TWO

WILL THE REAL KIM JONG UN PLEASE STAND UP?

Let There Be Light

A twenty-three-year-old woman who has been blind for many years is one of the hundreds of North Korean cataract patients operated on by a Nepalese doctor named Sanuk Ruit. She, like the other patients with bandages covering their eyes, is seated in a large hall.¹

The young woman is the first patient to have her bandages removed. As undercover National Geographic cameras record the moment, she holds her father’s hands in anticipation as an assistant peels off her bandages. Dr. Ruit asks her to open her eyes.

“Can you see?” her father asks.

“Yes, I can see very well, Father!” she shouts, and hugs him.

Any normal father would have hugged her back and thanked the medical team for restoring her eyesight.

This father, however, lives in North Korea. He faces the camera and says, “It’s all because of the Great General!”

Then the father turns back to his daughter and says in a trembling voice, “We must make a deep bow to our Great General for this! Thank you, Great General!”

Father and daughter stand in front of two large portraits of North Korea’s twin gods, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and bow their heads 90 degrees.

“We want to show our deepest gratitude to our Father, the Great General! We are most grateful to our Dear Leader!”

As they bow, the audience erupts in cheers to show their “spontaneous and ever-lasting” love for the Great Leader (Kim Il Sung) and the Dear Leader (Kim Jong Il, referred to also as the Great General).

“Manse! Manse!” Ten thousand years! Ten thousand years!

“Long live the Great Leader!”

The next patient is a thirty-five-year-old woman who works in a salt mine. When her bandages are removed and she is asked whether she can see, she shouts, “I can see! Great Leader, I will work harder at the salt mines. I will get more salt to bring you greater happiness!” In a very traditional Korean way, she prostrates herself in front of the portraits. As she begins to rise, tears flow down her cheeks.

An elderly woman who had been blind in her right eye walks over to the portraits after her bandages are removed. Overwhelmed with emotion, she bows her head and says, “Thank you very much! Thank you very much!”

In a land where cataract operations are a rarity, since the medical system for the masses is totally broken, North Koreans know in a heartbeat whom to thank for the return of their eyesight. And no, it’s not Dr. Ruit and his team. Here in North Korea, you’re supposedly living in an earthly paradise, as North Koreans always tell foreigners. Everything is provided by the enormous generosity of the Kim family. Two dead leaders are revered as gods, and the third to assume the throne is a living god.

The Royal Family, Aristocrats, and the Masses

No other country on the planet resembles the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It remains one of the most impoverished countries in Asia but, as previously noted, it has a growing nuclear arsenal—presently between thirty and sixty nuclear warheads, with annual production of three to five more. One U.S. government estimate suggests that North Korea has enough nuclear material—weapons-grade plutonium and enriched uranium—to build as many as twelve warheads annually.²

North Korea is the most militarized country in the world. All able-bodied men and women are expected to serve ten years and five to seven years, respectively, in the armed forces, although some students are allowed to finish their undergraduate studies and then serve only about five years in the military. Out of a population of 25 million, 1.2 million serve in the Korean People’s Army. Millions more serve in reserves, home guards, and youth brigades. A constant siege mentality permeates the country: accelerated labor campaigns are common, and strike force units specialize in rapid construction. Approximately 20–25 percent of the country’s GDP is devoted to defense, including WMD. All goods and services, in theory, are made to promote the goals of the state.

North Korea is also one of the largest criminal syndicates in the world: churning out counterfeit notes (such as fake U.S. $100 bills that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing); manufacturing and trading illicit drugs; running alcohol- and tobacco-smuggling rings; sending out slave laborers to Russia, China, and parts of the Middle East; and, increasingly, undertaking bank heists through computer hacking.

North Korea is the world’s only nominally hybrid communist state run by a family dynasty (see Figure 1). Initially founded on the basis of Marxism-Leninism but replaced by the ideologies of Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il and run by the same family since inception. The Kim dynasty began in 1945 when the Soviet Union tapped Kim Il Sung to lead northern Korea, which became a separate state in 1948. The mythology surrounding the Kim dynasty is too extensive to cover in its entirety here, except to emphasize that virtually every aspect of that mythology is based on lies and exaggerations.

No system of checks and balances exists in North Korea. Supreme power lies in the hands of only one person: Kim Jong Un. All others, including his wife, sister, brothers, and family elders, derive their privilege from their homage to Kim Jong Un. In order to maintain absolute power, the Kim family has resorted to brutal measures and an unparalleled police state. Every North Korean is beholden to the laws and regulations of the state except for the members of the Paektu bloodline—the direct descendants of the Kim dynasty that began with Kim Il Sung in 1948. The Kim family has ruled North Korea uninterrupted and with an iron fist since 1948. Although direct descendants of state-recognized revolutionaries and national heroes receive various favors, nothing compares to the aura surrounding the Paektu family tree. Political legitimacy stems from the Paektu bloodline.

Although Kim Jong Un is Kim Jong Il’s third son, his mother, Ko Yong Hui, was born in Osaka, Japan, to a Japanese mother and a Korean father. She moved with her family to North Korea when she was young. It’s ironic that the Supreme Leader’s mother was a Korean resident in Japan, given North Korea’s portrayal of the Japanese in the most negative terms.

Not only is the Kim family above the law, they live lavish lives totally separate from the masses. At the height of the great North Korean famine in the 1990s, Kim Jong Il asked his Japanese chef, Kenji Fujimoto, to fly to Tokyo via Beijing to buy his favorite sushi fish.

According to Fujimoto, Ko Yong Hui once recounted a story from when she was dating Kim Jong Il. “The two of them [Kim Jong Il and Ko Yong Hui] were riding in Kim’s Mercedes-Benz and listened to South Korean songs all night long,” writes Fujimoto, “and she [Ko Yung Hui] sang that song to us [Fujimoto]—‘Geuttae geusaram’ [The Person at That Time]—which was a major hit in South Korea.”³ The king and queen can listen to South Korean songs, but the masses can be sent to prison or reeducation camps if they do. Nor can ordinary people watch South Korean TV or movies—though many do, via illegally imported DVDs or thumb drives.

Kim Il Sung’s first wife, Kim Jong Suk, died when she was only thirty-two years old. Their son, Kim Jong Il, was brought up by his stepmother, who bore three children, including Kim Pyong Il, who was the spitting image of Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Il made sure, however, that Pyong Il would never assume the throne; beginning in the early 1970s, he was effectively exiled to various capitals in Eastern Europe as North Korea’s ambassador.

