The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

by Ralph Hassig

  Changes in the economy and a weakening of government control are beginning to transform the housing market. Although houses and apartments cannot be privately owned, people find ways to buy and sell their homes anyway. The usual procedure is for two individuals to agree to trade homes and then to bribe housing authorities to change their residency registrations. In some cases people trade away their homes for needed cash and end up homeless. It even seems to be possible to construct private housing. According to one report, a business enterprise, usually an arm of a government, party, or military organization, uses money from investors to buy out owners of existing dwellings, tear down their homes, put up a new building, and sell the condominiums for a tidy profit. Considerable bribery is necessary to complete such a project, and relevant housing officials may even receive ownership of one of the new units.87

  Because apartments and condominiums in desirable downtown locations can fetch thousands of dollars, and condominiums in Pyongyang sell for as much as $30,000 to $40,000, real estate purchases must be made with illegally gotten money.88 After all, the annual wage for most North Koreans is less than $100 in hard currency. Houses near marketplaces are in particularly high demand because when the authorities crack down on a market, vendors can take their customers to a nearby house and continue their business. A political lecture for domestic consumption mentions the existence of private inns in North Korea. Titled “Let Us Thoroughly Eliminate Private Accommodation Facilities and Give No Room for Enemies to Maneuver” and dated May 2004, this lecture alleges that private rooming houses springing up near railway stations and highways throughout the country can be used as hiding places for foreign spies.89 The lecture also notes that “ill-behaved women” entertain men in these houses.

  The Uncertain Future of the New Economy

  The Kim regime’s willingness to loosen economic restraints on the people and devolve economic responsibility to lower levels has fundamentally changed the character of the civilian economy, which has gone from being a struggling socialist command economy to an emerging protomarket economy. How far this change will go is hard to say. Those foreign analysts who see great promise in North Korea’s economy since the introduction of the July 2002 economic measures are really only seeing the emergence of a nation of very small shopkeepers. At the present stage, the reformed part of the economy is largely engaged in buying and selling cheap cottage-industry and Chinese-made goods, an activity that livens up the streets but does little to build a strong economy. It might not be an exaggeration to say that this is the sort of economic activity conducted in market towns in the Middle Ages. The sidewalk vending that is becoming popular in North Korea today was common in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, but in South Korea, by the 1970s, factories were beginning to turn out manufactured goods for the domestic and international markets, and by the 1980s South Korean heavy industry was taking its place in the front rank of the major economies. It is hard to imagine that North Korea’s dilapidated industries can make such progress in the coming years.

  The economic changes that have come from the people, not the regime, are creating a new economic class of people with hard currency, usually earned illegally, while the rest of the population depends for its livelihood on barter and the worthless North Korean won. Formerly, the privileged economic class consisted of top party and government officials, who receive better rations than the common people and whose positions of authority make it possible for them to exact bribes. Today, the rich people, who are sometimes the same party and government officials, are those who know how to earn foreign currency. This phenomenon is similar to what happened in Russia in the 1990s. In North Korea, many of the newly wealthy class get their start with money from relatives in China or Japan. Most of their businesses involve trading: they have not progressed to the stage of buying up North Korea’s decrepit industries, which have not yet been put on the market, although entrepreneurs may “rent” some of them by taking a management position in return for infusions of cash or resources.

  These nouveaux riche, who have foreign connections and whose families are often not native Korean, were formerly discriminated against as members of the unreliable political class, but now their foreign currency connections eclipse their political liabilities. They can rehabilitate themselves by providing generous donations to public projects, such as school improvements, and by being generous to members of the party and government bureaucracy. In fact, like flies to honey, cash-poor party members, bureaucrats, and police officers are drawn to these wealthy new entrepreneurs, forcing them to pay out money right and left in order to get things done and stay out of trouble. A former North Korean truck driver reports that he would lose 50 to 60 percent of his cargo on the drive from China to Pyongyang because each time he was stopped by security forces, he had to offer them some of his cargo as a bribe to let him proceed.90

  The state continues to intervene in the economic lives of the people by promulgating and sporadically enforcing strict rules for market activity. In the absence of resources to feed the people or any enthusiasm for the market economy, the government and the party exercise a constraining, rather than a facilitating, influence on economic life. Now that the socialist economy has collapsed, the state is trying to raise funds by taxing private economic activities. This taxation is bitterly resented by the people, who feel that they have been abandoned by state socialism and now are being taxed for finding an alternative livelihood.

  Rich people are beginning to flaunt their wealth by driving private cars, wearing expensive clothes, and living in apartments and houses they have illegally purchased, although they risk exposing their riches and falling afoul of crusading authorities. The Kim regime intermittently launches campaigns against nonsocialist activities and wealth and sometimes makes an example of these people, but they seem willing to take their chances. Entrepreneurs in China and Russia expose themselves to similar risks.

