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

by Bradley K. Martin

  Kim Jong-il may have grown a bit more serious as he became a university upperclassman and could see looming ahead his graduation into the North Korean top elite’s version of the real world. Maybe his father had a heart-to-heart talk with him about his future and the need to settle down somewhat— perhaps even mentioning Jong-il’s possible eventual succession to the top post. The younger Kim did not stop partying then, it is clear, but the official accounts have him accompanying his father on frequent trips for “on-the-spot guidance.” In the course of such trips the junior Kim enthusiastically picked up his father’s style of micromanagement. It is a style that unfortunately had reached, if it had not already long since passed, the point of diminishing returns for the economy.

  One such story unintentionally shows that Kim Il-sung’s originally admirable practice of going out to the boondocks to see the real problems of the people was becoming an empty ritual. Both officials and ordinary people wanted only to please the overburdened Great Leader without “troubling” such an exalted being with their problems.

  Father and son, visiting a military outpost near the Demilitarized Zone in February 1963, split up for separate inspections. The junior Kim noticed that the only water supply was a dribble from an ice-covered spring. Mess hall, bathhouse and laundry were all out of commission on account of the lack of water. Kim Il-sung had already asked the soldiers if they had any problems. Oh, no, they said. They were living “literally in plenty.” Then Jong-il approached the Great One to tell him quietly about the water shortage that the men had not mentioned, a problem that could be overcome with just a little pipe and pumping equipment. “These comrades say that they dared not request the material out of consideration of the nation’s economic problems,” he told his father, who immediately gave orders to solve the problem. “The next day found the arrival on that hill of many technicians and a large amount of pumping equipment, all sent by the Fatherly Leader. A fortnight later clear water began to gush forth.” The soldiers felt “boundless respect” for Kim Jong-il.51

  During a scorching lowland heat wave the following August, the Kims prudently chose to focus their guidance on remote Pungsan County, in the high, cool mountains of Yanggang Province. (The accounts do not say whether the premier’s entire family, including Pyong-il and the other children, went along on that working summer vacation.) Kim Jong-il discovered that local children’s lunchboxes were packed with potato cakes instead of the rice Koreans generally prefer. Imagining “the sorry faces of the mothers preparing the lunches for their children every day,” he “perceived the still poor livelihood of the mountain folk, and judged the irresponsible work attitude of the officials who were not so enthusiastic for the improvement of the people’s standard of living.” He passed along his findings to his father, who called a meeting of county agricultural officials and set them right with instructions on soil building, planting suitable crops for the cold highland, damming the river to set up an irrigation system and exchanging the potatoes grown there for lowland rice. Hearing the Fatherly Leader point out “the bright road they should follow,” the listeners cheered “at the top of their voices.”52

  In those instances Kim Jong-il kept his role to investigating quietly, advising his father of his findings and recommendations. One wonders, then, about the real feelings of an obsequious school official in Pungsan County when the college boy stepped out of the staff role and decided to guide the official directly in the work of running the Pungsan Middle School. Visiting the school’s science laboratories, young Kim noticed that they were set up only for general teaching of the subjects, with nothing to help tailor instruction to the particular needs of the county. He advised collecting local soil samples and bringing in preserved specimens of local flora and fauna— asters, sheep, bull trout. That seems to have been sensible enough advice.

  But then, “seeing that trunks of poplars around the playground had been mauled by axes and knives,” Kim Jong-il said sports equipment should be provided to prevent mischievous boys from misbehaving. Additionally, he instructed that apple trees be planted on a bare hillside behind the school. Apples don’t normally do well on such a cold highland, but Kim Jong-il “explained in detail” how to adapt them. That, he said, would be “very important in convincing the children that nothing will be impossible if they get down to implementing the leader’s instruction to develop the highland to be as good a place as the lowland.”

  In a classroom he found a gap in the floor. Frowning, “he exhorted the official to fill in the chink lest a cold “wind through it in winter should make the children catch a cold.” The school official, astonished that the young visitor had noticed something he himself had neglected, “bo-wed his head, ashamed of his failure to fulfill the duty as an educationist.” A little later, “reluctant to part” with Kim Jong-il, the same official “begged him to give more instructions.” Kim Jong-il then produced bark he had stripped off a birch tree in the schoolyard. (Evidently that was okay, although carving on poplar trees was not.) Using the birch bark as writing paper just as his father’s anti-Japanese guerrillas supposedly had done, he dashed off seven pages of “precious instruction.”53

  Back at the university that fall, Kim Jong-il is reported to have set out to use what he had learned as the starting point for a graduation thesis on the role of the county. His father was then promoting the county as the key local government level at which to “resolve all problems arising in the building of socialism and communism in the countryside.” A professor suggested that the topic was too ambitious for a mere bachelor’s-degree thesis, requiring so much original research and argument that it would be more like a doctoral dissertation. The professor advised young Kim to be satisfied with a typical graduation paper proving socialist economic laws. However, “Kim Jong-il said smilingly that the validity of socialist economic laws had already been confirmed and that there was no use of proving it again. He continued: ‘What we need is a correct way to carry on the revolution and construction. Many lectures at the university deal with something abstract and general, and lack in clarifying such a thing.’”

