Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Pyongyang made sure the word got out. Its propaganda organs portrayed the North as an egalitarian paradise. Kim’s achievements permitted him to press a psychological offensive against South Korea, issuing patronizing public offers to send food aid, hire the South’s unemployed and care for Southern orphans.34

  One strong indication of the magnetic power of the society Kim was building: Overseas Koreans in substantial numbers began to immigrate to the North. Kim wrote in his memoirs of the homecoming in 1960 of surviving members of the Jo family, who had sheltered him and nursed him through his fever in 1935. The family had lived in Manchuria since the start of the century, he said, and one could imagine their feelings “at the sight of the independent homeland, a country of freedom and a state which was now rising magnificently on the debris, beneath the banner of self-reliance.”35

  More significant was to prove the case of Korean nationals who had lived and labored in Japan as an oppressed minority since the period of Japanese colonial rule over Korea. In 1955, in accordance with Kim’s instruction that “the overseas citizens’ movement had to contribute to the Korean revolution,” pro-Pyongyang Korean residents banded together in Chongryon, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan.36 Most of the members actually hailed from the southern part of the peninsula; their identification with the North over the South reflected leftist sentiment as well as the widespread perception that the North was doing better than the South economically. Starting at the end of 1959, some seventy-five thousand of those Korean residents joined in an exodus to Kim’s Promised Land.37 It was a movement similar in some respects to Zionism. The returnees embarked from the docks at the Sea of Japan port of Niigata amid great flourishes of rhetoric by Korean resident leaders and leftist Japanese students.

  Chong Ki-hae38 was seventeen years old and a recent graduate of a Korean high school run by Chongryon when he and his parents repatriated to North Korea in 1960. Chong’s parents, born in what became South Korea, had gone to Japan in the 1920s and eked out a hand-to-mouth existence wandering around the country doing odd jobs. Life eventually had improved for the family—to the extent that Chong himself would have preferred to stay in Japan. But his parents’ experience of harsh pre-war discrimination against ethnic Koreans had made them hate Japan and long for the Korean motherland. A cousin, also living in Japan, visited South Korea and reported to them that people there lived no better than the communist North Koreans— and that the North, unlike the South, offered free health care and education. On that basis, Chong’s parents decided on the North. The family boarded a ship at Niigata, taking along 500,000 Japanese yen in currency, a Toyota sedan, a truck and a motorcycle. Realizing that North Korea still was not fully developed, they also took the precaution of shipping a ten-year supply of shoes and clothing and a cache of trading goods including twenty gold Swiss watches and two hundred meters of black suiting fabric.

  As a reality check on Kim Il-sung’s boast that his country would catch up with Japan quickly, consider the still relatively primitive North Korea that the Chongs found. Officials classified the family members, finding that young Chong was the only able-bodied worker since his parents were of retirement age. The family rode to Chongju County in North Pyongan Province, where they were assigned to their work unit: a sewing machine factory in a community of about four thousand people. The Chongs donated their truck to the factory and young Chong signed up to drive it on delivery runs. He did that for three years until he started worrying about his future prospects. Then he began studying and training to work as a machinist, a trade he was to practice until he defected to South Korea in 1994.

  North Korea was far from a paradise, the family quickly found. Living in a farmhouse with walls of sun-dried mud like everyone else’s, but still owning their black Toyota, the Chongs were the center of gawking attention in the county. Not only had the concept of private property become alien, especially among the younger people who had grown up under communism. There was also the matter that private cars were almost unheard of. There were state-owned sedans, but the black ones were reserved for really high officials. Although no one applied pressure directly the Chongs felt more and more uncomfortable about their car. Whenever a big shot came to town, local officials would ask to borrow it to convey him during his stay. Finally after a year, the Chongs sold the car to the state for use in Pyongyang, the home of most officials who rated black cars.

