The Great Successor

by Fifield, Anna;

  Hyon, the high school student in Hyesan, was a native capitalist and an ambitious member of the Jangmadang Generation. He was born near the border with China in 1994, when Kim Jong Un was ten years old.

  He never thought about university. He didn’t worry about mandatory military service either. He was from a family with good political standing, so he used his grandfather’s connections in the police to fake some documents and avoid being conscripted. He wanted money, and he wanted freedom. He found both on the road.

  All these goods coming in from China need to be transported, whether over the river into North Korea or to the hundreds of markets scattered around the country. As a result, a bustling logistics industry has grown up to support the markets.

  Travel within the country had traditionally been tightly controlled, with people prevented from going outside their county or province without the necessary permits. It was a way of keeping the population under control and limiting the flow of information. But the rules have eased, and palms can be more easily greased under Kim Jong Un.

  Thanks to his grandfather’s political links, Hyon was also able to use his grandfather’s networks to get travel permits to move freely around North Korea. And because his mother had escaped to China, he had access to outside funds.

  So he used $1,500 that his mother had sent him—the fruits of her own entrepreneurial efforts over the river—to lease a truck and start a transportation business with two friends.

  Never mind that private vehicle ownership is still not allowed in North Korea. When there’s money to be made, rules can easily be bent. Vehicles technically belong to state institutions. But managers at state factories, at state companies, or in military units can often be convinced to allow employees to use their pool cars or trucks in return for fees and a share of the profits.

  A taxi or a minibus that had been officially assigned to a factory suddenly becomes a “servi-cha”—a combination of “service” and the Korean word for “car”—that will take paying passengers places, whether across town or across the country.

  A truck assigned to a farm can easily become a delivery vehicle for market wholesalers, trundling over potholed roads and laden with imported consumer goods or homegrown harvests. Trains were once the main method of transportation, but they are slow and unreliable because of the lack of electricity and an aging infrastructure. Trucks are now preferred.

  Since the servi-cha and trucks are officially registered as state vehicles, they are not bound by the usual restrictions to stay within a certain geographical area. When the drivers approach checkpoints, the guards check if they’ve prepared their bribes by asking them if they’ve done their “homework.” Those who don’t “do their homework” are liable, in the code language of the checkpoints, to have to “stay and finish their homework” or have their cargo confiscated.7 Everyone has an incentive to make this system work.

  Vehicles registered to powerful entities like the Ministry for the Protection of the State are particularly lucrative when repurposed as they can travel long distances without the worry of being held up at checkpoints.

  This new transport service has been helped along by another crucial tool of the global logistics industry—and another thing that was, until relatively recently, banned in North Korea: the cell phone.

  Markets used to be the preserve of runner merchants, traders who would physically take their goods to the bricks-and-mortar market and try to find customers for them. Now, a merchant needs only a cell phone. She or he can talk to wholesale and retail merchants to agree on prices and quantities and then call truck or bus drivers to arrange for delivery. The runner merchant has been replaced by the sedentary merchant—someone who sits back and conducts all the business over the phone, selling goods and calling in people to move them around.8

  Cell phones have also helped to stabilize prices. People know when a new shipment of rice is coming across the border, so they’ll wait rather than pay high prices when stocks are low.

  In this new environment, Hyon began driving around the country, delivering goods and staying with his aunts or other relatives in various cities, including the capital of Pyongyang. He also acted as a supply chain manager for his aunt, who was married to a military official and lived in Pyongyang. Being an officer in the military used to be a plum job in North Korea, but now it was his aunt who was the main earner in the house. “Because of his position, my uncle could provide protection for my aunt’s business. It’s the women who can really make money,” Hyon said.

  For his part in the chain, Hyon would use middlemen in rural areas to buy stock for his aunt in Pyongyang to sell in the markets there at a higher price. Through the middlemen, he would buy huge quantities of beans to be delivered in increments to avoid raising suspicions.

