by Ralph Hassig
The government banned all cell phones in May 2004, although its reason for doing so is not entirely clear. There is much speculation that the ban was a response to the Yongchon railway explosion that just missed Kim Jong-il’s private train as it returned from China. If it was an assassination attempt, perhaps the explosion was detonated by a cell phone. The government confiscated all the phones it could find, and the ban continued into 2008.63 In May 2008, Orascom Telecommunications, a subsidiary of a large Egyptian conglomerate that has signed several investment contracts with North Korea, launched another GSM cell phone service, and cell phones began appearing once again in 2009.64
The first people in North Korea to use cell phones, as far back as 1997, were Chinese traders working in North Korea near the border, where they could receive signals from Chinese cell towers. The use of these Chinese cell phones has increased over the years, despite the North Korean cell phone ban. Chinese lend or rent the phones to North Koreans with whom they are doing business, and illegal businesses provide cell phones to North Koreans who want to talk with relatives in China or South Korea. The North Korean security services try to track down these phones by using spies and electronic equipment, and they sometimes succeed, although payment of small bribes usually keeps cell phone users out of jail.
With severe economic and legal restrictions on travel and poor telephone service, North Koreans have few ways to communicate with each other except by word of mouth. Train passengers are said to be an excellent source of information and rumor because their anonymity provides them a measure of safety. Where only two people are gathered, some freedom of communication is possible, because if one person reports to authorities that his interlocutor said something that could be construed as “counterrevolutionary,” the other can always deny it—unless the reporter is an undercover agent. Among three or more people, a measure of paranoia sometimes motivates listeners to report disloyalty to the authorities before they in turn are reported upon by the other parties to the conversation. The security services employ hundreds of thousands of informants (mostly recruited on a temporary basis) to report on their comrades. North Koreans believe that as many as one out of ten or twenty citizens is reporting to the police at any given time. Parents must even be careful about what they say in front of their children, who are sometimes induced by overzealous teachers to report on their home life. Despite these constraints, news, rumors, and even indirect criticism of the Kim regime make the rounds, with a few people paying the price for their loose lips but most escaping any serious consequences.
Media Impact
Gaining access to information is one thing; interpreting it is something else. People screen incoming information to keep from being overwhelmed, especially when the information challenges their current beliefs. The screening process involves selective exposure, selective attention, selective understanding, and selective remembering. The more committed an individual is to current beliefs, the more rigorous the screening process. Consider how this might work for a typical North Korean who encounters information coming from outside the country.
Because the Kim regime is highly selective about what information it allows its people to receive from outside, the information that does get in easily makes it through the personal information filter of selective exposure. Nor is selective attention likely to be a significant second-stage barrier in North Korea’s communication-deprived society because outside information is so scarce that people actively seek it out and pay attention to it. Selective interpretation, on the other hand, may prevent information from being correctly understood. North Korean propaganda has consistently taken the line that the United States is doing all it can to subjugate the North Korean people. Even American foreign aid is depicted as a kind of psychological operation. North Koreans who accept this viewpoint will be inclined to interpret any information coming from the United States and other capitalist countries as “imperialistic” propaganda delivered with an ulterior motive.
Such skepticism about U.S. intentions brings into relief two important and related issues in communication and persuasion: latitude of acceptance and communicator credibility. A communication is most readily believed when it is neither too different from nor too similar to the audience’s current attitudes and experience.65 If it is too similar, the new information is received with little thought and has little impact, falling well within the latitude of acceptance. If it is too different, the new information is rejected as implausible or incomprehensible, falling within the latitude of rejection. The width of these latitudes varies for each audience segment and even for each individual at different times and on different issues. A plausible hypothesis is that, having been for so long isolated and subjected to hostile anti-American propaganda, the North Korean people have developed a wide latitude of rejection for foreign (especially American) communications. Consider the case of a North Korean who escaped to China, where he came across an article in a Russian journal telling about how Kim Il-sung had actually started the Korean War. “If the journal had not been from Russia, I would have believed the article was fabricated by South Korea. So I decided to go to South Korea to learn more.”66
The Kim regime has taken extreme measures to prevent its people from receiving and believing foreign communications, especially those coming from the United States. As the country opens itself slightly to foreigners, it has erected a mosquito net of censorship to let some information in while preventing unwanted influences from turning people’s heads. Another measure to combat outside communications is the use of “inoculation,” whereby North Korean propagandists contrast the ideal American life with its somewhat harsher realities in order to prevent the North Korean people from believing everything they hear and see about the United States. In a particularly graphic, and sometimes comical, example of inoculation, Nodong Sinmun published an article describing the experiences of an unnamed Russian tourist who visited the United States. According to the paper, the Russian’s experiences were reported “some time ago” in a Pravda article titled “A Russian Citizen’s Account of the Disgusting United States.” The Russian reports on housing:
Only a very small minority of people live in skyscrapers. These skyscrapers are few in number. They converge in the “commercial center,” a small district that comprises a few streets in the heart of the city. The entire remainder of the city is a world of asbestos-board houses.… Most people live in pressboard or asbestos board houses that are singularly disorderly and swarming with roaches. The walls of these houses are such that just pressing on them with a finger leaves a mark, and one can push a nail into them with the bare hand. . . .67
One time I went into a house where eight households lived, with one kitchen and one bathroom. There were old people living in that house. Their lives were all but done. They sat and wept. The lighting was barely enough to see in front of one’s nose. I sat down and considered how I might console them.68
Eventually, I returned to my home in the fatherland. When I set my trunk on the floor, U.S. cockroaches came crawling out of it. We threw the trunk out on the veranda. In the cold of the Russian February, the cockroaches crawled barely half a meter and froze to death.69
On the U.S. health-care system, the Russian says,
If one is not insured, then he cannot get an operation. Yet the cost of insurance is 300 to 400 dollars each month, and no one can pay that much. They go on living somehow, without dying. There is a “free treatment system” for pensioners called the “old-age health system.” In fact, they call the old folks in every month to confirm whether they have died or not, then they insult them by asking why they live so long when they live poorly, and threatening to get rid of the “old-age health system.”70
In North Korea, as in all countries with heavy censorship, inquiring minds learn to read between the lines of the official media. Even though the media are designed to be a propaganda tool of the Kim regime, they are not without some informational value because the propagandist needs the raw material
of news content in order to tell a story. For example, in a Nodong Sinmun article arguing that U.S. forces fell into a “trap” set by resistance forces after invading Iraq in 2003, readers were informed that “it took only some 40 days for the U.S.-led coalition forces to occupy Iraq.”71 The astute reader could therefore infer that U.S. military power must be formidable if it vanquished the large Iraqi army in a matter of weeks. To take another example, a Nodong Sinmun article in 2003 reported that due to recent events, South Koreans no longer liked the United States. It is true that anti-American sentiment had increased at that time; however, the information in the article conflicts with the usual propaganda line that the South Koreans have always disliked the Americans.72
Sometimes so many facts are left out of a foreign news story that the audience can probably make neither head nor tail of it. For example, presumably referring to speculation in the international media that a nuclear transparency policy recently adopted by Libya might prove to be a model for North Korea, KCTV quoted a foreign ministry official as cryptically saying, “Recently, the United States has been extensively advertising the incidents they orchestrated in some Middle East countries and is having a hallucination that the effects from these incidents will be reproduced on the Korean peninsula.… To expect a change in our position is the same as expecting a shower from a clear sky.”73
Although it is easy to characterize North Korea’s information environment as impoverished and dysfunctional, the fact to keep in mind is that this environment has served its purpose as one of the most important means of keeping the Kim family in power for over half a century. On the other hand, the regime’s restrictive information policy has prevented North Korea from modernizing and becoming internationally competitive. Information needed to make optimal choices, especially economic choices, is in short supply. More importantly (from our point of view), the lack of information about alternative political systems keeps the people, dissatisfied though they may be, from finding a way out of their political prison.
It is difficult to predict what would happen if North Koreans gained unfettered access to information about their regime and the outside world. Such information might empower them to restructure their society to their own benefit, but they would need more than information to free them from the grip of thousands of years of autocratic rule.
CHAPTER SIX
Hidden Thoughts
What is in the minds of North Koreans as they go about their daily lives? What motivates them? What do they love and hate, hope and fear? Have years of indoctrination brainwashed them? Do they believe the propaganda that proclaims, “Our leader is the best, our ideology is the best, our army is the best, and our system is the best”?1 Or are their minds filled with contradictions, frustration, and resentment? The short answer to such questions is that the minds of North Koreans are in conflict, but they do not dwell on it. Their minds are filled with the teachings of the Kim regime, but they are guided in everyday life by beliefs of an opposite and far more practical nature. They heavily discount the official propaganda claiming that the North Korean economy is merely going through a bad patch on the road to socialist paradise, and they are beginning to doubt that the rest of the international community holds Kim Jong-il and the North Korean state in high esteem. With each passing year, they put less faith in the regime’s teachings, but they have no coherent set of alternative values to guide them to a better future.
Values—that is, a culture’s ideas about what is good and bad—provide very basic guidelines for behavior, although people do not always follow them, and they are usually open to interpretation and modification according to circumstances. For example, Americans value efficiency, hard work, freedom of choice, individualism, a judicious degree of conformity to social norms, and the rights of minorities. All cultures share these American values, largely inherited from European culture, with varying degrees of emphasis on each. Even traditionally collective societies, like those of the Japanese and Koreans, are today quite individualistic. North Koreans subscribe to most of these values as well, although they place more weight on social conformity and less on individualism than do most modern societies.
