A Capitalist in North Korea

by Felix Abt

  The North Koreans didn’t respond. But their icy silence spoke a thousand words. When Dr. Walia changed the subject to tuberculosis, a great sigh of relief went through the room.

  The uneasiness owes to the fact that North Koreans firmly believe in reunification; people all over the peninsula, north and south, yearn for a single glorious state, one that has not yet been realized thanks to the U.S. imperialists, a small group of fascist South Korean collaborators, and Japan (which has, in the eyes of the North Koreans, not properly compensated the nation for its colonial-era crimes). For those North Koreans, though, Dr. Walia was a reputable source, a medical doctor by training and a public health expert who did not invent stories to support any political goal. That’s why they were shocked to hear this story from him.

  This scenario is probably much more costly than the reunification of Germany, which itself was nonetheless incredibly expensive at more than $1 trillion, for West Germany, as of 2009. Many East Germans were, moreover, afraid they couldn’t find jobs and affordable homes. With a sudden large pool of semi-skilled workers from the North, salaries would plummet and unemployment would sharply rise. South Korea would also lack sufficient funds to be allocated to infrastructures in the south, and would need to increase taxes to fund unification. Living standards in the south would be lower for many years after the cataclysm.

  If anything, they probably felt a sense of betrayal over Dr. Walia’s claim. Once more, it seemed, their South Korean brethren had turned on them: South Korea was, as the government has said, long the source of their grievances, stretching back further than the Korean War. Dr. Lee, a tenured history professor at Kim Il Sung University, put it into perspective for me over lunch at his university. “For centuries the Goguryo kingdom was a powerful and flourishing state and more advanced than other kingdoms inside and outside Korea,” he told me in what sounded like a tome. “Geographically, it comprised what is today North Korea and most of Manchuria which was lost to China in the seventh century when a South Korean kingdom called Silla committed a huge betrayal by making an alliance with the Tang Dynasty of China to attack and conquer it.”

  “Thereafter, the Silla set up a brutal rule which oppressed the Korean people of the remainders of the former Goguryo Empire for more than two centuries. The Koryo dynasty which followed the Silla rule in the 10th century, and lasted until the 14th century, was largely dominated by Southern clans enriching themselves at the expense of Northerners.”

  He said that the Choson Dynasty, which was the regime that followed, lasted from 1392 to 1910. It too was dominated by southerners. The ruling house established a relationship that was, to the protest of Koreans, subservient to China. Northerners were discriminated against in an “Apartheid” fashion: they could not become state officials, and they had to pay heavy taxes without receiving much food and educational benefits in return for it.

  Much of the imbalance can be blamed on the topographic differences between the north and south, stretching back a thousand years before the post-World War II separation. South Korea was home to flatter landscapes, a milder climate and more watered rice fields, making it a natural producer of food and thus more prosperous than the harsh north. Southerners, who dominated the political system, conscripted Northerners as soldiers to fight various invaders, like the Manchurians. These mountain-dwellers were hardened by the environment, and were better built to fight off the frequent raids from Manchuria to the north.

  The royal court, moreover, forced northerners into slavery and prostitution. Girls from Pyongyang and elsewhere, who were poor, defenseless and looked down upon, were routinely abducted and brought to the south. Some women were obliged to work as entertainers for public offices during the Choson dynasty. During some period of the Choson dynasty these women were called Ginyeo, Gisaeng or Haeohwa (“flowers understanding words”) who had to “serve” noble bureaucrats, troops and foreign envoys. Though officially considered musician-dancers, they became men’s play-toys rather than artists. This was a sort of prequel to the Korean “comfort women” abused by the Japanese colonists in the 20th century.

  The Choson Dynasty opened up to the outside world in the late 19th century, after French, English, Russian and American troops started traveling up Korean rivers in their canon boats. The most successful foreign business quickly became a gold mine north of Pyongyang. Northern laborers toiled away under life-threatening conditions and earned almost nothing. Fat profits went to elites in Seoul and abroad.