The son who did succeed Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il (also known as the Dear Leader), had four wives, although he was only officially married twice. Kim Jong Il’s first wife was Hong Il Chon, whom he married in 1966, and not much is known of her. He married Kim Yong Suk in 1975 and had a daughter, Sol Song, with her. He fell in love with a famous actress, Sung Hye Rim, who, as mentioned in Chapter One, was already married, but he forced her to divorce her husband. She bore him his oldest son, Kim Jong Nam. With Ko Yong Hui, Kim Jong Il had three more children: Kim Jong Chul, Kim Jong Un, and Kim Yo Jong.

North Korea allegedly is a totally classless society, but every single North Korean is classified from birth according to their parents’ backgrounds and political fealty, a system known as songbun.⁴ It is the most politically determined caste system ever created.

Songbun is divided into two major categories: birth songbun, or family ancestry, and social songbun, or job category. Birth songbun automatically categorizes people into one of five classes: (1) special class, (2) core class, (3) normal class, (4) wavering class, and (5) enemy class. These classes are divided further into fifty-one subcategories. Birth songbun determines every facet of a North Korean’s life.⁵ Those with ancestors born in South Korea or Japan are considered to be particularly untrustworthy, even enemies of the state. But these considerations don’t apply to the Kim family.

The special class is composed of the inner circle of the Kim dynasty, such as descendants of the guerrillas who fought with Kim Il Sung during the colonial era, those who served Kim Jong Il and their descendants, and Kim Jong Un’s closest circle. They are the super-elites of North Korea’s power hierarchy.

The core class comprises those who fought the Japanese during the colonial period and their descendants, Korean War veterans and their families, and “heroes” who have proved their loyalty and allegiance to the state.

The normal class is the largest of the five groups. It comprises workers, farmers, and intellectuals whose loyalty is generally accepted but not guaranteed.

Following them is the wavering class, or those who are under more intrusive surveillance. This class includes Korean-Japanese who were repatriated in the 1960s and early 1970s; criminals and their relatives, who by association are considered disloyal; and any other individual the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) or the Kim family believes to be untrustworthy.

Finally, the enemy class includes descendants of landowners, rich farmers, capitalists, or pro-Japanese sympathizers; members of anti-party factions (one of the main reasons for conducting intermittent purges within the party); defectors and their families; released political prisoners or those who were sent to reeducation camps; and those accused of spying or potential spies. In short, just about anyone can be categorized as an enemy of the state.

These categories are, in part, intended to abet North Korea’s messianic mission to purify and liberate the rest of the Korean Peninsula (i.e., South Korea) from decades of capitalism, residues of colonial rule, a society flowing with material goods, and a people who have lost their true Korean identity. South Koreans are deemed to be ethnically impure since they have tainted uri minjok, or “our race,” and hence must be cleansed and rectified.

Only the elites can live in Pyongyang. Here reside the leaders of the party, the KPA, the government ministries, security organizations, and major state-run companies, among others. According to their pecking order, they get daily, weekly, or monthly rations, such as rice or other staples, cooking oil, meat, and fish.

The super-elites live in opulent homes outfitted with the latest South Korean or Japanese electronic goods. They have access to special vacation resorts. They shop in hard-currency stores. Their children attend the best schools (including top universities such as Kim Il Sung University, Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies, and Kim Chaek University of Technology), receive private lessons in key subjects, and get choice assignments in the military. They receive privileged healthcare, including treatment in Paris, Beijing, Singapore, or Geneva if needed.

The Beloved Father and a Mafia Regime

The Kim dynasty consists of five concentric circles that reinforce one another and keep the Kim family in power (see Figure 2). At the core is its third king, Kim Jong Un. Every aspect of North Korean life is devoted to sustaining and strengthening the Kim dynasty. All else remains secondary. Surrounding this nucleus are four interconnected rings: the party and military elites; the three main classes, including interclass suspicions, within and between them; 24/7 surveillance on all North Koreans; and a massive detention and prison system including gulags. They reinforce and counterbalance each other so that ultimately only Kim is needed to keep things in check. But as the North Korean dictatorship has evolved and become more complex—for example, with the proliferation of markets throughout the country—maintaining these concentric circles demands much greater attention and resources. In the end, Kim’s Achilles’ heel is that he has to constantly supervise and juggle these concentric circles to assure his hold on power, but as new forces appear, Kim may not be able to control them as effectively as his father or his grandfather did.

Deification of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il as gods is the basis of the mythology that sustains the Kim dynasty. Their all-important teachings officially guide every aspect of life in North Korea, including political ideology, core principles, and social organization. Never mind that neither Kim Il Sung nor Kim Jong Il actually penned any of the hundreds of books and thousands of speeches attributed to them. Their words are just like the Ten Commandments.

In North Korea, the years are now counted from 1912, when the first Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, was born—Juche 1. Hence, 2019 is referred to officially as Juche 108. This method of reckoning time is part of North Korea’s pervasive Juche sasang, or self-reliance ideology.

B. R. Myers’s The Cleanest Race is one of the most penetrating studies of North Korea’s sociopolitical psychology to date. Myers examines how North Korea’s propaganda machinery built a mythology of the Korean race based on three pillars: constant struggles against foreign invaders, exploitation by the ruling classes, and salvation by the Kim family. The Kims must battle insidious contamination by foreign ideologies and customs, foremost among them being residues of Japanese colonialism, American imperialism, and contamination of the Korean race by the South Koreans.

According to Myers, the foundation of North Korea’s fixation with racial purity can be traced to Japanese colonialism, when Koreans were taught that they were an extension of Japan’s “uniquely pure and virtuous” Yamamoto race (although in practice the Japanese rulers looked down on Koreans as much lower than themselves). But the net result was the notion of a “super-race”—Koreans living in North Korea—that longed for salvation. And who is their savior?

“North Korea regards the country’s history as a long foreshadowing to Kim Il Sung,” writes Myers, “much as Christians see everything before the birth of Jesus as a Vorgeschichte or pre-history.”6 The KWP is an all-encompassing mother that looks after its children under the tutelage of Kim Il Sung and his direct descendants.

In April 2012, five months after the death of Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s constitution was revised to immortalize the recently deceased leader as the “Eternal Chairman of the National Defense Commission” (Kim Il Sung was already referred to as the “Eternal President”). In tandem with Kim Jong Un’s rise, the party newspaper Rodong Sinmun emphasized after the May 2016 Seventh Party Congress that “the propagation of Kim Il Sung–ism and Kim Jong Il–ism is our party’s supreme doctrine” and “eternal leadership ideology.”⁷

Yet ideology alone isn’t enough to sustain the Kim dynasty. Central to the well-being of the Kim family are the super-elites of North Korea (the top 1 percent of the party, military, bureaucracies, and state-run enterprises) and then, one rung down, the elites (who make up about the top 5 percent).

None of the top levels—Kim and his family, the super-elites, or the elites—can survive without some type of support from Office 39, which is essential to providing critical incentives to Kim’s core group of supporters. Office 39 is Kim Jong Un’s personal bank, where all hard-currency earnings are funneled and redistributed based on Kim’s instructions. It is the most important financial nerve system within the Kim dynasty.

