ONE
LIFE IN EARTH’S PARADISE
The Land of Avatars
Whenever a North Korean is asked by a foreign journalist or visitor what life is like inside North Korea, the reply is that the country’s citizens live in an earthly paradise for one reason: the care given to them by the Supreme Leader. He is their father and provider. They lack for nothing, nor do they desire anything else. The Supreme Leader makes sure they are totally happy. Just like the Heavenly Father in Christianity, it is the living head of the Kim family that makes everything possible in North Korea.
This is a total lie. Except for the super-elites who are bound inextricably with the regime, including the crème de la crème of the party, armed forces, security agencies, and hard-currency-making enterprises, the vast majority of North Koreans must fend for themselves.
Life was not always like this in North Korea. While it’s impossible to imagine today, North Korea had a higher GDP than South Korea until the early 1970s. In 2017, South Korea’s GDP was $1.5 trillion, whereas North Korea’s was $33 billion; per capita GDP was $30,000 and $1,300, respectively.1
Still, North Koreans are routinely told that South Korea is filled with beggars and only a tiny percentage of corrupt capitalists live well; the rest of the population ekes out the barest of livings in squalid conditions. Because the country is a stooge of the American imperialists, South Korean women are constantly raped by American soldiers, Pyongyang’s propagandists claim, and the people are yearning for liberation by North Korea. Even the government-funded Russian international television network RT, which has prided itself as a mouthpiece of the Putin regime, believes that North Korean propaganda has gone a step too far. A 2017 RT documentary called The Happiest People on Earth: North Korea: The Rulers, the People and the Official Narrative offers the outside world a peek into the nation.2
A factory manager recounts her emotions when Kim Jong Un made an on-site inspection visit in January 2016. “When the Great Marshal Kim Jong Un opened the doors and walked in, we beheld his sun-like image. It was like a dream, as if I was the only one who enjoyed this great honor.” She continues with a straight face, “The entire factory and workshop filled with sunlight when the Great Marshal arrived!”
The film crew captures a scene of students studying in the famous Kim Chaek University of Technology. Since most North Korean men have to spend ten years in the army before they can enroll at a university, male students at Kim Chaek are typically in their late twenties or early thirties. One student says, “Thanks to the Great Leader and the Marshal General’s revolutionary course, our country became the strongest country in the world!” With a big smile, the student goes on to say, “All stooges who dare attack our sovereignty are our enemies.”
Each year the nation busies itself preparing for the celebration of Kim Il Sung’s birthday on April 15, called the Day of the Sun. The film crew captured citizens gathering in a plaza to pledge their loyalty to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. After they take their vows, first-grade children goose-step to martial music, and the child leading the formation raises her right arm in a 45-degree salute, just like the goose-stepping members of the armed forces.
A middle-school orphanage official tells the film crew that the Great Marshal Kim Jong Un spent two hours visiting the school. In the entrance, you see a giant mural depicting the floor plan of the orphanage. The point where Kim began his inspection is marked with a red star, and his footsteps are marked in red arrows. An entire room is devoted to pictures and relics of his visit. The red and yellow blanket that Kim touched and the white chair with a blue cushion he sat in are boxed in glass. Everything he touches is preserved as a holy remnant, just as was done with anything his father or grandfather touched.
This is how the state wants to portray the average North Korean: filled with undying love for the Kim family, finding truth only in the teachings of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and receiving guidance in everything from the current Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un.
The truth is, every North Korean has an avatar, because how the avatar behaves can mean the difference between life and death.
The avatar is for public consumption—what is shown to most friends, relatives, and co-workers. A North Korean can show his or her innermost secrets to just a handful of people, perhaps immediate family members, trustworthy relatives, and best friends who have committed a common crime—like watching a South Korean movie.
The dark side of North Korea, the state argues, is simply “fake news”: conjured up by the capitalist West and enemies of the state. But right beneath the veneer of 25 million smiling North Koreans lies a darkness that fills every square meter of the DPRK.
There are at least four gulags in North Korea where between 200,000 and 300,000 political prisoners and their families are held. Officially the state says there are no political prisoners. Ahn Myong Chol was a guard in Camp 22 (no longer in operation) and one of the few guards who escaped to South Korea. He was trained to see prisoners not as human beings but as animals. In fact, prisoners got smaller rations than the dogs reared by guards.
“Prisoners shouldn’t make eye contact with instructors,” recalls Ahn (“instructor” is the euphemism used in the camps for guards). “If they do or look up, they will, again, be beaten but that isn’t always the case. Depending on the day’s mood, you can make up pretexts and be harsher on them.”3
Camp 22 was a gulag for family members of those who had committed offenses. The individuals who were directly responsible were sent to even more dismal camps, like Camp 15 in Yodok. There prisoners died regularly, from forced labor, starvation, disease, torture, beating, or execution. In North Korea, families and relatives of political prisoners are also shipped off to be punished for crimes by association. If your cousin defects to the South, for example, not only is that person’s immediate family sent to reeducation camps, prisons, or gulags, but you and other similarly distant relatives may also be caught up. If an office or factory worker is accused of a serious offense, his or her superiors and co-workers can also be carted off. Students are taught to watch their parents; they’re supposed to report them for infractions or impure thoughts.
Deep inside, everyone in North Korea knows he or she must live a double life. The older a person gets, the more attention he must pay to his avatar. If he doesn’t, the avatar will slip up somehow—perhaps tell a joke on a forbidden subject, tell a party apparatchik of alternative options, or simply nod off during a gathering of hundreds or even thousands of citizens.
The most serious crime a North Korean can be charged with is contravening one or more of the Ten Principles in the Establishment of the Monolithic Ideology of the Party (Table 1). Not by coincidence, these principles are like the Ten Commandments. First introduced by Kim Jong Il in 1974 just as the personality cult surrounding Kim Il Sung and the Kim family was reaching new heights, it was revised by Kim Jong Un in 2013. Every North Korean must memorize the principles and repeat them when asked.
Almost any act can be considered as violating one or more of the Ten Principles. In November 2017, the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) reported to the National Assembly’s Intelligence Oversight Committee that several members of the North Korean party daily newspaper Rodong Sinmun had been “revolutionized” (that is, reeducated) for not putting a story about the successful testing of a ballistic missile on the front page.4 If Kim Jong Un saw that an official didn’t write down his every word or if someone didn’t bow her head to 45 degrees in front of his grandfather’s or father’s statue, that could be interpreted as going against one of the Ten Principles.