  To make a long story short, it’s understandable why North Koreans would see things this way, even if they are telling me a single side of the story. The north’s vast natural resources were plundered by foreigners with the assistance of southerners looking to make a quick profit. Corrupt officials further sold off Korea’s sovereignty to Japan, which brutally colonized the country from 1910 to 1945 and left thousands of people dead. Finally, Mr. Lee noted, the anti-Japan struggle was fought mainly by northerners under the leadership of “our Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, who was born in Pyongyang.”

  “Only during the Korean War that lasted from 1950 to 1953, we accepted foreign fighters on our soil,” Dr. Lee added. “The Chinese helped us resist the U.S.-led aggression, as Koreans under the leadership of Kim Il Sung helped the Chinese fight the Japanese occupation forces on their soil before.” He went on with the proclamation that sounded like a speech. Corrupt South Korean officials, he argued, brought in the American occupiers who remain today. They also helped sabotage the reunification efforts by North and South Koreans.

  The armistice agreement of 1953, after the end of the Korean War, stipulated that Washington was not allowed to station nuclear bombs on Korean soil. The 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty, signed by the U.S., similarly prohibits nuclear powers to threaten non-nuclear countries, and it’s thus understandable that North Korea withdrew in 2003 to pursue its experimental nuclear weapons program. The southern “traitors,” he lamented, allowed the U.S. to stockpile nuclear bombs in the South for decades after the Korean War; they even organized joint military exercises that included nuclear attack scenarios against the north. The Kim regime perceived the displays to be bold threats rather than true “exercises.” Dr. Lee came to a bitter conclusion: “Unfortunately, the history of Korea is also a history of treason and betrayal of southerners against northerners!”

  Dr. Lee’s speech sounded like an expression of factionalism in a country where not only ethnic homogeneity but also the rallying behind a single cause, namely the achievement of unification is considered paramount. Yet, he certainly wasn’t a traitor by North Korean standard since he considered his party and leaders as the vanguard to correct historic errors and to unite the Korean fatherland under its leadership.

  In one example of one national hope, these plants bear the shape of a reunified Korean peninsula with Pyongyang as its capital. Both North and South Korea, at least on paper, want reunification. The trouble is that both want to expand their political system to their counterpart, and neither side has arrived at a compromise.

  Listening to Professor Lee and other North Koreans, I learned that the strained relationship went back centuries. A rapprochement suddenly looked much more difficult than what had transpired to Germany. The split between East and West Germany after World War II was far easier to overcome: from the 17th to the late 19th century, the Germanic region was not a nation, but a loose collection of smaller states without any clear “east-west” rivalry. Looking at the Koreas, what the West often perceives as a hardliner stand-off between the two modern countries makes more sense when examining this historical context.

  For Americans, the incredibly brutal Korean War—sometimes called the “Forgotten War”—has been buried underneath memories of the traumatic Vietnam War and World War II. But the Korean War was just as destructive: between 2 and 3 million civilians were killed in the fighting, out of a population of 39 million people all over the peninsula. In 1953, the United Nations brought an armistice to the table, but South Korea’s c
andid strongman, Syngman Rhee, refused to sign it. He claimed the job was not finished, and that his country would rather fight until it had completely overthrown the Soviet-connected DPRK.

  It is true, according to Russian archives and the National Security Archive at The George Washington University, that Kim Il Sung had repeatedly talked with Stalin about igniting a war to rid the Korean peninsula of American influence. His hope was to reunite both sides into one socialist nation before United Nations forces arrived under General MacArthur. But this history has a lesser known side: that hostilities between the south and north exploded years before the official commencement of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, a day when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel in the south. Because of the decision, Kim Il Sung is commonly blamed in official histories as the instigator of the conflict. But the quandary goes back further.

