Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Before meeting him, Shin had thought Kim must be crazy. Now, however, upon hearing Kim’s apologetic and humble remarks, Shin concluded that the young leader had real humanity and was very generous. “I was amazed that he was a communist.”

  Shin and Choi were happy to be reunited. After the party, they were taken to see the Dear Leader’s personal film library, which they found to be a three-story building where some 250 employees cared for an astonishingly full collection of more than 15,000 films from around the world. Around 300 of those were from South Korea, and one of them came as a major shock to Shin and Choi. Years earlier, without taking the precaution of making copies of his new film Tale of Shimcheong, Shin had sent it to a representative in Hong Kong who had asked to have it shipped there so that subtitles could be made. The film thereafter had gone missing. Now Shin saw that Kim Jong-il had it in his library, which meant that the Dear Leader was the only person in the world who could screen it. The couple figured Shin’s Hong Kong employee had been Kim Jong-il’s secret agent, involved first in stealing the film and then in kidnapping them.

  Kim asked Shin and Choi to watch and critique films, four per day mostly from the communist bloc but also including the occasional Hollywood production such as Dr. Zhivago. All that viewing would not have seemed to Kim an onerous chore. He himself was watching movies every night. Shin and Choi concluded that he was using foreign films to make up for his lack of foreign travel, gathering from them information about foreign countries. Wherever he went, a video setup was expected to be provided. Shin learned that Kim personally vetted in advance each film proposed for showing in the country. Kim phoned the couple every day, dialing directly rather than having his secretary make the calls. “How are you? Is your health OK? If there’s anything you need, just tell me.” Shin developed considerable respect for Kim’s film knowledge and sensibility, deciding that the young ruler was “smarter than his directors and writers.”

  One day Kim phoned Shin, thanked him for his help and said he had a favor to ask. Kim had done the preliminary planning for a film and wanted Shin to direct it and enter it in an international contest. At the same time he said he was preparing an office for Shin at Pyongyang’s Choson Film Studios. When Shin saw it he was astonished. “It was a wonderful office, three stories, of semi-European architecture, lined in marble.” Shin was doubly happy: Not only would he be able to resume movie-making, he would also be given a passport, which meant there might be a chance for escape eventually.

  At the time of his kidnapping Shin had been on the outs politically with the military-backed government of South Korea. He and Choi knew that if they should ever escape and try to return to the South they would need proof to persuade the tough and suspicious anti-communist officials of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency that they had not defected willingly So they adopted an extremely risky gambit. When they visited Kim Jong-il in his office at party headquarters for an audience on Shin’s fifty-first birthday, Choi secreted a tape recorder in her handbag and managed to record forty-five minutes of the three-hour conversation. The date was October 19, 1983—ten days after the Rangoon bombing (and just a few days before I saw and panned the China trip documentary that had been assembled by far lesser talents than Shin). Choi noted with interest that Kim had monitors mounted on his office wall showing three South Korean television net-works.

  More than a decade later the South Korean monthly magazine Wolgan Choson combined the tapes of this conversation and some subsequent tapings onto a cassette and distributed it in connection with a magazine special report. As one South Korean listener commented to me, the Kim on the tapes talked “volubly” and “straightforwardly.” He “doesn’t embellish but just comes out and says what he wants to.” His voice was “normally pitched, resonant and pleasant. But he speaks with a slight stutter and the words don’t always fit together. He jumps around.” Kim seemed to like to talk—on the tape he left little time for others to talk. Although the accented Korean spoken by people from the North and the South can be quite different, Kim “speaks with only a slight accent. He could communicate easily in the South.”16

  In this first secretly taped conversation Kim offered an explanation, remarkably frank, of the thinking behind the kidnap plot. He had heard of Shin’s political troubles with the Seoul regime, which had resulted in revocation of the Shin Studio’s South Korean film license, he told the couple. Thus he figured that Shin, then spending time in Hong Kong and the United States, might be preparing to move his operation overseas. Shin had been born before liberation in the northern part of Korea, which also helped make him a plausible convert to the North Korean side. He doubted he could get Shin to come on his own, though, so Kim had ordered Choi brought to Pyongyang “to lure director Shin.” Kim explained that “at the time, the thing I was advocating was: How can the people from the Southern part come to us, to our republic’s bosom, and with genuine freedom, genuine, uh, in producing films, do so without worries?”

  Kim then launched into a soliloquy on why South Korea had achieved a higher standard of moviemaking than the North. The difference, he suggested, was that North Korean film industry people knew that the state would feed them even if they performed only minimally, so they didn’t try hard. Their Southern counterparts, mean-while, especially in earlier years when the economy was struggling, knew that they must work to eat. “Because they have to earn money,” Kim said, Southern movie industry people expended blood, sweat and tears to get results. South Korean actors, he said, obviously had been aware that instant stardom wouldn’t last; they must workto improve their acting because the public soon would tire of just a pretty face. Newcomers to the North Korean screen lacked that understanding and motivation, and thus failed to make the effort to grow in their craft after making their film debuts, Kim said.

