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

by Bradley K. Martin

  “When I look back I have to say that from the moment I graduated from the university I had a very good lifestyle compared with others,” Choe told me. “I changed cars four times in eleven years. My last car was a Toyota with a 2,400-cubic-centimeter engine, which I got as a commission from some Japanese.” That commission was a kickback. If Choe’s employers asked him to sell a certain product for 1,000 yen, he might tell the Japanese buyers the price was 1,200. After haggling, he would let them have it for 1,000 plus his “commission.” Such a procedure is illegal in North Korea, “but it happens anyhow,” Choe said. “And if I got a commission of, say, $50,000, I couldn’t keep it all for myself. I had to bribe high officials to keep their mouths shut. The biggest commission I ever got was $120,000. That was in 1986 when I was trading mushrooms.

  “All departments have their own trading companies. Every government and party organization has at least one. From the 1970s the central party had its secret Room 39. In the 1980s Kim Il-sung said to gain foreign exchange, so this expanded from the central party through the ministries. In 1985 and ’86 there were only about fifty of us doing that sort of work. But entering the 1990s, Kim Il-sung said that everybody must go and gain foreign currency, so there are lots more traders nowadays.

  “Starting in 1986 I traveled a lot on business to China, Japan, Hong Kong, Russia. I stayed home only three months out of the year. When I went on a business trip inside North Korea I always stayed at a hotel. Women knew we were from trading companies and had dollars, so we could have any woman we wanted: hotel employees, movie actresses, dancers. North Korea is basically run on dollars. The higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more important dollars are. My salary was 137 won a month. The company president got 148 won a month. We just laughed at it. To me, the North Korean currency is just valueless paper. It would take 10,000 won to equal $100. Since production has virtually stopped, there’s almost nothing you can buy in the store with North Korean currency. Only dollars—you can use those at the dollar store.

  “There is a feeling of animosity and jealousy toward the returnees from Japan. People call them call them han-joppari—half-Japanese dwarves. You say you saw a wedding in the Koryo Hotel. Not even high officials could have a wedding there. Either they couldn’t afford it or there would be too much gossip. Only people whose relatives in Chongryon would come and arrange the wedding and pay for it could do that. Most of the Korean-Japanese are very stingy. If the line to Japan is cut they have no recourse, so they’re very frugal. They’re called unpatriotic, perceived as having run away to Japan during the colonial period. But now the attitude has turned from jealousy to envy: ‘How come my grandfather wasn’t in Japan?’

  “Ordinary people don’t even have soap to wash their clothes, coal for the public baths. So people aren’t clean anymore. The people who are well off are concerned, on the one hand, because they have relatives in the rural areas. But to a greater extent they’re proud of themselves for having this lifestyle, very condescending to the rest of the population.

  “The first factor that led to my defection was discrepancies between what I was taught and what I later learned in China and the Soviet Union. When I was little I was taught Kim Jong-il was born on Mount Paektu, but Russians told me ‘No, he was born here.’ Also life in North Korea is very stressful with its emphasis on group teamwork. I couldn’t adjust after trips abroad where I had felt such freedom.

  “Before I defected to South Korea I had many business trips to rural areas. I was astonished to see Kim Chaek Steel Works. It was totally shut down. I thought, ‘If this factory isn’t working, what’s the situation in the rest of North Korea?’ After the fall of the Soviet Union, North Korea totally disintegrated. Just before I left I estimated about 70 percent of the economy was dead.

  “I started having positive, optimistic thoughts about capitalism and freedom. Starting in 1990, I listened to KBS-AM radio. I could listen on my car radio to the social-educational broadcasts.

  “I can’t say there’s no one who truly believes in the regime, but belief is mostly based on self-interest. There are people who still believe in the regime because they-want to maintain their status. From 1993, the authorities taught people, ‘Look at Eastern Europe. Former high officials are beggars in the streets. If our regime collapses, you are also doomed.’ This is strictly taught to high officials only, in high officials’ conferences.

