Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Throughout my visit, North Korean officials had been denying persistent reports of food shortages. Officials acknowledged that rice was rationed, but the figures they gave for rations (700 grams a day for an adult, 500 for a child) seemed adequate assuming they were accurate. The question was what the diet might include beyond the staples (grain and beans, mainly) and kim-chee, the national dish of spicy pickled cabbage, cucumbers or other vegetables. Foreigners living in Pyongyang said that eggs were available but that meat was a rarity on most North Korean tables. Visitors to the youth festival did not confront any shortage personally—far from it. Our hosts fed us great quantities of meat, fulfilling the dictates of traditional Korean hospitality even as they sought to persuade us that meat was plentiful in the diet of ordinary Koreans.

  At the picnic, country air and an endless supply of the local beer sharpened my appetite, which even normally was large—but as soon as I finished off one plate of roasted meat, another appeared. I was skeptical of Kim Jong-su’s assurances that food had become plentiful, but I did not know at the time just how bad the situation had become. Later, when I learned more, I felt ashamed of having pigged out at Kim’s picnic. The truth was that the food supply was miserably (although not yet disastrously) bad. The regime had come up with special supplies for the festival, but soon North Koreans once again would be eating grasses out of necessity, not nostalgia, and not mixed in with their rice but instead of rice.1

  Even while I was there, a look at North Korea’s agriculture suggested that the country was stuck, dabbling in slight changes to the formula but unwilling or unable to commit wholeheartedly to reforms that would deviate seriously from the original line of Stalin and Kim Il-sung—now, in its basics, the line of Kim Jong-il as well.

  That official line contradicted the clear evidence of-what worked best. In small private plots, to take the most readily gauged example, the corn was taller than corn growing in nearby fields that were farmed collectively. Despite such visual proof the authorities publicly continued to denigrate those private plots, and the markets at which their produce was sold, as shameful relics of the bad old pre-socialist days. While other communist countries were experimenting with private enterprise, North Koreans still were allowed to cultivate privately only their patches of dooryard. The proclaimed long-term policy was not to expand that tiny private sector but to phase it out, to collectivize farming even further—in other words, to redouble approaches that long since had passed the point of diminishing returns.

  Travel outside Pyongyang during my 1989 visit revealed that North Korean farmers were cultivating practically every available square inch of arable soil. Soil appeared generally not particularly good, and in places very poor—red clay or sand, with little or no topsoil cover.2 The land available was used not for pasture or fiber production but overwhelmingly for growing grains and other foods for direct human consumption. I saw few animals. Those I did see, in almost all cases, were not meat or dairy animals but oxen for plowing and pulling carts.

  At Haksan Cooperative Farm north of Pyongyang, rice paddies, green and glistening in early July, filled the lowlands while corn was planted on steeper land. Houses and apartment buildings clustered tightly together on high ground to conserve land. I met farm director Kim Ho-sok, who said he was in charge of 2,600 farmers cultivating 15 million square meters and living in 1,100 households. Kim boasted that harvests had continued to increase in the previous decade,3 but the farm director’s claims conflicted with the picture of North Korean agricultural stagnation that foreign and South Korean analysts were painting.

  Haksan’s dooryard private plots were limited to 66 square meters each. Farm officials said free markets were held every ten days where farmers could sell or barter some of the produce of their private plots—but the officials insisted those markets were a dwindling, unwelcome holdover from the bad old days and would not be needed any longer once the country achieved full, pure communism. “Gradually the free market is declining now” said farm director Kim. After all, he explained, “the state supplies the people with the necessities of life.”

  Reminded that the Soviet Union was emphasizing glasnost and perestroika, and along with China had been increasing the use of free markets, Kim replied: “We don’t know much about that, but we don’t want to follow their lead. ‘Openness’ and ‘reform’ are for the Russians and Chinese. It’s their style.” In theory, at least, farmers collectively owned the so-called cooperative farms such as Haksan, which sold their produce to the state. But cooperative farms were supposed to be converted soon into “state farms.” Their land would be owned by the state and the farmers would become salaried employees of the state, director Kim said with evident pride.

