The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

by Ralph Hassig

  In the opening scene, the grandmother is preparing breakfast while the son carefully cleans the three framed photos of Kim Il-sung, his wife Kim Jong-suk, and Kim Jong-il that are required to be hung on the most prominent wall in every North Korean dwelling and workplace. The rooms are small and full of furniture. After a hearty breakfast of the sort most North Koreans could only dream of, the mother walks her daughter to kindergarten, first singing a children’s song about trees and then urging the daughter to accompany her in a song that goes, “Our powerful people’s army, that shakes heaven and earth, the pathetic Americans kneel on the ground, and beg for their lives” (actually, the lyrics translate to “the jackal-like American bastards”—but these words do not appear in the film’s subtitles). Few cars are seen on the streets, just pedestrians and the occasional bicycle, but the camera does catch three large posters, two depicting North Korean soldiers ready for battle and the third depicting a large American and a small Japanese skewered on the end of a North Korean bayonet.

  As the children file into the school, each child bows to a large painting of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il surrounded by happy children. In the classroom the children sit on benches around the edge of the room as the teacher plays a taped morning message: “Flowers need the sun in order to blossom, and the children of our country need the love of our great general Kim Jongil in order to grow.” On the wall is a child’s drawing of two North Korean fighter jets shooting down an American jet. In the hallway is a poster of little children dressed as soldiers attacking an American—or rather, an American’s head, which seems to have been separated from his body.

  A kindergarten lesson is presented in a room built around an elaborate model of the “secret camp” on Mt. Paektu where Kim Jong-il is supposed to have been born. A similar room has been described by a foreign tourist who was taken to Pyongyang’s “model” kindergarten, suggesting that the film crew happens to be in this same school and raising the question of why this “typical” child in a city of three million would be attending such a prestigious school. The teacher tells the Story of the Returned Boots: “Sit up straight. Little comrades, when you have heard my story, you will know that our general is the most praiseworthy man on earth. When he was young, he was a child just like you. Comrades, do you know what boots are?” She holds up a pair of red-and-white rubber boots. “Have any of you ever played in the snow?” One child offers that he likes to throw “snow grenades.” The teacher then explains that Kim Jong-il’s mother gave him a pair of rubber boots. “The great leader was so happy with his boots he put them on right away, and he ran straight to his comrades. But suddenly our great leader Kim Jongil stopped running. Do you know why?” One child, who has undoubtedly heard the story many times, answers, “Because he was sad?” “Yes, because he saw his friends were still wearing wet sneakers. That’s why our thoughtful general ran right back home, and when he came back outside, he was wearing wet sneakers.”

  Meanwhile, the mother is on her way to the coat factory. Military music is playing on the subway public address system, and the obligatory photos of the two Kims are hanging in the subway car. At the factory entrance, the workers (all women) are greeted by a female agitprop team whose leader is praising Kim Jong-il while her half-dozen associates line up behind her waving red flags. As the workers prepare their sewing machines for the day’s work, the factory manager announces that the factory has been assigned a quota of 150 coats for that day, although they made fewer than 100 the day before. Then the electricity goes out, and the women take out paperback books and read or talk to each other.

  In a separate room the factory manager convenes a meeting at which he blames the power outage on “the American stranglehold and years of natural disasters” and predicts, “As long as imperialism continues, our energy problem will exist.” Then he calls on the equipment manager to stand and give her report, which she reads in a monotone voice: “I am responsible for the equipment department. I am not a good manager. I did not prepare the equipment plan properly. It’s my fault the machines are in bad shape and unreliable. I didn’t train the workers well. That’s why the whole department performs so poorly. I vow that I will improve the production lines.” Everyone takes notes, and when she sits, there is a moment of silence. Then another manager reads his report: “Our comrades should know that the electrical shortage is caused by the isolationist policy of imperialist countries, above all, the U.S.” The factory manager adds, “This problem will go on until our enemy is defeated.”