Kim must ensure the loyalty of the super-elites and the elites with tangible goods and incentives. But at the same time, their loyalty is constantly tested: every house, office, and telephone of every member of these groups is surveilled 24/7. Big Brother has been perfected in North Korea. China is hard at work on a digitized monitoring system for its 1.4 billion citizens, but North Korea has a time-tested analog system, although the regime is putting into place a digital surveillance mechanism as a result of the expansion of digital technologies, such as more advanced mobile phones and very limited access to the internet. In North Korea, everyone needs a pass to travel from one city to another. No one can change jobs, switch residences, or get married without state approval. And, as we’ve seen, North Korea has its gulag system, where as many as 300,000 citizens are imprisoned under the most inhumane conditions—and where many perish.

North Korea’s five concentric circles are controlled by an omnipresent party that is based on Leninist power structures but run like a well-oiled fascist machine. Ironically, North Korea proclaims itself to be socialism’s paradise, but it rejected Marxism-Leninism and communism beginning in the early 1970s. Kim Il Sung Thought and Kim Jong Il Thought are the guiding ideologies of the North Korean state. It is communist only by dint of its Soviet heritage.

What holds these five circles together is North Korea’s growing nuclear weapons arsenal, since it acts as a shield against “dangerous” external enemies. The primary justification for the regime’s draconian political system is to defend itself against powerful adversaries such as the United States and its minions, like South Korea and Japan. Because Kim Jong Il first tested nuclear weapons and Kim Jong Un completed North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, the state is now impregnable. State propaganda constantly reminds North Koreans that only through the genius leadership of Kim is the DPRK able to fend off enemies and pursue its own unique brand of a powerful socialist state.

Moreover, no other single development since the Korean War—not North Korea’s 1.2 million conventional troops, not the long-range artilleries deployed around the 38th parallel, not even its cache of biochemical weapons—has given North Korea as much strategic leverage as nuclear weapons.

Now that North Korea is a successful nuclear power, Kim can afford to take calculated risks, such as taking steps toward inter-Korean détente and even normalization of ties with the United States. He will never give up nuclear weapons, but he will declare his intention of doing so with symbolic gestures such as alluding to dismantling the Yongbyon nuclear facility and the Tongchang-ri missile test site.

A Different Kind of Leader

South Korean president Moon Jae-in believes firmly that Kim is ready to dismantle his nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles so long as the United States meets him halfway. Many proponents of engagement have been arguing—some since the mid-1980s—that North Korea is on the cusp of major economic reforms, like those undertaken in China. Kim Jong Un, they assert, is ready to open up North Korea.

The centrally planned economy began to crumble beginning in the late 1970s and reached its deathbed with the breakup of the USSR and the downfall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1990–1991. Today, it couldn’t function without a huge black market that has, over time, morphed into the ubiquitous jangmadang. When the North Korean economy began to collapse in earnest soon after Kim Jong Il formally assumed power in 1994, he refused to divert critical resources to the civilian economic sector. Instead, he was hell-bent on expediting North Korea’s clandestine nuclear weapons program and beefing up his ballistic missile arsenal. As stopgap measures to alleviate hunger, Kim grudgingly accepted pockets of black markets where people could access goods and services the state no longer provided. However, Kim Jong Il felt that the proliferation of jangmadang was fraught with dangers and cracked down on these markets by forcibly closing them and implementing anti-corruption drives to highlight the scourge of unintended capitalism.

“If we stop buying the shaky argument that North Korea is socialist, and begin seeing it as a country with an ultranationalist ideology and a repressive authoritarian state,” argues Rüdiger Frank, a prominent North Korea watcher, “then even cases like South Korea under Park Chung-hee or Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew look somewhat familiar.”⁸ He goes on to say that “authoritarian economic miracles like Singapore, China, or South Korea under Park Chung-hee show that if he plays his hand well, Kim Jong Un can have his cake and eat it, too—reform the economy while keeping his monopolistic grip on power.”⁹ This is at the very heart of the argument that Kim Jong Un can transform North Korea into the next Asian tiger.

Frank is correct only to the extent that China and Vietnam adopted economic reforms without giving up one-party rule. It’s crucial to remember, however, that none of the Asian tigers—South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong—were totalitarian states when they began their accelerated economic development. Indeed, Deng Xiaoping was able to implement reforms only after Mao Zedong died in 1976 and the so-called Gang of Four was purged. Vietnam’s doi moi, or reform policy, was possible because communist Vietnam has never been ruled by a family dynasty fueled by paranoid hypernationalism.

The critical question is whether Kim Jong Un will be a completely different type of leader compared to his grandfather and father and adopt structural economic reforms by doing away with the very foundations of his political legitimacy.

According to Park Young-ja, head of North Korean studies at the Korea Institute for National Unification, “Kim Jong Un is preparing to be in power for the next forty-plus years” and wants to show his people that the DPRK “can become a major economic powerhouse” by 2030.¹⁰ He also covets genuine international legitimacy more than his predecessors did, not content merely with the outrageous personality cult that permeates all levels of North Korean society. He wants to be seen in the eyes of world leaders as a serious, thoughtful, and decisive figure—a leader who will transform North Korea.

“I can do business with Mr. Gorbachev!” proclaimed Margaret Thatcher on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street after she met Mikhail Gorbachev right before he became secretary general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This is what Kim Jong Un wants to hear from Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Shinzo Abe, and most of all Moon Jae-in. Yet he is trapped in the very system that created him—a brutal dictatorship in the guise of a family dynasty.

Kim wants to become the Deng Xiaoping—arguably the most consequential world leader of the twentieth century—of North Korea, but without giving up any control of the levers of power. Nor does he want to give up the omnipresent personality cult of the Kim dynasty, symbolized by the Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il badges that all North Korean adults must wear. He wants to keep the most perverse and pervasive caste system in the world, one that categorizes every single North Korean according to political background and fealty. He wants to keep the police-state apparatus, which is essential to maintaining the Kim dynasty. While corruption is rampant in North Korea, the tentacles of the state are far-reaching, repressive, and brutally efficient when they have to be. Above all, he wants to keep his nuclear weapons. Weakening, much less eradicating, any of these pillars will undo the foundations of the system that supports him.