  “During New Year’s Kim Il-sung always made his annual speech. People stopped believing in those speeches. The content never changed. People are so desperate they want war. They’re sick of their life and they want things to spill over. They want a new something to come.

  “I was in China when Kim Il-sung died. When I heard the news, I couldn’t believe it at first. I never expected Kim Il-sung to die. I thought it was the end of North Korea. It could last at most four or five years—that would be the end. I have no faith in Kim Jong-il’s rule. He doesn’t have the capability to rule. Kim Il-sung had charisma. People thought of him as a god. Nobody reveres Kim Jong-il. High officials don’t revere him, but only fear him, because his character is very bad. He’s very mean, cruel. He doesn’t show respect to elders. He acts impulsively. If he’s in a good mood he can be very generous. He is very smart. In history many people who came to power were the sons of later wives. Kim Jong-il is the son of the first wife, so he must have some intellect to maintain his power.

  “From the 1980s Kim Jong-il told people, ‘We should help the old father in economic, political and cultural life.’ Every report had to go through Kim Jong-il before reaching Kim Il-sung. In the summers Kim Jong-il didn’t work—he’d go to Mount Paektu or other resorts. In 1988, South Korea had the Seoul Olympics. Kim Jong-il wanted to top that, so he put on the youth festival. That’s an example of poor economic decision making. They invested in buildings, hotels, Kwangbok Road. The deficits were so immense, North Korea never got out of the slump.

  “I knew Kang Myong-do very well when he was there, although he was younger than I. Now that we’re here I look for a lot of emotional support from him. I defected when I was in China for the trading company. Things weren’t working well. At that time I heard the news that Kang had defected to South Korea. I thought I should do the same. The government had set a price for the commodity I was trying to sell, but I couldn’t get it. There was a gap of a couple of million dollars. So I thought if I returned to North Korea I’d be in trouble.”

  In chapter 21, we met Ko Chung-song, an employee of a district office for preservation of revolutionary historical sites. Ko’s work there was supplying coal, food and other necessities for the office’s forty-five or so workers and managers. To do so, in the circumstances of the 1990s, he had to become a small-time trader.

  “I had to find the materials that the people in my office needed,” he told me. “It was difficult to buy those directly. By the 1990s there were shortages and the government couldn’t supply what we needed. At my workplace they had extra money. On my business trips, besides dealing with the government, I did my own trading. I played around with the money and bribed people. I went to another company, bought materials from it and brought them to our unit.

  “For example, to get coal once I started by trading tires for silk-worms. Tires were scarce, but I had access to some, so I was able to trade them for two tons of silkworms. I took the silkworms to another company, which accepted them in exchange for 220 meters of fabric and 150 pairs of shoes. One pair of shoes was worth three months’ salary for the average North Korean. With those I was able to continue trading until I got the coal that the unit needed. I had a pass to travel around the country on business, and I traveled about two hundred days a year doing that sort of trading.

  “I decided to defect when I was put under surveillance because they suspected me of being ‘anti-socialist.’ The head of one company I had bought from was caught [for accepting a bribe] and reduced in rank. I was sure they would come after me next. Sure enough, lots of phone calls came to the office, asking
that I go to State Security. But my colleagues told them I was away on a business trip. The office was very appreciative of my work. They also knew that if I got nailed everyone there would be demoted or fired along with me.

  “Anti-socialist is the term they used for a competent businessman like myself. Lots of North Koreans operated as I did. It started in the ’90s with the shortages. It’s impossible to manage an organization in North Korea without doing that. They say the society is communist, but internally there are many capitalist aspects. I believe they’ll open their markets slowly. Pyongyang fears it, so it formed an Anti-Socialist Surveillance Committee.