  At one point the “third broadcasting” speaker on the workroom wall comes alive with a “news flash”: “Our great general Kim Jong-il has, on behalf of the people, received a letter from a Chinese delegation. The letter of thanks says, ‘Pyongyang, we have seen the fantastic results of your socialist system and encountered a friendly tradition and warm atmosphere during our visit. We would like to express our thanks for the effort Korea has made to make our visit a success. DPRK, we wish you eternal life and happiness.’ ”

  At the end of the day, the family gathers in its apartment and listens to the grandfather, dressed in a suit covered with war medals, tell Korean War stories about how the Americans bombed his school and his house, killing his father and older brother. When he enlisted and went to the front, “I shot at Americans. I was breathing fire. You can imagine how badly I wanted revenge.” He proudly says, “Even my granddaughter says, ‘Kill the American dogs.’ I taught her that.”

  His daughter-in-law, smiling brightly, adds, “My father-in-law has often told us about the enemy and about his experiences during the war. So even though I wasn’t in the war myself, his stories have shown me how bad and cruel those American dogs, our people’s enemy, were to our people. We must ensure that our people never suffer at the hands of those American monsters again. I believe from the bottom of my heart that we must do everything to destroy all American monsters on our land [i.e., the Korean Peninsula].”

  The Book Chapters

  Following this brief preview of North Korea, we move in chapter 2 to a discussion of the ideas, leadership techniques, and lifestyle of Kim Jong-il and his father, who are the architects and builders of North Korea and the two people for whose benefit the country continues to exist separately from South Korea. Although they have governed much like other dictators, the two Kims stand out because they have had a much longer time to perfect their dictatorship.

  The foundation of a society is its economy, which is the subject of chapter 3. The socialist command economy that Kim Il-sung adopted and that Kim Jong-il has embraced is more than an economy: it is a social-control mechanism. People who don’t obey, don’t eat. Although this economic model is admirably suited to keeping the Kim regime in power, it can only function as long as it receives foreign aid or allows the people to supplement their income by participating in a parallel economy. When the economy breaks down, as North Korea’s has, survival becomes an individual rather than a collective effort, as is described in chapter 4, which takes a more detailed look at the health, welfare, and work of the people.

  Chapter 5 begins with the self-evident proposition that people need information to make intelligent choices. In order to limit the choices available to its people, the Kim regime has severely restricted information. Predictably, the so-called mosquito net that the regime has drawn over the country to block outside influences has developed holes. By secretly listening to foreign radio and television broadcasts and watching smuggled videotapes and discs, North Koreans are learning about the outside world, and this unauthorized information is beginning to change their beliefs. However, beliefs, the topic of chapter 6, change slowly, and in North Korea any beliefs other than the officially sanctioned thought of the party must be carefully hidden. In fact, it appears that most North Koreans do not even think about politics but instead focus on economic survival.

  Chapter 7 takes up the related topics of the law, political class, and human rights. It is not unusual for dictatorial governments to grant their citizens a long
list of constitutional rights, but most of these rights exist only on paper. The more rights the people enjoy, the more constraints are placed on the leader. Since the late 1980s, millions of North Koreans have not even enjoyed the right to an adequate diet. If the Kim regime does eventually reform its political system, which is far from certain, granting its people more individual rights will probably be the last step it takes.

  Chapter 8 recounts how hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have fled across the border into China and how, by 2009, over fifteen thousand of them had then made their way to South Korea. Severe economic hardships, loss of confidence in Kim Jong-il’s leadership, and disillusionment and curiosity due to information about the outside world are the main reasons they leave their homeland. Their flight to China and their struggle to survive or move on to a more hospitable haven in South Korea provide clues about what North Koreans will face if the Kim regime collapses in the near future.