  “I couldn’t just go out and buy two tons of beans. Because there was a shortage of crops in North Korea, you can’t be seen with that much food,” Hyon, who is tall and athletic and doesn’t look like he suffered from childhood malnutrition, told me over coffee in a trendy café in southern Seoul where reggae was blaring from the speakers. He was attending university in the South and looked the part in shiny white trainers and immaculately coifed hair.

  Food was a relatively safe business to be involved in. Trading in, say, DVD players was more profitable but much more sensitive. DVD players with USB drives from China were very popular and would fetch about twenty dollars each in North Korea. And well-connected traders could bring in whole train cars of DVD players—sometimes four thousand at a time—and make a lot of money. “But you had to be really powerful to deal in the DVD players because they were illegal,” Hyon told me.

  Whether the trade was in beans or DVD players, every part of the process involved business-minded people.

  Hyon would order the beans and send people to pack them into sacks. Then he’d hire porters to deliver the sacks to the train station. He would bribe the guards to turn a blind eye to the shipments—usually three or four kilograms of rice per ton of beans. And he would mete out the deliveries, sometimes over a month, so it wasn’t obvious just how much he was shipping. There were teams in Pyongyang who could be hired to offload the beans once they reached the station there and deliver them to his aunt.

  “Of course you have to smooth the way with money,” he said, describing how he conducted business. “But you also need connections. I bribed powerful officials to allow things to be offloaded in Pyongyang.”

  Then his aunt would send him money and instructions for the next order, and he would do it all over again.

  Hyon threw himself into the opportunities that marketization presented. Many others adapted out of pure necessity.

  Jung-a, who also lived on the border, was just eleven years old when Kim Jong Un became the leader of North Korea, so she was born into an environment that was becoming increasingly market driven. She was twelve when her father deserted and escaped from North Korea, leaving her mother with no choice but to turn to the markets to try to make a living.

  Still, her mother, Mrs. Cho, was hopeful when Kim Jong Un took over. “We thought that because he was a young leader, maybe things would get better, they would become easier,” she told me after they’d escaped to South Korea. But the Great Successor gave them nothing. “I had to do everything myself,” she said.

  To make ends meet in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, Jung-a had to drop out of school. She finished elementary but never started middle school.

  Instead, several times a week during planting and harvest seasons, and for regular weeding and tending in between, Jung-a and her mother would walk for about three hours from their house in the center of Hoeryong to their small plot of land in the foothills of the mountains, where they grew corn.

  They would skip breakfast and leave their house at 4:00 a.m. to arrive at their plot, which covered about one-third of an acre, at 7:00 a.m. or so. The land technically belonged to the state pig farm, but the farm manager was renting it out in small sections to locals like Mrs. Cho—f
or a handsome sum. Mrs. Cho, a small woman with a pained expression engraved into her face, agreed to pay the manager 440 pounds of corn to rent the plot for the year. Of course, the manager wasn’t paying these earnings to the state so that Kim Jong Un could fund his “Socialist Paradise.” He was selling the corn at the market, like everyone else.

  After their morning’s work, Mrs. Cho and Jung-a would stop for lunch—of a sort. They usually ate corn noodles with a soup made from ground beans. They ate it cold to avoid the cost, in both time and money, of lighting a fire to heat it. In the summer, they might have a little seasonal spinach or cucumber on the side. Then they’d get back to work.

  Sometimes they’d splash out and cook rice for dinner, but usually they just ate more cold noodles. Then, at around 8:00 p.m., they would start the trek back home.

  At harvest time, they hired a man with a cart to deliver the corn payment to the farm manager on the make, and then he would haul the rest of it into town so Mrs. Cho could sell it in the market. Many people ate corn—corn noodles, corn “rice,” corn husk soup—because it was so much cheaper than rice.

  With the money Mrs. Cho made from selling corn in the markets, she would buy soybeans—she’d tried growing them on her plot, but they were too labor intensive—and with the beans, she’d make tofu at home.