Yet increasingly Kim is being viewed as a reformer who has already come out of the closet. In 2013 he announced the so-called byungjin noseon, or “parallel lines”—a policy that stressed the twin goals of economic development and becoming a nuclear power. In April 2018, Kim dropped byungjin noseon and declared that henceforth the DPRK would focus like a laser on economic development, since North Korea had successfully become a nuclear power. As Rüdiger Frank concludes:

In the very distant future, this could help him to fulfill the vision that his grandfather Kim Il Sung harbored when he was Kim Jong Un’s age: national unification under North Korean leadership, driven by a superior military force and unhindered by an inferior economy. It would be a mistake to forget that this is the ultimate goal behind every North Korean policy.¹¹

The prevailing assumption in the Moon administration’s approach to inter-Korean relations is that, given the enormous economic gap between the two Koreas, South Korea is the richer older brother who looks after his much poorer, angrier, and lost younger brother. Nothing could be further from the truth, because Kim Jong Un is betting on the long game: none of the living autocratic or democratic leaders with a stake on the Korean Peninsula is going to be in power twenty to thirty years from now. South Koreans, for example, elect a new leader every five years in an increasingly polarized political environment. But Kim is only thirty-eight and is planning to still be around decades from now. So time, according to Kim, is on his side.

No country with nuclear weapons has given them up under duress. Intermittent progress in nuclear negotiations between U.S. president Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un is entirely feasible. But totally denuclearizing North Korea through negotiations is a pipe dream.

Kim Jong Un’s grand strategy lies in convincing the United States that he’s willing to dismantle his nuclear weapons and ICBMs over the longer term while simultaneously locking in inter-Korean détente to ensure a steady increase in South Korean investments and a political “disarmament” in South Korea. Because the left in South Korea shares North Korea’s penchant for hypernationalism, it is possible that so long as the progressives retain power, denuclearization will be pushed sideways with just enough lip service to satisfy the United States. It’s a risky game, but one that Moon is willing to play with Kim, creating a de facto united front against the United States.

The success of Kim’s grand strategy hinges on whether Trump buys a deal that papers over highly technical verification requirements to announce a diplomatic victory. If Trump is convinced that he can announce a diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea, details are peripheral. As a leader who doesn’t pay attention to his own intelligence agencies but relies on his gut and pro-Trump comments on Fox News, Trump has preemptively taken credit for “massive foreign policy achievements” such as his meetings with Kim Jong Un.

“You know, deals are deals, okay? Whether it’s a real estate or a retail deal, it doesn’t matter,” said Trump to Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes, in connection with his approach to North Korea.¹² When asked by Stahl about the repression, assassinations, and gulags in North Korea, Trump replied, “Sure. I know all of these things. I mean—I’m not a baby. I know these things.” But he stressed that “I get along with him [Kim Jong Un] really well. I have a good energy with him. I have a good chemistry with him. Look at the terrible threats that were made. No more threats. No more threats.”¹³

For a leader who otherwise has little empathy, it’s startling how much Trump connects with repressive leaders: Vladimir Putin, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Kim Jong Un. So long as he bonds with them on a personal level, that’s all that really matters to him. As far as Trump is concerned, a nuclear deal is just like a real estate deal, and he is always the “Great Negotiator.”

Personal ties between heads of state can be essential, but just because Trump likes Kim, it doesn’t erase the fact that the North Korean leader runs a vicious police state, nor does it justify the enormous price the North Korean people continue to pay under the Kim dynasty. No one chooses to live in a brutal dictatorship or a totalitarian state. Even if Trump has “bonded” with Kim—he’s actually said he’s in love with him—it in no way changes the fact that North Korea remains a rogue state with the worst human rights record in the world.

The Arduous March

The biggest cost that the vast majority of North Koreans continue to bear is living in one of the most repressive countries in the world. Since the mid-1990s, but especially during the early 2000s, the number of North Korean escapees to South Korea increased sharply. Today, some thirty thousand have resettled in South Korea while tens of thousands continue to live in hiding in China. Under Kim Jong Un’s rule, the numbers of North Korean defectors have decreased sharply due to harsher crackdowns. The spike in North Korean escapees peaked in 2005 and has subsided as the food situation gradually stabilized. Most of the escapees since early 2012, right after Kim assumed power, chose to leave North Korea because of the stifling dictatorship.

Masaji Ishikawa’s father was a Korean living in Japan, and his mother was Japanese. Ishikawa was born in Japan, but in 1960, when he was a boy, his family moved to North Korea as part of a massive repatriation effort. In 1996, during the height of the great famine, he escaped, leaving behind his wife and children. In his account of the escape, Ishikawa writes that as he stood on the bank of the river dividing North Korea and China, he thought about the thousands of North Koreans like him, and wondered if he would survive the escape. “What difference does it make?” he thought. “If I remain in North Korea, I’ll die of starvation. It’s as simple as that. At least this way there’s a chance—a chance I’ll make it, that I will be able to rescue my family or at least help them somehow.”¹⁴ But after Ishikawa fled, his wife died of starvation, and he has had no contact with his children since 1998.

“I often think about what would have become of me if I’d stayed in North Korea,” writes Ishikawa. “I would probably have starved too. But at least I’d have died in someone’s arms with my family gathered around me. We’d have said our goodbyes. What chance of that now?”¹⁵

During the Kim Jong Il era, the biggest challenge facing North Korea was coping with, and recovering from, the great famine of 1995–1998. The general consensus is that 1 million to as many as 3 million people died, although estimates vary.¹⁶ The North Korean government, for example, maintains that some 235,000 died in the famine. An academic study published in Population and Development Review in June 2001 estimated that total deaths from the famine between 1995 and 1998 were between 600,000 and 1 million.¹⁷ But Andrew S. Natsios, former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and author of The Great North Korean Famine, believes that between 2.5 million and 3.5 million deaths occurred.¹⁸ A fully accurate accounting of the total deaths from the famine is impossible, given the unreliability and unavailability of North Korean data. But whatever the final number, Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland write:

North Korea’s food problems pose a distinctive set of challenges for the international community. In many humanitarian crises, the international community faces failed states or conflict settings that make it difficult to provide assistance. In North Korea, by contrast, the international community faces a “hard” state that has repeatedly shown a willingness to allow its population to suffer extreme deprivation.… North Korea’s tragedy has many roots, but a famine of this magnitude could only have occurred in a system in which the political leadership was insulated from events on the ground and lacking in accountability to its people. The failure of the North Korean government to guarantee adequate supplies of food to its population is inextricably linked to the government’s denial of a battery of rights to its citizens: to confront public officials with their shortcomings; to publicize information that allows government officials to know the extent of distress; and to organize collectively in the face of injustice and deprivation.¹⁹

Fifteen percent of North Korea’s farmland was destroyed by flooding in 1995, and the government blames the floods for the humanitarian disaster.²⁰ But Natsios points out that North Korea’s food distribution system was already broken when the famine occurred, and he believes structural causes are largely responsible for the catastrophe. Many deaths could have been avoided if Kim Jong Il had allowed massive and direct food assistance, but it was only in 1996–1997, when the worst part of the famine was nearly over, that foreign food aid was at last permitted to trickle in. “All famines take place in a political context,” says Natsios, “and there has been no famine in a democracy. In a democracy, people take action long before that point. Famines take place under centralized governments precisely because information can be hidden.”²¹