  “Since I had a pass for business travel, no one would have been too surprised that I didn’t show up for several days. Taking advantage of that, I went to the Tumen River. I first tried to cross to China at Sosong, but couldn’t make it so went to Hoeryong and failed there, too. I thought of returning home. I went back to Musan and tried to bribe a guard but couldn’t. I stayed close to the border then, and for two days watched the way the guards walked their rounds until I knew their pattern. When I saw my chance, I ran for it across the river, which was frozen then, about 50 meters across. I could run 100 meters in thirteen seconds, so probably it took me only six and a half seconds to get across. It was 7:30 P.M.” Ko grinned as he recounted his adventure.

  “I didn’t have money. I starved for about five days in China. In Beijing, at a diner in front of the train station, I met a South Korean who gave me some money. Then I went to Dairen and stowed away on a ship. When we got far out of port I revealed and identified myself. In South Korea I want to become a businessman, but as yet I lack the capital. Now I’m just sightseeing and making speeches.” I asked if he had thought of going to business school. “In North Korea I couldn’t apply for university because of the forced labor on my record,” he replied. “Now I’m too old.” I told him Americans would not consider thirty-two too old for business school.

  Some who took up this new occupation did so because other avenues of advancement were blocked. Kim Dae-ho, whom we first met as a China-born member of a youth gang, ended up as a trader after having become a model soldier and a worker in the atomic energy industry. “Basically I had no prospects due to my family background,” Kim told me. “I decided to participate in the raising of foreign currency for North Korea. I was working on the western coast. Officially I was supposed to be selling clams, sea cucumbers and oysters to buy equipment for the atomic energy industry. But I was also trading on my own account, selling Korean antiques to Japanese businessmen.”

  Kim ended up a failure at that unfamiliar game, he said, when some people he dealt with tricked him out of $25,000—money belonging to the state. “First, I was conned by the brother of someone who was working for me. He said he knew of a gold antique that he wanted to buy so he could resell it to a Japanese trader, but he didn’t have enough money. He asked to borrow it. I went to the trading company and borrrowed $25,000, saying I would use it to make foreign currency profits for the state. The guy took the $ 15,000 I advanced him and never came back.”

  The second time, Kim said, “I was swindled by the head of the Tae-kwondo Department along with Chang Song-taek, Kim Jong-il’s sister’s husband. I wanted to pay back the $25,000 I had borrowed from my employers, but I needed to have my own import department to make enough money for that. Those two said, ‘Give us money to bribe officials. We can help you set up a trading company’ I gave them the remaining $10,000. Chang’s elder brother was in State Security then, the head of the political department. So I had no way of getting my money back from them. Then I decided I was really in trouble and had to defect.” Kim defected via China, in 1994.

  Kim Kwang-wook as a university junior became a black market dealer in antiques. He did not look the part. With his crudely cut hair, big black-framed glasses and acne he looked more like, say, a computer nerd.

  “I applied for a fellowship to study in China,” Kim told me. “Although I believed I was qualified, I was rejected. I checked it out and found the reason was my relatives in China. My parents had lived in China and had come to North Korea before I was born. I realized this family background would keep me from becoming a high official like a policeman or journalist. I could only go so far as an administrator. So I figured the only way to succeed in the society was to earn money so I could bribe officials, and then I could be somebody.

  “I sold North Korean antiques to Chinese and Japanese merchants in Pyongyang. These were the antiques rich people had owned before the Korean War. After the war they had hard lives. They sold them for money—or one could excavate rich people’s tombs to find antiques. I didn’t excavate them myself, but I bought, cheap, from those who did. Then I resold them to Japanese porcelain merchants.

  “I continued to work in antique trading even while I was a Three Revolutions team member. [His experiences as a team member are related in chapter 15.] Then a lot of the people who worked with me in the antique business got caught in the act and sent to prison camps. During interrogation they told about me. Since I was an antique dealer I had a lot of money. Money buys friends. I had friends all over, including police. One policeman warned me I had been reported. My friends got caught in July, and in September I learned that I had been fingered. I defected the next month, October.

