Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  The crops would be shared among the members, not equally but according to work performed. The party leaders in Pyongyang did not think the country was yet ready to live by what communist ideology considers a loftier principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Along with the transition from cooperative to state-owned farms, that was to come later. (A quarter century later, those changes still had not come.)

  If the farmers had yet to achieve ideal communism, nevertheless there had been plenty of other advances, as Chun To-kun was happy to point out. Chun, who looked a little like a skinny young Paul Newman, was introduced as deputy chairman of Chonsam Cooperative Farm. One of his duties was showing the occasional foreign visitor around. The government’s reservoir-building program and irrigation work had allowed farming “without any worry about water supply and without receiving any influence from drought,” Chun said. Farmers had smoothed out the 1,360 acres of paddy field and divided them into neat rectangles. They had terraced the hills, evenly planting 370 acres in vegetables and an equal area in persimmon orchards. The farm had the use of twenty-six tractors. “Our Great Leader provided them,” Chun said.

  Kim Il-sung had promised that his regime would enable everyone to live in tile-roofed houses. Indeed, the Chonsam farmers’ neat white masonry houses were all roofed-with ceramic tiles—the traditional Korean status symbol that only well-to-do farmers had been able to afford in the old days. The state had built the houses and turned them over to the farmers. Schools, a small hospital, a barbershop and a laundry served the 1,500 people living on the farm. About a quarter of the 270 households had television sets, Chun said, and the cooperative paid from its culture fund to bring in films to show on its three projectors.

  The changes had been slow in coming at first, leaving Chonsam-ri one of the more back-ward of North Korea’s cooperative farms. The big breakthrough, Chun said, came with 1959 and 1961 visits by Kim Il-sung. At that time there was no road into the farm and the hills were covered with pine trees. The state had begun to promote the planting of orchards only in 1958. “Our Great Leader pushed through the trees and grasses and taught us how to develop our farm,” Chun said. Monuments commemorated those first visits by President Kim to give “on-the-spot guidance.” Another monument recalled his only other visit since then, in 1976. In the fall of 1978, just a few months before my visit, Kim had held forth on farming questions at a party committee meeting in Wonsan, the nearby capital of the province. There he had instructed everyone to plant persimmon trees.15

  “Whenever our Great Leader visited and saw our farmers working in the paddy fields with crooked backs, weeding with hands and hoes, he told us that he couldn’t eat rice with an easy mind when he saw such hard work,” Chun said. “So he sent to our farm various kinds of insecticides, weed killers, weeding equipment, agricultural equipment. He sent these things to all cooperative farms, but he paid special attention to this farm because of its backwardness.” Still, Chonsam-ri was only an ordinary North Korean cooperative farm, Chun insisted—not a model farm such as the famous (and, to the Western ear, confusingly similar-sounding) Chongsan-ri, where the country’s agricultural policies had been incubated.16 Indeed, three visits by the peripatetic leader were not, relatively speaking, very many.

  Model farm or not, Chonsam-ri had a prosperous look to it. The previous year, Chun said, the farm had produced 4,200 tons of crops including 3,600 tons of rice. The average share of each family was six tons of grain, which could be sold to the state, and cash in the amount of 3,000 won ($1,754 at the official exchange rate). That would have made the Chonsam-ri farmers slightly better off than average wage earners in the cities and towns. “During the past, the young people preferred to go to the city to work,” the farm official said, “but now young people from the city are coming to the countryside because the living standards of cooperative farmers have improved.”

  Farmers shared in the cooperative’s income according to a formula setting norms for what would be considered a day’s work in a particular task. Hand transplanting of rice seedlings is backbreaking work, and there were not enough rice-planting machines in operation in North Korea yet to make the old way obsolete. Bending to plant one hundred seedlings was considered a day’s work. A farmer got due credit, in the form of added fractional “days worked,” for overfulfilling the quota. On the other hand, plowing was mechanized and a day’s work was considered planting one hectare (two and a half acres). Farmers shared the grain crop, and cash earned by the cooperative from sales of vegetables and fruit, according to each family’s total days worked, officials said. But first, the cooperative took a portion out for the common fund to finance the next year’s farming and development projects. The farm had to buy fertilizer and tractor fuel from the state and pay the state for water supply and tractor rental.

  The work on the farm remained hard and long. The farmers followed the old East Asian custom of taking a day of rest only every ten days. In the winter, though, there was a day off once a week, and each family could take fifteen days’ leave each year for a vacation at a state-provided beach or mountain resort. “Our farmers,” Chun said, “are receiving great benevolence from the state.”

  Children inherited household effects from their deceased parents, Chun told me, and could stay on in the family homes if they wished. The typical family kept savings of about 10,000 won ($5,850 at the official exchange rate) in a state bank in the name of the head of the household. By custom another family member could use the money. Money in a savings account drew interest of about 4 percent a year. In the cooperative’s early days, Chun said, farmers had borrowed money from the bank, but later they had found it unnecessary to do so. The farmers did not have much need for their savings, aside from financing weddings and the like, Chun said, because “thanks to the solicitude of our Great Leader, the state provides the goods needed for our farmers’ life. Even raincoats are supplied for work at very cheap prices.”