  There is a limit, however, to how much the North Korean economy can change. Deep and enduring economic changes must await political change, and once politics begin to change, people will ask why they had to suffer for so many years and why North Korea has fallen so far behind. People will no longer believe the propaganda claims that “imperialists,” primarily the Americans, are responsible for North Korea’s economic failures. They will begin to ask questions about how Kim and his associates have been running the country, and at that point it will be all over for the Kim family regime.

  In food, housing, and health care, the stealthy transition from a command socialist economy to a protocapitalist economy is teaching North Koreans to become entrepreneurs and consumers.91 The transition is also creating a gap between the very rich and everyone else. Koreans with good political connections, business talent or experience, access to foreign currency, or good luck are beginning to make thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in business. The majority of Koreans only earn enough to buy food and other basic necessities, and some people still die of starvation.

  It is difficult to predict North Korea’s economic future. The tension between the growing market economy and the regime’s continuing hostility toward capitalism has resulted in an awkward economic transition. The regime periodically rolls back market initiatives, as it did in May 2004 when it banned the use of cell phones, and then relaxes enforcement of the bans. In 2007, the government tried to prohibit women under the age of fifty (in some places, forty) from selling goods in the markets. According to an October 2007 Korean Workers’ Party document, which quotes Kim Jong-il’s instructions, the major problems with markets are that “women in their prime and workable age” are at the markets rather than at state factories and offices, that merchants are making “exorbitant” profits, and that the sale of South Korean goods is “spreading illusions about the enemy.”92 The instructions portray markets as instruments of North Korea’s enemies who seek to “employ all vicious means to disintegrate us from within.”

  In late 2008, rumors circulated widely that the go
vernment had decided to transform the markets into the old-style farmers’ markets that met only three times a month. The order was supposed to go into effect at the beginning of the new year, but nothing happened.93 If the markets were limited to selling food, it would be a severe blow to North Korean commerce and a hardship on the people. It would also deprive the local officials of the money they earn legally and illegally from running the markets, and for this reason alone, such a move would meet with resistance.

  Groups of inspectors are dispatched from Pyongyang to try to stamp out such “antisocialist” activities as viewing smuggled videotapes and using Chinese cell phones along the border. These “secret gruppa” (“groups,” from the Russian, which may also be the same as “724 Gruppa” and “No. 5 Anti-Socialist Inspection Groups” mentioned by various defectors) include officials from several security organizations, the party, and the state prosecution, perhaps in order to have personnel from the different organizations keep an eye on each other. The inspection teams are supposed to be on the lookout for activities occurring outside the socialist economy, but since everyone is at least partially engaged in these activities, the inspectors’ efforts are doomed to failure.

  The transition from socialism to capitalism seems to have gone too far to stop. The more people turn to the markets, the fewer resources are available to the state—unless it creates a more systematic form of taxing private incomes. People are unable to plan for their future because they cannot know what the economic situation will be from one year to the next, but they can be sure that they must continue to struggle in the new marketplace because the old socialist economy is unlikely to return.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Information Environment

  Although the Kim regime has gone to great lengths to restrict the information available to its people, information control is breaking down. North Koreans today live in two information environments. The regime has fashioned the public environment of party speeches, propaganda banners, and communist-inspired culture for its own purposes, and it is filled with falsehoods. People treat this environment the way most Westerners treat their commercial environment—by ignoring it as much as possible. And then there is the hidden information environment of news and entertainment that seeps in from outside North Korea’s borders. Because this information is hard to come by, it is much sought after. Even Western-style television commercials and print advertisements are eagerly viewed by those few North Koreans with access to them. The question of how much impact this information has on people will be taken up in chapter 6, leaving this chapter to survey the official and unofficial sources of information available to the North Korean people.

  People need information to navigate their social and physical environments and make optimal choices; information is also sought for its entertainment value. Systems theorists have observed that closed systems, which do not communicate well with the environment, eventually falter and die because they cannot adapt to the larger systems of which they are a part.1 These systems may be countries or companies or social groups. Open systems have a better chance of surviving, but they are vulnerable to change imposed upon them by their environment. The Kim regime has struggled with the trade-off between the benefits of open and closed systems. North Korea cannot survive by relying solely on its own knowledge and inventions. Yet, information from the outside world inevitably provides a standard against which North Koreans can compare their difficult lives. How can Kim Jong-il let in the information necessary to make his economy competitive without introducing ideas that challenge the official ideology? The attempted solution is to drape what Kim Il-sung described as a “mosquito net” around the country, letting in some things and keeping out others.2

