Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  There remained severe problems in the South, to be sure. A populace growing more prosperous, literate and sophisticated increasingly found itself in conflict with the repression that the military-backed dictatorship used to preserve its power. The North cheered Southern dissidents and lost no opportunity to attack Park Chung-hee’s legitimacy: the South Korean leader had served during colonial times in the hated Japanese Imperial Army. North Korean propaganda continued to portray the South as a puppet state, where

  the U.S. imperialist aggressors have planted themselves in the top-level places of the exploiters and traitors who ride the people, and lord it over them. In shanties and dugouts the people are bemoaning their poverty and hunger, while the plunderers satiate themselves with the blood and sweat of the people, in their palace-like mansions, indulging in orgies. Brandishing their bayonets, the ruling classes, who control the power and the wealth, oppress the people struggling for liberation and unification at will, making the land one of carnage.2

  While the South’s frequent political turmoil did not derail its astonishingly rapid economic growth, the North started to bump up against the limits of what could be achieved with a command economy3

  Mean-while, facing both real and imagined threats, Kim took it upon himself to militarize the economy to an unprecedented degree. “The turning point,” according to Hwang Jang-yop, who was then his ideology secretary, “came in the late 1960s.” Disillusioned by both the revisionists in the Soviet Union and the wild leftists then launching the Cultural Revolution in China, Kim Il-sung “decided that his party had to rely on its own strength to liberate South Korea and achieve reunification.”4 Accordingly Kim began his militarization campaign.

  Although militarism would, over time, cripple the civilian economy, North Korea in the ’60s still enjoyed some momentum. As late as 1965 the North’s $292 per capita GNP was more than three times the South’s $88, according to one set of estimates.5 Those were the golden years of North Korean life, to hear former residents reminisce. In the 1950s and ’60s, “even though it was difficult to have an easy and comfortable lifestyle, at least the rations came regularly—never delayed,” Lee Ok-keum, who was born in 1949 and defected to the South with her husband and family in 1994, told me. “There were actually goods made in North Korea that you could buy in the stores— clothing, material, underwear, candy.”

  As South Korean economic growth accelerated, growth rates in the North gradually declined. While the multi-year state economic plans of the late 1940s and the mid- to late ’50s were deemed to have achieved their goals more or less as planned, growth from then on failed to meet planners’ expectations. The first “seven-year plan,” begun in 1961, dragged on for three extra years. Subsequent plans like-wise could not be completed without extensions of two or three years.

  Those disappointing results came despite a series of campaigns and mass movements intended to wring greater output from the economy. Kim’s Chol-lima movement had brought serious confusion around 1959, when planners misallocated resources to various sectors of the economy. Quality of production dropped, and eager-to-please economic units turned in inflated claims for their quantitative production. Kim added incentives, short of money bonuses. He combined ideological indoctrination with prizes, including free vacations, and awards of medals and honorific titles for exceeding production quotas. Those incentives proved insufficient.6

  Kim’s “Tae-an work system,” named for a power plant he was visiting in 1961 when he gave the instructions, was supposed to reduce bureaucratic inefficiency. In practice, it focused all power in party secretaries who, in turn, represented the will of the Great Leader. Hwang Jang-yop, who held high posts in both the party and the administration before he defected in 1997, explained how it worked:

  Say the prime minister has given a certain factory manager some instructions. The factory manager will immediately report to the factory party committee and follow the committee’s instructions. … The prime minister does not have the authority to give instructions to the factory party committee. The factory party committee will deliberate on whether or not the prime minister’s instructions are commensurate with the will of the Great Leader, and if it decides not, then it will not carry out those instructions but report to its supervising party committee and await instructions from there before proceeding any further.