  The other items the Chongs had brought along from Japan turned out to spell the difference between a fair level of comfort and the poverty that characterized the lives of ordinary North Koreans despite the undeniable advances of the previous several years. Take the clothing, for example. North Koreans were wearing clothes of a fabric based on reeds and wood pulp, manufactured inside the country. Pants ripped easily and often had to be patched, especially on the seat. People seeing the twin round patches would say, “I see you’re wearing glasses on your butt.”39

  Then there was food supply. Starting in 1954, North Korea had transferred the farmland from individuals to cooperatives. From 1958, China’s Great Leap Forward inspired Kim Il-sung to push farm collectivization even further. He launched his own Chollima movement, named after a mythical winged horse that could leap 1,000 ri (about 250 kilometers or 150 miles). Using the Chollima to symbolize the “breathless speed of socialist construction and revolutionary spirit of Korea,” Kim set out to remake nature, reform society and revitalize the people.40 Perhaps forgetting that extremely rapid collectivization moves in Manchuria in the 1930s had left a bad taste in his mouth, he briefly threw caution to the winds in the late 1950s. It was a time of high excitement as North Koreans, like Mao Zedong and his subjects in China, were swept away by an almost mystical belief that the stage of true communism was at hand.

  Kim grouped the original cooperatives together in even larger units, under state control, which also functioned as the lowest level of local government. Still called cooperatives, those were in fact similar to China’s new communes and the Soviet Union’s collective farms. Boosting production (on the theory that bigger is better) was only part of the objective. At least as important was to turn peasants, whose propertied status inclined them to bourgeois capitalist traits, into good members of the working class—and, thus, prospective communists.41

  Remember that only a decade earlier the land had been redistributed from landlords to the tillers. The state giveth; the state taketh away. Official propaganda claimed that the peasants “found happiness in cooperative labor and beamed for joy.”42 Peasants had been “sitting alone on banks between paddy fields … unable to move heaps of stones.” Now discovering economies of scale, they “pooled their strength and wisdom, built waterways through the hills and farmed the land with new methods, bidding good-bye to outdated ways.”43

  The collectivization movement did bring some bigger harvests—but it failed to “resolve questions of food”—Kim’s ambitious goal when he set out the five-year plan in 1956. Very quickly in 1959, he found it advisable to back off a bit from collectivization. He restored to farm families individual kitchen garden plots and the right to use them to raise chickens, pigs, ducks and rabbits for sale. The regime urged that they use the money to build new houses.44

  Even though harvests did increase, the increases failed to meet planners’ goals. Rationing—the surest sign of scarcity—continued. Disappointing results probably explain North Korea’s failure to release its agricultural results after completion of the “extended” seven-year plan that went into effect around the time of the Chongs’ repatriation. The regime itself reported that wealthy farmers, along with those whose middle-income status predated land reform, tended to oppose collectivization.45 Probably the dilution of farmers’ individual incentives played a role in limiting harvests, along with frequent droughts and a persistent cold front.46

  The food that the Chongs got every fifteen days in their official rations left them unsatisfied, even though at the beginning they always received the full ration of grain (
700 grams a day for a worker, lesser amounts for children, retirees and others). Except for soybeans, which occasionally-were distributed, the ration included no vegetables or meat. At that time the problem with grain was not so much the quantity but the quality. What people found objectionable was the fact that the ration usually consisted of 90 percent “mixed grains”—mostly corn (maize)—and only 10 percent rice. Like most East Asians of that time, the Chongs wanted rice at every meal. The preference for rice over corn is a matter of custom, of course—but it also reflects the body’s nutritional needs since corn contains far less protein and niacin than rice does. As public health workers discovered in impoverished areas of the southern United States early in the twentieth century, subsistence on a corn-dominated diet with little fresh meat is a formula for contracting pellagra, a serious disease whose symptoms include skin changes, severe nerve dysfunction and diarrhea.47

  Unlike Chong and other factory workers, members of agricultural cooperatives received their entire grain ration in rice. Although the state prohibited trading in grain, some farmers were willing to sell their rice on the black market for one and a quarter won per kilogram. At that rate young Chong, drawing a monthly wage of about 45 won, could not afford to supply enough rice for himself and his non-working parents with just the contents of his pay envelope. So he bartered the family’s trading stocks of-watches and fabric for rice.