  “I crossed the Yalu River secretly at night. Just before crossing I was apprehensive, but looking back on it now I think it was pretty easy. Even if I’d been caught, I wouldn’t have gotten in trouble. I had a certificate saying I was from a Three Revolutions team, signed by Kim Jong-il’s secretary’s office, and I also had a counterfeit travel permit. To get by in China I had plenty of foreign exchange left over from my antique business. In fact I never had a hard life after I started dealing in antiques. I never intended to come to South Korea. I just wanted to live in China. When I first defected I really believed the North Korean propaganda that said South Korea was full of economic strife, and I didn’t want to come here. While I was in China I realized South Korea is a democratic, wealthy country.

  “I’m certain North Korea can’t last long. Kim Il-sung and O Jin-u are dead. Kim Jong-il’s reputation is bad. Hunger is so prevalent. I give it three to five years. When you look at South Korea there were lots of demonstrations during the 1980s. That was possible because South Korean students could compare their situation with those of other countries. North Koreans couldn’t, but by the time I left in October 1993 people had more perception of the outside world. So I think these complaints will swell and explode. They learn about reality mainly from Siberian loggers and from Chinese and Japanese merchants visiting North Korea. At the moment the economic situation won’t permit the regime to kick those merchants out. It can’t do without the foreign exchange they bring.”

  Bae In-Soo’s father studied tractor design at a Chinese university and became the chairman of the metal and steel industry inspection department in the government division of the Workers’ Party Central Committee. His mother ran the accounting department at the Kumsong tractor factory—the factory that had produced the famous tractor prototype that only moved in reverse. In 1968, the father was one of many members of the Yenan (Chinese) faction who were purged. He was sent to political prison camp—Bae did not know which camp—and was never heard from again, Bae said, even though many political prisoners were released between 1984 and 1986. Eventually Bae, his mother and his elder brother were exiled from the port city of Nampo, where they had lived, to a rural area in South Pyongan province.

  “Most of our belongings were confiscated,” Bae, a handsome, thoughtful-seeming man, told me. “We still had our color TV We were the only family in the area who had one. After four months someone set fire to our house. Everything was lost except the underwear we had on. Probably it was a villager, one of those people who were calling us anti-communists. After our property was set on fire, Mother kept demanding an investigation. The Central Party said she was crazy and put her in a mental hospital when I was seven, in 197
6. For three years she stayed there while my brother and I dined only on small rations. I had eyesight problems. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t attend the elementary school because schoolmates would call me anti-communist and teachers would hit me. My brother taught me a little. But if anyone had offered us help, that person would have gotten in trouble. No one helped.

  “My uncle on my mother’s side was vice-commander of the Second Army Corps. He met the governor of the province and asked him for clemency. The governor arranged for us to be resettled. In 1980, we moved to Maengsan County, 120 kilometers east of Pyongyang, where Mother worked as farmhand. People who were deemed anti-communists, capitalists or landlords, or who had helped South Korea during the war, were resettled in Maengsan County. Seventy percent of the people there are like us. It was a difficult place to survive. The soil was poor. Transportation was poor. It was in remote mountain terrain. The nearest train station was 30 kilometers and the way to get there was on foot.

  “Every time I start talking about the past I just start crying,” Bae said. “I don’t recall any good experiences. When I was in senior middle school, my only hope was that some day I could enter the army. I had no hope of going to a university. But by the time of graduation, I realized that I could not even enter the army because of my father’s status. So I had lost all hope in life. North Korea should be called the Feudal State of Korea. It’s like during the Yi Dynasty, when it was the yangban [nobles] against the ordinary people. We started bribing authorities and I was allowed to go to Maengsan County automotive school, where I learned to drive. I went to work driving a truck for a truck-and-driver-hire organization. I did that from 1988 to May 1993.

  “On the side I was making money by trading. Normally, on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, each family got a fish. They sold them instead of eating them. I bought those fish for 10 won each on the black market and dried them at home. My workplace sent me to get fish for employees. I would barter 50 liters of liquor, 140 kilograms of oil and 100 of coal for a truckload of fish. The barter was unofficial. We would steal some of the load on the way back.