  A visit to a farm family’s home illustrated both the old-style incentives that were still considered ideologically correct and some financial incentives that the regime scorned but had to tolerate during the “transitional” period. Kim Myong-pok showed off an apartment of three rooms plus kitchen that she said her farming family had occupied since the previous year. Haksan’s farmers were gradually moving out of old fashioned, single-story houses into such newly built, modern apartments, similar to those of city-dwellers. Mrs. Kim explained that her husband had been high on the list to get the new housing because he was a “labor hero.” She was watching a Japanese Toshiba television set that she said had been donated by the Great Leader to the husband for his labor heroism. Heroes got their special awards based on effort, for going all out.

  On the other hand, cash payments to Haksan’s farmers were based on time worked, skill level and unit-wide production. The previous year, Mrs. Kim had made 3,400 won and her husband 5,200 won, she said. The total, 8,600 won for a year, was two or three times as much as a typical urban-dwelling, two-income couple might bring home for factory or white-collar work. Since there was no need for farmers to spend money on housing or on food, Mrs. Kim said, theirs went for home furnishings, or into savings to pay for their children’s weddings, parents’ wedding anniversary parties and other foreseeable social obligations.

  North Koreans insisted that financial incentives were passé, but their actions suggested the opposite. By 1989, reports had reached the outside world of self-seeking behavior among the country’s supposedly puritanical communists. For example, high-ranking officials demanded that underlings bribe them with scarce goods such as color television sets in exchange for promotions.

  One diplomat who was stationed in Pyongyang intermittently for years illustrated the change that was taking place by citing two identical incidents when his family visited a beach resort and an adventurous child swam out too far, so that the concerned diplomat had to ask a lifeguard to row out and bring the youngster back. The first time that happened, in the mid-1970s, the lifeguard had to be pressed to accept some lollipops as a gesture of thanks. When it happened again more than a decade later (an amazing coincidence, but that’s the diplomat’s story), the lifeguard refused the proffered candies, asking to be re-warded instead in U.S. dollars.

  I had a similar experience in 1989 when one of the North Koreans assigned to help foreign newsmen asked me to give him some American currency. He said he wanted dollars to spend for foreign goods that were for sale in the special hard-currency shops established for the youth festival. Some Adidas sports shoes, in particular, seemed to have caught his eye. I reflected at the time that he might have been instructed to ask for money as part of the regime’s efforts to accumulate foreign exchange. But the amount involved was insignificant, so I leaned toward the explanation that he had made the request on his own initiative and for his personal benefit. This instance of seemingly individualistic behavior reinforced a sense that the regime had given up some of its rigid control, perhaps to a greater degree than planned. And I thought that the authorities had better brace themselves for a sharp rise in consumer expectations, now that Pyongyang residents attending the festival had seen what they were missing.

  On the level of official incentives, the regi
me had paid a bonus of one month’s salary to the country’s workers before the festival opened in recognition of their hard work in a “200-day speed campaign” to meet production and construction goals. In practice, then, the gradual shift was continuing from the old-style “moral” incentives, such as medals for labor heroes, to financial incentives. The latter were officially keyed, to be sure, to group rather than individual performance. Even such relatively mild heresy, however, was not something the regime’s ideology permitted it to take pride in.

  Chinese followers of Deng Xiaoping by then had become communist in name only as they pursued economic reforms nakedly intended to unleash the individual’s profit motive, but North Koreans were still required to praise the communist ideal of selfless behavior. “All for one and one for all” was the rule.

  The propaganda machine promulgating such beliefs, heavy-handed though it was, still succeeded “well enough that even in 1989 North Koreans were reciting their collectivist catechism smilingly and with evident sincerity. Whatever bourgeois sins they might be tempted to commit, they gave every appearance of believing in—or believing that they ought to believe in—old-fashioned communism, tied closely to the leader cult. Call it brain-washing or education, or credit the art of a host of-well-trained actors; no matter how the authorities had managed to pull it off, a visitor was left with the feeling he had traveled to the center of a great and still-burning faith. Instead of Pyongyang it could have been Teheran.

