Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  7. Speech quoted in “Bankers Given 5-Point Guideline,” Vantage Point (January 1979): pp. 23, 24.

  8. Byoung-Lo Philo Kim estimates South Korean per capita GNP of $518 versus $605 in North Korea in 1975, the last time he thinks the South was behind (Two Koreas in Development, p. 66).

  9. At a hothouse growing vegetables for the residents of Pyongyang, most of the workers likewise were women. “Our principle is, if it’s easy work we give preference to women because they are not so physically strong,” an official told me. Hothouse gardening was considered light work.

  10. Forty-five percent in 1981, according to the Souths National Unification Board. By 1989 (as demographers Nicholas Eberstadt and Judith Banister reported in North Korea: Population Trends and Prospects [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990]), the far greater participation of women in the North’s workforce was reflected in a total participation rate for both men and women of 78.5 percent. That compares with an official South Korean workforce participation rate for the same year of 58.3 percent (Byoung-Lo Philo Kim, Two Koreas in Development, p. 92).

  11. This factory evidently was one of the installations most frequently visited by the Great Leader. A guide at the industrial and agricultural exhibition in Pyongyang told me, “The respected and beloved leader Chairman Kim Il-sung visited 199 units 699 times in the fields of heavy industrial factories,” which averages out to about three and a half visits per factory.

  The pride shown by hosts at factories, farms, and schools in the president’s historic visits to give “on-the-spot guidance” seemed unaffected, although close questioning of recipients of those visits usually revealed that the leader had offered little more than compliments, words of encouragement and general suggestions.

  12. I got a similar answer at a suburban hothouse, officially a state farm, which produced off-season vegetables and fruits for Pyongyang residents. “I’m not a specialist in financial matters,” said a management official whom I asked to tell me the annual budget.

  13. Baik II (see chap. 4, n. 24), p. 161.

  14. “Although lagging far behind industry and ridden with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, growth in agriculture has not been unimpressive. However, self-sufficiency in food has not yet been achieved; North Korea is a substantial net importer of food” (Chung, North Korean Economy, pp. 151–152).

  Cornell reports (North Korea Under Communism, p. 44) having heard during the mid-1970s from East European diplomats that “food production in the country was only sufficient for twenty-five daily rations a month.”

  15. “At an expanded plenary session of the Party’s Kangwon Provincial Committee held on October 5–6 in Wonsan, the capital of the province, Kim put emphasis on farming, fishing and industry. ‘For effective transportation of farming tools in the countryside,’ Kim said at the meeting, ‘more trucks and tractors are needed in the province.’ He also said that every household should plant at least two persimmon trees in its yard to increase the production of fruits.’ He praised the great achievements’ of East Coast farmers despite various adversities and personally set the next year’s production goal for grains” (“Kim .Makes On-the-Spot Guidance Tours,” Vantage Point [November 1978]: p. 26).

  16. Kim supposedly spent fifteen days at the more famous Chongsan-ri in 1960, thinking through what was later named the “Chongsan-ri .Method.” A foreign journalist visiting that farm eighteen years later heard a guide explain that method, “still used today,” involved “the cadres coming to the workplace to stimulate the ardor and the creativity of the peasants.” See “ ‘Market Economy Doesn’t Apply to Our Country’: Visit to NK .Model Farm,” AFP dispatch in Korea Times, May 4, 1995.

  17. “Summing Up of the 1970s,” Vantage Point (December 1979), quoting North Korean Premier Li Jong-ok. The plan’s goal was to increase electrical power generation to 56–60 billion kilowatt hours, coal production to 70–80 million tons, steel production to 74–80 million tons and the grain harvest to 10 million tons.

  18. At the time, examined in historical context, that seemed to some foreign analysts a strong possibility. For example, “South Korea … for all its belated ‘miracle growth,’ is a house built on sand, utterly vulnerable to the storms of the world economy, a classic example of extreme dependency. The crucial point is that, contrary to the advocates of so-called ‘export-led growth,’ there is no evidence of any Third World country having attained self-sustaining growth on the basis of an open export economy” (Foster-Carter, “Development and Self Reliance” [see chap. 6, n. 15], pp. 85–86). Foster-Carter added (p. 98), “Far from signifying an economy in deep trouble, they [North Korea’s debts] may paradoxically testify to its long-run advance and strength despite short-term problems of cash flow.”