  At farmers’ markets, the farmers were permitted to sell livestock, baskets and other goods, but if they got caught selling grain they would be sent to jail.48 Before Chong could buy grain from the farmers, he had to approach them delicately. “In the farmers’ market, I’d buy some livestock and other things I didn’t need, and ask that they be delivered to my home. Then when the farmer brought them we would talk about a food purchase. After that first time, I could work it out any time.” Chong told me that people who remembered the economy of Japanese days understood the value of such transactions. The Workers’ Party, however, “was very harsh in its treatment of the exchange of goods.” The party decried the practice as a capitalist holdover. Koreans who knew Chong and his family could see that the returnees were living better than the others. “Basically people were very envious of us.”

  Even Kim Il-sung’s official biographers acknowledge dissatisfaction with living conditions during that period—if only on the part of “people with antiquated petty-bourgeois ideas.” An official inquiry revealed that such people “are without exception the people who lived well in the past. These people seize every opportunity to complain and readily waver before the slightest difficulty.49

  Most ordinary North Koreans, however, did not have direct knowledge of Japan and other outside countries, and they knew that their own living standards had improved after the advent of communist rule. Thus, Chong told me, they were inclined to believe Kim Il-sung’s boast of having unfolded a paradise.50

  Outside analysts’ comparisons during that period bolstered Kim’s claim. One study shows North and South neck and neck at the time of the 1953 armistice, with gross national product per capita of $56 and $55 respectively. By 1960, the South at $60 had barely advanced, while the North’s figure had nearly quadrupled to $208—an impressive statistical advance, even if only a fraction of that increase translated into improvements in the daily lives of the masses.

  As Chong Ki-hae’s cousin had reported before the elder Chongs decided on North Korea as their destination, the living standard was at least as high in the North as in the South. And the North was far ahead in industrial development, especially heavy machinery. That did not necessarily contribute to living standards immediately, but at least it seemed to point to a brighter future.

  A student-led uprising in the South in 1960 kicked Rhee out and installed a democratically elected government. But that failed to alter the equation, as the new South Korean government of Prime Minister Chang Myon proved weak and corrupt. In April 1961—seven years after Dulles had talked about making the South attractive through an economic buildup—the U.S. ambassador in Seoul sent a classified cable to Washington. In it he lamented that the “stark, bleak facts of economic life,” along with frustrations over the peninsula’s continued division, were behind Southerners’ “widespread feelings of hopelessness.” Add to that mix “continuing mutual recriminations among Koreans,” the ambassador wrote, “and all this creates an atmosphere wide open to exploitation by enemies of a free Korea.”51

  Commentators friendly to Pyongyang seized upon the real differences and exaggerated them. “The South was literally a desolate land,” wrote an East German who visited North Korea in the early 1960s and essayed a comparison. “Only helmets of the American soldiers were shining. But to the north of the demarcation line as far as the eye can reach there were fields of golden grain.”52 A Western academic’s 1965 article entitled “Korean Miracle” referred not to the South Korean but to the North Korean economy.53

  Kim Il-sung’s personality cult was gathering momentum. The theory, earlier worked out in the Soviet Union on behalf of Stalin, was that the people, defined by communist doctrine as all-powerful, nevertheless could not function properly without becoming united under the leadership of a superior being, one without the limitations that afflict other people. Thus, an official biographer shortly would wriate that Kim Il-sung from the time of liberation had been the country’s obvious and true leader:

  But it is not a gift that everyone has, this ability for correct insight into such a complex situation, looking far into the future to hammer out the only correct line for the Korean revolution. Ahead of the Korean revolution on this morrow of the liberation lay countless complex problems, including the people’s inherent backwardness due to their history, the complex intertwined political forces and social and class relations, the occupation of South Korea by U.S. imperialism and the forced division of Korea into North and South.