  Again, as in 1979, national beliefs were nowhere more accessible to visitors than in Pyongyang’s theaters, and it was on this trip that I saw one of Kim Jong-il’s “new type” revolutionary operas, The Flower Girl. In New York a few days earlier I had seen and been moved by the Broad-way version of Les Miserables. Almost certainly the creators of that hit musical had not seen the North Korean production, and vice versa. Yet the similarities between the two were remarkable. Both were beautifully staged melodramas, evoking with consummate skill that hatred of privilege that was the ideological starting point of both the French Revolution and Kim Il-sung’s regime. The stage version of The Flower Girl struck me as world class—much better than the 1972 movie version, which itself had been singled out for considerable praise at home and abroad. If what I saw was fairly representative of the genre, Kim Jong-il had much cause for pride.

  The plot of The Flower Girl is simple: In the 1920s, cruel landlord-usurers take advantage of a small loan of rice to enslave the family of heroine Ggot-bun. Reduced to going to town to sell flowers in the street in order to buy medicine for her sick mother, she is insulted and molested by Japanese colonialists and their Korean henchmen. One moonlit night she is falsely charged with theft. The police whip her as punishment, and she happens to learn that the landlords are about to sell her into bondage. Returning home, she sings about her sad fate:

  On the petals dewdrops glisten.

  Is it there that my tears flow?

  The moon is bright but in this dim,

  Dark world I know not where to go.

  One moon shines up in the sky.

  But different people gaze upon it.

  Some are happy to see the moon,

  While others grow most melancholy.

  (Kim Jong-il, chain-smoking until he got his thoughts in order, is reported to have taken a personal hand in sharpening the lyrics’ focus on the different moods in which people would react to the moon, depending on their social station in a pre-revolutionary society full of contradictions.)4

  The heroine’s troubles only get worse. After the landlords sell her to a textile mill, they beat her mother to death and blind her sister. In the second act, a show-stopping pangchang sung by an offstage ensemble of-women—the lyrics again reportedly showing Kim Jong-il’s personal revision5 —expresses Ggot-bun’s feelings and those of other women of her class:

  Moon, bright moon, you shine sadly.

  Do you know how hard our fate is?

  We ’re assaulted by woe and woe,

  Ill-treated and humiliated.

  At the climax, guerrillas swoop down from the hills to execute the wicked landords and reunite Ggot-bun with her siblings.

  At that point in the evening when I saw The Flower Girl, if there was a dry eye in the house it certainly did not belong to me. But then came the finale, apparently an even more exciting moment for other theatergoers. The image of a red sun appeared on a backdrop, symbolizing Kim Il-sung (-who claimed to have come up with the story line as a teenaged revolutionary)6 and the good life that liberation and his communist regime would bring. Koreans in the audience, all wearing their miniature enameled portraits of Kim on their breasts, stood and cheered for the leader. Finally the curtain fell and the evening’s performance ended. As we turned to leave, my guide explained that the revolution symbolized by that red sun was far from over. “We are continuing until we establish in this land communism, an ideal society,” he asserted earnestly.

  Pyongyang continued to rely on propaganda campaigns to whip its people into a revolutionary frenzy of overproduction. Even given the potency of its propaganda, it was remarkable after so many decades how much the regime had to show (and “show” is the operative word here) for its seemingly anachronistic, circuses-before-bread approach. Carried on at breakneck speed and referred to in borrowed military terminology as “speed battles,” its orgies of construction were the sort of exercise of which even the most dedicated ideologues must soon have tired. Yet North Koreans had battled on, out of whatever combination of fear and fervor, so that those visiting for the youth festival found new wonders to behold. In downtown Pyongyang we could see that the basic concrete work had been done on the 105-story hotel structure that was intended to be Asia’s highest building.7

  Soldiers had helped build the West Sea Barrage, consisting of a five-mile-wide dam, with ship locks, across the Taedong River where it meets the Yellow Sea. Guides boasted that the construction project had produced 103 “labor heroes.” At Sunchon, an hour and a half’s drive north of Pyongyang, a largely military workforce was putting up an enormous complex to produce the indigenous synthetic fiber vinalon.