  The material for these chapters has come to us from many sources. Because our writings have been uniformly critical of the Kim regime, we have not been permitted to visit North Korea; instead, we have let North Koreans come to us. Over two hundred defectors have been interviewed by Kongdan Oh in recent years. In addition, Koreans and Chinese who live on the Chinese side of the North Korean border have shared their observations. North Korean officials attending international conferences are usually eager to talk with Oh, whose family originally came from North Korea (although she was born in South Korea). We have also consulted many North Korea specialists in South Korea, China, and Japan and studied thousands of news reports, travelers’ accounts, and direct transcriptions and translations of North Korean media reports and internal documents. We frequently quote from domestic North Korean sources as a means of illustrating the information environment in which the North Korean people live, and it must be admitted that a secondary motive for doing this is to convict the Kim regime with its own words.

  North Korea is constantly changing, and in any case it is impossible to be entirely accurate when describing a population of twenty-three million people. We believe our conclusions about North Korea are substantially correct, although we would be the first to admit that a few of the details may not be entirely accurate or up-to-date. One of the defectors we have interviewed on several occasions has been kind enough to read through the entire manuscript and tells us that, based on his experience, our description is accurate in regard to not only the main themes but the details as well. We have done our best with what is at hand, and we encourage interested readers to consult other sources as well, because no two views of North Korea are identical. For a start, a short list of readings for further study may be found at the end of the book.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Life of the Leader

  To understand why the North Korean people live the way they do, it is necessary to understand the thinking and personality of their supreme leader, Kim Jong-il, who, along with his father, has shaped their lives and limited their chances. And just as the son continued his father’s work, there is every reason to believe that whoever takes over for Kim Jong-il—most likely one of his sons—will govern in the style of the first two Kims.

  The North Korean people are accustomed to being ruled by autocratic leaders. Since the end of World War II, the North Korean dictators have been Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il. Before that, it was the Japanese emperor and his colonial administrators, and before that, an assortment of Korean kings and queens stretching back for millennia. Almost inevitably, dictators use their powers to serve their own personal interests before those of their people, and this is certainly the case in North Korea, which is run for the benefit of Kim and his elite supporters.

  Kim Jong-il is, by occupation, a dictator, and that job description limits his choices—and also the choices of his successor. It is no coincidence that his policies strikingly resemble those of other dictators, past and present. Thus, Kim is neither crazy nor strange; he is just doing his job. Ronald Winetrobe provides a good general description of dictators based on numerous case studies (not including North Korea) that fits Kim like a glove:

  Such leaders tend to be paranoid, because they lack reliable information about what their people are really thinking about them. One of their chief concerns is staying in office, and to this end, they are engaged with more or less frequency (depending on the type of dictatorship) in buying loyalty and implementing repressive measures in order to do so. We know less about their subjects, but we do know that as long as they are at all numerous—and especially if they are unorganized—the benefits to each one of overthrowing the dictator will be small compared with the potential costs. This free-rider problem helps dictators immensely in the task of staying in office, but it doesn’t solve it completely, and under the right circumstances, they can be deposed, as dictators often are.1

  Winetrobe would likely place Kim Jong-il in the category of most dangerous dictators: “Of all of the systems examined, dictatorship approaches the purest form in the role of a single individual, someone who is beholden to no interest group and who is not motivated by economic concerns. And as a dictatorship approaches this form, it becomes progressively more dangerous and more interested in controlling a wider fraction of the economy and society.”2

  Kim Il-sung’s Legacy

  When Kim Jong-il took over after his father’s death, his official slogan was “Expect no change from me.” From his father he inherited not only a country but a system of governance. Whether the son would like to make substantial changes is a moot question. Over a decade later, the only changes that have come to North Korea have occurred in spite of Kim.

