by Felix Abt
At some point, they figured that the benefits of this privately run university, such as access to state-of-the-art equipment, outweighed the political risks when they finally gave in—but with a few safeguards, of course. They were required to undertake a more rigorous selection of cadres than at the Pyongyang Business School.
One caveat, though, is that PUST doesn’t take on truly secular lecturers, and those who do get jobs usually volunteer. “I tried to get a job with PUST but they ignored my application. I was willing to teach English and/or journalism,” one university professor, an acquaintance, wrote to me in a rather humorous e-mail. “My wife was ready to teach English and creative writing. I may have failed their religious test. The application form asks: ‘When did you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior?’”
Despite stereotypes that North Korea overwhelmingly represses the Christian religion, the government usually doesn’t see the Lord as a serious threat to their earthly system. I once asked a senior security official if they did not feel threatened by Moon’s Unification Church, active in North Korea in the hospitality and car manufacturing industries. He answered quite candidly: “Well, you know, it’s a cat and mouse game.” It’s a never ending contest which the North Koreans will make sure the other side can never win.
Professor Park Chan-Mo, one co-president and as Chancellor of PUST running this unique university, and his wife together with me in a Karaoke room in Pyongyang.
Hardliners in the West Wing
After two nuclear tests by North Korea, Chinese involvement significantly slowed down for a while. Later, the Chinese Chuangli Group and North Korea agreed to develop the number 1 dock at Rajin port while the Russians were renovating the rail line from Russia to Rason. The Rason port is ice-free and it gives landlocked Jilin province of China access to the East Sea. Chinese investment is on the rise, not only in and around Rason but throughout North Korea, particularly in areas rich with metals and minerals.
To the North Koreans, Chinese investment has a big advantage to North Korea: it is much less politically sensitive than investment from its capitalist rival South Korea. It may therefore not surprise that Chinese and other foreign investors are substantially privileged, compared to South Koreans. North Korean workers working for Chinese businesses, or other foreigners in North Korea, have to be paid a monthly minimum salary of 42,000 won, or 30 Euros, but four times more when they work for South Koreans in Kaesong, according to the North Korean Joint Venture and Investment Committee.
But there may be another, more important reason for this. When I was working on some joint North–South projects, the northern side always demanded a substantial advance payment upfront from the southern side. Informally, it looked more like a heavy entrance fee, something they would never have asked from other investors. When I asked for the reason, one North Korean responded, “Southerners helped destroy our country. That’s why they have to pay for that!”
In 2005, I met with Kim Soo Yol, the chairman of the Rajinsonbong (or Rason) Free Trade Zone (FTZ), bordering Jilin province of China and Primorsky Krai of Russia. In the middle is Ms. Kim Cha Yon, also known as Susan, a Korean American academic and strong supporter of the FTZ. Since the area was established in 1993, laws governing its status have been amended six times to improve the incentives for foreign investors and traders.
For example, foreign investors have been given greater investor rights. Decision making has been shifted away from central government to the local government encouraging more pragmatism. Unlike in the past. prices can now be set between buyer and seller, with a few exceptions. Susan and others have exerted a decisive and positive influence on the authorities in Rason and Pyongyang, which has paid off. More investor-friendly laws have attracted substantial inflows from China and Russia in road, rail and port facilities since 2010.
Business and geopolitics
Ms. Kim Cha Yon helped establish the Rajin Business Institute, a graduate school affiliated with the Rajin University to train students in market skills required by foreign enterprises in the trade zone. The institute provided courses in business English, management, business finance, accounting, quality assurance, among other topics, another sign that this regime is committed to some sort of business reform even if on its own terms.
Students told me that Ms. Kim, who gave lectures herself, was a popular character in Rason. She was deeply concerned about the growing influence of, as she put it to me, a “peacefully rising China” that might exert influence on them sooner or later—a fear widespread among Koreans. To counteract this trend, her goal was a politically and economically more balanced development in the region.
In what would be a strange meeting to most South Koreans, I met Lee Ji-sun, Miss (South) Korea 2007 (who represented her country at the 2008 Miss Universe Pageant), in Pyongyang. She visited in 2008 as a goodwill ambassador for the World Trade Centers Association, a non-profit group that promotes trade expansion around the world.
North Korea, on the other hand, has no “Miss Korea” beauty pageant, as they tend to think of that concept in a more nefarious way. When I told a senior government official that I had just met Miss Korea in Pyongyang, he grinned and asked, “So, what did you do with her?” I did not like the insinuation; in her defense I answered, “We just took pictures and nothing else as she is a respectable and serious Korean lady.” She was then the only Korean woman with a miniskirt in town, which may have stoked the fantasies of North Korean men and made the women, who were not allowed to wear miniskirts, jealous.
