Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  For a time after that, change once more slowed. Pyongyang-watchers warned that signs of relaxation in the North must be read carefully. Jean-Jacques Grauhar, secretary general of the Seoul-based European Union Chamber of Commerce, previously had worked and lived in Pyongyang for several years. He told me in 2000 that North Korean leaders apparently had no objective beyond repairs to their economic system. Their goal was “not to change the system—and that shouldn’t be the objective of foreign investors,” he said. Grauhar and other experts advised non-Korean companies to team up with South Koreans and emulate their style, doing business in ways that were minimally threatening to a regime leery of change. “I’ve been pushing Club Med to do something there for years,” he said. The French company’s resorts were often built in pristine environments secluded from the surrounding reality—much like Mount Kumgang. In addition, Club Med got its profits from outsiders, not from hard-pressed locals of the host countries. The notion of Club Med’s bikinied guests playing bar games in North Korea seemed far-fetched—but then, until not long before, so had the idea of Hyundai tours of the Nine Dragons waterfall.

  In his taped conversation with Chongryon’s Japanese-Korean delegates on April 25, 1998, Kim Jong-il addressed economic issues. “We are not isolationists, but we want to keep the status quo,” he said. “We don’t want hordes of tourists to come here and spread AIDS and pollute our land.”6

  Kim in that conversation showed a lively interest in the details of other economies, particularly those of Japan, South Korea and the United States—all of-whose nationals he referred to as “devils.” He saved his most favorable words for the United States, specifically then-President Bill Clinton. “Clinton is doing well in the White House,” he said. “Jack Kennedy tried to make a name for himself but he was rubbed out before he had the chance. This Clinton fellow is only fifty-two, but he got elected to the White House twice. He is quite a guy.” Kim praised American-made computers. “Today,” he said, “South Korea brags about its computers on TV commercials, but the South Korean computers don’t even come close to American computers. We have to butter up the Americans and get the best they have. Our People’s Army regards the United States as its sworn enemy, but our people engaged in trade address the Americans with much respect. This is called the principle of ‘hard inside, soft outside.’ ”

  Kim showed himself to be a news junkie, ever ready to call forth odd facts from his memory. However, his failure to travel widely could be seen in misconceptions and examples of naiveté. He asserted that Japan could do much more with damming rivers to produce hydroelectric power than it had done, taking advantage of its “many tall mountains with high volumes of-water.” In fact, Japanese rivers are short and not especially mighty—a big reason why the country had chosen to emphasize nuclear power. By looking through Japanese product catalogs, Kim had discovered the installment plan. “How long have they been using this method of payments?” he asked his visitors from Japan. “Even shoddy products are being sold on the installment plan. It appears that the installment plan is due to slow sales.”

  His characterizations of South Korea, which at the time was suffering from a severe Asian financial crisis that had begun in 1997, were full of exaggeration and misrepresentation—perhaps simply his wishful thinking: “The real ruler of South Korea is the United States. Today South Korea is in turmoil politically and economically. Seoul officials are trying to restore economic stability but I doubt they will make it.” Of course, following that economic rough patch, they did make it. Revealing his faulty perception, Kim observed that, after having prospered “for about ten years starting in 1988,” the South Korean devils were “broke and dirt poor.”

  In an illustration of Kim Jong-il’s peculiar sense of proportion, he related at some length his wish that Chongryon officials search in Japan and South Korea for two species of native Korean dogs that were approaching extinction in the North. We can speculate that the beasts’ scarcity had to do with the famine and the unavailability of other sources of protein. (East Asian joke: What do you call a Korean with seven dogs? Answer: A caterer.) But Kim ascribed their absence to a lamentable lack of popular devotion to the maintenance of the breeds. “We don’t want our own native dogs to die out,” he said earnestly. “We must make sure that pungsan and jindo dogs prosper and propagate. Our people are quite indifferent to the future of our dogs. That is wrong. These dogs belong to Korea and we must preserve them.”

