A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom

by Felix Abt

  To be fair, though, the idea of racial purity stretched beyond Pyongyang and even into the so-called decadent American fiefdom of South Korea. Until 2006, biracial South Koreans were not allowed to serve in the military even if they held South Korean citizenship; nevertheless, all other citizens were required to serve for two years in the armed forces.

  Discrimination against biracial South Koreans is still common in the countryside. They’re often teased and bullied at school, and not a single yet has held public office. North Koreans, it would appear, have more in common with their southern brethren than is usually stated.

  Others have had it worse than me. My friend Eduard Meier-Lee, a Swiss senior project manager at ABB with a South Korean wife, was on the receiving end of even more racially charged questions when he visited Pyongyang in 2003. One evening I took him to a centrally-located Japanese restaurant, where we sang karaoke after dinner. The charming waitresses, wearing their typical Chosŏn Ot national dress, invited us to sing and dance with them. They were keen to learn about Edi’s family life, thanks to his decision to marry a Seoulite. In their eyes, the pairing was so outrageous that they bombarded him with questions and ignored me.

  Until the early 1960s, mixed marriages were allowed in the DPRK. But that opening was long before the waitresses, all in their twenties, were born and they were surely not aware of this. In 1963 the Party began a campaign against mixed couples, going as far as to ask interracial couples to divorce—mainly Korean and Eastern European couples. Since then, the party storyline has been that South Korean women were forced by the brutal American occupation forces into prostitution and arranged marriages. The liberated women in the DPRK, on the other hand, could marry the man of their choice, who was, of course, always a Korean.

  Another time, a group of foreign children—mostly the kids of diplomats—were invited to play soccer and rope-pull with their North Korean counterparts. The Korean children overwhelmingly defeated the foreigners in every game by a significant margin. North Korean parents cheered on their allegedly superior offspring, once more reassured in the natural strength of their race. They probably didn’t know that their children trained for weeks or month before the informal competition, whereas the expatriate kids arrived unprepared.

  After a seminar at the Pyongyang Business School, I drove the lecturer from Hong Kong to the airport, and we joked around and had a jolly time. The jokes were certainly not politically correct and could be perceived as offensive in the wrong context. For example, one was “How do you get a retard to commit suicide? Put a knife in his hand and ask him ‘Who’s Special?’”

  My secretary sat silently in the back, and didn’t say a word. On the way back home, she suddenly broke out crying and yelled that my behavior was not acceptable. She exclaimed that she didn’t want to work with me any longer, and then shouted: “The whole world knows that we Koreans are the best!”

  I tried to explain to her that we were only being sarcastic, and not specifically directing our jokes at the Koreans. We also insulted ourselves in a comic way, I added, and that it was merely a misunderstanding. I indeed had a high respect for the Korean people. Usually, my secretary carried herself with an excellent sense of self-control, and she would not have offered sharp words under normal circumstances; she was legitimately offended and expressed what North Koreans truly thought about themselves.

  After a few years in Pyongyang, I realized that the ways North Koreans viewed themselves had two faces: one targeting the outside world, and one discussed among North Koreans themselves. North Koreans were trained to be polite with foreigners and to skirt around political talk that could antagonize these impure humans. Like many East Asians, they’re pragmatic enough to subordinate their personal views to the higher calling of bringing in foreign investment and charity. They would never tell a foreigner that he is a suspected sleuth or trouble maker, or that his work in the country equals an expression of greatness of the Kim regime.

  North Korean hosts went to great lengths to make their guests feel good. Here, charming young waitresses present a cake, songs, and flowers to celebrate the birthday of a German software engineer, Tom, at the Pyongyang Information Center (PIC).

  Yet this is exactly what they believe in, at least under the surface. My staff occasionally translated political slogans, book, newspaper texts, and even North Korean songs played in Karaoke rooms. I correspondingly scoured through the English-language literature on ideology and politics, finding some differences in the way they portrayed ideas.

  To name one example, our guides told American tourists, “We love American civilians!” Kim Il Sung, however, used to call upon the Workers’ Party to always prepare for war against the Americans by instilling hatred against them: “The most important thing in our war preparations is to teach all our people to hate U.S. imperialism. Otherwise, we will not be able to defeat the U.S. imperialists who boast of their technological superiority.”

  I also tried to spark improvised discussions that revealed their true mindsets. While this helped me understand the business environment, my inquiries destroyed my wishful thinking that I, along with most other foreigners, come to believe during short visits. We can acknowledge, with a jest of humor, that they see themselves as exceptional, and get along with it.

  1 http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2012/07/18/28/0301000000AEN20120718005600315F.HTML

  2 http://www.echinacities.com/china-media/why-is-china-reluctant-to-abandon-north-korea.html

  Chapter 8:

  Feeding the People

  “All we have is guns and millet.” — Deng Xiaoping, 1974

  When I traveled in summer months in the countryside, I saw the devastation of frequent heavy rainfalls, which destroyed large parts of the rice harvest. The downpours even triggered landslides that upended roads and houses, and washed human excrement into the mostly untreated water supply.