Politically, North Korea began to accentuate the all-pervasive ideology of Juche, or self-reliance ideology, in the early 1970s, with the intention of highlighting its independence from the great powers. It was this ideology that gradually morphed into Kim Il Sung–ism and later Kim Jong Il–ism. Economically, the focus was on jaryeok gaengsaeng, a self-reliant economy. So when harvests began to dwindle, Kim Jong Il’s response was triage: the first priority was to feed the party, government, and military elites living in Pyongyang. The state was no longer responsible for feeding the masses, who were forced to fend for themselves. Rations for farmers were cut, journalist Jordan Weissmann writes, and, “faced with the unappealing prospect of going hungry, farmers began hiding their grain. In 1996, the World Food Program found that half the country’s corn crop had gone missing.”²² When foreign food aid eventually began to flow into North Korea, “much of it was stolen by well-connected elites, who re-sold the aid at marked-up prices. Farmers started doing the same thing with their own crops. As a result, food prices soared, and the poorest continued to starve.”²³ Even as the vast majority of the population suffered enormously during the Arduous March, none of the top elites or the Kim family reduced their huge appetites for luxury goods. Kim Jong Il and his family continued to live like billionaires.

As the famine expanded, the minister of agriculture became aware that massive numbers of deaths were taking place. Too afraid to report it up the chain of command, he asked Hwang Jang Yop, the party’s secretary for international affairs and the primary author of the Juche ideology, to pass on the bad news to Kim Jong Il. Hwang agreed.

As a routine meeting was nearing its end, Hwang told the Dear Leader about the mounting famine and extreme food shortages. Kim Jong Il was outraged that Hwang had even mentioned it. He slammed his hands on the table and stormed out. That was the last time Hwang or anyone else at that level spoke to Kim about the famine.²⁴ Kim Jong Il didn’t want any responsibility for killing up to 1.5 million North Koreans. The economy, he always argued, was the purview of the premier and his cabinet. Kim himself would focus only on military and political issues. This is how the Dear Leader, the father of all North Koreans, deflected the most basic requirement of leadership: feeding his own people.

From 1994, when he officially succeeded Kim Il Sung, until his death in 2011, Kim Jong Il visited China seven times. As China prodded him to adopt economic reforms, Kim toyed with the idea from time to time. In 2001 Kim visited the Pudong district of Shanghai and remarked, “Shanghai has been totally transformed!”²⁵ North Korean watchers were sure that this was a signal that the Dear Leader was open to real economic reforms. Chinese premier Zhu Rongzhi, who accompanied Kim on his Shanghai tour, cautiously asked him about the possibility of implementing reforms in North Korea, but the Dear Leader didn’t reply.

When Kim revisited Beijing five years later, he was “unable to sleep” because of the shocking speed and breadth of China’s economic transformation, according to Chinese press reports.²⁶ Kim’s trip was followed up by Jang Song Thaek—his pro-reformist brother-in-law, widely regarded as the main conduit with China. Even though Jang urged Kim to follow China’s path, Kim Jong Il didn’t want to.

The abject failure of Kim Jong Il’s economic policies had political and structural causes, such as aftershocks from the downfall of the Soviet Union and the accompanying loss of subsidized energy and other assistance. As economist Nicholas Eberstadt argued back in 2011, that didn’t necessarily have to lead to failure:

The counterexample of Vietnam—another socialist Asian economy heavily dependent on Soviet subsidies in the late 1980s—proves as much. According to the World Bank, Vietnam’s per capita income rose by over 150 percent between 1990 and 2007, and its nominal per capita exports (in US dollars) rose by a factor of over 7 times during those same years, whereas North Korea’s nominal per capita exports slumped by over 25 percent between 1990 and 2007.²⁷

Eberstadt also emphasized two other critical factors that resulted in the collapse of the North Korean economy under Kim Jong Il. First, there was “planning without plans” or “planning without facts.” Second, the policy of “military first,” or songun jeongchi, resulted in a “monstrous military burden.”²⁸ In short, North Korea was drafting economic strategies without the requisite resources and realistic data.

North Korea spends around 20–25 percent of its GDP on its military, according to the U.S. State Department.²⁹ (Officially, the North Korean government reported that it earmarked 15.9 percent of its 2017 budget for the military, although observers deem this figure to be too low.³⁰) While accurate figures are unavailable given the paucity and unreliability of North Korean data, the 20–25 percent figure means that approximately $7–10 billion was spent on defense in 2017, given that the DPRK’s GDP was estimated to be $40 billion in that year.³¹

The South Korean government estimates that North Korea has so far spent a total of between $1.1 billion and $3.2 billion on its nuclear and other WMD programs (although here too, accurate figures are nearly impossible to discern). Recall, also, that this is a country that isn’t even able to feed its people and is nearly totally dependent on China for oil and food aid. The upshot is that Kim Jong Il’s enduring economic legacy is simple and dark. Kim had no intentions of emulating China’s reforms no matter what he said about the PRC’s remarkable economic transformation. For Kim Jong Il, the most vital goal was ensuring the survival of the Kim dynasty and his military-first policy. Nothing else mattered. Nothing at all.

The Little Comrade General

Getting glimpses, even fleeting ones, into the Kim dynasty other than state propaganda is very rare. Recently, Kim Jong Un’s unprecedented meetings with Moon and Trump—which would have been unthinkable in his father’s time, even though Kim Jong Il did participate in summits with former South Korean presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun—have shed light on his personality. The Dear Leader was very cautious, much more of a hermit. Kim Jong Un is also a hermit but a more strategic one.

Born on January 8, 1983, Kim Jong Un from the beginning had a very strong personality, with a penchant for winning. He had an older half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, who by tradition as the first son would have been the first choice to succeed Kim Jong Il. Kim Jong Nam’s chances of becoming king evaporated in May 2001 when he was caught with a bagful of hundred-dollar bills at Narita Airport in Tokyo. Traveling under a forged passport from the Dominican Republic, Kim Jong Nam was planning to visit Tokyo Disneyland with his four-year-old son, Sol Song, his wife, and their child’s nanny. Kim Jong Il was livid, both at his oldest son’s sheer stupidity and also for showing the world that the Kim family wasn’t entirely made of premium revolutionary stock. Becoming the laughingstock of the world wasn’t the worst part; what really angered Kim Jong Il was that the incident happened in Japan, Korea’s old colonial master and, after the United States, the most hated country in North Korea.

