Special Report on The Koreas: Survival of the Fittest

THE KOREAS

Survival of the fittest

Sep 25th 2008
From The Economist print edition

North Korean society is turbulent and in flux

WHAT with North Korea being a cold-war state and a nuclear one to boot, the fixation on its missiles is perhaps not surprising. Around the world that fixation has spawned a veritable industry of think-tankers, journalists and officials past and present, many with an axe to grind, who make a living from parsing the intentions of the regime and second-guessing the leader’s health and even thoughts. Yet much Pyongyangology is futile, because no outsider has a line into the ruling elite. Almost certainly the upper levels of the regime have never been infiltrated by Western or South Korean spy agencies. The most recent high-level North Korean defection was in 1997.

The keenest insights into Kim Jong Il and his court have come from more surreal angles. For instance, a well-known Italian chef, brought in to pamper the dictator, later wrote about the experience. And there is Shin Sang-ok, a legendary South Korean film director whom Mr Kim, a film buff, kidnapped and held with his actress wife, hoping to improve the North’s film industry. “All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing,” an indignant Mr Kim told the pair, hauled out of prison to attend a cocktail party in their honour. “I didn’t order them to portray that kind of thing.”

A fixation on North Korea’s missiles can “end up obscuring a great deal of other things worth knowing,” as Christian Caryl, a journalist based in Asia, put it in the New York Review of Books. Most worthwhile of all is knowing just how the mass of ordinary North Koreans act, think and feel. It is still too widely assumed that such things are unknowable. After all, foreigners, and especially reporters, have always found it hard to get into North Korea, and those who do are assigned minders. Only the minders offer the chance to learn about life and leaders—which is why they are often supplied in pairs, to mind each other.

So a visit to North Korea—which usually means only to Pyongyang, with its empty boulevards, its traffic policewomen in skirts and boots, pirouetting with fixed smiles, and its old-fashioned communist propaganda—leads many to the conclusion that the North is set in amber. A reconsideration of this view is overdue. For a new picture is emerging that shows a protean society in flux, one that in the face of harsh realities is adopting an improvisatory approach to survival, and some people are thriving.

The uses of famine
The roots of this change lie with the famine of 1995-98 that killed up to 1m people, or over 4% of the population, and brought outsiders—aid agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)—to North Korea. The regime made it hard for these groups to get aid to those who needed it, and kicked some of them out after the famine was over, notably the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). Other NGOs, however, continue to work there in inconspicuous ways. Aid groups have filled big gaps in outsiders’ knowledge about life and death in the provinces. Good Friends, a South Korean Buddhist outfit, publishes regular reports on food supplies across North Korea, the latest government campaigns and evidence of popular discontent. Not every detail can be substantiated. But the latest bulletin reports some dozens of deaths from hunger and the ill-effects of eating grass among farming families in the southern part of the country. Earlier this year Good Friends reported the public execution in North Hamgyong province of 15 North Koreans, mainly women, for having attempted to cross into China.

The risks of crossing the border illegally are high, but during the famine the rewards easily outweighed them. That was particularly so for those from the north-eastern provinces near China where food shortages were most severe because of a breakdown in the public food-distribution system in industrial areas: uniquely, North Korea’s was as much an urban famine as a rural one.

Thus for the first time the famine brought North Koreans to the outside world. At the peak, perhaps 80,000 North Koreans were hiding in north-east China looking for food, work or a clandestine route to South Korea. These crossings bred a habit: whereas leaving North Korea was unthinkable before, since the mid-1990s more than 500,000 North Koreans have crossed into China, legally or illegally. Most have eventually returned (indeed, many make multiple trips), with startling evidence of a very different world outside.

Surveys among these North Koreans in China’s border provinces offer the best insights to date about ordinary life in North Korea. Ground-breaking work by three scholars, Yoonok Chang, Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, published this year by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (IIE), offers a psychological as much as a material portrait of North Korea. It is clear that the famine and the government’s brutal mismanagement of it (both in denying food to those who most needed it and in criminalising people’s response to hunger) cast a long shadow.

In their survey of 1,300 North Koreans, the authors draw a harrowing picture. Some 23% of men and 37% of women say family members died of hunger. More than a quarter report being arrested, and of those who were held in political detention (about a tenth of the survey sample), 90% witnessed forced starvation, 60% saw deaths due to beating or torture and 27% said they had witnessed executions.

The findings underscore earlier clinical reports of psychological distress akin to post-traumatic stress disorder: doctors working with North Korean refugees put rates of distress at 30-45%. Clearly, some of the stress is associated simply with getting to China. But beyond that, the IIE authors find that certain groups of refugees are particularly disturbed. These include those imprisoned by the regime, and those who lost family members to hunger or illness.

Strikingly, the psychological effect is as great or greater among the group of interviewees who were aware of international aid programmes for the starving but who did not believe that they themselves had been beneficiaries. At its peak, the humanitarian programme was supposedly feeding more than a third of the population, yet a large minority of those interviewed had never heard of the programme. Of the majority who had, 96% believed they had not benefited from it; they assumed that the armed forces had appropriated the aid. This group, the authors find, was “profoundly embittered”. Modelling conservatively, they estimate that 35% of the North Korean population were in a famine area, knew of the aid but thought they were not receiving any of it. That makes it hard to argue that Mr Kim, even as his public appearances are greeted with mass displays of emotion, still commands the people’s loyalty. It seems that the regime itself does not think so: it has long classified more than half the population as hostile or at best wavering in their loyalties. Possibly this assessment is no longer paranoid.