  As the torrents came, farmers desperately scoured to collect their wet rice. Only few trucks were available to assist them; most vehicles sat idly thanks to a lack of petroleum and spare parts, making the situation worse for those poor planters.

  Floods and famine have killed thousands of people in the past, orphaning children and tearing apart families. Currently, they are being cared for with modest food storages and medication in orphanages in the larger provincial cities, which I saw during my own visits. Regional differences also struck me: the rugged northeastern provinces were much worse off in terms of food availability, compared to provinces in the southern ‘cereal bowl’ that produces most of the country’s grains.

  Everywhere I went, I saw that the deep face lines of farmers in their forties and fifties were proof of physical hardship. Transplanting rice by hand is tiresome and back-breaking work that requires hours in the scorching sun. Farmers without rubber boots were exposed to all kinds of nasty water borne diseases. Visitors were often asked by farm managers, empathetic to their workers’ plight, to donate boots, along with spare parts for machines and fuel to operate the machines.

  In North Korea, food is closely tied to politics. For a long time, the highest echelon of politicians dictated which food their citizens would eat, along with how much of it. This is because free food fit into the socialist state’s role as a provider of necessities, including work, housing, health-care, education and clothing. The government, in fact, had a very particular type of food in mind for its children, a meat-based soup with rice.

  This description stuck out to me as I read a New Years editorial published in the three army, party and youth newspapers. The op-ed echoed Kim Il Sung’s principle that all North Koreans should get their daily rice and meat soup for free. The most influential paper, the Rodong Sinmun, lamented in December 2010 that North Korea hadn’t met the goal. “I’m the most heartbroken by the fact that our people are still living on corn,” Kim Jong Il was quoted as saying. “What I must do now is to feed them white rice, bread and noodles generously.”

  It wasn’t just newspapers that played with
the idea of food for all. On North Korean TV, the Dear Leader visited chicken farms, fish ponds and food processing companies. It was obvious from the broadcasts that food issues were a top priority to the leadership.

  The shortages of food, unfortunately, were used by adversaries in South Korea, Japan and the West to prove that the DPRK was a failed state. Outsiders raised the question to me all the time. “Do you have enough to eat in Pyongyang?” a South Korean university professor asked me during my luncheon presentation organized by the European Chamber of Commerce in Seoul. “How can you live in such a place?”

  While in Seoul, others raised similar questions. “You wouldn’t get your favorite Italian ice cream, your Starbuck’s coffee or a crispy chicken leg from KFC there, would you?” a young Samsung executive sarcastically reminded me.

  As a foreigner living in Pyongyang, I was privileged to be so well fed. But the situation in North Korea wasn’t as bad as many outsiders perceived it. The New York Times and The Guardian, for instance, published a lot of chatter about the thousands of people starving. I feel compelled to offer a corrective. Because I was a resident businessman, my travels around the country were far less choreographed than others. In the mid-2000s, I did not come across starving people, though I did see scores of thin Koreans who looked malnourished. This was, of course, after the famine of the 1990s.

  At times, I bluntly gave my unsolicited opinion to agriculture officials. Because I had lived in Vietnam from 1996 to 2002 I mentioned that the country provided a great example. Over there, Hanoi solved food problems within a year by giving farmers larger plots to work on, outside the collective state-run farms set up after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Like in Vietnam, collectivized land, I argued, was demotivating farmers and giving them little reason to work hard. The poor souls had little personal incentive to “reap what they sow,” to apply the proverb in a literal sense, because they couldn’t make any profit off of them.

  There is no doubt that North Korea’s shortcomings, which the Vietnamese and the Chinese have solved since the 1980s, remain a major cause for the lack of food in North Korea. Food supplies, coming from the World Food Organization and other organizations, helped cement the status quo. The absence of it would have obliged North Korea to undertake the necessary privatization reforms like Vietnam and China, even if changes in Pyongyang’s system would not have fed its people to the extent that its neighbors were successful.

  To start, here’s a brief background on those countries’ paths to agriculture reform, and how they’re different from North Korea. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping shifted responsibility from state farms to private household farms in the early 1980s. At the same time, the quota fixed by the state called the “iron rice bowl,” meaning food formally guaranteed by the state like it is still the case in North Korea, was massively decreased. The food produced above this minimum quantity could be sold in free markets at unregulated prices. Poor agricultural performance and then common food shortages were soon things of the past.

  In 1981 Vietnam, too, started moving away from a collectivized agricultural production system to a household responsibility system, in which individual households could cultivate land outside of government control. As a result, after two decades of importing rice, Vietnam became a rice exporter in 1989. Today, it’s the world’s third largest rice exporter after India and Thailand.

  From the 1980s China and Vietnam did not believe any longer that collectivized land with a higher level of mechanization would produce higher yields than smaller and less mechanized private household farms. North Korea, however, has unwaveringly kept holding on to this socialist myth to this day, refusing to follow the promising example of the more pragmatic Asian countries.