As noted previously, one of the rare firsthand accounts of the Kim family comes from Kenji Fujimoto, who lived in North Korea on and off for a decade beginning in the mid-1980s. Fujimoto ultimately escaped North Korea and made his way back to Japan, where he wrote best-sellers about his time with the Kim family—and where he feared being assassinated by North Korean agents. Years later he returned to North Korea and, with tears flowing down his cheeks, apologized to Kim Jong Un for his transgressions and begged forgiveness. Because Fujimoto had been the Supreme Leader’s playmate as a child, Kim Jong Un forgave him, and he now runs a highly successful Japanese restaurant in Pyongyang. Still, Fujimoto’s ultimate fate depends on the whims of Kim Jong Un.

During his years as a companion to Kim Jong Il’s sons, Fujimoto played basketball with Kim Jong Un and his older brother Kim Jong Chul. According to Fujimoto, Kim Jong Il once said of Jong Chul, “He doesn’t cut it. He’s like a girl.”³² Fujimoto never once saw the third brother, Jong Nam, in any of the palaces in Pyongyang or in the countryside.

There is a photo of a young Kim Jong Un dressed in full military regalia. As befitting a prince—and the future crown prince—he was addressed as “Little Comrade General” by those around him. He deeply resented being called “little” and insisted that he was his brother’s equal.

On January 8, 1992, officials and family members gathered for the celebration of Kim Jong Un’s ninth birthday. During the festivities, the famous Bocheonbo Orchestra, at Kim Jong Il’s direction, played a song written especially for Kim Jong Un, called “Footstep.” This song was the earliest known homage to Kim Jong Un, although songs were written for Kim Jong Il’s other children as well.

Thump, thump, thump, footsteps coming

Our general’s footsteps,

Spreading the energy, flowing from February

Onward, thump, thump, thump

Step by step, the stronger you walk

The whole nation’s mountains and rivers welcome them

Thump, thump, thump.³³

Even in his early teens, Kim’s urge to win was very strong. After a basketball game, Kim praised those who played well while criticizing others, sometimes harshly. Once he asked Fujimoto if he hadn’t been too hard on a player, and Fujimoto replied, “You have to get angry when you have to. Otherwise, how will their techniques improve?” Kim was mightily pleased.

“That’s right, Fujimoto!” said Kim with a big smile on his face.³⁴

Kim, like his sister and brother, was schooled in Switzerland. Between 1998 and 2000 he was a student at Liebefeld-Steinhölzli school in Koeniz, south of Bern, where he was known by the alias “Pak Un.” Students at the time remembered him as a fun classmate; one recalled that “he had a sense of humor and got on well with everyone, even those pupils who came from countries who were enemies of North Korea.”³⁵ His former teacher Michel Riesen told NBC’s Today that he was a “good student but not an extraordinary one.”³⁶ Fujimoto recalls that Kim Jong Un returned frequently to North Korea while studying in Switzerland, and spent only five months out of each year at school.

When Kim Jong Un succeeded his father in 2011, speculations abounded on whether his Swiss experience could be a harbinger of a more reform-oriented North Korea. It’s impossible to gauge how his studies in Switzerland affected Kim, but it would be misleading to read too much into his foreign experiences. Indeed, the most important education he received was after he returned to North Korea and began to be seriously groomed for the succession.

Becoming Deng Xiaoping?

Louis XIV’s famous dictum “L’état c’est moi,” the personification of the principle of divine right, runs even deeper in North Korea. For Kim Jong Un is not just the rightful inheritor of the throne: he is heir to two gods.

Both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are embalmed like Lenin. Two of the most auspicious holidays in North Korea are Kim Il Sung’s birthday, April 15, known as Taeyang Jeol, or the Day of the Sun, and Kim Jong Il’s birthday, February 16, celebrated as Gwangmyeong Jeol, or the Day of the Shining Star. Kim Jong Un was born on January 8, 1983, but so far, his birthday has not been turned into a major national holiday.

Much more relevant is whether Kim Jong Un is going to undo the legacies of his father and his grandfather. Will he embark on pathbreaking economic reforms by emulating China’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—a fig leaf for adopting market economic principles? Is he going to startle the world and his people by ultimately giving up his precious nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles? Most importantly, is he willing to give his people enough freedom to basically do what they want to do so long as they stay loyal to the regime? Can Kim Jong Un undo his gulags and still survive?

The Moon government earnestly believes that Kim is a reformist. Moon himself believes that Kim has already done a major U-turn.

“I profoundly respect the determination and actions by Chairman Kim,” Moon said in Pyongyang during a joint press conference with Kim in September 2018, and added, “Chairman Kim has clearly shown the way to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and we have agreed on the vision of freeing the Peninsula from nuclear weapons, nuclear threat and war.”³⁷ This was about three months after Kim and Trump had met for the first time, and Moon urged everyone to redouble their efforts to schedule a second Kim-Trump summit so that “denuclearization and the peace process on the Korean Peninsula make significant headway.”³⁸ Moon also emphasized that “a new order is about to take shape on the Korean Peninsula. This new order on the Peninsula will lead to a new order in Northeast Asia.”³⁹ Moon’s comments reflected three themes that were emphasized by the South Korean government in 2018 about events on the Korean Peninsula: peace is at hand; North Korea is committed to denuclearization; and a bright new era is dawning for the Korean people.

There is little doubt that Kim Jong Un is stylistically very different from his father. He is more urbane and nuanced, and understands the enormous value of branding and image-making. So the fundamental question remains: Is Kim Jong Un North Korea’s Mikhail Gorbachev or Deng Xiaoping?

Kim will never seek to emulate Gorbachev, since Gorbachev’s reforms led not only to his downfall but also to the collapse of the Soviet Union (something Russian president Vladimir Putin called the biggest historical mistake of the twentieth century). The more appropriate model is Deng Xiaoping’s market-style reforms (which began with the establishment of special economic zones) or Vietnam’s adoption of similar reforms.

Moon is very eager to host Kim in Seoul to demonstrate that the Korean peace train is well on track. His affinity for Kim, however, has not only blinded him to reality, it has also led to the mushrooming of pro–Kim Jong Un groups in South Korea. Die-hard leftists and North Korean sympathizers in South Korea put up billboards heralding the Supreme Leader’s prospective visit to Seoul. South Korea’s public TV channel hosted a program highlighting why Kim Jong Un was such an incredibly different young leader.

When Moon visited Kim in Pyongyang, Kim dangled the possibility of making a landmark visit to Seoul by the end of 2018. Kim didn’t show up, but according to South Korea’s Blue House, he sent a personal letter to Moon in the last days of 2018 conveying his disappointment at having been unable to visit Seoul that year. In the letter, Kim told Moon that he would try hard to make it to Seoul in 2019.