  By the time he died, the man known to North Koreans as the suryong (“great leader”), or more reverentially as oboi suryongnim (“fatherly great leader”), had taken his people down a dead-end road—although it would be equally true to say that the road led directly to the Kim family estate. Beginning life as a wandering young man with a limited education and no profession other than guerrilla fighter, he ended up virtually owning a country of twenty-two million people. Although he was able to hold on to power for almost half a century, he failed to achieve his oft-pronounced goals of seeing his people “eat soup with meat, wear silk clothes, and live in tiled-roof houses.” He also failed to unite the two Koreas under communism. Yet he was, and still is, respected and even worshipped by most North Koreans. Kim enjoyed unparalleled power to shape his country, and as Adrian Buzo has perceptively written, North Korea in many respects reflects the outlook and experience of its founder.3

  Lacking education and international experience, Kim and his comrades were unable to progress beyond the first and most obvious stages of nation building. When Deng Xiaoping and the ruling Chinese communist elites were authorizing significant changes in China’s economic affairs, Kim could see nothing wrong with North Korea’s Stalinist-style socialist economy. When the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe gave up on communism, Kim held firm. In the final two decades of his life, Kim gradually handed over the day-to-day affairs of state to his son and receded into semiretirement to oversee the writing of his autobiography. The book’s title, With the Century, is misleading because rather than living with the century, Kim was stuck in the first half of it. His policies of the 1950s no longer worked in the 1980s and 1990s. And because his autobiography mixes personal reminiscences with the cult stories that party propagandists invented for him, it does more to confuse his life story than clarify it. For more accurate accounts of his life, one must rely on foreign biographers.4

  Kim Il-sung was born on April 15, 1912, in the village of Mangyongdae, just north of Pyongyang. His name was Kim Song-ju, not Kim Il-sung—the name change did not occur until the early 1930s, when he took the name of a legendary guerrilla fighter about whom little is known. He had an ordinary, if somewhat difficult, childhood. His father, Kim Hyong-jik, was at various times a schoolteacher, a clerk, and an herbal pharmacist who had briefly attended an American missionary school and becom
e a Christian, which was not unusual in Korea. Most Koreans bowed to the authority of the Japanese administrators and went on with their lives, but not the Kim family, which fled to regions of China that the Japanese had not yet occupied. Kim joined a youth league that harassed the Japanese troops who were gradually spreading out over China, and at the age of seventeen, he was arrested and sentenced to several months in prison for being a member of the Korean Communist Youth League. With his entry into youthful anti-Japanese politics, Kim ended his formal schooling, having completed eight grades.

  At the age of twenty-one, Kim graduated from politics to the military, joining a guerrilla band of Koreans that North Korean propagandists would later call the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army, and it was at this point in his life that he began using the name Kim Il-sung. The Japanese were able to break up the group, but Kim eluded them and joined other resistance groups that were usually affiliated with contingents of the Chinese army. Most of the time the guerrillas fought the Japanese in Manchuria, but occasionally they conducted raids into Japanese-occupied Korea.

  Thanks to his leadership qualities, Kim soon had command of his own small group of fighters, who rarely numbered more than a hundred men. His most famous “battle” was fought in and around Pochonbo, a small Korean town close to the Chinese border. Leading a band of two hundred men, grandly named the Sixth Division of the Chinese Second Army (of the First Route Army), Kim and his men staged a daring early-morning attack on June 4, 1937, destroying Japanese administrative offices, setting fire to a corner police office, the elementary school, and the post office, and quickly retreating back across the border. Although North Koreans are taught that Pochonbo marked a “decisive turning point” in the liberation of Korea, in fact skirmishes such as these had no effect whatsoever on the tide of war.5 In 1940 or 1941, Kim and his soldiers took refuge in Russia, where Kim settled in a Soviet army camp outside the village of Viatsk (Viatskoe or Vyatskiye) near the city of Khabarovsk (Chabarovsk) and was commissioned a captain in the Eighty-eighth Independent Brigade. There he stayed for the remainder of the war, undergoing Soviet military training and marrying Kim Jong-suk, one of the Korean women who had joined his guerrilla group. Their first son, Yura, later to be known as Kim Jong-il, was born on February 16 in 1941 or 1942 (some sources say his birth date was moved back a year so he could be exactly thirty years younger than his father).6