  Kim first explained North Korea’s power shortage in terms that blamed nature and let the regime and its policies off the hook. “We had ample electricity when Leader Kim Il-sung was alive,” he said. “You may wonder why it is that we are short of electric power now. The reason is simple. We had natural floods several years in a row, which was unprecedented in our history, and our coal mines got flooded. We could not dig enough coal to keep our thermal plants going. That is why we are short of electricity and our people are suffering. Our economy is suffering for lack of electric power because our coal mines are flooded.”

  * * *

  To outsiders hoping for major changes in North Korea, though, Kim’s somewhat mixed-up view of the capitalist world might seem less significant than his reiteration of the failings of socialism as he saw them. As his talk with the Chongryon representatives progressed, for example, he took a different tack on the causes of at least part of the power shortage. He criticized colleagues who insisted on taking juche’s self-reliant principle to extremes. “During my 1983 visit to China, Hua Guofeng and I visited the Baosan thermal power station,” he said. “It was imported from another country. China was technologically advanced enough to build its own power plants but it decided to buy the plant abroad. I asked Hua why” The Chinese leader “said that China could have built the station but the foreign plant was better.” In contrast, Kim observed, “Our people reason differently. Their idea is to buy only those parts that we cannot make and the rest we build here. This kind of attitude has led to many costly failures. … We are paying dearly for our mistakes. …

  “Our socialist system is people-centered and we say that we serve the people, but the truth of the matter is that our economic system is not quite like that,” Kim told his visitors. “In a capitalist society, customers are catered to and their pockets are picked clean in every possible way” He elaborated: “The socialist system is ice-cold and indifferent to the customers. In our country, our store workers take the attitude that they don’t care if the customers buy anything or not. Instead of servicing the customers and trying to sell something, they would rather that patrons did not show up so that they won’t have to do anything. In a capitalist nation, service is everything. When our people visit Japan, they are courted everywhere with ‘Welcome, welcome, please come in.’ Japanese eateries have managers who supervise the servers, and any service boy in trouble with a patron is severely reprimanded or punished. In our country, our servers are never fired for poor service. On the contrary, the patrons are expected to pay and bow to the servers for the privilege. It should be that those who receive money should thank the givers, but alas, here in this country, it is just the opposite. Capitalism has been around over one hundred years now and it tries all sorts of things to stay alive.”

  Kim spoke of some management changes that could help his system stay alive. One was to hold qualifying examinations instead of assigning people more or less at random to such demanding jobs as handling foreign trade. “In organs like Foreign Economic Cooperation, anyone who knows Kim Guk-tae can join his outfit,” he remarked (mentioning the official who had gotten reformer Kim Dal-hyon demoted and sent off to the provinces). “We need to change this and require specific knowledge of foreign trade.” He spoke favorably of sending students abroad for training. “In China, one of Deng Xiaoping’s great feats was to send two thousand or so students abroad annually to study, and upon their return they were given important jobs,” Kim said. North Korea should emulate Deng on this point. “We have people at the top who don’t have even the v
aguest idea of how to get our economy moving. All they are able to think about is how much pay they are getting. Such is our sad situation and we must change it fast. Many of our workers have poor or no concepts of money. They are completely in the dark on making profits. They know about meeting production quotas, but they have no idea how to sell the products and make profits.”

  Those were strong criticisms indeed. But it was not that Kim Jong-il was ready to praise the capitalist system, after having struggled against the alien Western system throughout his career. “To be honest, we like the current financial meltdown in Asia,” he told his visitors. “Some of our people in charge of our economy had harbored some illusions about emulating the capitalist economy of Asia, but now the current crisis made them realize how wise Leader Kim Il-sung’s policy of juche is. It was a rude awakening to these people.” He added, “Currently we are poor and our life is hard, but you won’t see any people on earth that is as united as we are.”