Oleg Kim, a wealthy Russian businessman of North Korean descent, sits at the end of the right side of the table with his wife. Kim was a respectable entrepreneur who chaired the Korean International Business Association based in Russia, and received a VIP-welcome in Pyongyang during this trip in 2005. He discussed a number of business ideas with North Korean government officials and businesses, but also took an interest in the activities of European business people like myself. He approached the group I oversaw, the European Business Association, for feedback on his ideas like processing food items in North Korea for export, to be paid by fertilizer imported into North Korea. On the left of the photograph is his son, who studied Korean and Chinese at the Kim Il Sung University. His parents, who were Russian speakers, regretted that they did not speak any Korean and wanted their son to get to know their homeland.
Kim comes from a historically persecuted group of Koreans who grew up in the Soviet Union, and thus is distant from Pyongyang. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union adopted a secret plan in 1926 to resettle Soviet Koreans north of the town of Khabarovsk, on suspicions of that they were disloyal to the Soviet Union that was founded four years earlier. The plan was executed half-heartedly after a delay, and in 1937 tens of thousands of Korean Russians were deported from the Russian Far East to the Soviet Central Asia. The state gave the official line that it was suppressing “the penetration of Japanese espionage to the Soviet Far East,” fearful of its enemy in Tokyo during World War II even though Korea was just a colony. Many ethnic Koreans became “Russified” after their deportation, with a new generation not learning the mother tongue. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its successor, the Russian Federation, restored ethnic rights to the Koreans.
While the soldiers that carried out rocket and nuclear tests were national heroes, North Korea was home to many more stars who helped define national identity. The country has a fair share of film stars and music celebrities, which are generally not known outside the DPRK. Some even showed up at the PyongSu booth during exhibitions where they confessed they were happy customers - much to the delight of my staff and myself.
Among the most admired sports heroes was the legendary North Korean soccer team, which sparked a great shock in North Korea. On June 1, 2010, AFP reminded the world, about a truly historical event: “North Korea 1, Italy 0. Four decades on, the sensational defeat of the two-time world champions by a team of unknowns from the insular nation ranks as perhaps the greatest shock in World C
up history.”
Although they did beat the world’s then strongest football team, the North Koreans did not win the World Cup itself. Losing the World Cup did not lead to any punishment as the Western media reported. On the contrary they were duly celebrated as heroes when they returned home.
That event came more than a three decades after the North Korean national soccer team was victorious over the world champion, Italy, in Middlesborough, England, on July 19, 1966. For a few days in the summer of 1966, Pak Doo Ik, an army corporal, was the most famous footballer in the world; he was the scorer of the goal that knocked haughty Italy out of the World Cup. Games like these give North Koreans hope that their pure and superior race can defeat any foreign attacker. ABB sponsored a documentary film on the historic event, because I hoped the company could draw on its popularity.
The renowned soccer player Pak Doo Ik, sitting in the middle, poses with former teammates all around. He remains a national hero today. He told me in 2003 that the football encounter had great symbolic significance for his country when it defeated the soccer “superpower,” Italy. The former soldier stressed that his country could equally well defeat a military power.
I was watching the old sports competition on TV in my condominium in Pyongyang with some angst. One of the participants struck my eye. To me she looked weaker and more fragile than her rivals, but to my relief, she won the match for the team. Pak Hyon Suk, born August 4, 1985, became the heavyweight lifting gold medalist at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, defeating Chinese Taipei, the Olympics label for Taiwan, for bronze, and Kazakhstan for silver. She lifted 241 kg in total in the 63 kg category.
Pak explained that she was trying to please her then-leader, Kim Jong Il, when she went into the last and decisive heavy lifting round. North Korean TV viewers were allowed to watch only North Korean athletes win Olympic medals in 2008. In 2012, though, North Korean authorities allowed their citizens for the first time ever to watch South Koreans win gold medals as well.
For her gold medal, Ms. Pak was rewarded by her government with a house in Pyongyang and a car. Compared to the advertising contracts rewarded to Western athletes, her prize was modest. But it meant a lot to this patriotic North Korean. I expressed my heartfelt congratulations to Ms. Pak for her achievement when I met her at the airport upon her return. Her fighting spirits instilled confidence in millions of North Koreans. They were, as always, convinced that they are the best people in the world.
1 http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_northkorea/459520.html
2 http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/northkorea/2010/05/18/88/0401000000AEN20100518007600315F.HTML
3 http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/may/31/top-100-universities-under-50
4 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/23/world/la-fg-korea-torpedo-20100724
Epilogue:
Winds of Change
“Reform is China’s second revolution.” — Deng Xiaoping
In February 2008, more than 400 Americans traveled to Pyongyang in what was the largest American delegation to have ever stepped foot in the country since the Korean War. The New York Philharmonic Orchestra was performing, and it brought about 80 journalists from all over the world. The group even included William Perry, the U.S. defense secretary under Bill Clinton who always carried a hawkish stance towards Pyongyang.
The historical concert by the New York Philharmonic, performed in 2008, was broadcast live worldwide. To the surprise of the Western commentators who thought classic music was prohibited, it was in fact shown on North Korean TV. Here, television crews film the arrival of the concert guests.