Kim also met with U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo four times in 2018, in addition to his meeting with Trump in June of that year. Trump was very eager for a second summit, which was held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February 2019. Trump chose to walk away rather than agree to a bad deal, and the Hanoi meeting illustrated once again the perils of two self-obsessed leaders convinced that they alone could change the other’s mindset.

Domestically, Kim has built ski resorts, amusement parks, and high-end restaurants, but they’re primarily for propaganda purposes. During his many inspection tours, Kim talks about producing quality consumer goods for the masses. He has refurbished Pyongyang with new apartments and a North Korean version of Silicon Valley.

Kim is brutal and smart, and he genuinely wants to transform North Korea into an economic powerhouse; he believes he can do so without loosening his grip on power or giving up his nuclear weapons. Although he is caricatured abroad as an overweight dictator with a crazy haircut, that focus is not only wrong but woefully simplistic. At the same time, magnifying Kim’s alleged reformist tendencies and the abiding belief that he will give up his nuclear weapons in order to devote his undivided attention to economic development is also a mistake.

“He is seeking the kind of rapid economic development growth seen in China,” argues Lee Jeong-seok, a former South Korean minister of unification and a key national security advisor during the Roh Moo-hyun government. “We have looked only on the nuclear side of Kim Jong Un’s rule, trying hard not to look at the other side. He is ready to bargain away nuclear weapons for the sake of economic development. If he were content with just feeding his people three meals a day, he would not give up his nuclear weapons.”⁴⁰ Such statements are typical of South Korean experts who are convinced of Kim’s underlying reformist inclinations.

After Kim’s third meeting with Xi Jinping on June 20, 2018, a week after Kim’s summit with Trump, the progressive Hankyoreh Sinmun reported that Kim was on the verge of instituting economic reforms through the twin pillars of modernization of farming and railway construction. Reporting on Kim’s visit to Beijing’s traffic control center and a key infrastructure investment corporation, the newspaper noted that these visits “illustrated the North Korean leadership’s very high interest in railways and infrastructure modernization, which are critical to economic development.”⁴¹

As this was all happening in South Korea in 2018, in North Korean in April a video was shown to lower-level North Korean officials in state-run companies to highlight just how much heartache the Supreme Leader was feeling when economic goals weren’t met. In the video, a person purported to be Kim Jong Un stands on a seashore and stares at the horizon. Tears flow down his cheeks. The narrator says, “[The Supreme Leader] is crying because he is feeling heavy in his chest because of the lack and unevenness of reforms in order to build a strong nation!” Wrote the newspaper Chosun Ilbo, “It is significant that the video was shown to officials in the countryside and managers in state-run firms rather than central party members whose loyalties are high.” The paper speculated that the party wanted to instill guilt in the minds of these managers by showing the tears of Kim Jong Un, who is treated as a deity in North Korea.⁴²

Mike Hay is a Western lawyer who practiced in North Korea for twelve years. Unlike other foreigners who stay for limited periods, Hay was deeply involved in a variety of business enterprises in Pyongyang. Speaking of his colleagues, Hay recalled that “they were excellent English speakers, all graduates of Kim Il Sung University College of Law, with considerable experience of interacting with foreign entities and companies.”⁴³ One way he survived and prospered was to never talk about political subjects or the leadership and to always abide by local customs. Hay pulled out of North Korea as international sanctions mounted and foreign clients dried up; he joined a law firm in Seoul. He remains adamant, however, that given the chance, North Korea can prosper.

“The DPRK does not give a rat’s ass about sanctions, and the current state of play seems to bear that up. The economic development—the construction, the gorgeous restaurants, the emerging middle class, the money available—is all working with sanctions.”⁴⁴ It’s virgin territory for foreign firms if, and when, the North opens up to the world, he says. “They have the stuff [minerals] in the ground but don’t have the equipment to get it out of the ground: there is the opportunity awaiting foreign investors.”⁴⁵

Hay says that there is every reason to believe that North Korea could be radically transformed economically under the right circumstances. But Kim Jong Un faces an existential dilemma: if the state is to prosper, he needs to open up the country, but the moment that opening reaches the point of no return, his dynasty will be imperiled. Many argue that China and Vietnam undertook reforms while maintaining their communist systems. That is a fair statement. Both Hanoi and Beijing, however, weren’t run by a cold-blooded family dynasty that is corrupt to the core and demands total obeisance from its people.

Kim Jong Un’s Catch-22

Since his rise to power in December 2011, Kim has stressed “worldwide trends,” an approach very different from his father’s emphasis on Juche ideology. Kim, of course, maintains the importance of Kim Il Sung Thought and Kim Jong Il Thought to justify his legitimacy and the Kim dynasty’s rule. But within the confines of the North Korean system, Kim is remarkably pragmatic.

In 2002, Kim Jong Il announced the so-called July 1 Economic Management Improvement Measures, which partially recognized market economic functions. He did so because as the state’s central planning continued to fail, small markets proliferated and the black market increased exponentially in size. By giving collective farms and other working units some autonomy and officially opening state-sanctioned comprehensive markets, the state believed it would still be able to exert control over them. As these policies began to bear fruit, however, the boundary between the planned economy and the informal economy blurred far too rapidly for Kim Jong Il’s tastes.

People began to open businesses outside of the sanctioned comprehensive markets, such as ad hoc, alleyway, and mobile shops, and there was a boom in individual economic activities. Specifically, wide-ranging service businesses began to flourish, such as karaoke bars, PC game rooms, private lodgings, movers, bathhouses, restaurants, repair shops, and bike and motorcycle deliveries. Some factories and enterprises entered into the fray to make greater margins or to entice investments from the donju so that they could afford to pay a percentage of the profits to the state.⁴⁶

As the informal economic sector continued to grow, the regime realized that it might overtake the command economy, so the July 1 Measures were formally discarded in the second half of 2005.

On November 30, 2009, North Korea announced currency reforms and introduced new banknotes, but this triggered massive pushback from North Koreans, who stood to lose 80 percent of the net value of existing notes. In a highly unusual move, the regime withdrew this policy after two months. Subsequently, the party secretary in charge of the economy, who only followed Kim Jong Il’s orders, was made the fall guy and executed. Kim Jong Il had wanted to showcase currency reform to bolster Kim Jong Un’s image, but it backfired completely. The policy was supposed to introduce the masses to Kim Jong Un’s leadership skills, since he had only been groomed to succeed Kim Jong Il for a short period, starting in earnest after Kim’s stroke in 2008. Not only was the general population against the measure, so were the elites. And Kim Jong Il could ill afford to anger the elites whose support would be essential in elevating his number-three son to the throne.

This fiasco was yet another reminder that the planned economy didn’t function. For Kim Jong Un, it meant that without the help of the donju, his dreams of enacting economic reforms weren’t likely to succeed. So he had to look the other way and allow them to continue their quasi-informal activities.