Holding up more than half the sky
Border surveys also cast light on life in North Korea since the famine, with a proliferation of informal markets and an increase in unofficial movements subverting people’s relationship with the state. The factories of the command economy have ground to a halt: fuel and other inputs are too expensive to run them, and workers often go unpaid. Frequently, it is not just a factory’s output that its managers have sold on the black market but all its plant and equipment too, leaving a shell.

Yet most men in the state system still sign on each day, even if they sit about. In the countryside the men have the backbreaking work of farming without mechanisation: again, fuel is dear, and many powered irrigation systems have broken down. In the main, it is women who have been responsible for the explosion of markets and other entrepreneurial activity.

The degree of marketisation of this socialist paradise, although noted by foreign observers, seems to have been underestimated. One young defector recently disparaged Seoul’s famous street market of Dongdaemun, sniffing that it was not a patch on markets up north. (As for the feral orphans, or kotjebi—literally, “flower swallows”—who were a post-war feature of Dongdaemun, they now flitter around North Korea’s black markets, scavenging or stealing what they can.)

In the IIE survey four-fifths of interviewees agreed that anything in North Korea can be bought for money, something they say has been true since at least the mid-1990s. This corrects another widely held misconception. Marketisation was not a consequence of a set of economic liberalisations trumpeted by the regime in 2002, leading some to wonder whether North Korea would at last go down the Chinese path of reform. Rather, these policies were the state’s belated acknowledgment of an unstoppable force set off by the famine, described by Messrs Haggard and Noland (in a separate work, “Famine in North Korea”) as “coping mechanisms”: foraging, barter and petty trade.

In North Korea, then, everything, as the Korean expression goes, is for sale except cats’ horns: household belongings, vegetables from private plots, grain that is supposed to be distributed by the state, consumer electronics, designer brands, Mercedes cars and any kind of official paperwork you care to name (a passport is $60; what is known as a “VIP defection” to South Korea, with every detail taken care of, costs $1,500 and can be arranged within a month). North Korea’s elite has always been relatively well off, and some of its members have dived into business. And people are making money on the Chinese border, where both official trade and smuggling have boomed.

As well as humans for work or sex (another area of competitive advantage for women entrepreneurs), the Chinese pay for medicinal herbs foraged in North Korea’s hills, furs and drugs (methamphetamines). In addition, Chinese businesses are investing in the northern part of the country, buying underworked mines and factories on the cheap. They are hated for it, but their money is now starting to splash around the North Korean economy.

North Korean traders returning from China stock up on clothes, secondhand sewing machines and consumer goods. Paradoxically, those social groups that in the past have borne the brunt of the regime’s persecution have gained most from this growth in private trade. Japanese-Koreans have used remittances from relatives overseas as start-up capital for new trading businesses. North Koreans of Chinese origin and those with Korean-Chinese relatives across the border take advantage of their relative freedom to travel.


The daily grindAs much as the economic impact, the cultural effect of this cross-border exchange is already huge and still unfolding. Andrei Lankov of the Australian National University, an astute observer of North Korea, describes how a relatively minor technological revolution in China changed the lives of many North Koreans. Earlier this decade DVD players fell dramatically in price, so South Korean households quickly dumped their old VCRs in favour of the new players. Smugglers picked up the old units for next to nothing and sold them in North Korea for $40 or so apiece—a price that plenty of urban North Korean families could afford if they saved up.

The consequence was what Mr Lankov calls a “video revolution”: a flood of South Korean soap operas, melodramas and music videos entering North Korea by the same route and delighting new audiences. The impact of the astounding affluence on display—the stars’ clothes and cars, Seoul’s glittering skyline—exposes the central lie on which the regime bases its claim to rule: that South Korea is backward, impoverished and exploited. Korean-language programming from abroad on radio sets imported from China (and thus not tuned permanently to state radio) reinforces this discovery. Thus, disillusion and anger with the regime only mounts. In the IIE surveys nine-tenths of the interviewees disagreed that either the regime or the economy were getting better.

On the border
In the face of what Mr Caryl, the journalist, calls the “profound epistemological shock” of North Koreans who have glimpsed another world, the regime has adopted an ambivalent attitude. Although those caught crossing the border can face harsh punishments, the regime, if it was minded to, could be much more brutal. The penal code was revised in 2004 to differentiate between “economic” refugees and “political” ones (though refugees say judicial proceedings under the new code are often skipped and torture is still used). Border-crossers can buy a degree of protection by bribing local authorities; border guards are even rotated every six months so that more of them can get a share of the spoils. The border with China is, as Peter Beck, a scholar of North Korea, describes it, both the regime’s safety valve, providing an alternative living to the dysfunctional state economy, and its Achilles heel.

In daily life, the regime appears to be re-establishing its grip in some areas but losing it more often in others. Since 2005, after a decent enough harvest, the regime sought to take control of burgeoning markets, redirect grain supplies through the public distribution system and get people back to their work units. First men were banned from selling in the markets, and more recently women under 50 too. The attempt at control has been only partly successful.

The state manufacturing economy has officially stayed aloof from the new market economy, though parts of the regime have proved opportunistic. For instance, railways are the major conduits for the new trade, and railway stations often serve as lively markets. Rather than clamp down on them, railway staff and police take a cut. The armed forces, too, have leapt into the black market: after all, they have the transport, the personnel and the weaponry to enforce a protection racket. This may be profitable for the state’s agents, but it hardly reinforces their moral authority. A Western diplomat recounts seeing a group taking a sofa up a subway escalator in Pyongyang to sell on the street. Guards were bawling at them to get out of the way, but nobody paid the slightest attention.

It all adds up, reckons Mr Lankov (whose life in the former Soviet Union informs his view of changes in North Korea), to something of consequence: North Korea is no longer the ruthless Stalinist state it was, but a shoddy, corrupt little tyranny. And now the people know it.