In the 1990s, Perry was prepared to launch surgical strikes on nuclear facilities in Pyongyang and pushed for tough sanctions against North Korea after its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The North Korean government perceived his plan as a belligerent act of war, but it was scuttled thanks to an intervention from ex-President Jimmy Carter, who met with both President Kim Il Sung and then-President Bill Clinton in 1994.
On my way to the concert hall I passed Mr. Perry, who was smiling in front of the camera with other Americans in a country he once hated. How lucky, I thought, that this guy didn’t get his way, so he could later visit a peninsula he almost turned into a crater.
Music helped open up China in the 1970s when the Philadelphia Orchestra played, when the Nixon administration was following a policy of “détente” with Beijing. Indeed, music can also open the doors to change in Pyongyang. Perhaps the ball is already rolling.
After a symphonic performance of “Arirang,” the foreign and North Korean audience applauds. Arirang is an old Korean folk song recounting the story of an unhappy woman left by her lover, and yearning for him to return. It is a metaphor of today’s divided Korea.
The Western media, in particular, were hoppy over the North Korean program that included composers like Dvorak, Gershwin and Wagner. Even the American and North Korean anthems were a part of the show. Most of the pieces were not directly subversive, with the exception of “The New World Symphony,” a piece that Dvorak composed in 1893 during a visit to the U.S., praising the continent’s blossoming democracy and free markets. The emotional highlight of the evening was the Korean folk song, “Arirang.”
Are foreign influences banned?
At the end of 2006, Reuters published a German language report claiming that Western music was banned in North Korea—the sort of allegation you would find in George Orwell’s 1984. The reporter claimed that the permitted tunes had titles like, “Let us support our supreme commander with weapons” and “Song of the coast artillery.”
Reuters must have been puzzled, then, when the North Korean government held a concert on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart where, for example, “Figaro’s Wedding” was played. I visited the concert in the Moranbong Theater with a young French IT entrepreneur. Even though he didn’t enjoy watching symphonies, he was excited to learn that North Korea wasn’t just about revolutionary songs. “In the State Symphony of North Korea, they do Tchaikovsky from memory,” Suzannah Clarke, a British opera singer who has performed frequently in North Korea, told the Washington Post. “The Philharmonic could probably learn a thing or two.”
The supply of classical music has a historical precedent. Russian dance groups and orchestras performed regularly in Pyongyang for years, part of a palette that included European classical alongside communist Soviet songs. The affinity for classic music, then, was a result of Russians, Isang Yun, and others like Clarke.
Moving deeper than the New York Philharmonic visit, artists from around the world were invited to perform every two years at Pyongyang’s biannual Spring Festival. There was little censorship involved; these performances were even aired on TV for all North Koreans to see, rather than being cordoned off as a playground for elites.
One year, Swiss yodeling groups and alphorn musicians once amused audiences at the festival, and quickly garnered their own nationwide celebrity on television. That would simply have not been possible in their home country, where the market was flooded with talented musicians. Still, even North Koreans had mastered the Western fine arts. My wife took piano lessons from a North Korean teacher, who had mastered the classics on his instrument.
The Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble, one of North Korea’s most popular orchestras that could regularly be heard on local radio stations had an impressive repertoire of foreign songs ranging from “Lambada”, a world hit by the French group Kaoma to the German pop group Modern Talking’s famous catchy record “Brother Louie” to “L’amour est bleu” (“Blue, blue, my world is blue …”) a song ranked second at a Eurovision Song Contest in 1967. As a fan of classical music I enjoyed concerts given by the National Symphony Orchestra on several occasions that had a wide variety of famous classical tunes in their repertoire ranging from Johann Strauss’s Radetzky March to the overture to Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen.
At the karaoke rooms around Pyongyang, amateur
singers cheered over the ubiquitous theme from Titanic, Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” The song, strangely, had been “Koreanized” with a Korean text and a more local background film which didn’t have much to do with the original theme.
The Path towards Reform
So, how will reform come about, and what can observers expect based on past patterns? Political changes do not come as a “big bang”—and when they do, the results can be disastrous, as is the case of impoverished Cambodia after the United Nations hastily tried to set up a democracy in 1992. Rather, reform comprises a gradual process of trial and error, a pattern that often consists of two steps forward, and one step back.
Noteworthy changes occurred not only from 2002 but emerged already in 1996 and 1997, the years of the huge natural calamities, when the Public Distribution System collapsed and failed to feed the population any longer. Markets sprung up to fill the gap and people started to wheel and deal in any way possible to make their ends meet. Although then illegal, authorities reluctantly tolerated the development of this marketization and, finally, accepted and legalized the markets in 2002.
But what came as a surprise in 2005 is that the private sale of grain in the markets was banned again in an effort to roll back the markets and to revive the Public Distribution System. A host of other measures, described elsewhere in the book, against markets and traders were carried out until 2009, when a currency depreciation as the last and hitherto most radical action to restore the state-controlled economy of the past completely failed.