In his documentary Under the Sun (2015), Russian director Vitaly Mansky’s goal was to provide the world with a glimpse of the life of an ordinary North Korean schoolchild, eight-year-old Ri Zin Mi. The North Korean government allowed only Mansky, his cinematographer, Alexandria Ivanova, and a sound assistant into Pyongyang, and Mansky was obliged to shoot just scripted scenes prepared by North Korean handlers. Unbeknownst to the North Koreans, however, the sound assistant was a Russian who was fluent in Korean, and Mansky left his cameras running all the time, not just during the scripted scenes. According to the Los Angeles Times, “At the end of each day, the North Koreans would go through the day’s shoot, but in a risky move, in a country where foreigners who act out sometimes spend years in jail, the crew kept duplicate memory cards of all footage, that they then snuck out of North Korea.”5 Throughout Mansky’s finished movie, one can hear North Korean handlers who shout “Action!” and then “Cut!”
In the film, Zin Mi is shown right before she joins the Children’s Union on the Day of the Shining Star (the late Kim Jong Il’s birthday), one of the holiest days in North Korea. The camera zooms in on her classroom. She is dressed in a well-pressed blue Mao suit. That day’s lesson is about the anti-Japanese and anti-imperialist struggles of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung.
“What did the Generalissimo Great Leader Kim Il Sung teach us about the wretched Japanese?” asks the teacher. All the students raise their right arm at a 90-degree angle with their left arm across their chest, a signal that they want to answer.
“To remember how much they mistreated the Korean people!” says one student.
“Yes, that’s right!” the teacher responds.
From nursery school on, North Korean children are taught to worship the Supreme Leader and the two former Great Leaders. They sing songs praising the Kims’ leadership, although at that age they don’t have the faintest clue what they are singing about.
Zin Mi’s father, in real life, is a print journalist. For the party handlers who were responsible for the film shoot, however, a print journalist was deemed too low in the social hierarchy, so they made him into an engineer at an exemplary garment factory. Her mother, who works in a cafeteria, is instead shown as working in a model soy milk factory. Of course, the three of them are shown living in a very nice apartment, one that Mansky was not sure actually belonged to them. In a scene in which the family sits down for breakfast on the heated floor, as is customary in Korea, Mansky shows the family being made to run through their lines several times, in an effort to sound as natural as possible, before the final take is approved.
NORTH KOREA’S TEN COMMANDMENTS
1. Fight, with all your strength, to make the whole society the Kimilsung-Kimjongilist one.
2. Venerate the Great respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il as the Great Leaders of the Party and of the People, as the Eternal Suns of Juche.
3. Make the authority of the respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and of the Party the absolute one. Be ready to defend them.
4. Arm yourself with revolutionary ideas of the Great respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and with the fulfillment of their ideas: the line and the policy of the Party.
5. Defend the principle following unconditionally the commandments of the Great respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il as well as Party line and its policy.
6. Reinforce further the ideological willful and revolutionary unity of the whole Party around the figure of its Leader(s).
7. Learn after the Great respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, have a high moral and ethical image, use the revolutionary methods of action and the people’s model of action.
8. Venerate the political aspect of life, bestowed by the Leader and by the Party, respond to it by having a high political consciousness and real successes in doing your job.
9. Establish a strict organizational discipline in a wholehearted movement of the whole Party, whole state, and whole army under the Party’s sole leadership.
10. Inherit and fulfill the great deed of the Juche revolution, the great deed of the Songun revolution, started by the Great Leader respected comrade Kim Il Sung, and guided by the Great respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, which continues from generation to generation.6
“Zin Mi, you must eat a lot of kimchi because it is our national food,” her father instructs. “And if you eat kimchi daily, it provides you with half the daily intake of vitamins.”
“Yes!” replies Zin Mi. “If I eat kimchi, it also prevents aging and cancer!” Her father praises her knowledge.
Once this scene was completed, the camera shows the family moving the dining table back to the kitchen. It is full of foods that average North Koreans will never see in their daily lives: scrambled eggs, beef sausages, white rice, cooked vegetables, beef broth soup, and sweet rice cakes.
In another staged scene, the camera focuses on Zin Mi’s mother, who is standing in line with her co-workers (whom, in reality, she had never met before). The script has an official telling the assembled workers to congratulate Zin Mi’s mother because her daughter has joined the Children’s Union. Mansky films the handler saying, “Try not to think about the camera. Can you do that?” But the eight women workers and their supervisor look anything but natural. “Everyone smile when the comrade speaks to you!” they’re told.
At the end of the movie, Zin Mi is asked for her thoughts about joining the Children’s Union. Instinctively, she delves into a self-criticism session: she decries her shortcomings and promises to work harder for the Great Leader, tears flowing down her cheeks. The handlers can be heard saying, “Calm her down. Tell her everything will be all right.”
“Try to think of something good,” one suggests to her.
“Like what?” Zin Mi replies sadly.
Eventually the handlers ask her to recite a poem, and after wiping away her tears, Zin Mi is back on track:
Founded by Great Leader Kim Il Sung,
Kindled by Great Brilliant Commander Kim Jong Il,
Led by Respected Leader Kim Jong Un,
I joined the glorious Children’s Union and swear,
Always and everywhere,
To think and act in the spirit of the Great Generalissimos
And the teachings of Respected Leader Kim Jong Un
In order to become a reliable reservist of the
Revolutionary Juche movement for the building of Communism
Continuing from generation to generation,
I swear!
Mansky later recalled to an interviewer that he had filmed children all over the world, and all of the children had one thing in common: they were curious and always asked him questions. Except Zin Mi. “Throughout the whole shoot, Zin Mi never once looked at herself in the camera, and never once asked a question,” Mansky said. “It was like something out of science fiction.”7
When the movie was released to critical acclaim, North Korea lodged a formal protest with the Russian foreign ministry, and the North Korean propaganda machinery went into damage-containment mode. The Ri family were trotted out and swore that it was Mansky who had made them act out the scenes. They said they followed his orders only because they thought the documentary was being made in order to enhance cultural exchanges.
Most disturbing, perhaps, is Mansky’s suspicion that Zin Mi’s family didn’t actually live together. “I saw that women work and live at factories, children go to school and live at some sort of boarding school … and I have never seen a family walking down the street—mother, father, and a child—never. Only our family was walking down the streets together, for filming.”8
North Korean media subsequently reported that Zin Mi presented a flower to Kim Jong Un to allay suspicions that she might have been harmed. Still, Mansky says the fate of Zin Mi will “always be a weight on my heart.”9
Defectors’ Stories
Some thirty thousand North Korean defectors live in South Korea. Tens of thousands more are in hiding in China and parts of Southeast Asia. All of them risked their lives to escape North Korea. Crossing the shallow Amrok River (in China called the Yalu River) is the main way to escape North Korea. Brokers smuggle escapees into China, and the lucky ones make it to South Korea. Many North Korean women are sold into prostitution when they arrive in China as the price of leaving the country. China cracks down on North Korean refugees, and if they are caught, they’re almost always repatriated to North Korea.