  Besides recognizing the motivation problems in a socialist system, Kim in that conversation also acknowledged that the North’s insistence on national self-reliance made it difficult for others in the country to speak, as he was doing privately to Shin and Choi, about the superiority of outside ways. “If someone else says this, the others will criticize him for being a malcontent,” the Dear Leader said. “He might be termed a toady.” As a result, he said, filmmakers in the North worked dogmatically. “There are many repetitive scenes and the stories are already schematized. … There are so many crying scenes, like a funeral. Why aren’t there any movies without crying scenes?”

  Kim told his forced guests, apologetically, that he could not have it known that he had kidnapped Shin and Choi to the country to upgrade the local film industry. “It is not propitious to talk about it truthfully,” he said. Then he taught them the cover story they should use when meeting people from outside North Korea. They should say that “South Koreans do not have democracy. No freedom, no democracy. Next, say there is too much meddling when it comes to creative invention. The intervention is what you [in the South] call the anti-communist law. Uh, [in the South] they only tell you to do anti-communism, so there is anti-communism here and there and thus no freedom.” Shin tried to interject a remark at that point but Kim ignored him and continued laying down his script for the couple to follow: “That is why, because there is no freedom, in seeking genuine freedom, pursuing genuine freedom, to be ensured freedom of creativity, you have come here. And as for the plot of a movie, we can start following the developed countries and even exceed what they have done. With this slogan, ‘exceeding,’ we will march forward. This way everything will be natural. It’s better than saying you came here by force.”

  Kim later explained his remark about movie plots, acknowledging that films made for internal propaganda purposes might not be suited for entry into international contests. Thus Shin would be permitted to select themes more likely to be accepted abroad. Kim told the couple a story of one contest in Cambodia, a country then ruled by Kim Il-sung’s close friend Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in which North Korea had tried to enter a guerrilla-themed film. Sihanouk was not amused. Aft
er all, Cambodia had rid itself only recently of the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal former guerrillas whose dead victims included some of Sihanouk’s children. Sihanouk complained that the pro-revolutionary North Korean entry was “a film opposing myself.” Kim recalled that Sihanouk was “fuming with rage.” North Korean representatives spent the rest of their time in Phnom Penh aplogizing. “It is evident,” concluded Kim, “that we don’t have a properly made film to enter in a film festival.”

  Resuming his comparison, Kim said North Korea’s filmmakers were “like kindergarten students who just learned how to walk, but in the South they all possess mid- to high-level technologies. [The Southerners are] university-level, and we are kindergarten level, but still when new ideas are introduced they [North Korean film people] reject them and are firm about it.” He worried that “in ten years, if-we don’t catch up, frankly speaking, in an international perspective, because our movies are so back-wards, we might rank number one among the most back-ward films. Ah, I’m saying that we might be the last among the lagging films.”

  Shin started work October 20, 1983, at his new office. Kim provided Shin with millions of dollars, practically a blank check, for the quest to win international film awards. Once the couple went abroad together, under close guard, and gave a press conference in which they denied having been kidnapped, claiming that they had gone voluntarily to Pyongyang. They had no choice at the time, they were to write later. But lying at that press conference helped them prepare for their eventual escape (-which came in 1986), by persuading Kim that they were loyal and need not be guarded so closely when they traveled.

  The Choi-Shin episode revealed much about Kim Jong-il’s personality and work style. When it came to his favorite subject, movies, Kim proved to be not so rigid an ideologue as might have been expected based on his attacks on others who fell short of ideological purity. His published movie writings focus tightly on promoting the unitary system, yet he told Shin not to worry about political statements but just to make prize-winning films that would show off North Korea.

  The liberal attitudes that Kim showed to Shin and Choi could have been role-playing, to an extent. The couple reported that Kim described Shin’s harsh treatment in jail as a dreadful mistake, the result of poorly performing security personnel who provoked Shin’s rebellion. In that case the Dear Leader seems to have sought to present his “good cop” face. Following in the footsteps of his father, he would make frequent use of the device of publicly blaming subordinates for failed policies—and punishing them—even though the policies were his.

  Note the unashamed tendency to play god, planning the lives of people under his control, as when Kim suggested that Choi and Shin remarry even though Shin still had a legal second “wife in the South. (The second “wife subsequently died in a motor accident.)

  And there is the fact that, even with a whole country to look out for as the co-ruler, Kim Jong-il still spent a great deal of his time and effort on movies. Subordinates seeking to justify his fascination with foreign movies might explain it as a means to learn English and thus learn about Western economic methods. But that hardly accounts for his having received four critiques a day from Shin, for example. One may question how much time and effort he had left over to spend on improving the people’s livelihood—aside from exhorting them to work ever harder and faster.17

  Shortly after Kim Jong-il’s formal elevation to the heirship in 1980, Pyongyang’s Central News Agency praised the “Party Center” for an “economic agitation campaign” through which “a leaping advance has been made in economic development.”18 The people of North Korea would have had to be instructed where to look for evidence of such an “advance.” Agitation was the old, top-down motivation method used in the Chollima campaign, Kim Il-sung’s knockoff of China’s Great Leap Forward. By the 1980s the method had lost much of its usefulness, but the elder Kim had been loath to adopt the un-socialist Western approaches that were being introduced into other communist economies.