  Sticking with his plan, the junior Kim worked hard studying his father’s pronouncements on rural economy and local industry, says an official biography. “At the same time, he himself toured different parts of the country to collect various data on politics, the economy and culture.” That was, of course, a research opportunity not available to the usual North Korean undergraduate. He also had plenty of help from state agencies, normally stingy with statistics, as he “analyzed the facts consolidated by the State Planning Commission and economic guidance agencies.”

  After all that work, finally “he could give perfect answers to the questions raised in the revolution.” In March of 1964, a few days before his graduation, he rose in a college lecture hall to deliver “an immortal work, ‘The Place and Role of the County in the Building of Socialism.’” Needless to say “the audience loudly applauded him for his firm conviction, clear-cut analysis and cogent theory and his ideo-theoretical brilliance and convincing argument by which he solved the complex rural problem in an original way from the standpoint of juche.”54 As in the case of his other some 1,199 college writings, though, skeptics harbor doubt that Kim himself-wrote the thesis— or wrote it the way it was finally published, twenty-one years later, at a time when efforts to promote his personality cult were peaking.55

  But even if Kim Jong-il was not quite the Big Man on Campus that such official accounts make him out to have been, it does seem he was very much a presence at his university—and not only on account of-whose son he was. Partially overcoming his peculiar upbringing, he was developing some engaging qualities of his own. Perhaps he was learning something about human relations by-watching his father, a past master. Relationships with classmates seem to have been relatively good.

  According to a Bulgarian diplomat who was an exchange student at Kim Il-sung University, Kim Jong-il “loved to talk with friends,” especially foreigners. Evidently, by that ti
me he had acquired a proper aristocrat’s set of manners. He seemed “not as arrogant as many sons of high-ranking officials in Bulgaria,” Georgi Mitov recalled in a South Korean newspaper interview some three decades later. Young Kim’s humility quotient was high enough, at least, to permit his becoming star-struck: Mitov was a famous volleyball player, and he thought that was part of the reason Kim Jong-il visited him in his dormitory often—so often that the Bulgarian sometimes had to pretend he was out.56

  Another former East European diplomat has described the junior Kim in Joe College terms—soccer player, amateur pianist, at least normally intelligent student. Expanding on the latter point, a North Korean who knew him told me, “Although his mind is okay, it does not appear he studied much. There must be a strict teacher-student relationship for good education. Could there possibly be someone able to teach properly the son of Kim Il-sung?”

  TWELVE

  Growing Pains

  Kim Jong-il, at the top of the pecking order, was by no means unique in the extent to which the experiences of childhood and youth depended on who his father was. All the way down the complicated North Korean class hierarchy youngsters typically found their treatment, from even their earliest years, to be governed by the family’s socioeconomic position, or songbun — essentially the status of their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.1

  Take Dong Young-jun, who grew up in privilege—although not even remotely near Kim Jong-il’s level—in Bukchong, the big country town in North Hamgyong Province where he was born in 1965. “My family-was very well off,” he told me. “Whenever I met people who were undergoing hardship or hunger, I felt especially thankful for my parents.”

  Dong’s father worked as an investigator in “internal affairs,” meaning he was checking up on his fellow North Koreans. Following the turmoil of the Korean War, “many people lied about their backgrounds,” Dong explained. Employed by a secret police organization that in 1973 was renamed Department of State Security, his father “was digging up their true backgrounds.” On the other side of the family Dong’s mother, herself a doctor, had some good connections in Pyongyang. One of her cousins was a senior colonel working at a military academy. Another was a member of the Supreme People’s Assembly.

  Dong grew up, he told me, as a “fanatic,” idolizing Kim Il-sung and urging his schoolmates to do the same. “All through elementary school, junior middle and higher middle school, I was student body president. Even at the university I was on the student council.”

  At one point in our interview Dong asked if I minded if he smoked. I told him it was all right with me. He interjected then that he had grown up hating the United States. Now that he had defected to South Korea, though, “I think I actually like the United States,” he told me. “Look, I have a U.S.-made lighter and I smoke Marlboros.”

  I asked when he had started smoking. His answer, totally unexpected, introduced me to a facet of North Korea that I had neither heard nor read about. He had started “at age eleven,” Dong said. He explained: “In North Korean schools there are gangs that fight a lot. They consider the first boy to suffer a nosebleed the loser. They believe if you smoke a lot you won’t get a nosebleed.” So Dong the model student had led a double life, moonlighting as a member of a violent teenage gang? Naturally I wanted to know more, and Dong obliged me.

  “Gangs are rated according to the social rank of the members’ fathers,” he told me. “These aren’t formal groups, but this has been going on for years—for generations. In most cases, if your father is very high ranking you get the power. You hang out with kids from similar family backgrounds.

  “You can’t fight on the school grounds,” Dong said. Rather, the gangs usually fought at sites where the students were doing the manual labor frequently required of them. “Or we would meet on Sunday by pre-arrangement, say near the Namdaechon River bank at such and such a time with such and such number of people. We might catch a dog around there and eat it, or hide and steal people’s watches.”