An escapee who is forcibly returned to North Korea faces imprisonment and beatings, is sent to a reeducation camp, or, in the worst case, is executed. Because corruption is so rampant, some are released early after their families pay bribes. In fact, those who have hard currency can pretty much bribe their way through most situations.
Despite the information blockade, many North Koreans know something about their prosperous and free cousins in the South. Most North Koreans have surreptitiously watched South Korean TV. North Korean defectors only learned about the reality of everyday life in South Korea once they got to Seoul. In the beginning, many wondered if the buildings, avenues, and cars were all part of a huge movie set.
The harrowing stories of defectors offer unique insights into North Korea. Safe in the South, the defectors no longer have to act like avatars. Their accounts peel away the fabric of lies put out by North Korea.
Many of the defectors have thrived in South Korea; a large number also feel like second-class citizens. The younger ones adjust most rapidly, since they go to school and learn to speak in the Seoul dialect; older defectors are instantly identified because of their Pyongyang accent.
One of the biggest problems defectors face is adapting to South Korea’s super-competitive culture. In South Korea, pali, pali (fast, fast) is a fact of daily life. People who order food in a restaurant expect it to arrive in minutes. In the super-connected world that is modern South Korea, everything can be delivered quickly. You want to establish cable service in your home? It’s done within hours of your call. You want to get new prescription glasses? Less than an hour.
South Korea’s winner-take-all culture and very strong work ethic enabled it to emerge from the ashes of the Korean War to become the world’s eleventh-largest economy within the span of two generations. The social price for this has been very high, however. Among the OECD countries, South Korea has the highest suicide rates for teenagers and for men over age sixty-five. Making it to the top in South Korea involves intense competition and requires money and parental sacrifice.
For North Koreans living in the South, just surviving in this environment is hugely challenging. Moreover, they are largely on their own, unlike in the North, where the party is omnipresent. From birth, North Koreans are told what they can and cannot do. All jobs are assigned by the party. University exams? Only those from certain songbun (essentially, castes based on a family’s political, social, and economic background; see Chapter Two) can take the exams.
Those who had full careers in the North find life in South Korea very difficult. Integrating themselves into South Korea’s intensely networked and very competitive organizational culture is nearly impossible. A former North Korean policeman laments his life in South Korea, where he now works as a construction worker. In North Korea, he says, he was feared but also respected.
A very small number of North Korean defectors have opted to return to the North. One of them is Lim Ji-hyun (known as Jeon Hye Sung in North Korea), who, after her initial defection to the South in 2014, gained fame through South Korean reality and talk shows. In July 2017, however, a videotaped interview of Lim appeared on a North Korean government-run propaganda website. “Every single day of my life in the South was a hell,” said Lim. “When I was alone in a dark, cold room, I was heartbroken and I wept every day, missing my fatherland and my parents back home.”10 The South Korean government was unsure if she chose to go back or if she returned because the authorities threatened her family.
Another North Korean defector, Kim Ryen Hi, applied for political asylum in the Vietnamese embassy in Seoul in March 2016, asking for Vietnam’s help in returning to North Korea. She said that she had come to the South by mistake: on a trip to China in 2011, she claimed, she had met smugglers who told her that she could make money in South Korea and then return to the North.11
Defectors’ stories are critical in putting together the pieces of the North Korean puzzle. Yet corroborating defectors’ testimonies isn’t easy. Many tell South Korean officials what they want to hear. Shin Dong-hyuk, the subject of Blaine Harden’s best-seller Escape from Camp 14, said that he was tortured and that he watched his mother’s and brother’s execution in a prison camp. He also said that he was born in the camp. In 2015, however, “he admitted he left out some key parts of the story—like the fact that he spent most of his childhood across the Taedong river in Camp 18, a less draconian prison (although in North Korea, that’s a matter of degree). But, he says, the torture he described to Harden all happened, just in a different place and at a different time.”12
What is unmistakable is the thousands of voices that illustrate the brutal and dark side of everyday life in North Korea. Hyesonseo Lee, who wrote The Girl with Seven Names, escaped from North Korea in 2006 and has been active in helping to direct the world’s attention to the plight of North Koreans. “I want to establish a foundation that will help North Koreans not just now but over the longer term,” Lee said. “And it’s so important for South Koreans to understand the brutal conditions in the North.”13
In a widely viewed TED Talk in April 2014, Lee recounted how, after her own escape, she helped her family leave North Korea:
I took a flight back to China and headed toward the North Korean border. Since my family couldn’t speak Chinese, I had to guide them somehow through more than 2,000 miles in China, and then into Southeast Asia. The journey by bus took one week, and we were almost caught several times. One time, our bus was stopped and boarded by a Chinese police officer. He took everyone’s ID cards, and he started asking them questions. Since my family couldn’t understand Chinese, I thought my family was going to be arrested. As the Chinese officer approached my family, I impulsively stood up, and I told him that these are deaf and dumb people that I was chaperoning. He looked at me suspiciously, but luckily, he believed me.14
Lee Hark-joon is a South Korean journalist for the Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest and most influential newspaper. Lee wrote a landmark book on the journey of North Korean refugees, called Crossing Heaven’s Border. Lee is also the only journalist who has embedded himself with escapees—he joined a group of North Koreans who walked through China and into Laos.
“I was so worried that someone in the group may not be able to make it but I was sure of myself as I had completed my military service,” Lee said. “Surprisingly, I was the one who began to fall behind. The North Koreans’ passion for life and freedom helped them overcome their age and physical disadvantages. I was holding the group back so I asked them to leave me and go on. For them, being captured could lead to their repatriation to North Korea, but for me, my punishment would just be spending some time in a Chinese prison.”15
Among the many journalists who have covered North Korea, Anna Fifield of the Washington Post stands out. Based in Seoul, Tokyo, and now Beijing, Fifield has spent more than fifteen years covering North Korea and has made seven visits to Pyongyang. Author of The Great Successor—an in-depth look at the evolution of Kim Jong Un—Fifield authored an award-winning piece for the Washington Post called “Life Under Kim Jong Un” in November 2017. “Increasingly, North Koreans are not fleeing their totalitarian state because they are hungry, as they did during the 15 or so years following the outbreak of a devastating famine in the mid-1990s,” wrote Fifield. “Now, they are leaving because they are disillusioned.”16
One of the great ironies of the political left in South Korea is its near-total denial of North Korea’s gross human rights violations. Like prior progressive governments such as those led by presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, the current government of South Korean president Moon Jae-in continues to discourage North Korean defectors from speaking out about North Korea’s atrocious human rights record. Extreme leftists in South Korea constantly attack nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that attempt to shed light on North Korea’s brutal regime. At the same time, the South Korean left, including members of the Moon administration, attack any human rights infractions in the South itself.
