merely for pocket money. To make up for the gaps in their background knowledge they have to study harder than their South Korean peers, but economic pressure makes this difficult.
Despite these issues, it would be wrong to assume that North Koreans feel regret about their move to the South. There have indeed been a few cases of refugees fleeing the South in order to head back North. But for every such case, there are hundreds of instances where individuals and entire families work hard to pay a broker in order to bring their relations to the South.
Nonetheless, the problems are real. And they are likely to increase in magnitude in the case of unification. After all, refugees, as a self-selecting group, have an above-average ability to adjust to the differences between North and South. It follows that a group of people who have consciously chosen a different life will face fewer problems adjusting to massive change than a group of people who have had a different life forced upon them. Therefore, when and if unification comes, the above-mentioned problems are merely a sample of the social and economic issues that will face the South Korean state and the North Korean people above all.
A NORMAL DAY …
It is not that difficult to find the most representative North Korean newspaper. Everyone knows that this role has been reserved for Rodong Shinmun, the ruling Korean Workers’ Party mouthpiece. This is not just a humble newspaper, but the voice of the Party and State itself.
One day last year, while dropping by the National Library, I decided to have a look through the latest issue of this venerable newspaper. The latest available issue happened to be published on July 11, 2011, and the choice was completely random.
The entire front page was taken up by one large, unsigned article that informed the reader of the greatest event of late. The Dear Leader, Marshal Kim Jong Il, inspected the largest department store in the city of Pyongyang and provided its personnel with a wealth of managerial guidance on the best way to run this retail outlet. The article was accompanied by two pictures: one depicts the Marshal taking an escalator with some of his entourage, and another shows the Leader standing with the top management of the department store.
The upper part of the second page was occupied by a report of another great event: Marshal Kim had inspected the Pyongyang Zoo and taught its personnel a thing or two about animal rearing and zoo management.
The second page also included official telegrams sent to and received from China on a diplomatic event—the 50th anniversary of the treaty of friendship and alliance between China and North Korea. The page also had a small report about an event to commemorate the 117th birthday of a humble rural school teacher, Christian missionary, and nationalist
named Kim Hyǒng-jik. He happens to also be the grandfather of Marshal Kim Jong Il and the father of Kim Il Sung.
The third page contained a half-dozen reports about labor enthusiasm and production achievements. Somewhat uncharacteristically, these reports almost exclusively focus on the light industry—obviously resulting from the recent emphasis on the production of consumption goods.
An article in the bottom right corner attracts some attention—it tells of how housewives of a particular county created a model reconstruction brigade to work on irrigation projects in the area. A small picture depicts the construction site: women are neatly dressed but there is not a machine to be seen, so they use only shovels and their bare hands to line the walls of the irrigation canals with block-like rocks.
The fourth page was filled with reports of foreign visitors who had come to North Korea to express their admiration for the country’s great achievements. Most delegations are Chinese, but it is reported that a group of Russian police officials have also come to join the chorus and have expressed their admiration for “the great successes of North Korea, achieved under the wise leadership of Comrade Kim Jong Il.”
The fifth page dealt with South Korea and foreign policy. The largest article was titled “The Hatred of Treacherous Regime,” and told North Koreans how much their South Korean compatriots hate the current South Korean administration of President Lee. There are reports of strikes, police abuse, and an unfolding scandal in the South involving US military use of defoliants at a military base.
A small photo depicted a student’s rally in Seoul, whose participants were demanding a 50 percent cut in tuition fees. The accompanying article did not even hint at the fact that such a cut was actually suggested by “the treacherous regime of Lee Myung Bak.” Instead, it deliberately created the impression that South Korean students have begun this revolutionary fight spontaneously, because they could not bear the prohibitively high burden of tuition fees.
The final page again dealt with foreign policy. It began with a large and boring (even by Rodong Shinmun’s notorious standards) article about the eternal friendship between China and North Korea. It also included reports from other parts of the world that talk about how much the people of the world admire Generalissimo Kim Il Sung, the founder of the North Korean dynasty. According to the newspaper, commemorative events to honor the memory of the late Generalissimo Kim had been held in Romania, Nigeria, Congo, and Thailand.
The sixth page also contained an article commemorating UN World Population Day. The article concentrated on gender inequality in the capitalist world and contained some statistics about the sorry fate of Western European women (clearly the world’s greatest victims of gender discrimination).
Another article on the sixth page dealt with the complex situation of the world food market. Obviously, it was published in order to tell the readers that North Korea is not unique in having grave food shortages. Nonetheless, this article stood out because it was almost free from demagogy and indeed contained an interesting analysis of current international trends (perhaps the only piece in the entire newspaper that deserves to be called an article).
Such is the daily fare of news and views provided to North Koreans by their media—day by day, for decades, without much change.
CHANGING WORLDVIEWS
Approximately a half-million North Koreans have visited China over the last 15-odd years, and most of them have eventually returned home, voluntarily or otherwise. They have to be cautious, but nonetheless manage to tell stories about China’s prosperity—descriptions that are indeed shocking to any first-time North Korean visitor.