  In my home country, Switzerland, only 17 percent of the land is arable, meaning most food has to be imported to feed its people. North Korea is an equally rugged country, with all its mountain ranges and hills, giving it no more arable land than my alpine republic in Western Europe. As such, North Korea depends roughly the same in its food imports, a fact mentioned neither by the Western media nor in NGO or business reports that I have read.

  While the food situation was improving during the years I lived in North Korea, it is also true that the country had just risen out of disastrous famine. In the 1990s, the natural calamities, consisting of floods followed by droughts, triggered a food crisis and indeed fostered mass starvation from 1995 to 1998. I won’t speculate in the actual numbers of deaths, though North Korea’s strongest critics, mostly regime-hating rightwingers, pegged higher estimates at several million.

  Among them, The Wall Street Journal claimed that “a famine from 1995 to 1997 killed two million to three million North Koreans.”1 Prof. Lankov, a better informed and less biased North Korea expert estimated however that the famine “from 1996 to 1999 killed between 600,000 and one million people.”2 On the other hand, the regime’s most arduous supporters, generally left-leaning intellectuals and politicians, put forward the lowest figures at around 100,000 dead from starvation and disease.

  After 1999 North Korea halted the major food shortages due to a combination of food aid from foreign countries, agricultural and infrastructure repair work, and growing private business activities. Nevertheless, the Western mass media continued to rant about the supposed food debacle for the years to come. In a typical year, the UN World Food Program contributed with alarming, embellished conclusions that the threat of food shortages loomed over the countryside. The WFP persisted with these claims, even when the South Korean government and private watch dog groups documented “bumper harvests,” or increased harvests during a season that reached record levels.

  Andrei Lankov, for one, has documented the conflicting interests that lead to these different estimates in 2008 and 2009. “Unless the 2008 harvest was the result of incredible luck, it seems to indicate that fertilizer is far less important than previously believed,” he wrote in Asia Times Online. “It is possible that North Korean farmers have devised strategies to deal with fertilizer shortages.”

  In October 2010, a headline by Agence France-Presse declared, “WFP chief says child malnutrition widespread in North Korea.” The WFP claimed in a press statement that a third of North Korean children up to five years old suffer from severe malnutrition. On the other hand, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) argues differently, pointing out in its report, “The State of the World’s Children 2012,” that under-five and neonatal mortality rates in North Korea are substantially lower than the developing country average.

  The country was ranked by UNICEF at 73 out of a total of 193 countries, because of its under-five mortality rate of 33 out of 1000. That’s just over half the developing country average of 63 out of 1000—not the best it could be, but certainly an accomplishment given its tumultuous famine. Another international charity, Save the Children, similarly released a global study on changes in changes in the numbers of stunted children from 1990 to 2010, placing North Korea as the sixth best country making the most progress in curbing this problem.

  Other groups have challenged the notion that North Korea is stark and desolate. From 2000 to 2005, a couple of years after the famine, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) declared that North Korea was among the world’s top ten producers of fresh fruit per year in terms of total production. Vegetables ranked twelfth at 2,450 million metric tons, behind the production of rice with 2.5 million metric tons. Most of this produce was not meant for domestic consumption, but for export. It generated hard currency and helped pay for imports.

  For this reason, regular North Koreans didn’t realize that an abundance of fruit was produced in their country. What was left in the country was not sold at a cheap price. When driving from time to time, I stopped my car at a small food stall where an older woman was selling apples. I paid one Euro per kilogram, even though I could have pushed it down to 0.50 Euros. But my conscience got the better of me, since few Koreans could afford this fruit and she only sold a few kilograms a day.
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br />   The situation could be improving with more supply and, I hope, prices in the reach of locals: in 2011, China gave North Korea millions of apple trees, giving fruit production a boost.

  During a dinner with a minister, I asked him why his government had asked foreign nations and organizations to supply food, instead of laying down the conditions for agricultural and industrial growth.

  “Our first and more short-term priority was to get as much food as possible to save lives in an emergency situation,” he said, “while our second, longer-term priority was to strengthen our agricultural base to make food security more sustainable. As you know donor countries did not support our second priority. That is, they refused development cooperation and instead of giving us fertilizer and other requirements for agricultural development they sent us their own surpluses of agricultural products.”

  “Every year, we get reports about a looming famine in North Korea - and this year is no exception. A quick look through headlines of major newspapers can clarify that such reports surface with predictable regularity every year.

  In March 2008, the International Herald Tribune ran a headline “Food shortage looms in North Korea”. In March 2009, the Washington Post headline said “At the Heart of North Korea’s Troubles, an Intractable Hunger Crisis.” One year later, in March 2010, the Times of London warned: “Catastrophe in North Korea; China must pressure Pyongyang to allow food aid to millions threatened by famine.” In March 2011, The New York Times wrote: “North Korea: 6 Million Are Hungry.” The predictions of gloom come every year, but famine does not.

  Actually, from around 2002-2003, we have seen a steady but clear improvement in North Korea’s economic situation. North Koreans are still malnourished, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, they are not starving anymore - at least not in significant numbers.