Kim Seong-min, head of Free North Korea Radio, is a leading defector who has devoted his life to spreading freedom to North Koreans. When asked what he thinks compels Moon to ignore North Korea’s human rights, Kim surmises that it has to do with the South Korean government’s efforts to establish peace with North Korea. Moon “is very concerned about North Korea’s reactions. In order for him to achieve his goals, I think he believes there’s no real need to address contentious issues.”17 But the effect is that the South Korean left has lost its moral compass when it comes to North Korea, cowering under the guise of Korean nationalism.
Thae Yong Ho, who served as deputy ambassador in North Korea’s embassy in Britain, defected to South Korea in April 2016 and became the highest-ranking defector since Hwang Jang Yop, who fled North Korea in 1997. Hwang was a leading intellectual in North Korea and served in various high-level positions, including party secretary for international affairs and chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly. Thae has recounted his own story in a Korean best-seller, the title of which translates as “Thae Yong Ho’s testimony: the secret code of the third-floor secretariat.” In one of the most harrowing sections in his book, Thae writes about the truly evil nature of Kim Jong Un, who ordered the execution not only of his own uncle, Jang Song Thaek, but of more than fifteen government and party officials deemed close to Jang. According to Thae, some four hundred government officials and three hundred members of the armed forces were purged at the same time.18
In mid-November 2013, two of Jang’s closest advisors, Ri Yong Ha and Jang Su Gil, were executed by a fusillade from antiaircraft guns at the Kang Kon Military Academy—the same place where Jang was killed a month later. Ri was the first vice director of the party’s administrative bureau in charge of the security forces, while Jang Su Gil was believed to be a high-level official in the Ministry of People’s Security (MPS).19 According to Thae, the executions were witnessed by a number of top officials, including party secretaries and deputy secretaries and government ministers and vice ministers. A bus carrying lower-level officials who were also to witness the execution arrived as well. One of the people who got off that bus was Jang Song Thaek—which astonished many, given Jang’s stature under Kim Jong Il and the fact that he was his brother-in-law.20
During a press conference in January 2017, Thae Yong Ho said he thought Kim Jong Un’s regime wasn’t likely to last all that long, since corruption and discontent within the regime itself were hampering its efforts to control information from the outside.21 The value of Thae Yong Ho’s insights into the North Korean system is somewhat limited, since he wasn’t in Kim’s inner circle, but he did have direct experience with how the regime functioned—or, more often, malfunctioned.
In May 2015, Thae said, he received an encrypted message from a colleague at the North Korean mission in Paris telling him to expect a very important order from the top. Several messages later, he discovered that his mission was to buy tickets for Eric Clapton’s concert at Royal Albert Hall for Kim Jong Chul, Kim Jong Un’s older brother.
A diehard Clapton fan and an amateur guitarist, Jong Chul had no interest in becoming Great Leader himself; his father, Kim Jong Il, had seen from a young age that Jong Chul wasn’t cut out for politics. Jong Chul did, however, show total loyalty to his brother, who in return allowed him to travel the world to satisfy his musical interests.
It was clear early on that Kim Jong Un was destined to follow in his father’s path, and had Jung Chul shown even the minutest of political ambitions, there would have been a major power struggle with Jong Un. So Jong Chul played it smart: as long as he was able to live the life of a prince, with all the attendant privileges but none of the political power, he had everything he needed, and more. In some ways, Jong Chul is luckier than his younger brother, who has not only the power but also the burden of ruling North Korea. As despotic as Kim Jong Un is, he is ultimately responsible for what happens in North Korea. No one will dare challenge his authority or tell him he made a mistake. Deep inside, though, Jong Un is aware of both his successes and his failures.
As Thae Yong Ho tells the story, when Kim Jong Chul landed at Heathrow Airport before the Eric Clapton concert, he was met by Thae, and Jong Chul asked to go to a specific record shop. It was late in the day, and Thae told him as politely as he could that the shop was going to be closed by the time they made it into the city. All during the journey into London Jong Chul couldn’t let go of the idea, asking Thae, “If it’s closed, can’t you just knock on the door or call them? If a diplomat made a request, wouldn’t the owner come out? You don’t even have such connections?”22
When they arrived at the hotel, it was well past midnight, but Jong Chul wanted the trousers he was wearing to be dry-cleaned immediately so that he could wear them the next day. Told that the in-house laundry service was closed, he insisted he couldn’t wear any other pants, since the pair he was wearing was his favorite. Thae managed to have someone at the embassy find a dry cleaner that opened at 4:00 a.m., and the cleaned pair of trousers was delivered to Jong Chul’s hotel room before he woke up.
When Kim Jong Chul was ready to leave London after the concert, clutching the £2,400 electric guitar he had purchased, he told Thae how grateful he was for his help and said Thae should look him up when he returned to Pyongyang. Thae was glad and proud that he had accomplished the mission he had been tasked with and returned home a little giddy, expecting his two sons to share his moment of joy. Instead, they brought him back down to earth with a thump.
“We wondered where you were, Father, but you were escorting Kim Jong Chul,” one of his sons said. The son continued, “Average citizens are forbidden to listen to decrepit capitalist songs by order of Kim Jong Un, and students are even expelled if they listen to foreign songs. The Kim family ordered their people to endure the Arduous March [the North Korean famine in the mid-1990s], but they do whatever they want to do. Does it make sense to you that he spent thousands of dollars a day to be engrossed in decadent Western music?”23
Hearing his sons admonish him was a kick in the gut. “My children couldn’t hide their anger,” writes Thae. “While my generation looked up to the Kim family as gods, a new generation was being formed that held totally different views. I suddenly felt ashamed that I had aided Kim Jong Chul. It really wasn’t something to be proud of. It was as if a slave was serving his master.”24
Soldiers who defect to the South usually traverse the dangerous no-man’s-land across the mine-filled DMZ. A few have made it to South Korea by flying MiG fighters across the border. On November 13, 2017, however, a North Korean soldier named Oh Chung Sung, who was assigned to a unit near the Joint Security Area (the one place in the DMZ where North and South Korean forces as well as some U.S. troops are virtually face-to-face), drove his North Korean jeep right along the Military Demarcation Line separating the two Koreas. He stopped near the South Korean guard post some fifty meters from Freedom House—South Korea’s meeting point for inter-Korean contacts—and ran like a madman across the invisible line while being shot at by North Korean troops. South Korean soldiers eventually pulled the injured Oh to safety and helicoptered him to a South Korean hospital. South Korea’s most well-known emergency surgeon, Dr. Lee Jong-guk, later revealed that the soldier not only suffered from bullet wounds but also had pneumonia and “an enormous number” of parasitic worms in his intestines, some up to twenty-eight centimeters long.25
A year after his defection, Oh sat down with a journalist from Sankei Shimbun in Tokyo to talk about his perspective (the entire interview was reprinted by New Daily in Korean). “About 80 percent of my generation are apathetic toward politics and the leadership and I believe they don’t feel loyal to the regime,” he said.26 “The ration system or the state’s ability to provide welfare is totally bankrupt, so if you don’t have power or money, you die in North Korea.”27 He emphasized that everyone in North Korea looks out for themselves, and security officers or those who wield influence are paid bribes by citizens to look the other way. Oh added that he didn’t regret his defection. But the most likely scenario was that his immediate family—including his father, who was a brigadier general in the KPA—would have been executed by the regime or, in the best case, sent to one of North Korea’s penal colonies.