  Hwang further illustrated his point by noting that as president of Kim Il-sung University he had held cabinet ministerial status. “I was also the Speaker of the Supreme People’s Assembly and member of the party’s central committee, and was therefore one notch above the rest of the cabinet ministers. Thus, in terms of status in the party and the state, the party secretary supervising the university was far below me. And still all power in the university was in the hands of the party secretary, and the university president was under his command.” The Tae-an work system, Hwang said, “only served to paralyze the creativity and spontaneity of administrative and economic officials and legitimize the bureaucracy of party officials.”7

  Economic strength translates into political and military power. Park Chung-hee’s reinvigoration of the Southern economy meant that the South now would have a shot at achieving ultimate reunification on its terms. The contest was becoming clearer. Most Koreans believed that reunification was inevitable sooner or later. One possibility now was that the South, by overtaking and overwhelming the North economically would set the stage for a demoralized North to fall into its lap. The other possibility—that the North would “win the prize by patiently pursuing its tactics of subversion, then intervening in a moment of Southern weakness to help communize the South—depended on dislodging or neutralizing the South’s U.S. backers.

  After using the term juche in 1955 to describe his self-reliant policy8 Kim had said little about it for a while. By the early 1960s, though, Kim was tilting toward the Beijing side in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Khrushchev in Moscow was promoting the line that communist countries should de-emphasize military preparations. Instead they should focus on peaceful competition with capitalist countries to develop their economies. Moscow assured the smaller communist countries that they need not worry; the nuclear-armed might of the Soviet superpower deterred Western attack.

  To Kim such talk had one highly unwelcome meaning: He could expect no help from the Soviet Bloc in a forcible reunification of Korea. The notion of peaceful coexistence—-whether the Soviet Union’s coexistence with the hated imperialist Americans or North Korea’s coexistence with South Korea—-was anathema to him as it had been since the 1950s.9 He still had on his agenda the big-ticket items of pushing the Americans to withdraw their troops, fomenting a Southern revolution and unifying Korea under his rule. (As an official biography put it, he was “leading to victory the revolutionary struggles of the South Korean people, to sweep away U.S. imperialism and its agents, and the struggle of the entire Korean people for national unification.”10)

  In 1963, under such circumstances, Kim picked up the theme of juche again. Afterward he never tired of talking about it. “In a nutshell,” according to Kim, juche means “having the attitude of master toward revolution and construction in one’s own country.” It means “refraining from dependence upon others.” It means “using your own brains, believing your own strength and displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance, and thus solving your own problems for yourself on your own responsibility under all circumstances.” Kim went on to emphasize the importance for any socialist country of “applying the universal principles of Marxism-Leninism and the experience of other countries to suit the historical conditions and national peculiarities of your own country.”11 In other words: Don’t let Moscow or Beijing pull your strings.

  In the end, however, juche, Kim’s homegrown twist, was to prove just as limiting for the North’s economic growth as the Stalinist-style planned economy. The limitations were to become especially apparent in view of-what Park Chung-hee was starting to do in the South. The Korean peninsula’s own natural resour
ces were concentrated in the North, out of the Southerners’ grasp. Even if that had not been the case, the peninsula—lacking petroleum and another industrial essential, coking coal—could not be self-sufficient and therefore could never be completely self-reliant. The Southerners turned to international trade, at the opposite pole from.ju.che. They would import the basic commodities, then reprocess them using borrowed capital and cheap local labor. Finally, they would export the finished products.

  In 1965, South Korea normalized relations with Japan, which provided $300 million in grants and $200 million in loans as compensation for damages inflicted during the colonial period. That money, plus enhanced business ties with Japan, gave South Korea a running start toward the “miracle” that was to make it the leader of Asia’s fast-developing “tiger” economies. According to one analysis, the South’s growth rate outpaced the North’s from 1966—and in 1976 the South’s per capita GNP surpassed that of the North for the first time.12

  After somewhat de-emphasizing the military following the Korean War, Kim Il-sung in the 1960s resumed with a vengeance the policy of building up his armed forces.13 While the psychic costs are hard to measure, it is clear enough that Kim’s growing obsession with security-was terribly expensive in economic development terms. His policy of maintaining military superiority over the far more populous South proved to be a crushing burden—and, in the long run, countercompetitive.14