  Casting about for reasons to be optimistic, Kim imagined that North Korea could reverse its fortunes by turning into what, in his vision, sounded like a new Kuwait or Brunei. “We have untapped oil fields, and once we develop our oil fields our economy will change dramatically. Once we get the oil flowing, we won’t need to work our farms. We will sell our oil to the Japanese devils and buy their rice. Our oil will be like a nuclear weapon.”

  On a more mundane level he showed a willingness to buy from successful countries their used equipment, such as tile factories and steel-rolling mills, to facilitate the manufacturing that North Korea still would need to do in addition to encouraging tourism. The problem was to avoid loss of face, a fate almost worse than death for a traditionally minded East Asian. So he asked his visitors to have Chongryon serve as intermediary in such deals. “Of course we can obtain these things through normal trades,” he said. “But how can we save our face and ask the Japanese devils for cheap used merchandise? Our trading people are reluctant to negotiate such deals, and Chongryon should step in and help us here.”

  Economic backwardness had become so apparent as to tarnish the North’s image among impressionable young South Koreans. Many of them idealized Kim Il-sung as a great patriot and studied his juche philosophy, even after the successful end to South Koreans’ struggle against military-backed dictatorships at home. By the time Kim Il-sung died in 1994, though, the economic failure of the North Korean system had become too obvious for any but the most devout Southern leftist to ignore. The South Korean news media, overcoming the taboo I had encountered in the 1970s, were throwing major resources into reporting on North Korean affairs. Of course there was far more negative than positive to report. If there was a defining moment in the decline of the North’s image among idealistic South Korean leftists, perhaps it came in 1997 when no less a figure than Hwang Jang-yop defected to the South. Hwang was the North Korean senior official widely credited with having developed the juche ideology.

  A 1999 scandal in Seoul illustrated the disillusionment that resulted among some South Koreans who had been beating the drums for Pyongyang. Kim Young-hwan, one of the most prominent leaders of pro-Pyongyang 1980s student radicals who called themselves Jusapa, the juche ideology faction, was reported to have confessed that he was a spy for Pyongyang. According to the National Intelligence Service (the former KCIA, in its latest renaming), Kim Young-hwan, by then a practically middle-aged thirty-six, confessed that he had joined Pyongyang’s spy service in 1989 at the behest of a North Korean agent. Kim said he was then taken to the North on a semi-submersible spy vessel and there joined the Workers’ Party, received a medal and met Kim Il-sung—-who directed him to undertake development of a pro-Pyongyang underground and start a legal political party in the South. That he did, bringing in other veterans of the student anti-government movement.

  Kim Young-hwan grew disillusioned with the North Korean system. In a 1995 magazine interview, he denounced the juche ideology. He asserted that Pyongyang had been seriously on his case from then on, scheming to assassinate him for his betrayal. He did not go to the South Korean authorities right away but, in fear for his life, fled to China. When he returned home and spilled the beans, the prosecution recommended leniency.

  Such incidents did not by any means cause the South Korean left to disappear. Sympathy for the Northern brethren would remain strong. The anti-Americanism that had become pronounced in the 1980s would continue to thrive and even grow in the South. But Kim Jong-il, unlike his late father, could hardly be seen realistically as leader of or role model for a future South Korean revolution. To the extent he recognized that, it was all the more reason why he needed to do something about the economy.

  Being able to point to South Korea as an implacable enemy had been, from the beginning, an essential element in the North Korean regime’s control of its people. Thus it seemed significant that in April 2000, practically on the eve of South Korea’s National Assembly elections, Pyongyang appeared to endorse blatantly the soft-line “sunshine” policy on North-South relations of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. The endorsement came in the form of a mutual announcement of plans for a June summit in Pyongyang. The agreement for the South Korean president to meet Kim Jong-il was reached in a Beijing session, five days before an election that observers deemed too close to call. It seemed clear that both sides hoped the announcement would give Kim Dae-jung’s party the push it needed to achieve a majority in the national legislature, so that its policies could be continued.