  A major construction goal in 1989 clearly was to try to outdo Seoul’s Olympics, and no effort or expense was spared. Besides stadiums and other venues for the festival’s sports events, North Koreans had built streets lined with high-rise apartment buildings. Those housed festival participants. After their departure the apartments were to be turned over to citizens. Pyongyang’s skyline soared, and the opening and closing ceremonies for the youth festival proved more elaborate even than the extraordinary shows Seoul had put on for the Olympics.

  “We’re in a hurry,” Kim Jong-su explained to me. “Everyone’s in a hurry here. Our leader said we are a back-ward country. If the others take one step forward, we must take ten. If they walk, we must run.”

  Glorification of the leaders was the focus of much of the frenzy of construction. It was impossible to miss Pyongyang’s version of the Arc de Triomph, larger than the Paris original. It had been built in 1982, the year of Kim Il-sung’s seventieth birthday, to commemorate his triumphal return from exile in 1945 to take command of a country he supposedly had liberated from the Japanese. Kim Jong-il had overseen the recent monument building, which foreign economists were calling a major drain on the economy.

  If in retrospect the gargantuan effort of the 1980s is seen to have been a last hurrah before Pyongyang’s world fell apart in the 1990s, in the process it may have provided history the definitive last word on just how very far a people can be led with propaganda.

  Whatever cosmetic touches the regime had employed to inflate its claims of having created a “paradise,” and however far behind South Korea—and even China—the country had fallen in reality, North Korea in 1989 still managed an appearance of dynamism that appealed to some people outside its borders.

  Third World leaders were impressed with Kim Il-sung’s credentials as an anti-imperialist freedom fighter. Some of them also admired the North’s economic d
evelopment—or at least appreciated Pyongyang’s foreign aid programs and arms supplies. (Some had adopted personality cults similar to Kim’s. At the youth festival, Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian and Cote d’Ivoire delegates all carried—or, in the last case, wore stamped on their clothing—portraits of their own national leaders.) Naturally, any hint of foreign approval the regime could muster was translated instantly into domestic propaganda. “I recommend to you The Pyongyang Times,” my straight-faced guide said to me when I asked him about reading matter. He referred to a weekly tabloid devoted mainly to chronicling Kim Il-sung’s meetings with and tributes from foreign dignitaries.

  The ideology was even proving exportable to South Korea. A virulent Pyongyang fever on campuses had become a severe complicating factor in the South’s quest for stability. Radically inclined South Korean students were attracted to Kim’s teachings of revolutionary egalitarianism, economic self-sufficiency unification zeal and anti-Americanism. His pre-liberation guerrilla opposition to the Japanese made him a patriot hero in their eyes. Based on that interest, the Kims appeared still to hope that a resurgence of unrest in the South would lead to a leftist insurrection, reversing the otherwise clear course of history, and pave the way to reunification on Pyongyang’s terms.

  Until not long before, after all, the major influences on Koreans in the South as well as the North had been authoritarian. They had lived under the dynastic system of royalty and hereditary nobles backed up with Chinese Confucian thought, and then under the emperor-worshipping Japanese colonial regime. The only major difference was that from 1945 South Korea received American influence while North Korea received Soviet and then Chinese communist influence. American-style democracy-was far from transforming South Korean politics completely. The authoritarian tradition held sway among political leaders of all stripes even after a relatively free election in 1987. Thus, it was not unreasonable to imagine, as did many in the North and some in the South, that American influence was just a thin veneer that could be replaced with socialist and communist ideas.