Overseas Slave Workers
The urge to escape North Korea can be triggered by several things: hunger, the search for freedom and money, the need to run away from a crime. The first two reasons have been by far the most common, though ever since the great famine of the mid-1990s subsided, most defectors aren’t fleeing North Korea because of hunger. Instead, they choose to defect for freedom—and money.
International sanctions haven’t really stifled the North Korean economy. Its resilience to foreign pressure stems from decades of coping with economic hardship, lax enforcement of sanctions (especially by China and under the Moon government in South Korea), and, above all, novel ways of making hard currency.
One model the regime has chosen involves siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars from overseas North Korean laborers. Exact figures are hard to come by, but by one calculation, North Korea “is able to make up to $2.3 billion in hard currency a year by sending some 100,000 or more workers abroad, according to estimates. Up to 80 per cent of them go to China and Russia, where they are employed in what the UN has called ‘slave-like conditions’ and give up to 90 per cent of their wages to Kim Jong Un’s regime.”28 Some North Korean laborers work in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Kim Seung Chul worked at timber farms in Siberia, toiling thirteen hours each day, and for a month’s work received $20.29 Other estimates of the amount the regime makes annually from these workers range from $200 million to $2 billion.30
“The workers wake up each morning on metal bunk beds in fluorescent-lit Chinese dormitories, North Koreans outsourced by their government to process seafood that ends up in American stores and homes,” wrote Tim Sullivan for the Associated Press. “This means Americans buying salmon for dinner at Walmart or ALDI may inadvertently have subsidized the North Korean government as it builds its nuclear weapons program.”31
Part of the reason North Korean workers are attractive to Chinese firms is lower labor costs. Sullivan interviewed one Chinese sales manager for a seafood processor who said that in his factory North Korean workers were paid roughly the same as Chinese workers, between $300 to $385 per month. But, noted Sullivan, “others say North Koreans are routinely paid about $300 a month compared to up to $540 for Chinese.”32 The North Korean workers see very little of the money they make—the North Korean government takes away 70 to 90 percent of their earnings.
UN Security Council Resolution 2375, adopted on September 11, 2017, after North Korea’s hydrogen bomb test, explicitly notes that “all Member States shall not provide work authorizations for DPRK nationals in their jurisdictions in connection with admission to their territories unless the Committee determines on a case-by-case basis in advance that employment of DPRK nationals in a member state’s jurisdiction is required for the delivery of humanitarian assistance, denuclearization or any other purpose consistent with the objectives of resolutions … or in connection with any contract or other transaction where its performance was prevented by reason of the measures imposed by this resolution or previous resolutions.”33
Despite the resolution, North Koreans continue to find their way to China, which happens only because the Chinese government decides to look the other way. A Sino–North Korean agreement stipulates that a North Korean worker can stay in China for only thirty days, but North Korea “issues passes valid for periods of from six months to a year, and China does not argue over this extended period of validity.”34
Yulia Kravchenko, a Russian housewife in Vladivostok, said that “North Korean workers are fast, cheap and very reliable, much better than Russian workers. They do nothing but work from morning until late at night.”35 A Vladivostok company promotes North Korean workers by saying, “Surprisingly, these people are hard-working and orderly. They will not take long rests from work, go on frequent cigarette breaks or shirk their duties.”36
Undercover reporting by the BBC revealed North Koreans working in Polish shipyards without any breaks. “You have to eat trash, you have to give up being a human being,” said one of the North Korean workers. A North Korean foreman working for a Polish company remarked that “when there are deadlines, we work without breaks. Not like the Polish, they work eight hours a day and then go home. We don’t, we work as long as we have to.”37 The BBC reporter secretly recorded one Polish manager saying that he continued to use North Korean laborers even though he “complained that it was getting harder to get permits for them.”38
The Gulags of North Korea
If Kim Jong Un wanted to take just one step to reassure the world that he was serious about economic reforms and truly making life better for the masses, all he would have to do is raze his gulags. Yet the moment he does, it’ll open a can of worms, because the gulags are the most potent symbols of immense oppression. While the circumstances are different, if Kim Jong Un opted to close all gulags, it would be equivalent to Stalin shuttering all Soviet gulags.
In February 2014, the UN Human Rights Council released an extraordinarily chilling report on North Korea’s unparalleled violations of basic human rights, in particular in its gulags. “Gross human rights violations in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea involving detention, executions and disappearances are characterized by a high degree of centralized coordination between different parts of the extensive security apparatus,” notes the report. “The use of torture is an established feature of the interrogation process in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, especially in cases involving political crimes. Starvation and other inhumane conditions of detention are deliberately imposed on suspects to increase the pressure on them to confess and to incriminate other persons.”39
A U.S. State Department report on human trafficking pointed to the forcible return of North Korean escapees to China by Chinese authorities, with horrible consequences: “These individuals, including potential trafficking victims, were sent to interrogation centers, where they were subjected to forced labor, torture, forced abortions, and sexual abuse by prison guards, and potentially sent on to prison camps.” It adds that, according to reports, “infants born to forcibly repatriated victims while in prison were killed.”40
Known as kwanliso, North Korea’s “political camps resemble the horrors of camps that totalitarian States established during the twentieth century … [and] between 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners are currently detained in four large political prison camps.”41 They are also known as total control zones, since their prisoners are completely separated from society and are essentially enslaved.