  With eight pounds of beans, which cost 18,000 North Korean won in the market, she could make tofu that she could sell for 30,000 won.

  It was Jung-a’s job to sell the tofu from their house. “I couldn’t play with my friends; I missed going to school,” she told me when I went to visit her and her mother in their tiny apartment outside Seoul. “It was so boring being home all the time, and I was very envious when I saw my friends coming home for lunch with their schoolbags.”

  But for Mrs. Cho, keeping Jung-a at home not only helped to bring in money but also saved on another expense: school. North Korea is nominally a socialist state, where housing, education, and healthcare are theoretically free. In practice, though, everything comes at a price.

  Teachers ask students to pay them fees in return for instruction. The fees are not usually denominated in cash but in goods: soybeans, rabbit skins, things that the teacher can then sell for a profit in the market.

  Technically, students could continue going to school if they didn’t pay the fees, but they wouldn’t get much of an education. They’d have to sit in the back of the class, if they were lucky, and would get no attention at all. The ostracism means that students whose parents can’t afford these “fees” usually stop going to school.

  Mrs. Cho felt bad that her daughter was lonely and at home, so she bought a simple television set that she could have on during the day. But it was a miserable existence for Jung-a.

  After buying firewood and food for themselves—once they sold all the tofu, they bought cheaper food to eat—Mrs. Cho would make a 5,000-won profit on a good day, enough for two pounds of rice. On a bad day, because of bean price fluctuations or insufficient demand, they made no profit at all.

  Their lives saw a lot of toil for very little gain. Mrs. Cho soon found herself with constant back pain and became increasingly reliant on her daughter to earn their tiny income. So, one day, despite everything she’d heard about South Korea being full of beggars and torture being widespread, Mrs. Cho and Jung-a decided to flee.

  That’s how we were able to talk in their new home. Mrs. Cho, who now had the obligatory perm of a middle-aged South Korean woman, was pounding her lower back with her fists and grimacing as we sat on the floor talking. Jung-a was asleep on a futon beside us. She was now eighteen and had been up studying all night. She was trying to catch up on her education, to get a high school diploma so she could compete in South Korea’s schooling-obsessed society.

  Even after she arrived in South Korea, Mrs. Cho continued to hope that life in North Korea would get better. “I learned that he was educated overseas, so I thought that he was going to open the door to the outside world,” she said wistfully of Kim Jong Un.

  But the news she heard from home suggested that, for people like her, life was just as tough as it had always been.

  Selling homemade tofu and carting beans around the country were businesses that existed in a kind of gray zone in North Korea. It was always dicey because such transactions could easily be deemed illegal if Mrs. Cho or Hyon got the wrong checkpoint guard or couldn’t muster the right bribe.

  Yet there was nothing gray about what Mr. Kang was doing. His business was definitely illegal, no matter which way you looked at it.

  He’d been a drug kingpin in Hoeryong, just across the river from China and the farthest part of the country from Pyongyang. For decades, this part of the nation was considered deprived even by the standards of North Korea. People considered politically unreliable were exiled there if they were lucky and to the nearby concentration camp if they were not.

  Like many people on the border, Mr. Kang took advantage of his location at the edge of a booming China. He had a Chinese cell phone that could pick up a signal from Chinese cell towers, and he made money by connecting North Koreans with people in the outside world, including South Korea. He arranged for family members in North Korea to cross the border to be reunited, briefly, with relatives in South Korea. And he was one of many people involved in the money transfer business, arranging for remittances from family members in the outside world to get to designated recipients—all for a hefty fee, of course. The commission on money transfers generally works out to 30 percent.

  But the riskiest, and most lucrative, of all Mr. Kang’s enterprises was selling ice, a methamphetamine that was popular across the river in China and is widely used in North Korea, not least because of its appetite-suppressing abilities. Entrepreneurial scientists have turned the chemical factories of Hamhung, once a core part of the socialist state, into private meth labs. It is the North Korean equivalent of Breaking Bad.