  I knew that outsiders’ reports of North Korea’s economic shambles, even if exaggerated compared with the real situation in 1979, had their basis in genuine difficulties. Drought had affected harvests for several years. And, of course, the country had failed to repay its foreign trade debts. But officials’ talk during my visit was upbeat. Rains in that spring of 1979 had filled the reservoirs, they said. They predicted a bountiful harvest. And they claimed the country would be able to pay off its foreign debts by 1984, the end of the current seven-year economic plan.

  Obviously there had been a great deal of construction already—I took a trip by car on a recently completed and nearly empty multi-lane high-way across a hundred miles of mountainous terrain between Pyongyang and the east coast port of Wonsan. Generally, what I saw of North Korea had a built-up and well-tended look. The seven-year plan for 1978–1984 called for nearly doubled electrical power output and steel production.

  But many outsiders were skeptical about the chances of meeting the new plan’s goals—especially since the capital-short regime counted on increased labor efficiency to power three-quarters of the increase.17 Certainly there was no sign of a real boom such as capitalist South Korea had been experiencing for several years. Missing were the signs of rising affluence that could be seen in the South: streets and high-ways clogged with private cars and taxis, new hotels opulent enough for Dallas or Palm Springs going up in the heart of the capital, a vibrant stock market fueled with cash from a new middle class. But neither did one see in North Korea slums, prostitution, street waifs hawking chewing gum—signs easily found in the South of 1979 that some segments of society had been left behind.

  North and South Korea each claimed per capita gross national product of more than $1,200. Western and South Korean estimates at the time placed the Northern figure at only about half that amount, giving the twice-as-populous South an enormous advantage in the overall weight of its economy. While it was possible that estimates from sources unfriendly to the North had overstated the difference—and while it wa
s hard to compare the two quite different economic systems—it did seem that there was a gap in the South’s favor, one that might well continue to widen.

  But then again, the vagaries of the international economy and then-rampant inflation might conceivably take a heavy toll in the South.18 North Korean officials claimed their economy was immune from such forces, and on that basis they seemed to hope that time was really on their side. A planned economy, with virtually no private sector beyond the farmers’ small, household vegetable plots, meant that the state set prices. Necessities were cheap. Rice, the basic dietary staple, went for the equivalent of two cents a pound at the official exchange rate. Anything deemed a luxury, on the other hand, was very expensive. A black-and-white television cost the equivalent of $175— more than three months’ wages for the average worker. The state provided housing, health care and education without levying taxes.

  In Pyongyang, at the Children’s Palace, a soldier packing a pistol guarded the lobby as visitors from abroad arrived for an evening performance by school-aged youngsters enrolled in afternoon performing-arts classes. One of the lavishly staged skits dramatized the youthful exploits of Kim Il-sung in guerrilla warfare against the Japanese. As children on the stage chased others who were done up as caricatures of grinning, bo-wing Japanese, with enormous papier-mâché heads, an English translation of the pursuers’ call was projected on a screen: “Let’s march forward, following our commander, to annihilate the Japs to the last man.”

  The day I visited the Chonsam-ri cooperative farm, a nursery school teacher was leading her four-year-old charges in one of their favorite exercises. Holding aloft a toy rifle, she called out, “How do we shoot the rifle?”

  “Pull the trigger! Pull the trigger!” the little ones responded in unison, shouting at the tops of their lungs.

  I quickly learned that North Korean officials took immense pride in the country’s elaborate, state-financed system of nurseries, schools, “children’s palaces,” colleges, universities, courses for workers at their job sites and correspondence courses. Of the population of 17 million, some 8 million were enrolled, paying no fees. The society, officials said, was being “intellectualized.”19

  The basis of the system was composed of nurseries followed by compulsory education from kindergarten through tenth grade. Matriculation came when a baby, only a few weeks old, was sent to a nursery at the mother’s workplace. The children would stay there from early morning until late evening. The mothers were permitted breaks from their work to feed them. After regular classes, the state kept school-aged youngsters busy with supervised activities. Youngsters might end up spending only an hour or two a day with their parents, if that much. North Korea had been one of the first Asian countries to extend free public education as far as grade ten, and that in itself was an undeniably impressive accomplishment. As a Westerner, though, I could not help finding a sinister aspect to the system’s near monopoly on children’s upbringing and the direction in which it guided them.

  Official propaganda claimed on one level that the children themselves were the beneficiaries of the approach. “In this country,” President Kim had said, “children are the kings.” His disciples rhapsodically reported that the Great Leader would do anything for the children, and that the educational system was a manifestation of his boundless love for them.

  I visited a Pyongyang weekly boarding nursery, whose tiny charges spent only Saturday nights and Sundays with their families. The director said enthusiastically that they “grow faster and learn more than if they were at home.” Mean-while, tots in her nursery competed in a relay race to see which of two teams could be first to complete sentences such as “We are happy” and “We have nothing to envy in the world.” Two-year-olds in the showplace nursery were counting apples displayed on a visual aid: “These are four and one more makes five.” In a room decorated with models of President Kim’s birthplace, little ones showed the proper attitude to the Great Leader by reciting stories of his childhood and bo-wing before his boyhood portrait. By the time children reached kindergarten age, they would have learned to say, when they received their snacks, “Thank you, Great Fatherly Leader.”