The conclusion of the UN Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is simple but powerful:
The commission carried out its inquiry with a view to ensuring full accountability, in particular where these violations may amount to crimes against humanity. The commission is neither a judicial body nor a prosecutor. It cannot make final determinations of individual criminal responsibility. It can, however, determine whether its findings constitute reasonable grounds establishing that crimes against humanity have been committed so as to merit a criminal investigation by a competent national or international organ of justice. According to that standard, the commission finds that the body of testimony and other information it received establishes that crimes against humanity have been committed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, pursuant to policies established at the highest level of the State. These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation. The commission further finds that crimes against humanity are ongoing in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their heart remain in place.42
Kwanliso, however, aren’t the only type of harsh prisons and gulags. NGO reports have identified six different types of prisons: kyohwaso (reeducation camps), kyoyangso (labor-reform centers), jipkyulso (collection centers for low-level criminals), rodong danryeondae (labor-training centers), and kuryujang (interrogation facilities).43 The kwanliso are the type most well known in the West, but the kyohwaso are equally brutal and inhumane. The kwanliso are run by the Ministry of State Security (MSS), whereas the kyohwaso are run by the Ministry of People’s Security (MPS). The MSS (known as the bowibu) is the secret police, a North Korean version of the former Soviet Union’s KGB or the SS under the Nazis. The MPS, or anjeonbu, is North Korea’s police agency, though it has much broader powers than the typical national police force.
The kwanliso are used to “preemptively purge, punish, and remove” political and social elements deemed as threats to the ruling party and the Kim dynasty.44 The kyohwaso house a general population, although in terms of how inmates are treated, they are as bad as the kwanliso. Former prisoners who escaped to South Korea commonly cite “grossly inadequate food rations, arduous and dangerous labor, absence of medical treatment, high rates of deaths in detention with offensive and culturally improper burial of the dead, and widespread and wrongful imprisonment.”45
In April 2017, the International Bar Association published a major finding on crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Kim family. It noted that political prison camps were established in the 1950s by Kim Il Sung “to eliminate the ‘seed’ of three generations of class enemies,” and hundreds of thousands of people have been sent to them over the past six decades, “with up to three generations of families detained together and forced into slave labor, mostly to work in mines, logging, and agriculture.”46
The unspeakable brutality highlighted in all these reports is confirmed by numerous testimonies from former inmates lucky enough to have been released or, in rare cases, to have escaped. Lee Eun Shil recounted the terrible conditions she had to live in: “People died after about six months. I’m not sure whether the cause was torture, but it was also incredibly unsanitary. Since you don’t have water, you collect your urine and use it as water to soften your hardened stool by rubbing and pressing with your hands.”47
According to the International Bar Association’s report, there are four political prisons in North Korea today: Camps 14, 15, 16, and 25. The UN commission noted that a new prison camp may have been built in 2007. The most infamous is Camp 15, in Yodok. Camp 14 is near Kaechon City, Camp 16 is near the Pungye-ri nuclear test site, and Camp 25 is near Chongjin City.
Ahn Myong Chol, the guard who worked in the now-closed Camp 22, said that it was common practice to kill an inmate to set an example and that “there were as many as 20 executions in a given year.”48 The International Bar Association report concludes that, based on its independent assessment, “we find that sufficient evidence exists to conclude that Kim Jong-un is responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder, extermination, enslavement, forcible transfer, imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, persecution, enforced disappearance and other inhumane acts.”49
In North Korea, anyone can be sent to a gulag. Kim Young Sun was imprisoned in Camp 15 from 1970 to 1979 simply because she was a friend of Sung Hye Rim, who was forced to divorce her husband so that Kim Jong Il could be with her. Kim didn’t want anyone who knew Hye Rim to speak of his relationship with her. “There’s no time to talk or see anyone else,” Young Sun said of her existence in the camp. “It’s just hell. You must do hard labor until nightfall.… There’s no hope. You get up at 3 a.m. and go off to work. Loggers often fall, break their bones, or get crushed by falling trees. People eat poisonous grass, roots, and mushrooms because they’re starving, and they eventually die.”50
One of the most heinous aspects of North Korea’s gulags is, as the UN report detailed, that up to three generations of family members can be incarcerated for crimes none of them committed. For example, if a man is incarcerated for political reasons, his children are incarcerated, too; a child unlucky enough to be born inside a camp to a confined parent is automatically considered a criminal. The children are told they’re in prison because of what their father did, and so they grow up despising him. When the children are finally adults and can think on their own, they come to realize that their father didn’t actually commit a crime. By then, of course, it’s too late—he may well be dead, whether from forced labor, disease, accident, or constant beatings. Certainly the psychological burden of being ostracized by his family was another example of mental torture.51
Ri Young Guk spent time in Camp 15. “If they say you’re slacking, they beat you on your back and your legs with twenty branches that are tied together,” said Ri. “Students died from such beatings. There are days when the so-called teachers actually smile, but when they have bad days, you wonder if it’s your time to die. Teachers considered us animals and expressed their pleasure or anger in any way they pleased.”52
According to Ahn, the former prison guard, about two thousand guards are used in each prison camp, including guards from the MSS. “In Camp 22, they imprisoned fifty thousand people. There are two military units on standby to put down possible uprisings, and there are six guard posts in the outer perimeter.”53
Escapees from these camps have recounted horrible experiences, both their own and ones they witnessed. A pregnant woman may be forced to abort her child by placing a board across her stomach; two inmates seesaw back and forth on the board until either she dies or the unborn child dies. Prisoners are allowed thirty minutes each week to get some sun; those who are caught eating grass during this time, however, are killed by guards who smash their heads with rifle butts. When one of the dogs that are raised by the guards inside the camp kills and eats a young child, the guards applaud the unit for making the dogs aggressive.54
No other country in the world has put into place a network of gulags and political prison camps like North Korea, but the camps are largely unknown to foreigners. Instead, Western media fawn over Kim Jong Un’s highly choreographed forays into the outside world, and they write articles about the jangmadang, the former black markets that over time were transformed into de facto marketplaces throughout North Korea. The North Korean economy is indeed changing. But that in no way alters the fact that North Korea remains a totalitarian state. As the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea asserted in a 2018 report,
North Korea’s political environment operates in an ideological framework supported by a system of political terror so regulated and rigid that organized resistance is nearly impossible under current circumstances. This social control system will continue to impede any meaningful improvement in human rights and prevent the general populace from having any influence on the regime’s decision-making process.55
Those lucky enough to escape from North Korea’s gulags are like the very few who managed to escape from Nazi death camps. It’s impossible to come up with an accurate figure for how many people have perished in North Korea’s gulags, but defectors have stated that the survival rate is very low. An average prisoner wakes up at 5 a.m. and works until 11 p.m. Thomas Buergenthal, a survivor of Auschwitz and a jurist who served on the International Court of Justice, commented, “I believe that the conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps and in my long professional career in the human rights field.”56 The fact that a survivor of one of the most atrocious death camps in human history has deemed the North Korean camps as bad as or worse than Nazi concentration camps begins to convey some sense of the severity of North Korea’s human rights abuses.