  That move came despite the fact that Southern hard-liners, if they took power in Seoul, “would provide more convincing bogeymen for the benefit of Northern propagandists. The South’s chief opposition party was highly critical of Kim Dae-jung’s use of aid to lure North Korea into shifting its emphasis from military preparations to economic reconstruction. “Keep it at home,” opposition representatives repeatedly urged. “South Koreans need the help more.”

  The fact that North Korea at the moment had decided to endorse soft-line South Korean candidates did not prove it had said a permanent fare-well to enmity and militarism. Long-time Pyongyang-watchers believed that the Northern leadership kept various strategies for interim survival and some form of ultimate victory going at once and would shift back and forth among them as it saw advantage in doing so. In that regard, it was noteworthy that the North’s version of the announcement differed from the South’s in saying Kim Dae-jung’s visit to Pyongyang would be at his request, instead of at the invitation of Kim Jong-il. The first conclusion to be drawn was that Pyongyang did not think enemies should be made to look like sought-after guests. (Only later would it become clear just how accurate Pyongyang had been in saying this was Kim Dae-jung’s show.)

  News of the summit announcement suggested that Kim Jong-il had looked over the possibilities for fixing his busted economy and realized that it could hardly be done without the participation of the estranged but filthy-rich Koreans living south of the Demilitarized Zone—-who by that time had shown their staying power by weathering the Asian financial crisis. Hyundai, with its tour cruises to Mount Kumgang, had given Pyongyang a tantalizing sample of just how much help the South could provide if relations improved. And the basic strategy embodied in both Kim Dae-jung’s sunshine policy and the South Korean–American-Japanese “Perry process,” named after the former defense secretary, was to combine aid with credible assurances of domestic non-interference and hook Pyongyang on peaceful coexistence. The eventual goal was to end the military threat that Pyongyang posed to the South and, with its development of weapons of mass destruction, to other parts of the world.

  The cynicism of South Korean opposition politicians was understandable enough. After all, the two sides had gotten that far in 1994 only to see a planned summit fall through. Many many, many lesser initiatives also had come to naught over the decades. Was there anything different this time? There was, and the differences provided some grounds for hope that something might eventually come of the new initiative.

  One diff
erence was that the North’s economy, despite some visible recovery from the worst years of the mid-1990s, was in far worse shape both absolutely and relative to South Korea’s than it had been when earlier initiatives failed. Kim Jong-il, although confused or naive on occasion, was not stupid. Neither he nor anyone else in Pyongyang could be unaware that the economy needed to be fixed. Kim Jong-il had blamed fall guys at home: ministers and other high-level officials who had tried to use the inherited Stalinist policies but (predictably enough, from a capitalist perspective) always failed. Some foreign intelligence people believed that the executions and banishments of thus-failed officials had begun to backfire, causing other officials who feared they might be next on the list to reflect privately upon where the blame really lay.

  Kim, as we have seen, harbored many private reservations about his own regime’s policies. He had told South Korea’s Hyundai Group founder Chung Ju-yung he wanted to learn about the New Communities movement that military dictator Park Chung-hee had employed in laying the foundations for South Korea’s largely successful market economy. Perhaps, commented a writer for South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, “2000 will be the year to test whether [Kim Jong-il] will transform himself into the North Korean version of Park Chung-hee.”7 That did not happen, although in May 2002 Park’s fifty-year-old daughter, Park Geun-hye, received a VIP reception when she visited Pyongyang.8

  Why had Kim not moved faster to change things? Like some foreigners,9 reform-minded North Korean officials might blame hard-line communist traditionalist holdovers, including military men, for tying his hands. Still, some officials had to find it hard to escape the thought that Kim’s power was enormous; if only he had sufficient will to take risks in pursuit of a clear vision of meaningful change, he should have a good chance of succeeding. Regardless of his status as dictator, Kim must have realized that some in the elite circles just beneath him would not accept his policy failures forever. Such reasoning could help explain why he saw detente with South Korea as a major opportunity to make some changes that might help ensure his longer-term survival.