  Sometimes it was the parents who were said to benefit from the country’s educational system. Mothers were “liberated” for “political, economic and cultural life,” the nursery director said. At the mammoth Pyongyang Children’s Palace, an official explained that having the state in charge of children not only in school but after school meant that “parents do not have to worry about the children’s education.” The “palace” kept ten thousand middle school and high school students busy from 4 P.M. to 7 P.M. daily-with classes—some rather advanced—in music, arts, crafts, vocational subjects, sports, gymnastics and communist ideology. Provincial capitals offered similar if somewhat smaller facilities.

  On another level, Kim Il-sung himself had indicated that benefits flowing from the educational system to parents and children as individuals were not really what he had in mind. Rather, the education system was intended to benefit the collective mass of the people. After all, as Kim told a national meeting of teachers in a key speech in 1971, “in any society the primary aim of education lies in training people to faithfully serve the existing social system.” Echoing Friedrich Engels, Kim argued that the socialist state must “prevent the old ideas of their parents from exerting influence on children’s minds.” Children would be taught to be militant revolutionaries. “We must educate the students to hate the landlord and capitalist classes and the exploiting system,” Kim said. “If we neglect the education of the rising generation on such lines, they-will lose sight of the class enemies and, lapsing into a pacifistic mood, hate to make revolution and, in the end, may degenerate and become depraved.”

  Any stray impulses to go in a different direction would be rooted out. Children in a socialist society, Kim said, should be guided “to reject individualism and selfishness, love the organization and the collective, and struggle devotedly for the sake of society and the people and the party and the revolution.”

  I saw just how seriously North Koreans took that struggle for uniformity and against individualism when I went to the Taedongmun Primary School in Pyongyang. Teachers in classrooms I visited were posing questions to classes studying, variously, birds, evaporation and the revolutionary deeds of President Kim. Upon hearing each question, the pupils, sitting perfectly erect and still at their desks, all raised their hands, barked in unison, “Me!” and then instantly fell quiet again. Whenever any pupil was called upon, he or she marched to the front of the room, stood at attention and shouted out the memorized answer in a high-pitched monotone like the one used by West Point plebes to address upperclass cadets. Among the pupils who were not called upon, no one stirred; no one whispered.

  Chung Kwang-chun, the principal, bragged in an interview that this was an “all-As school.” A single teacher had charge of the same group of pupils as they passed through all four grades, she said. That teacher was responsible for making sure—through extra work, if necessary—that all members of the class progressed well. “In the final analysis, we don’t believe there are people who can’t learn and can’t study,” Mrs. Chung said. She enumerated the most important subjects taught at the school, in this order: (1) “the revolutionary activities of the Great Leader,” (2) communist morality, (3) reading, (4) math. Actually, in the forty-three pages of the Great Leader’s important 1971 speech, “On the Thorough Implementation of the Principles of Socialist Pedagogy in Education,” he had not mentioned either reading or math.

  At the time of the Korean War, Confucian filial piety had remained enough of a force that parents still had taken first place, even in Kim Il-sung’s rhetoric. Speaking with the army corps commander leading the battle of Heartbreak Ridge, Kim supposedly told him he wanted the soldiers to “realize that it is the wish of their parents and the Party’s line that not even an inch of the sacred soil of the fatherland be yielded to the enemy. …” When his words were dul
y conveyed to the men, “moved by their Leader’s love, all rubbed their eyes with their fists” and pledged to do as parents and party asked.20

  More recently however, Kim had been talking about “revolutionizing the homes,21 and I began to get some concrete idea of-what that meant. When I asked Principal Chung about parents’ role in their children’s education, she said they were allowed to visit the school, and ought to help the pupils with their studies. She added, however, that parents were not called in for disciplinary problems, which were handled with teacher persuasion (no corporal punishment) and—through the school’s Young Pioneers–style children’s corps—peer criticism.

  Actually, Mrs. Chung said, there were few behavior problems. The pupils hardly ever fought among themselves, even outside class, because “we are educating them in communist morality.” She was proud of the discipline of her students. Sitting up straight in class was required for health reasons, she said. Outside class the pupils were free to slouch if they liked—“but as we teach them the healthful way they always follow that way” Even as she spoke, I heard from the playground the unmistakable sound of schoolchildren at recess, whooping and running around. Relieved by this return to recognizable reality, I stepped to the window to photograph the scene. Mrs. Chung, however, quickly spoke to my interpreter—-who strode over and grasped my arm before I could click the shutter. Those two explained, patiently and in excruciatingly friendly fashion, that such a photograph of unorganized activity might make a bad impression abroad.

  Quite the contrary, I replied. Americans and many other Westerners would be favorably impressed by such evidence that at least a little freedom survived in such a rigidly controlled society.