The Power of Money and Donju
Is it possible for gulags to coexist with de facto markets? If the state economy is no longer able to provide for its people, the answer is yes. With the collapse of the state economy during the great famine of the mid-1990s, when more than a million North Koreans died from starvation or related consequences, North Koreans had little choice but to fend for themselves. As the ration system collapsed, free markets, or jangmadang, sprang up throughout North Korea to sell food, goods, and information, and as previously noted, Kim Jong Un had no choice but to legalize them.
The jangmadang system today is arguably as powerful as the state economy. And it has led to the emergence of an entirely new class of nouveau riches, called donju, or money masters, over the past two decades. According to MBC News in Seoul, there are about ten thousand donju with a net worth of at least $100,000, and around two thousand have at least $1 million. And a hundred donju are believed to be worth $10 million or more.57
What is unique about the jangmadang and donju is that both are creatures of a failed state economy. Because Kim Jong Un can’t satisfy the demands of Pyongyang’s elites solely from state coffers, he has grudgingly accepted the existence of the jangmadang and donju. How long he is going to continue to tolerate them is unknown, although it seems clear that he currently sees them as a way of incentivizing a new cadre of supporters. The donju live in North Korea’s “parallel universe”—what Anna Fifield has called “Pyonghattan” (a mash-up of “Pyongyang” and “Manhattan”).58
But allowing the donju to prosper is a Faustian bargain. Kim Jong Un wants to retain all of the tyrannical tools at his disposal while using jangmadang to provide the masses with what he can’t give them: basic living standards. Much more alarming for the Kim family is that North Koreans no longer fear Jong Un as much as they feared his father or grandfather.
Kim Jong Un will never give up his gulags because they are the superglue that keeps his dictatorship in power. The problem is, he can’t afford to snuff out jangmadang either. And the power of money—highlighted by the swagger of the donju—is as strong as the power of fear. When money overtakes fear as the principal currency of coercion, the Kim dynasty’s iron grip on power will weaken. That the regime continues to allow jangmadang and turns a blind eye to the donju creates the risk that a North Korean fifth column will develop. Indeed, a survey of eighty-seven defectors who came over to South Korea in the period from 2017 to 2018 indicated that 60.9 percent of them had sold goods at jangmadang.59
The Arduous March of the mid- to late 1990s, in which as many as 1.5 million died because of famine and its effects, not only resulted in the collapse of the state rationing system but also led to the virtual meltdown of state banks. The disastrous currency reform of 2009 was the nail in the coffin. The donju began to proliferate when factories and state-run companies no longer received backing from the state. The donju acted as virtual banks, offering services that included loan sharking, money transfer, and currency exchange. Very rapidly, they established pawnshops, moved into apartment construction, began to offer venture capital, created networks for human trafficking, and engaged in illicit trade. Today, Travis Jeppesen, a frequent visitor to North Korea and author of See You Again in Pyongyang, estimates that there are four hundred sanctioned markets or jangmadang in North Korea that represent some sixty thousand vendors.60
Enormous money continues to be made from Sino–North Korean trade, and the donju are indispensable to its functioning. A defector recalled that “it is a well-known secret among border traders that some entrepreneurs eat $1,000 meals at restaurants in China or Russia with local associates.”61
Jeppesen writes, “My experiences in North Korea have taught me that the donju are the closest thing North Korea has to a dissident class. They are savvy and worldly and certainly don’t conform to the outside world’s image of the brainwashed Kim Jong Un fanatic; they don’t buy into the state’s propaganda.”62 The donju flaunt their wealth: “These new dreamers of North Korea don’t have revolution on their minds. Their dreams are wrapped up in business, deals, the attainment and sustenance of personal wealth.”63 Jeppesen also points to a fundamental flaw in North Korea. “[The donju’s] existence reveals the inevitable flaw that Kim Il Sung and his cohorts failed to discern when they were designing what to them seemed like their own unique form of socialism: the failure to do away with a class system.”64
In the end, however, the influence and limitations of the donju can perhaps be best illustrated by a verse from the classic hit song “Hotel California” by the Eagles: “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” Ironically, the donju are the least likely to support all-out economic reform in North Korea, since that would leave them without special privileges. Their love-hate relationship with the state, and more specifically with Kim Jong Un, is based on the fact that they can’t survive without Kim, but neither can they really take off with him.
The donju are the new elites of North Korea. They are cornering the market for three critical North Korean exports: coal, fisheries, and clothing. The showcase Ryomyong Street in Pyongyang, with its high-rise apartments, took just thirteen months to complete in April 2017 thanks to investments by the donju.65 But the donju are a double-edged sword for Kim. Even though they pay off party, military, and government officials so that they can continue to survive and prosper, their growing power comes at the expense of the Kim family’s iron grip.
North Korea’s Millennials: The Children of Jangmadang
One might logically wonder why North Koreans continue to put up with the Kim family and its police state. Kim Yoo Sung, who escaped from Giljoo county, Hamkyungbuk-do, in 2005, describes why it’s virtually impossible for an Arab Spring or a “people power” revolution to occur in North Korea.
Foreigners wonder why there is no anti-government movement to topple the dictatorship. Sometimes, they think it’s because we North Koreans are too stupid to carry out such an uprising. But ordinary North Koreans are simply too afraid to become part of an anti-government movement, because they know the truth: they cannot bring about change themselves.… If people went out into the streets and said something negative about Kim Jong Un or the government’s policies, they would be executed the moment they opened their mouths.66
There are many aspects of life in North Korea that the outside world will never know until the two Koreas are unified or the Kim dynasty collapses. North Korea, however, is no longer an enigma. Enough information has seeped out over the years for observers to see that Kim Jong Un is in a very perilous place.
Yes, he is in total control of the party, the armed forces, and security apparatuses, and he is more confident of his power than ever before. Like all dictators, he has learned the game of instilling fear in his people. This is especially true for the elites that are closest to him. At the same time, he knows how to appease them with material goods, foreign travel, and posh vacation homes, and also by allowing his underlings to fill their own coffers. The police state shows no signs of weakening anytime in the near future. North Korea will continue to be a totalitarian state.
The Arduous March, however, irreversibly broke the social contract that had existed during the Kim Il Sung era. Ingrained collectivism is the glue that holds North Korean society together, but it’s not nearly as strong as before.