  Since both sides agreed to a cease-fire and not a legal end to the war, they continued to fight a merciless but low-intensity conflict that continued throughout the Cold War. In the late 1960s in particular, both sides launched sporadic border intrusions and fought gunbattles, causing about 750 deaths among North and South Korean, as well as American, forces. North Korea also abducted Japanese civilians from 1977 to 1983, because they intended to plant agents in Japan with fake identities, but who were trained by real Japanese to blend into Japanese society.

  North Korea recognized 13 abductees, apologized and returned five abductees still alive in October 2002. Japan claimed there were at least 17 abductees, but North Korea insisted that their figure was correct. Japan, on the other hand, has still not recognized, apologized and compensated Pyongyang the hundreds of thousands of North Koreans it abducted some of which became sex slaves.

  During most of the Cold War, South Korea was more autocratic than democratic and military rulers governed it with an iron fist. The country wasn’t as democratic as Westerners generally assume, and it wasn’t North Korea that had a monopoly on evil. In 1973 Kim Dae-jung, who later became the liberal South Korean president and launched an engagement with the North called “sunshine,” was to be thrown by South Korean KCIA agents into the ocean. General Park Chung-hee and allies of the United States wanted to have this opposition politician disappear forever. But the opposition learned about this plot on time and was able to mobilize the world opinion to have it prevented. Even the U.S. saw itself obliged to intervene in favor of Kim Dae-jung by sending helicopters to the ship where he was going to be thrown into the ocean and meet his doom.

  One of the famous personalities that helped alarm the world about Kim Dae-jung’s situation, and change its opinion in order to keep him alive, was the South Korean composer Yun I-sang. He had studied music in Europe and was living and working in Germany. Yun became a target of the South Korean military dictatorship, too, and was abducted in 1967 in Berlin by the KCIA. He was brought to Seoul where he was, under the pretext of being a spy, tortured and imprisoned.

  His actual “crime,” of course, was that he was critical of Park’s dictatorship. Yun was a friend of the heads of government in Germany and Portugal, Willy Brandt and Mario Suarez. The German government put a great deal of pressure on the South Korean government to release Yun I-sang from prison. After being set free in 1969, Yun was prohibited from returning to South Korea and lived in Germany until his death in 1995.

  In exile, Yun had composed an orchestra piece called “Exemplum in Memoriam Kwangju”, with which Yun protested against the Kwangju massacre, a 1980 military crackdown against protestors that left some 200 demonstrators dead. This statement drew the attention of the North Korean leadership which, from then on, took an interest in Yun’s music style.

  Yun was indeed world famous for creating a unique blend of traditional Korean music and Western classical music. The North Korean president Kim Il Sung invited him to teach classical music as well as his own compositions in North Korea. The social democrat accepted the offer, hoping to promote reunification through his music. This caused his popularity in the South to drop for a number of years.

  In 2005, on the tenth anniversary of Yun I-sang’s death, his daughter, Yun Chong, founded the Yun I-sang Peace Foundation. She felt sorry that she could not help her father during his lifetime, but would be all the more active from now on to take care of his legacy and to make his music known all over Korea and beyond. She believed that many Koreans, from North and South, consider him as a peace icon, even if they did not sympathize with the northern regime. I attended the opening of Yun Chong’s shop in Pyongyang.

  She used the profits generated there to support the orchestra performers and their family members in Pyongyang. I sometimes saw her arrive at the airport in Pyongyang with huge cases that contained elegant and fashionable clothes, bags and shoes as well as fashionable and valuable jewelry bought in neighboring countries. She developed a good sense of business. We once discussed the joint opening of a pharmacy, as her clients, who could afford buying these high-priced items, were in the same bracket.