  As the poorly traveled Kim Jong-il gained power over his country’s affairs, the top-down, closed-to-the-outside-world approach was all that he had been taught, all he knew. It was during this period that his committee of sympathetic biographers troubled to tell us, in Great Leader Kim Jong-il, that as a primary school pupil in the period immediately after the 1953 armistice the junior Kim often visited private rice shops in the market and “made a close study of rice prices and citizens’ purchasing power. At night, he showed to his father his pocketbook in which the prices of goods were written down.” By the time he was a political economy major at Kim Il-sung University, private shops were a thing of the past and Kim Jong-il was lending his talents to the regime’s micromanagement of the economy. He would, his biographers say, drop into a mountain food shop, check the soybean paste, find it sour and deliver a speech urging shop employees to protect consumers by cracking down on suppliers “when there are shortages of goods or the goods supplied are inferior in quality.”

  It was the Chinese who now tried to teach Kim Jong-il some different ideas about economic development. And he listened, at least to an extent. But much of-what he heard seems to have worried him, or baffled him, as much as it inspired him. He began talking of plans to open North Korea soon after returning from his 1983 trip to China. In the recorded portion of his October 19 conversation that year with film couple Shin and Choi, Kim noted that China like Yugoslavia had “opened itself up. … Hu Yaobang said: ‘Now here, uh, Chairman Mao, Chairman Mao, when Mao Zedong was still around, the doors were tightly locked and thus [the Chinese] people saw nothing. When they see other people’s things they say without consideration that the other people’s goods are good while theirs are bad. In reality, their goods aren’t so bad. They have to make efforts to improve theirs to do better than others, but instead of making efforts they continually claim that the other person’s goods are good, which is a major problem. After opening up a little, what do they learn first, instead of Western technology? They learn to grow beards and [long] hair. Ah, tell them to acquire technology but all they do is take in external things, thus they have nothing in them yet. The education system should generally be reformed.’ That’s what Hu Yaobang said to me.”

  Kim talked then about how the lesson applied to North Korea: “It’s the same in our case,” he told the couple. “If-we continually show Western films on television, show them without restraint, then only nihilistic thoughts can come about. Eh, then, in a situation where we are divided, how can our national pride and next patriotic struggle—all those things, patriotism, patriotism—-we have to increase this, but we only make them idolize Western things, Western things. So we must advance the technology before opening, but this is one of the problems that cause us to fall into internal contradictions.” His conclusion was a cautious compromise: “Eh, thus, because of this, I want to give rights to a limited degree. That is my intention.”

  Kim then returned to his concern about the failure of the regime’s incentives to make North Korean movie industry people work hard. He had more than an inkling that the North Korean system was at fault. “What I’m saying is that this—ever since the end of the Korean War, speaking in materialistic terms, what you call, eh—unless we make them have desires, uh—I think it is related with the system. What I’m saying is that even if only one piece is written in a year, living expenses are still given. When a piece is written, only the cost of the paper can be earned. It should be their main job but it is only a side job. Eh—-what one has to really, really do [for a living], that is a side job while even if one does not do this, living expenses are still given by the government. Thus the people have no desire or need. So if we say, ‘Write three pieces a year,’ thus they’ve already become too full in the stomach. Then they say that they can’t write it at their home and thus request that they be sent to a resort. That’s how people have become.” Once, Kim said, “I called on my propaganda department workers and said to them that the socialist system is said to be good, but that th
ere are a lot of internal discrepancies that must be resolved. Yes. So what I’m trying to say is that they have no motivation to work.”

  Months later, after one of their new films won an award at a festival in Czechoslovakia, Kim invited Choi and Shin to his office—and again the couple managed to tape the conversation. This time, Kim broadened his economic analysis a bit to touch upon aspects beyond his beloved movie studios: “Ten years ago, twenty years ago, what did we say? ‘People should tighten their belts. In a situation where the North and the South are separated, we must ourselves prepare a revolutionary capacity. Thus we must tighten our belts and work to build our defense.’ ”

  From this historical note Kim abruptly shifted his thoughts to the competition from South Korea, which was then getting favorable world-wide publicity for its success in launching an indigenous automobile industry. Kim felt the praise was undeserved because the Southern automakers relied heavily on overseas suppliers of components. “Localization, localization is what they claim, but in engine development the South Koreans, the South Korean people, in producing a motorcycle they import the engine, bring in this and that. … It is basically an assembled good. The automobiles, what do they call it [perhaps he was attempting to recall the name of the Hyundai Pony which was the Model-T Ford of South Korean industrialization], even those are completely assembled. What they claim as localization is only 40 percent. How can they call what they assemble localization? They themselves—-we shouldn’t do it that way We must show the machines in the planning stages. Show this, show them from the first stages, then the reporters will go to the South and will compare our factory to the South Korean one.”