  One reason that Kim and his associates have been able to stay in power for over half a century is that they have been able to control information channels. A former North Korean has characterized the people as twenty-three million frogs living at the bottom of a deep well. The people not only lack knowledge about what is going on outside their country but are even ignorant about what is happening within North Korea. Without information about alternatives, including alternative political systems and standards of living, their options for change are limited. Since it began publishing its annual world index of press freedom in 2002, Reporters without Borders has placed North Korea dead last on the list every year except in 2007 and 2008, when it was next to last (after Eritrea and just ahead of Turkmenistan, Burma, Cuba, Vietnam, and China). By monopolizing information, the political elites have erected a protective wall around themselves. At the center of things, Kim, who has more knowledge than anyone else, including about what the other elites are doing, has built an inner wall around himself to guard against coups, much like the keep or inner tower within a walled castle.

  North Koreans live in a propaganda-rich, information-poor environment. During the Cold War, citizens of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had much more information available to them about life outside their country than do North Koreans today. In the heyday of communism, perhaps only the Chinese and Russian peasants were as ignorant of the outside world as today’s North Korean villagers. To be sure, not all North Koreans are unin-formed about what is going on in their country and the world. Those in the upper political class have more knowledge about international events than do the peasants, and Kim Jong-il has full access to the international media. Below them, most party cadres get their news from the government-controlled media, supplemented by whatever they pick up from rumor and clandestine listening to foreign radio broadcasts. Ordinary North Koreans must rely on radios with dials fixed to the government station and televisions that can only receive the nearby government stations to get the news, and electricity shortages prevent even those who have radios and televisions from using them much of the time.

  Because the government owns and operates the radio and television stations and the newspapers, they provide a single source of information, with one media channel reinforcing another. Consequently, North Koreans cannot judge the reliability of one news medium by comparing it with another. And not only are most North Koreans deprived of reliable information, but they are saddled with large amounts of misinformation. For example, North Koreans are told that in 1945 Kim Il-sung won the war against Japan and that several years later he successfully defended North Korea against a joint American–South Korean invasion that started the Korean War. They are also told that in his day Kim Il-sung was recognized throughout the world as one of the great leaders of the twentieth century and that Kim Jong-il holds that position today.

  Authorized Sources of Information

  The Role of the News

  The role of the media in a communist state is to make people loyal supporters of the regime. As Lenin said, “Newspapers are free not for the sake of the circulation of news but for the purpose of educating and organizing the working masses toward the attainment of goals clearly defined by the thoroughgoing leadership of the party.”3 Article 67 of the constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) provides for freedom of the press, publication, assembly, demonstration, and association, but “freedom” in North Korea is defined as what “corresponds to the interests of the popular masses”—and party officials decide what is in their best interest.4 The DPRK has never been shy about admitting that the primary role of its media is to indoctrinate. Nodong Sinmun, the party newspaper, calls the press a “sharp ideological weapon dedicated to staunchly defending and safeguarding the leader” and urges the press to “dye the whole society one color, the color of the revolutionary ideology of the great leader.”5

  The Kim regime places great faith in its media’s ability to transform people from what it calls “egotists” into socialists loyal to the Kim family. Countless articles have emphasized the important role the media play in molding people’s socialist outlook, with several themes predominating: obey the leader and the party without question, protect the leader with your life, adhere to the military-first pol
icy by supporting the army, be optimistic about the country’s future, work hard for the good of the community and country, do not be tempted by capitalism and its products, be proud of Korean culture and hold to the traditional ways, hate the Americans and Japanese, and if you are a bureaucrat or manager, get out of your office and go among the people to lead them by setting a good example. Yet, despite this flood of propaganda, the North Korean people have actually become less socialistic and more capitalistic with each passing year. It is probably not wrong to infer from the media’s repetition of propaganda themes that their opposite is closer to reality: people do not obey the leader and the party when they can get away with it, they harbor ill will toward the military, they work for themselves rather than the community, and they are mightily attracted to the products and pleasures of capitalism. The only propaganda themes that seem to strike a chord are nationalism and hatred of the Americans and Japanese.

  The North Korean press publishes little news about the outside world except items that reflect badly on other countries—the better to foster the belief that North Korea is the finest place in the world to live. Any foreign news story that does make it into the media is likely to be brutally short. For example, following a visit to Pyongyang by a former official of the Clinton administration, North Korean domestic radio broadcast this item: “Bill Richardson, governor of the state of New Mexico of the United States, and his party left Pyongyang on 20 October. They were seen off at the airport by functionaries of the relevant sector.”6 Why Richardson was in Pyongyang, how long he had been there, and whom he was talking to—none of that is supposed to be the business of the North Korean public.