  Yun Chong has vigorously promoted the legacy of her famous father, the South Korean democracy activist and musician, Yun I-sang. Unfortunately, the mercurial relationship between North and South Korea shook her efforts. She was disappointed, for instance, when the famous South Korean conductor Chung Myung-whun of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra cancelled his visit to Pyongyang in October 2006 because of the first North Korean nuclear test. (South Koreans need the approval of their government to travel to the North, and he did not receive it.) She was hoping South and North Korean musicians could perform together under Chung.

  Five years later, in 2011, Chung finally visited Pyongyang, agreeing “to hold regular joint performances by the two countries’ orchestras from 2012 to ease cross-border tensions,” he said.

  On the South Korean side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), a poster at this souvenir shop illustrates a South Korean and a North Korean soldier in military police garb. The South Korean garb resembles an American armed forces uniform, while the North Korean outfit could fit in the Soviet Red Army. The juxtaposition is a reminder of who divided Korea into a socialist North and into a capitalist South, and a lingering ghost of the Cold War.

  My wife and I pose on the northern side of the joint security area (JSA), a tense meeting point at the DMZ where both sides rendezvous in occasional negotiations. We’re carefully watched by both North Korean and South Korean military police, pictured behind us. Tourists and diplomatic visitors can have a glance on the North Korean side from the largest building in the background, while the blue barracks directly behind us are operated by the United Nations for infrequent diplomatic talks.

  My wife and daughter take a break during our tour on the southern side of the DMZ. Behind the fence sits a neutral buffer zone, and about 2,000 meters behind that await hundreds of thousands of North Korean troops, trained to mobilize at a moment’s notice should fighting break out.

  During his visit in 1993, Bill Clinton called the DMZ the “scariest place on earth.” More than 600 South and North Koreans and 50 Americans have died in periodic outbursts of violence since the 1953 armistice was signed, and to this day both sides remain technically at war.

  Dorasan is the name of South Korea’s last train stop before, in theory, the cargo is supposed to embark north of the DMZ and into China and Russia. South Korea wanted to develop the Trans-Korean Railway to connect South Korea by rail with the outside world. That’s a better deal for the economy than having to rely heavily on sea transit. Delivering goods by train will substantially reduce delivery times and make South Korean exports more competitive.

  The empty train sitting in Dorasan, pictured, never leaves for Pyongyang, even though South Korea has been dreaming for many years of a trans-Korean railway line. Political upheavals, of course, regularly interfere with the plans. Other plans were in the works that would bend the economic relationship between North and South Korea: one idea was to erect pipelines to import gas from Russia, an idea North Korea also favored because of the
money it could bring.

  One English-language newspaper in Seoul, The Korea Times, opined on South Korea’s balancing act on the pipelines on September 30, 2011: “In the end, the key question boils down to whether South Korea is willing to have its key energy supply controlled by North Korea, with whom it has the most adversarial relationship in the world.”

  My two-year-old daughter visits Seoul for the first time in 2007. A few years later, when looking at the photo album, she innocently asked: “Why does South Korea have such traffic jams and North Korea doesn’t have any? Why could we use the metro in Seoul but not in Pyongyang?” Her child’s mind, it seems, has been untainted by the sad story of division on the peninsula and all the human suffering it has wrought.

  The Chinese Koreans

  Most of the 2.5 million Chinese citizens of Korean descent live in northeast China, near the North Korean border. They mostly speak Mandarin, a Chinese dialect, but many of them nevertheless speak Korean amongst each other. Almost 1 million of these ethnic Koreans live in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, a special economic zone created by the Chinese government in 1952. Today’s ethnic Koreans in China stem mostly from migrants who fled a famine around 1860, and continued their movement until 1945.

  Ethnic Koreans stroll about in a market in this Chinese town in the Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin Province, known for its large Korean population. The sympathies of these Korean residents are sharply divided between North and South Korea. Nevertheless, Chinese-Koreans oversee most business transiting between Beijing and Pyongyang. As early as 1954, China allowed the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture to conduct border trade with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, helping its battered ally getting on its feet faster after the Korean War.