  19. “A rapid expansion in investment in human capital, especially in technical education, … must have substantially contributed toward productivity gains. North Korea was reportedly successful in eradicating illiteracy within a few years after the division of Korea. … Since 1967 North Korea went even farther by adopting a free nine-year compulsory system of education with greater emphasis on technical education, the first such program in the Far East. (Both China and Japan have six-year compulsory systems with tuition partially free.) Beyond the level of primary education, North Korea has exerted all-out efforts to increase the supply of technical-scientific personnel by expanding the enrollment at and resources of technological colleges, vocational schools, and ‘factory colleges,’ and by sending selected groups of students abroad (primarily to the Soviet Union) for scientific and technical education. The whole educational system seems to be geared to the goals of industrialization” (Chung, North Korean Economy, pp. 158–159). Chung cites statistics showing the numbers of engineers, technicians and specialists increasing from 21,872 in 1953 to 293,506 in 1964. Source: Choson chungang yongam, 1965 (Korean Central Yearbook) (Pyongyang, Korean Central News Agency, 1965), p. 482.

  20. Baik II, pp. 359–360.

  21. Viewing the home as “the hotbed of outdated institutions, outdated ideology and outdated customs,” the state undermined the family’s role through a variety of policies. The virtual abolition of private land ownership—and its inheritance— was the most obvious. That chipped away at the authority of the family patriarch in a country where Confucian patriarchal teachings had reigned supreme for centuries. Korean custom required city-dwelling families to return regularly to their hometowns and villages for ancestral memorial services—which were also reunions promoting close family ties. But the regime’s system of restrictions on freedom of movement, perhaps the most stringent in the world, took a heavy toll on such observances. The old custom in which parents arranged their children’s marriages gave way to a new system in which the party’s intervention superseded that of the parents (“Building a Socialist Culture,” The Principles of Kim Il-sungism [Propaganda Bureau of the Unification Revolutionary Party Central Committee, 1974], p. 182, cited in Park Yong-hon, “Cultural Policy of North Korea,” Vantage Point [August 1979]: pp. 10–11).

  22. One defector in a 1994 interview assured me that what I had seen out the school window was typical. See chap. 21 for his remarks.

  23. Kim, With the Century (see chap. 2, n. 2), vol. 3, pp. 302–303.

  24. Kim Il-sung’s youthful organ playing may help to explain the curious taste in music that, since liberation, has channeled the talents of countless North Korean youngsters into playing the accordion—a portable version of the instrument that would have been found in a small Korean church in those days, the pump organ. The Kim Il-sung regime’s ties to Eastern European communist countries where the accordion was in favor, and the frequent cultural exchanges accompanying those ties, may also have been a factor.

  25. Hwang Jang-yop, The Problems of Human Rights in North Korea (3), trans. Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights (Seoul: NKnet, 2002), http://www.nknet.org/en/keys/lastkeys/2002/9/04.php.

  26. “His teachings covered the whole realm of literature a
nd the arts. They became the programmatic guide for each branch in upholding its Party spirit, class spirit and popular spirit and raising its artistic quality. The ‘golden arts’ which peoples of the world admire today had their new beginning immediately after liberation under his wise guidance, and by his boundless effort and proper guidance, the northern half has now come to full bloom in its national culture, built and consolidated on the democratic base, rock-firm” (Baik II, p. 223).

  27. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, p. 5.

  28. Kim, “Building a Socialist Culture,” in Park Yong-hon, “Cultural Policy,” p. 2.

  29. “Stalinist ideology did have one thing to teach the Koreans that fit like a glove with their own preconceptions. This was the Platonism of Stalin, the architectonic, engineering-from-on-high quality that marked his thought and his praxis. Stalin was a hegemon in the era of late’ heavy industrialization, and his discourse, like his name, clanked with an abased, mechanical imagery that valued pig iron over people, machines over bread, bridges over ideas, the leader’s will over the democratic instincts of Marx. When he had Zhdanov impose his suffocating doctrine of socialist realism on the cultural realm in 1932, the metaphor of choice was that artists and writers should be ‘engineers of the soul,’ and that may serve as a general metaphor for Stalin’s rule.