Attitudes—positive and negative feelings about objects as diverse as guns, carrots, and democracy, along with knowledge and beliefs about those objects—are a more precise guide to behavior than are values. Knowing something about a person’s attitudes makes it easier to predict behavior. As it happens, attitudes may sometimes be formed as a consequence of behavior, as in the case of rationalizations, but once formed, attitudes guide people as they navigate a world of choices, suggesting what to approach and what to avoid. People also use attitudes to define themselves, as in “I am a proud North Korean.”
Attitudes are transmitted by teachers, by the media, and by the people we respect. For over half a century, the Kim regime has devoted prodigious efforts to teaching a set of socialist, loyalist, and nationalist values and attitudes. Attitudes, and to a lesser extent values, are also formed by experience; in fact, the strongest attitudes are learned in the school of hard knocks. Every day, North Koreans face a harsh contradiction between attitudes they have been taught and attitudes they learn from direct experience with life. For example, the Arduous March of the late 1990s taught the lesson that the state would no longer look out for its citizens, even while the propaganda press told people to keep their faith in state socialism. Those who remained faithful to socialist principles became society’s losers, while those who went into business for themselves survived.
It is difficult to describe the beliefs of people living in a totalitarian society, where many thoughts must be hidden from all but family members and a few close friends, and no public opinion surveys are conducted. Instead, we must rely on material gathered from individual interviews and surveys of North Koreans who have already left the country, realizing that these people are not a representative sample of North Koreans and that their postdefection thoughts may color and even crowd out the thoughts they had while living in their homeland. Much of the material for this chapter comes from two surveys of defectors conducted by South Korean organizations and from two hundred defector interviews conducted since the late 1990s by the book’s second author, Kongdan Oh.
An Ideology “in Our Own Style”
The Kim regime is inordinately proud of its ideology. “Some countries are known for their economic prosperity and others for military strength and still others for rich cultural assets. But our country is the only country known for its ideological power.”2 From cradle to grave, North Koreans are exposed to this ideology, and a good place to begin studying what they think is to look at what they have been taught.
An ideology is a collection of mutually consistent values and attitudes on which a political system is based. The Kimist ideology, borrowing heavily from Confucianism, Stalinism, and Maoism, stresses the value of the family as a model for society, with the leader as the father figure and each citizen-family member having his or her own role to play. According to Confucianism, the leader in turn has obligations to his national family, and when those obligations are not met, the leader loses his ruling mandate and should expect to be replaced. Of course, in practice it is as difficult to remove the leader of a state as it is for a family to replace its father. Chinese dynasties were passed on from parent to child for generations. In North Korea’s dynasty, through good years and bad, Kim Il-sung ruled for almost fifty years as the “father-leader” (oboi suryongnim).
The point in common between Confucianism and the various forms of communism is the autocratic nature of governance. Kim Il-sung borrowed many ideas from Marxism-Leninism as it was practiced in the 1930s and 1940s, including an emphasis on collectivism and on the perpetual revolution. Even in the 1940s it was difficult for many people living under communism to take this ideology seriously because it was obvious that their leaders were determined that the dictatorship of the nomenklatura should never give way to the dictatorship of the proletariat. By the twenty-first ce
ntury, communist totalitarianism had become an anachronism found only in North Korea and Cuba, although communist parties in China and Vietnam continued to monopolize politics and guide their respective economies.
A truly socialist or communist society can succeed only if its people are remolded into citizens who place community above personal interests. In Stalinist Russia, the utopian citizen was called the “new man,” and this new man is the ideal in North Korea as well. Party lectures, newspaper articles, radio and television programs, and movies and plays teach people that egotism has no place in their society. Unfortunately, this teaching goes against universal norms and may well violate biological survival instincts. Only when faced with a community emergency are people willing to put aside individual goals; the rest of the time, they revert to their own self-interest, none more enthusiastically than the communist elites.
Communism is acknowledged to be a work in progress. Because some people cling to the old individualistic values, the transition from socialism to communism is painfully slow. In fact, North Korea is all about transitions: year after year the propaganda press proclaims that a foundation has been laid or a turning point reached in achieving economic goals, but as with a mirage, those goals are never reached. Nothing gets built on the foundation, and one turning point simply leads to another, until the economy comes full circle in failure for the simple reason that the problem is not the economy but the political system that controls it. Given the transitional nature of communist society, it is especially difficult to get people to adopt a communitarian outlook when some are working for the community while others are working for themselves. The existence of so many free riders gives people the feeling that they are not being adequately compensated for their selflessness.