  To correctly analyze all these issues and to chart the correct way for the revolution—this was a task to which only Comrade Kim Il-sung was equal, outstanding Leader of revolution as he is, who had gained unique and rich experience through his long-drawn revolutionary struggles, and who burned with patriotism and was armed with Marxist-Leninist convictions.

  This was the reason why immediately after liberation, the Korean people looked to Comrade Kim Il-sung to take the lead in the revolution as quickly as possible, in order to overcome the confusion. Political leaders of both North and South Korea, too, realizing their own limitations, earnestly wished him to lead them to the fulfillment of the long-cherished desire of the people as soon as possible.”54

  Kim Il-sung and the party “became the brain, heart, wisdom and conscience of all the Korean people.”55 While other high-level leaders had to wait until they were dead before anything would be named after them, the huge Kim Il-sung Square had been one of the first features completed in the new Pyongyang.56

  Kim’s purges continued as he moved to consolidate his rule. Soon it became the turn of the Yenan faction, made up of Korean returnees from China proper who had fought against the Japanese as members of Mao Zedong’s communist forces. They showed their potential for challenging Kim in the years following Stalin’s 1953 death. At a 1956 meeting in Moscow, Khrushchev criticized the Stalin personality cult and proposed collective leadership in the Soviet Union to replace the dead leader’s one-man rule. Clearly, other communist countries were expected to follow that lead.

  After watching Khrushchev’s treatment of Stalin several North Korean officials (mostly members of the Yenan faction, although some Soviet-Koreans got involved also) were bold enough to question Kim’s personality cult, management style and economic policies. They plotted to topple him. Scholar Andrei N. Lankov demonstrates their deep differences with Kim by citing memoranda of conversations between Soviet officials and the plotters, documents he found in the Soviet archives in the 1990s. “I am becoming more and more convinced that Kim Il-sung does not understand how harmful his behavior is,” one plotter complained to a Soviet Embassy
official. “He paralyzes the initiative of members of the Standing Committee and other executives of the Party and the State. He intimidates everyone. Nobody can voice an opinion on any question. People are subjected to repression for the slightest criticism. He has gathered around himself sycophants and mediocrities.” Another man dissected Kim’s economic policies: “Farmers compose 80 percent of the population. … After Liberation they were offered a good opportunity for a better life but they remain very poor. The government’s taxation policy is incorrect. Instead of 25 to 27 percent tax they took more than 50 percent from the farmers. Such a policy continues to this day. It is not necessary to recount the methods used in 1954–1955 to gather taxes. Tax gathering was accompanied by beatings, murders and arrests. The party’s activities are based on violence, not persuasion. The [agricultural] co-operative movement is based on violence.” What to do? “A group of executives considers it necessary to undertake certain actions against Kim Il-sung and his closest associates at the earliest possible opportunity. The group sets itself the task of putting new persons in charge of the [Korean Workers’ Party] Central Committee and government.”57

  At a Central Committee meeting where they hoped to win support for his ouster, Kim was ready for them. Those who stood to speak against Kim’s idolization were “pushed back by abusive insults and shouting,” according to Yu Song-chol. The atmosphere was so threatening that four of the Yenan faction members “fled to China immediately after the morning session, fearing for their lives.” The vicissitudes of the Yenan faction continued until it was wiped out. Its leader, Kim Tu-bong, lost his party membership in 1958 and was sent off to a collective farm, where he died. Yenan faction members in the military were charged with plotting a revolt. The “military revolt plan” that was used in evidence against them was in reality merely a plan for suppressing anti-government uprisings, a plan they had been assigned to draw up, according to Yu.58