  “Koreans think a maximum leader should be an engineer of the soul, too, but through exemplary behavior instead of by ramming it down your throat. They think a leader should be benevolent instead of brutish. And they think good ideas come from right thought—rectification of the mind—proceeding from the leader down through the masses, who learn the teaching by rote mastery of received wisdom. These Confucian residues melded with Soviet doctrines to make Kim a kind of benevolent Stalin, the fount of ideas, leading to a profound idealism and voluntarism at opposites with the materialism of Marx. The Koreans still refer to artists as engineers of the soul. They still surround Kim with a cult of personality. They still depict him as the source of all good ideas. This aspect of Stalinism stuck like glue in Korea, and if it had not existed in .Moscow, it would have had to be invented in Pyongyang” (Cumings, Origins II [see chap. 3, n. 43], pp. 296–297).

  30. Kim, “Building a Socialist Culture.”

  31. Thirty percent of all artistic creations were supposed to deal with revolutionary tradition—meaning “Kim Il-sung s exploits in his struggle against the Japanese and the idolization of Kim and his clan,” according to a South Korean scholar’s analysis. Another 30 percent should deal with war, including the North Korean People’s Army’s heroic struggle in the Korean War. That left 40 percent divided between socialist development of the country and unification of the peninsula (Lee Han-gu, “The State of Literature and Arts in North Korea,” Vantage Point [December 1983]: pp. 4–5).

  32. The regime’s “folklorists” employed a similar procedure to appropriate surface elements of the Korean folklore tradition. But when South Korean folklorists met their Northern counterparts to compare notes at a time of tentative detente in the 1970s the Southerners ’were “confused and dismayed,” one of them wrote later (Kim Yol-gyoo, “A Survey of the Character of North Korean Folklore,” Vantage Point [.March 1988]: pp. 5–10). “A glance through the papers and other materials prepared and published by north Korean students of folklore disappointed us in the south beyond measure. It was not so much a feeling of despair as a sense of betrayal that gripped us. The folklore as presented by the north Korean publications was anything but folklore.” Even the nursery rhymes glorified Kim Il-sung. For example, “in the course of an instruction trip, Kim Il-sung happened to see a group of children who were learning their lessons, while singing songs. Kim made some comments on the spot, and the contents of the comments were instantly woven into the lyrics of the song. It became an ‘instruction song.’ A north Korean folklorist proudly mentioned the episode in his published paper.”

  The sense of betrayal reflected a feeling that something binding the two halves of the peninsula together had been tossed out in the North. “Koreans used to sing the time-honored song ‘Oh, the moon, oh the moon, the bright moon,’ perform the traditional mask dance, and play yut. As long as they enjoy these activities together, the division of the country into the south and north might come to an end. We felt as if Koreans in both parts of the land would share the same feelings of family ties when they kneel before the altar of ancestor worship at the tomb of their forefathers. Such feelings must turn out to be true. When a glance at the materials from north Korea made it known to us that such an expectation was a mere illusion we were confused and dismayed. As far as I felt, the north Korean folklore was a folklore alien to me. Part of it had a veneer redolent of its sameness of our folklore heritage, but the substance was totally different from that of ours.” The South Korean folklorist was horrified to find poems and tales preoccupied with “labor efficiency, animosity aimed at struggle and blind devotion to the cult of personality of Kim Il-sung.”

  This tendency, he added, “is not limited to the study of folklore in north Korea. Such pretended and deliberate reliance on the authority of the Leader is prevalent in all papers and publications in all disciplines and artistic pursuits. For instance, the so-called Outline History of Korean Literature devotes two chapters to commentaries on some poems attributed to the mother and father of Kim Il-sung.” The folklorist said he had watched a documentary film on the life of ethnic Koreans living around Tashkent in what was then Soviet Central Asia (Tashkent now is the capital of independent Uzbekistan). “The cultural distance between them and us is far smaller than that between north Koreans and south Koreans as far as current folklore is concerned,” he concluded sadly.