  Many South Korean and Western analysts argued that the militarization drive represented nothing but Kim’s continuing dream of military conquest of the South. The North, on the other hand, always maintained that it arose from the prospect that South Korea and its American backers would start a new war and Pyongyang would have to defend itself.15 My view is that Kim’s policy combined offensive and defensive elements—although his defensive concerns to a large extent represented his fears of the consequences of his offensive policies. Despite military alliances with China and the USSR, and Khrushchev’s assurances of protection, Kim feared he might not be able to count on allies to rescue him in case his contest with the South should lead to renewed war with the Americans. Without an impenetrable defense, he could not feel secure in taking offensive measures.

  Kim became downright nervous from the early 1960s as he was finding it difficult to get along with his Soviet allies. An opportunity for a second south-ward strike came during the confusion of the South Korean student uprising against Rhee in April of 1960. Both China and Russia urged against acting, however, according to Hwang Jang-yop’s reported later testimony. The Pyongyang leadership lacked the stomach to go it alone, particularly since it had just finished rebuilding the country from the ruins of the first Korean War.16

  In 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy went eyeball-to-eyeball with Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis; it was the Russian who blinked, agreeing to eliminate the Soviet missile bases in Cuba that had sparked the crisis. Kim Il-sung’s growing concern that he could not depend on his biggest supposed backer in the communist world inspired a major round of diplomacy to find friends among the smaller communist and Third World countries.

  Just as he split with Moscow over its challenge to the doctrine of continuing revolution, so Kim eventually turned on Beijing—for failing to put aside its own disputes with Moscow in the interest of the Vietnamese revolution.17 Before that dispute could be cooled off Chinese Red Guards would attack Kim’s very un-communist lifestyle, deriding him as “fat,” a “counterrevolutionary,” “a millionaire, an aristocrat and a leading bourgeois element in Korea.”18

  Mean-while, American attempts to remove Fidel Castro in Cuba and to defeat the Viet Cong made Kim wonder if he might be next. His attitude was not mere paranoia. In addition to whatever concern he felt over the new U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, he had to worry about less direct means the United States and South Korea were using to attack his regime. While the North Koreans hoped to subvert South Korea, that was also precisely what South Korea and its American backers hoped to do to North Korea. As a control measure, the Soviet occupation regime in the 1940s had initiated what proved to be a pattern of North Korean isolation that would last for decades. Washington sought to intensify that isolation as part of its efforts to exert pressure that might cause the Northern system to break down.19

  The installation of the new, military-backed regime across the DMZ in South Korea in 1961 certainly did not ease Kim’s worries on this score. It was around that time that Kim draped over the North a shroud of secrecy and exclusivity comparable to the centuries of isolationism that had preceded the nineteenth century opening to the West and earned Korea the sobriquet “hermit kingdom.”20 A large part of his objective clearly was to make the population inaccessible to propaganda and other subversion efforts. While the South Koreans and Americans liked to imagine that isolation would threaten his rule, Kim believed that even more isolation was the way to preserve his system. In more than four decades to come, he was never proved wrong about that.

  The change Kim put into effect was dramatic. During Rumanian diplomat Izidor Urian’s first stay in Pyongyang, from 1954 to 1959, “the people in North Korea treated me kindly and I could meet people freely. At that time I was allowed to travel freely almost anywhere in North Korea.” Urian returned to Pyongyang in 1963 and found quite a different atmosphere. Even diplomats dispatched from friendly communist countries such as his were confined to the capital and permitted only minimal contact with North Koreans. Without special permits they could visit only a few sites such as a swimming pool at Nampo, west of Pyongyang, and a Kim Il-sung museum at Mount Myohyang, some 150 kilometers north of the capital. Urian later wrote that from 1963 he “managed to meet government officials only in the Foreign Affairs Ministry and some other departments, and a few reporters.” Until he ended his duties in Pyongyang in 1983, he had no further chances to meet ordinary people in Pyongyang. Even at banquets for foreigners, the North Koreans kept to themselves instead of mixing with their guests.21