Once, while in Northeast China, I had a conversation with a member of an NGO who occasionally brings junior North Korean officials to a sleepy, dirty Chinese town in Manchuria. I asked him about the typical reaction of these North Koreans, to which he responded, “They cannot sleep for the first couple of nights, they are so shocked and overwhelmed by the prosperity of the place, by the bright lights and nightlife of the town.” (To the present writer, this particular Chinese town during the night looked more like an abandoned steel mill.)
Chinese prosperity might be overwhelming at first, but soon North Korean refugees discover that these Chinese—whom they regard as filthy rich—actually consider their own country poor in comparison to South Korea. Indeed, it’s not difficult to learn a lot about South Korea when in Northeast China. South Korean satellite TV is widely watched by ethnic Korean families and South Korean soap operas with Chinese subtitles are a staple of local TV networks. At any given moment, roughly one out of seven ethnic Koreans of the Yanbian area resides in South Korea, usually being employed there on some unskilled, badly paid job. It does not take long for a North Korean refugee to learn that more or less everything that he or she used to read in the official media about the South is a blatant and grotesque lie.
This discovery does not necessarily make him or her dream about going to Seoul—after all, such a step requires considerable resources, is inherently risky, and might be simply not to everybody’s liking. Nonetheless, stories of the fairy-tale land south of the DMZ are shared with trusted friends and family members back home.
From around 2000, VCRs and, soon afterward, DVD players began to spread in North Korea in large numbers. These machines are cheap and perfectly legal. It was assumed that North Koreans would use them to watch officially approved and ideologically wholesome fare, like, say, biopics of the Dear Leader and his extended family. However, North Koreans usually prefer to watch something different and rather ideologically suspicious: smuggled foreign movies and TV dramas, often those produced in South Korea.
As always is the case with North Korea, statistics are highly unreliable. According to Chinese customs, 350,000 DVD players were brought to North Korea in 2006 alone—a large number for a country with a population of some 24 million.15 It seems that in border areas and major cities, one out of every three or four families has a DVD player nowadays. A study by the InterMedia research group concluded that in 2009 the penetration rate was 21 percent and 5 percent for VCD and DVD players, respectively.16 From my own research, it seems that in the borderland areas of the country, some 70 to 80 percent of all households were in possession of DVD players by early 2012. We can be sure that more or less all of these families have watched South Korean programs. These shows (unlike the DVD players themselves) are illegal, but small entrepreneurs in China make good money by recording them and then smuggling the copies across the border.
Even computers are becoming increasingly common among the more affluent part of the population. Estimates vary, but one can surmise that the number of privately owned computers, or computers that can be accessed with relative ease, now definitely exceeds 100,000 and is likely to reach a few hundred thousand. A Western diplomat recently related to the present author that USB memory sticks have become a popular fashion accessory among the privileged Pyongyang youth. The message is unmistakable: by sporting a USB, an individual demonstrates that he/she has access to a computer, one of the important status symbols in present-day Pyongyang. Nowadays, possession of a computer in North Korea is somewhat akin to ownership of a sports car in more affluent societies.17 North Korean computers are not connected to the Internet, and only some of them have a dial-up connection with the national intranet, known as the Kwangmyǒng network. However, even without an Internet connection, a computer remains a powerful information dissemination device—largely thanks to USB and CD-R drives. The authorities are aware of these threats, and therefore all computers are registered and their hard drives subject to random checks by the authorities (recently, the security bureaucracy created a special division—the so-called Bureau 27—to monitor and control privately owned computers). Frankly, however, one should be skeptical about the effectiveness of such checks: a teenage computer enthusiast will always outsmart an aging policeman, especially if the latter does not see a good reason to be excessively vigilant.
As to South Korean movies and TV dramas,
North Koreans do not necessarily always believe everything they see. Their own movies have always presented a grossly embellished picture of life in North Korea and they expect this to be the case everywhere in the world. For example, as my own talks with North Korean refugees confirm, few of them believed that the average South Korean family had a car when they saw their first South Korean TV dramas (in actual fact, more or less every South Korean family does own a car—as of 2010, the country with a population of 50 million had 13.6 million passenger cars). The interior of a normal South Korean apartment, frequently shown in movies, did not look plausible to them, either—they believed it to be a set, and that such a lifestyle (with that unbelievably large fridge in the kitchen!) would be available only to a select few. Nonetheless, they also know some things are difficult or impossible to fake—like, say, the Seoul cityscape with all its high-rise buildings and giant bridges—and they use these trustworthy images as visual clues, surmising that South Korea must be very rich indeed.
North Korean people are now increasingly aware about South Korea’s prosperity. As one defector, a woman in her late 50s, remarked to the present author, “Well, perhaps children in primary school still believe that South Koreans are poor. But everybody else knows that the South is rich.”
But there are two important caveats. First, it is not quite clear how far this new consciousness has spread outside of the borderlands and a few major cities. Second, while the average North Korean has begun to suspect that the South is ahead of the North economically, he or she seldom comprehends how huge this gap really is. After all, for the North Korean farmer or skilled worker, being wealthy means feasting on rich gruel every day.
Since around 2000, even North Korean propaganda began to take into account this slow change of mind—after all, Pyongyang’s agitprop shock brigades are not as inflexible as they appear to many foreign observers (those who are seriously interested in the changes in North Korea’s propaganda should read the informative works of Brian Myers and Tatiana Gabroussenko).
B00BY4HXME EBOK Page 13