All North Korean babies are sent to state-run nurseries when they are just three months old. From this point on they are brought up in collectives. In nursery school, toddlers learn songs praising Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and of course the Supreme Leader. In kindergarten, children learn to march to martial music. When they enter elementary school, all students must join the Youth League. A report put out by the South Korean government notes, “The Youth League receives the biggest attention since that’s when political indoctrination begins in earnest and since coming to power, Kim Jong Un has officially stressed the need to strengthen the activities of the Youth League.”67 This is where the songbun you were born into really begins to determine your collective life—whether you’ll become a party member or join a workers’ or farmers’ union. The regime makes a gargantuan effort to control society through the party’s tentacles, which reach every square inch of North Korea. Surveillance is nonstop. Officials can come into any household. Between twenty and forty households form an inminban, or people’s group, that monitors those within it. According to Amnesty International, this system locks in surveillance.
Each inminban shares the duty of monitoring its members, providing ideological education, and serving as a conduit for various mobilization campaigns. Every North Korean national is required to belong to an inminban. The group meets once or twice a week, attended by representatives of each household, who often tend to be women who do not work outside the home. Group leaders watch closely the behaviour and personal relations of residents under their supervision, and have the authority to visit homes at any time, day or night.68
While total control remains intact, the system is cracking from within. When a North Korean who defected in 2013 is asked by Anna Fifield what her first impression of Kim Jong Un was, she answers: “I was in my second year at the university when this person was introduced to us as our new leader. I thought it was a joke. Among my closest friends, we were calling him a piece of s——. Everyone thinks this, but you can only say it to your closest friends or to your parents if you know that they agree.”69 The same person recounted what she thought was the superglue that held the system together. “The secret to North Korea’s survival is the reign of terror. Why do you think North Korea has public executions? Why do you think they block all communications? Why do you think North Koreans leave, knowing that they will never see their families again? It shows how bad things are. All our rights as people have been stripped away.”70
Another defector, Kim Jae Young, recalls the first time she saw a South Korean TV drama: “I was in high school.… and I was very surprised. I could feel for the first time that South Koreans were living much better than us. It was shocking to see that young South Koreans of about the same age as me were living a completely different lifestyle.”71 Many North Koreans believe that their poverty is a result of international sanctions, not because of the corruption of the regime. And Jae Young never even thought of criticizing the leadership, since the Kims were thought to be gods.
After she escaped, she found out that North Korea was poor, and that she was not alone in that realization. “With the increasing levels of information coming into North Korea through foreign videos and radio, people are starting to realize that North Korea is much poorer than the outside world,” she says.72
The single biggest transformation in North Korean society since the great famine has been the spread of the jangmadang, as noted earlier in this chapter. Jieun Baek writes in the New York Times, “Today an estimated two-thirds of the population depends on the hundreds of street markets for food and other goods, including foreign media. A nascent market economy has taken root.”73
Other changes are creating fissures within North Korea as well. One of the most striking statistics that Baek writes about is that as many as two thousand phone calls are made illegally between the two Koreas every day.74 Cell phones that can connect with Chinese cellular networks are popular. But people know to keep most calls to just a minute or two. That way, North Korea’s constant surveillance won’t be able to trace the signals back to them.
People’s minds don’t change overnight, especially in a thick bubble like North Korea. Over time, though, as more information makes its way into society like a slow-moving stream, it begins to trigger doubt. These doubts turn into very basic questions, like: Are South Koreans really poorer than North Koreans?
Baek writes about Kim Ha Young, who says she was taught that South Koreans run around the streets naked. “South Koreans don’t go to school because they can’t pay tuition, and they die on the streets because they can’t pay for hospitals,” says Ha Young, “but as I watched Korean movies and shows, I thought to myself, ‘What kind of bullshit are the textbooks talking about?’ I quickly realized that South Korea was more developed than North Korea.”75
Liberty in North Korea, an NGO devoted to helping North Korean defectors, made an eye-opening documentary in 2017 called The Jangmadang Generation. In this powerful film, young North Koreans recount stories of dead bodies piling up in the streets during the great famine. They tell of imprisonment and torture, and of forced adulation of the Kim family. But the documentary also allows them to give voice to their aspirations.
No doubt many of them are like Min Kang, a self-made businessman who now lives in the South and whose dream is to run an inter-Korean travel agency when the country becomes unified.76 At a young age Kang was separated from his mother and learned to beg and to steal. Eventually, as more and more people around him became underground traders, he too became one. He made enough money to make a dash for China, where he lived for three years before coming to South Korea.
His message is a simple but critical reminder that North Koreans are people. “This is absolutely basic. But this is so basic that people [here] don’t think enough about it,” says Kang. “North Koreans have their own thoughts. If you look into their eyes, they will see you and you will see them, you feel something inside.”
Twenty-five-year-old Kim Danbi recalls that “in the winter, I’d put goods in a water bucket and take it to the river [the Amrok] and slide it across the ice. A Chinese trader would grab it and slide the money over to me.” This is how she began to learn about survival.
Joo Yang left North Korea in 2010. She recounts how, “at the height of the famine, many young girls, aged 16 and 17, were sold into forced marriages in China. When you woke up, another girl from the neighborhood had disappeared.” She adds, “If I didn’t do anything, I was going to starve, so we started trading. If you had rice, you made some rice cakes and sold them. If you had corn, you made corn flour noodles and sold them. So little by little, that’s how people started doing private business. I knew I had to make money, so I started thinking about business from the age of 14.” Today she’s a student at the prestigious Korea University.
Geum Ju left North Korea in 2008 and emphasizes that “since the government became poor, they couldn’t take care of us. We lost faith in the government and we knew we had to shape our own futures. That’s how I grew up.”
In one of the most poignant parts of the documentary, Geum Ju’s mother, Hyun Soo, explains why the jangmadang generation is, in her mind, fundamentally different from her own. “There was no food and we couldn’t provide books or pencils, so the children learned how to do business and they didn’t care much for the social controls,” Hyun Soo explains. “[So] they didn’t pay attention to rules. Our survival came first. The young generation woke up to this reality early on. They grew up seeing and experiencing all of the negative aspects of society, so they grew up to be bold and audacious.”
“We’re different from our parents. We had to figure out everything ourselves,” says Kang Nara. “The year I turned six, the Arduous March famine began, a lot of people died of starvation and cold, government officials at each level were siphoning off food for themselves, so citizens got less and less. In the end, there was almost nothing. No rations.”
The jangmadang generation won’t trigger a bottom-up revolution and cripple the Kim dynasty. They are the first generation, however, to question the rationale for why they live in a police state when the world is passing them by. All revolutions begin with a single doubt. Brought up during the great famine, this group of North Koreans know how much the state has failed them and continues to fail them.