  If resident and visiting Rumanians and Cubans felt themselves isolated and restricted in Pyongyang, citizens of Western countries were barred, for the most part, from even entering North Korea in the first place. For them and for the South Koreans, the battles above the 38th parallel in the Korean War would prove to have been the last chance to glimpse North Korea for decades. Even if they should manage to get in, they-would encounter a population trained to tell them nothing.

  Feeling a need to know what was happening in the North, but finding human intelligence increasingly hard to come by, Washington and Seoul resorted to electronic and photographic surveillance by plane and ship.22

  Some analysts have sought to explain what was happening in North Korea almost entirely in terms of the threat facing the country from the nuclear-armed American forces and their South Korean colleagues. Indeed, the North Koreans were being pushed extremely hard. In the end, though, the argument is not convincing. Other countries have felt themselves under siege without going to such extremes of self-isolation, of one-man rule systematically built on enormous lies and on whipping up mass hatred.23 Whatever they were telling their people, for propaganda purposes, about diabolical American schemes, could Pyongyang’s leaders really not understand that the American nuclear weapons were in Korea to deter the North from provoking or starting another war? From the other side it seemed clear that the weapons were there precisely because the United States had no desire to fight another full-fledged war—much less (for the time being, at least) initiate one. Washington just as obviously-was determined to keep Seoul from sparking a Second Korean War.

  Whatever threat he might have felt from American and South Korean subversion and espionage efforts, Kim Il-sung was doing his share of threatening. In September 1961, he sounded an anti-American theme, calling upon South Koreans to reject military service, to struggle against U.S. military bases and to shut down factories with strikes and sabotage. Simultaneously he ordered reconstruction of a communist party in the South. In 1964, an underground revolutio
nary group, the Revolutionary Party for Reunification, was founded in the South with a twelve-point program that read very much like the program of South Vietnam’s National Liberation Front. The party had the mission of attracting Southerners, particularly intellectuals, to the communist movement under Kim Il-sung’s leadership.

  Having failed to take advantage of the South Korean student revolution in 1960, or to prevent the military coup of 1961, Kim appears to have been determined to be ready the next time opportunity might knock. In December 1962 the North Korean party leadership formally raised military preparation to equal status with economic development, citing both the international situation and South Korea’s “acute crisis.”24

  As the North Korean military built its strength, its soldiers involved themselves increasingly in small-scale assaults on the enemy along the DMZ. One theory was that those clashes were intended for domestic consumption—to keep tensions high. Thus, the regime could justify the sacrifices being made to build up the military at a time when strained relations with the Soviet Union also contributed to economic hardship.25 Border skirmishes became especially frequent starting in 1967 when the number of reported incidents exceeded 550—a tenfold increase over the 1966 figure. between 1967 and 1969, thirty-eight Americans were killed and 144 wounded, with South Korean casualties in proportional numbers.26

  No doubt there was a connection between North Korea’s redoubled militancy and the Vietnam War. Kim Il-sung decried the massive U.S. commitment in Indochina as imperialism at its worst. From 1965, South Korean troops were dispatched to take some of the burden off the Americans—and to give the South Korean soldiers valuable combat experience. Kim followed suit, dispatching fighter planes and pilots to Vietnam. At the same time, though, the Vietnamese quagmire was a distraction of his enemies of the sort Kim had been awaiting. Weakening those enemies would be one dividend from his own support of the Vietnamese communists. Kim’s identification with Ho Chi Minh and his close ties with North Vietnam suggest that Hanoi’s strategy for liberating South Vietnam impressed him as valid for use against South Korea, if sufficient preparations could be made.27