  Dong told me he stayed in his gang until junior year in higher middle school. “But in senior year I studied very hard, so I could get into Pyongyang Engineering College.”

  My own very first article as a cub newspaper reporter in North Carolina, in 1969, was about a fatal fight between gangs supporting the basketball teams of two high schools. Of course, it made the front page of The Charlotte Observer. To hear Dong describe the fights with rocks and tools that went on in his community—an arm cut off, a skull broken in half—it was clear to me that some of them would be considered newsworthy in any country with a free press. In North Korea, however, although the official media on occasion referred vaguely to problems of young people’s misbehavior, the regime did not like to shine too bright a light on such rampant juvenile delinquency as Dong was describing. “It’s never in the newspapers there,” Dong said.

  Most interesting in Dong’s account, I thought, was his description of the makeup of the gangs. “There were basically about four groupings throughout the grades,” he said, and all of those were from the elite. “Ordinary people’s children could hardly be part of the gangs. Say you had a fight and hurt someone. You’d go to prison. If your parents were influential, they could get you out. But the ordinary people would have no chance of getting out, so they didn’t join.

  “The leader of each gang was whoever had the most important father. The first group consisted of children of party or State Security men. The second group’s members were children of people working in administration and technology; the third, military; the fourth, trade and commerce. I was part of the first group. Because our group was highest ranking and most powerful, the other groups would give us gifts like cigarettes. Normally the first group would fight the second and third groups. Often the second group fought the third.”

  And what were those fights about? Dong gave me an example. “In my district,” he said, “there were a lot of special forces military men. The student who got his arm cut off was the son of a military man. The one who cut it off was the son of a technocrat. What happened was that the military man’s son had just been transferred into the school and wasn’t part of a gang yet. Kids can be very cruel to newcomers in school. People in the second group kicked him around and beat him up badly. The military kids took offense, even though he wasn’t yet part of their gang. The whole gang got into the fight. That was in 1977, at the Namdaechon River bank. We were assigned there to collect pebbles. One guy hit a military kid with a sharp-edged spade and cut his arm off. It was completely severed. I saw it. We always sharpened the spades so they would slip easily into the ground. I was twelve years old then, and so was the kid who got hurt.

  “The incident of the split skull I didn’t see. It happened a year later at the same site, during the night. In that case it was a fight with kids from another school. A guy on the other side had his skull split—again, with a sharpened spade—and died.”

  So what happened to the young authors of mayhem and murder? “If the victim’s father was of higher rank, the perpetrator would be in serious trouble,” Dong said. “And if the perpetrator’s father was of higher rank, things would be hushed up. The guy who cut off his opponent’s arm got only three weeks of forced labor. In the case of the killing I described, the perpetrator had his head shaved and was sent to prison. He stayed only ten days, though. His father was so prominent, he was just sent to another school.”

  When I asked, Dong told me that from what he had heard his experience was not peculiar to his locale. “All over North Korea there are gangs like this. I don’t know about the degree of brutality. Even in Pyongyang there are gangs, but they’re closely watched. If there’s a fight between two groups there and the authorities find out, the leader and his family are sent to a prison camp. Chongjin, Rajin and Hamhung are the worst places. Gang fighting originated with Koreans from Japan, who tended to settle in those areas. Lots of Koreans who moved from Japan are people who got in trouble in Japan and then were sent to North Korea. They were a
ccepted because they had money.”

  I have no confirmation of Dong’s observation that banishing troublemakers was a significant factor when ethnic Korean families in Japan decided who among them would repatriate to North Korea. However, it is true that for decades many of the gangsters in Japan were people of Korean ancestry. (That was, at least in part, a reflection of the Korean minority’s mistreatment by the Japanese majority.) So I was curious to know whether the North Korean gangs followed the rituals of the Japanese underworld yakuza. “No, they don’t cut their fingers off or tattoo themselves,” Dong told me. “But they do prick their fingers and hold them together to become blood brothers.”

  Dong told me that the name of his gang was a Korean word that means downpour or deluge. “Every member of my gang wore formal shoes—leather shoes with laces. Of course, the other kids had only cloth shoes. Leather shoes were rare. Just by wearing those, we showed we had prominence.”

  The shoe discussion led Dong to digress away from the topic of gang life into courtship customs. For a son, the arranged and rather formal first date between a man and woman of marriageable age, he told me, “a guy might borrow leather shoes to impress the woman.”

  It took me a moment to realize that Dong was relating a standard North Korean joke, whose humor derived from its essential if not literal truth about the material advantages of the elite. “The three things you need for that first date are leather shoes, a Seiko watch and a gold tooth,” Dong went on, getting wound up. “Sometimes you would even borrow the gold tooth. At night the guy would take the girl to a bright spot and show those things off as he made arrangements for the next meeting. He would say, ‘We have to meet tomorrow at eight,’ and he would tap his Seiko watch. ‘We have to meet here.’ He would tap his leather shoe on the ground so she would look at it when he said ‘here,’ and then he would grin widely at her so the light would glint off his gold tooth.”