  33. Baik II, p. 582.

  34. The health worker as prototype of the “new man” continued as a main theme. In a September 22, 1994, broadcast that I heard, a Radio Pyongyang narrator told of a hospital patient in a Pyongyang neurological ward who, at visiting time, received no visitors. One day at visiting hour, however, an old woman appeared with chicken and soup, which she urged him to eat to ensure a quick recovery. He asked who she was, but she refused to identify herself, saying that the whole country was one family with Kim Jong-il as the father. After further inquiries she revealed that she was the wife of the doctor who was treating the lonely patient. As is typical of such propaganda stories, her name was not mentioned— but Kim Jong-il’s name was repeatedly brought into the narrative.

  35. “Almost everyone had diarrhea. Some suffered from scurvy, others from pneumonia and hepatitis. Scratches became infected, and the infections spread. … Dale Rigby developed a rash over 90 percent of his body. The skin above his waist peeled off; ugly sores formed on his legs. The North Korean doctor wouldn’t let him disrobe; the sight might ‘embarrass’ the nurse. He prescribed a mud-pack. Rigby’s condition worsened. The doctor gave him a liquid ointment. That didn’t help, either. Bill Scarborough’s feet began to swell. The doctor tried acupuncture. He stuck four needles in one foot and three in the other.

  “ ‘Doc’ Baldridge asked for permission to treat his ailing shipmates. The North Koreans produced a medical dictionary and told him to prove that he was a corpsman. They interrogated him at length about his personal life: Why had he married a Japanese? Then they told him he couldn’t help; he couldn’t even offer advice” (Armbrister, Matter of Accountability [see chap. 7, n. 29], p. 291).

  36. This is one area in which official figures, at least, show North Korean superiority over South Korea—which boasted only a quarter that ratio of physicians to population (.6 doctors per 1,000 people in the South in 1982 versus 2.4 in North Korea). In hospital beds per 1,000 people, North Korea similarly showed a huge lead over the South: 12 to 1.6 (Kim, Two Koreas in Development, p. 90).

  37. “Kim Il-sung believes that South Korea is a colony of both the United States and Japan. Even if South Korea does possess technology, that is only dependent technology, not technology obtained through nationalist development. When it comes to foreign debts, K
im insists that North Korea, if it desired to, would borrow as much money as it likes, as well. However, when I finally arrived in South Korea and saw for myself, I felt that Kim’s claims were erroneous” (Kim Jong-min quoted in Cho, “Interview of Former High-Level Official of DPRK Ministry of Public Security Who Defected to South Korea” [see chap. 6, n. 88]).

  38. As did the Chinese.

  39. I was pleased with my escapade that afternoon, but later found that my friend Mike “Buck” Tharp, then Tokyo bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, had one-upped me. Tharp had brought jogging shorts and shoes to Pyongyang, and he told his handlers that it was his custom to run every morning for his health. They were welcome to come along, he told them blandly. The first day, a hardy handler tried to keep up with the fleet-footed Tharp. After that, they let him have his run unescorted.

  Besides breaking free from our handlers for an unfettered look around, the other major fantasy of every correspondent visiting Pyongyang was to land an interview with the Great Leader himself. The late John Wallach, then foreign editor of Hearst Newspapers, trumped the rest of us with his ingenuity in pursuing that goal. Wallach while at the theater paid attention to the large baskets of flowers that symbolized respect for Kim Il-sung. He cleverly went to the hotel florist and ordered one to be delivered to Kim. He definitely pushed the right button, as this proved to be a gesture that Kim would not ignore. Wallach was taken to a guest house and permitted to greet Kim briefly. The president thanked the reporter for the flowers and immediately turned him over to foreign policy chief Kim Yong-nam for an interview similar to the one I had. Wallach had exchanged only a few words with Kim Il-sung, but being able to write that he had been in the presence of the big guy certainly dressed up his story. (-My consolation was being first in print with the story of Kim Yong-nam’s proposal.)