  Drug dealing was a risky business. The standard sentence for drug dealers and manufacturers is a couple of years in a prison camp, although there have also been reports of executions for those running large-scale drug rings.

  But if things go right, it’s a lot more profitable than clocking in at your job in a dormant factory while your wife sells homemade tofu or rice cakes in the market.

  In the years leading up to Kim Jong Un’s succession, Mr. Kang had built a thriving business. His wife stopped working as a teacher and started working in the drug-dealing business. They had a baby. Drugs and money were flowing, and they were living well. They had a Japanese fridge, a leather sofa from China, and two TVs, one of them from Japan. They had a maid who would cook and clean for them in return for two pounds of rice a day.

  When their daughter started going to school, the teachers doted on her. They lavished her with special attention and took pains to make sure she understood the lessons properly. She was treated better than the children of high-ranking officials because Mr. Kang was giving the teacher one hundred Chinese yuan a month—about fifteen dollars—and treating her to expensive spreads in local restaurants.

  When, in 2010, he first began hearing about Kim Jong Un, Mr. Kang was also hopeful, thinking that this young man would lead North Korea to open up to the outside world. The opposite happened. Security all along the border was tightened as the authorities tried to batten down the hatches ahead of the second transition of power.

  Mr. Kang’s export business got more difficult as China cracked down on drug usage and the North Korean state accelerated preparations for the Great Succession. So he rerouted it: the drugs that once flowed into China now stayed at home to be consumed entirely by North Koreans.

  “Even though they tried to crack down on that too after Kim Jong Un came in, it’s impossible to stop anyone from doing anything in North Korea,” Mr. Kang told me in a restaurant near his new home outside Seoul. The hot plate between us sizzled with meat and kimchi. “You can always bribe your way out.”

  Mr. Kang escaped to South Korea in 2014, when he
was forty-two. When I met him, he looked like any other ordinary, middle-aged man; he was wearing a red hiking parka and black hiking pants. He had not been hiking. A perm gave his hair some extra lift. To wash down his pork, he ordered a bottle of soju—not the ordinary soju but the one with the red cap: the strong one.

  Kim Jong Un’s efforts to clamp down on illegal drugs did not work. At the time he left North Korea, Mr. Kang estimated that about 80 percent of the adults in Hoeryong were using ice, consuming almost two pounds of the highly potent drug every single day.

  “My customers were just ordinary people,” he said. “Police officers, security agents, party members, teachers, doctors. Ice made a really good gift for birthday parties or for high school graduation presents,” he said. Teenagers were using it. Even his seventy-six-year-old mother was using it—to boost her low blood pressure.

  For many North Koreans, taking meth became an essential part of daily life, a way to ease the grinding boredom and deprivations of their existence. For that reason, drugs can never be eradicated, he said.

  “Honestly, it makes you feel good. I used to feel that if I didn’t do it, then I didn’t really feel right; my day didn’t get off to the right start. I felt like I was barely human,” he said. “It helps you release stress, and it really helps relations between men and women,” he added without even a snicker.

  Although it was technically illegal, Mr. Kang was open about his drug selling. His neighbors knew, and the police knew, but he tried not to flaunt his wealth to avoid attracting wider attention.

  The police themselves were also seizing new opportunities to become not just rich but also high. They provided protection in return for regular doses of ice. “They would come by my house during their lunch break, and of course I didn’t charge them.” Mr. Kang laughed. “The head of the secret police in my neighborhood was almost living at my house. He’d come by every day.”

  Despite the tighter border crossings, Mr. Kang, one of the pioneers in the ice business, was still managing to make between $3,000 and $5,000 a month from his illegal businesses—an enormous sum of money in China, let alone North Korea. And the more he earned, the more influential he became.