Originally functioning as loan sharks and black-market currency swappers, the donju began to act as key financial middlemen. Given the absence of lending institutions, the donju have expanded to provide loans and money transfers, financial transactions, collateral-based financing, and angel investors for new enterprises.⁴⁷

Since April 2018, when Kim announced that North Korea would focus exclusively on economic development, he has stressed the importance of finding a unique North Korean model for economic development and expanding it nationwide. Farmers are allowed to keep more of their harvests; factories have more leeway to make their own decisions on quality control, prices, and wages; and a greater number of direct business-to-business interactions among small enterprises are authorized.

Economic change was unavoidable. With the downfall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, North Korea began experimenting with very limited economic reforms. It set up special economic zones (SEZs) and opened the Mount Kumgang tourist region through an investment made by the Hyundai group and the Kaesong Industrial Complex as a symbol of inter-Korean economic cooperation. In practice, however, none of the SEZs first set up by Kim Jong Il or, later, by Kim Jong Un have taken off. Kim Jong Il was unwilling to make a political decision since he was afraid of the socioeconomic consequences. Under Kim Jong Un, ongoing international sanctions and an inability to shift key resources in a shrinking economy have stymied SEZs.

Under Kim Jong Il, piecemeal efforts at opening the economy were like “mosquito net” reforms, designed to filter out undesirable elements such as foreign capital, technology, and ideas, since he had no interest in reforming the broken North Korean economy.⁴⁸ Kim Jong Un believes that he can eat his cake and have it too. That is, he acts as if he’s going to give up his nuclear weapons while locking South Korea into a web of irreversible inter-Korean projects, exploiting the opportunities tendered by a softening of South Korea’s national security resolve, and enacting a series of controlled economic reforms, all while keeping in place the system that sustains his dynasty—the world’s most Orwellian police state, a caste system that affects every single North Korean, a 1.2 million–strong military, and the gulags that imprison hundreds of thousands of North Koreans in inhumane conditions.

What he wants and thinks he can achieve is rapid economic growth while retaining the privileges, power, and influence he currently enjoys. Can his huge criminal syndicate be transformed into more legitimate businesses? It is possible in bits and pieces. But structural reforms are extremely risky, since the framework of control has already been weakened by the infiltration of hard currency to all levels of North Korean society and decades of numbing indoctrination that no one really believes anymore; additional reforms would only further weaken the framework.

How much freedom is Kim willing to give to the masses? To what extent will he allow relatively free information flows? There are some 5 million to 6 million cell phones being used in North Korea today, which means that about 25 percent of the population has them. Of course, they can’t make international calls, and there’s no internet connection for the masses. In 2010, 1,024 internet addresses were put under the control of Star Joint Venture, a Pyongyang-based company owned partly by Thailand’s Loxley Pacific.⁴⁹ According to Recorded Future, an internet threat intelligence company, a few North Koreans (the top “0.1 percent”) have access to the internet. North Koreans gain access through their nine top-level .kp domains, China Netcom, and a Russian satellite company.⁵⁰

A recent assessment by Recorded Future noted that “North Korea’s ruling elite are technologically savvy, use a full range of older and cutting-edge computers, phones, and devices, use the internet as a tool for sanctions circumvention, and recently shifted to embrace Chinese social networking services over Western ones.”⁵¹ This report also mentioned that North Korean senior leaders with internet access had much greater operational security awareness than they did in 2017 and that several countries were likely to be hosting North Korean workers involved in the information economy, including China, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Mozambique, Kenya, Thailand, and Indonesia.⁵²

North Korea operates an intranet through which people have access to officially sanctioned services and apps but ordinary citizens are denied internet connections. Even though Kim Jong Un knows that he can’t really modernize his country without opening up to the internet, he also realizes that enabling the masses to freely connect with the outside world would open a floodgate he wouldn’t be able to control. If average North Koreans accessed the internet like the citizens of China and Vietnam do, the entire edifice of lies they’ve been told all their lives, such as the “heavenly genius” of the Kim family, will come tumbling down. And even Kim Jong Un won’t be able to massacre 25 million North Koreans.

The apparatus of Kim’s police state remains unchallenged, but the level of corruption at all levels of the government, the military, and the party long ago passed the point of no return. What passed for centrally planned economic policies or, more recently, five-year plans can’t keep pace with the hundreds of jangmadang that serve as the main conduit for the exchange of goods and services. The rise of small markets and the thirst for hard currency have replaced Kim Il Sung Thought and Kim Jong Il Thought as the lubricant for the Kim dynasty’s machinery.

According to Gareth Leather and Krystal Tan of Capital Economics, “While North Korea’s natural resources, geographical location and low labor costs mean its economy has plenty of potential, Kim Jong Un’s hopes of North Korea emulating the economic achievements of Vietnam are slim.”⁵³

Seoul’s KBS News has reported, based on a Chinese source, that Kim Jong Un recently set up an office within the party called the Reform and Opening Leaders Department and asked the Chinese Communist Party for support. While this report has not been independently verified, it said that “North Korea is believed to be recruiting personnel for the department, and Pak Tae Song, deputy chairman of the Korean Workers’ Party, who visited China in May 2018 to observe China’s scientific and technological development, and others are likely to be involved.”⁵⁴

Whether Kim Jong Un is going to make an effort to emulate China, or even Vietnam, is an open question. “Reform and opening up could be highly damaging to political stability. International investors will be extremely skeptical of Pyongyang, while the country’s solipsistic attitude to the world will make it very difficult [to] create trust and mutually beneficial investment schemes,” writes Peter Ward of NK News. Consequently, “South Korean government-backed ‘cooperation’ is likely to form the bulk of any future investment ‘boom.’”⁵⁵

Like Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who spearheaded his Vision 2030 initiative to transform Saudi Arabia into an economic powerhouse, Kim faces huge structural challenges. But Kim’s problems are even more pronounced, because while Crown Prince Salman can be replaced, in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea Kim himself is irreplaceable. Short of a coup led by key leaders in the party and the military, he cannot be ousted.

Ultimately, Kim cannot undertake massive economic reforms without allowing the free flow of information, because unfettered economic transactions depend on it. Moreover, the political caste system that enslaves all North Koreans except for the super-elites cannot continue to exist if Kim is serious about systemic economic reforms. Free will is, after all, humanity’s most powerful weapon, even if at present it is repressed in North Korea like nowhere else.

What Kim is most afraid of isn’t the United States or its South Korean lackeys. It’s the specter of a single North Korean who has the courage to say “No more!,” like the lone individual who faced down a tank in the middle of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

North Korea is changing under Kim Jong Un, but it is changing within the confines of what is for all intents and purposes a movie set, like in The Truman Show. If Kim really believes in transforming North Korea, then he must set his sights far beyond his Potemkin village, Pyongyang, and go for broke.