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

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  Copyright 2009 by Ralph C. Hassig and Kongdan Oh Hassig

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hassig, Ralph C.

  The hidden people of North Korea : everyday life in the hermit kingdom / Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-7425-6718-4 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-7425-6720-7 (electronic)

  1. Korea (North)—Social life and customs. 2. Korea (North)—Social conditions. 3. Korea (North)—Economic conditions. 4. Political culture—Korea (North) 5. Korea (North)—Politics and government—1994– 6. Kim, Chong-il, 1942—Influence. I. Oh, Kong Dan. II. Title.

  DS932.7.H37 2009

  951.9305—dc22

  2009029786

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  We must envelop our environment in a dense fog to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.

  —Kim Jong-il

  Preface

  Kongdan (Katy) Oh’s parents came from North Korea, although in the final years of the Japanese occupation they lived in China. As members of the educated class, her parents were understandably wary of the new communist “working-class” government being set up in the North, and with hundreds of thousands of other North Koreans, they fled to the South before the border was closed. Since coming to the South, they have not heard anything from their relatives who stayed behind.

  Under a succession of South Korean authoritarian governments that viewed the North as an enemy state, school children had no opportunity to learn anything about North Korea except what the authorities permitted under the National Security Law—still in force today but greatly relaxed since the end of the Cold War. Nor was information about other communist states available. It was not until she enrolled in graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley, that Oh was able to begin an objective study of North Korea.

  Upon graduation, she went to work for the RAND Corporation with a primary assignment to analyze how North Korea could threaten the national security of the United States. In practice, this meant that much of her work, first at RAND and then at the Institute for Defense Analyses, has been related to North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction. A secondary field of study is the nature and stability of the Kim regime, which after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was dubbed one of the three “axis-of-evil” governments by the George W. Bush administration. Missing from this study, and from most studies of North Korea, is an analysis of how the ordinary people live; since they have absolutely no voice in formulating their government’s policies, what happens to them is of little concern to foreign governments.

  The book’s first author, Ralph Hassig, developed an interest in North Korea after being asked to edit and coauthor reports and articles with Katy Oh, who happens to be his wife (they met while they were teaching for the University of Maryland University College in Seoul). Since the early 1990s, Hassig has devoted most of his research time to North Korean studies, doing much of the English-language writing and research and relying on Oh to do most of the presentations, Korean-language research, and networking with other North Korea watchers in South Korea and around the world.

  After completing our first book on North Korea, which was published in 2000, we decided to write something about the North Korean people, a topic that up to that time had been extremely difficult to research because few North Koreans could get out of their country and few foreigners could get in. This situation began to change in the late 1990s as thousands of North Koreans escaped into China; by 2009, over fifteen thousand of these defectors had made their way to South Korea, where they provide valuable information about everyday life in the modern-day hermit kingdom they were forced to leave behind. By interviewing them and by talking with other interviewers and reading their reports, it is now possible to piece together what life is like in North Korea today.

  Along the way we have become indebted to many people for information, insights, and materials pertaining to the North Korean people. We would particularly like to thank Dr. Seong Il Hyun, currently a senior research fellow at South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy and formerly a North Korean diplomat, who was kind enough to read through our manuscript and give it his personal approval. Some of the defectors we interviewed wish to remain anonymous to protect their identity (most of them have relatives still living in the North), while others have gone public with their testimony, although sometimes they adopt new names in South Korea. These former North Koreans, along with numerous researchers from other countries who have directly contributed to this book, are listed here in alphabetical order: Amii Abe, Seungjoo Baek, Stephen Bradner, William Brown, Jin-Sung Chang, Seong-Ryoul Cho, Charles Hawkins, Takeshi Hidesada, Yoshi Imazato, Eun Chan Jeong, An-sook Jung, Chul Hwan Kang, Byeong-Uk Kim, Kap-Sik Kim, Koo Sub Kim, Kwang-Jin Kim, Kyung-Hie Kim, Sang-Ryol Kim, Seung-Chul Kim, Tae Hoon Kim, Taewoo Kim, Doowon Lee, Duk-Haeng Lee, In Ho Lee, Won-Woong Lee, Young-Hwan Lee, W. Keith Luse, Mitsuhiro Mimura, Marcus Noland, Seung-Yul Oh, Young-Ho Park, Scott Snyder, Jae Jean Suh, Ven. Pomnyun Sunim, Chang Seok Yang, and Yeosang Yoon.

  About Korean Names and Pronunciation

  We’d like to say a few words about the romanization and pronunciation of Korean names. The Korean alphabet is a wonderfully transparent writing system, but when it comes to transliterating it into roman letters, there are several alternatives. Until 2000, the most common method was to use the McCune-Reischauer System, a version of which we use in this book because it is familiar to several generations of readers and because it is also used by North Koreans to translate their works into English. We have simplified the system by dispensing with apostrophes (used to indicate aspirated consonants) and diacritical marks above vowels. The resulting simplification will be admirably suited to the needs of most readers, and those who are familiar with Korean will be able to translate back into Korean. Since 2000, South Korea’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism has put forward a somewhat different method of transliterating Korean into English. This method, the Revised Romanization, has met with some resistance, even from major South Korean newspapers, but now seems to have been adopted widely in South Korea. However, because it looks somewhat strange to many foreigners, ourselves included, we have chosen to stay with the older system.

  In Korean names, the family name usually comes first, followed by one or two given names. Some Koreans hyphenate their two given names, others write them separately, and some even combine the two (for example, the book’s second author). The official North Korean approach is to write them separately, as in Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il; however, to make it clear to foreign readers whi
ch are the family names and which are the given names, we have decided to use an equally popular approach and hyphenate the two names, hence, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Throughout the book Korean names are presented in this manner except where Koreans (outside of North Korea) specifically use another form.

  As for pronunciation, “Kim” (the most popular name in Korea) is pronounced just as it would be in English. “Il” is pronounced like “eel,” and “sung” is pronounced much like the English word. “Jong” rhymes with “sung.” In general, the vowels in romanized Korean names are pronounced more as they would be in romance languages than in English. For example, the letter a in Pyongyang, the capital city, is pronounced like the a in “almond,” not the a in “salmon.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Illusion of Unity

  Unity of purpose and coordination of effort are important sources of strength for a nation, so it is not surprising that the Kim regime of North Korea (officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK) has spent over half a century trying to unify the North Korean people socially and ideologically. The regime’s unifying principle is not nationalism, however, but loyalty to the Kim family. Everyone is supposed to think the same thoughts—to be “dyed” with whatever the ideology of the moment is, whether it is Kim Il-sung thought, Juche theory, or military-first politics. The regime wants every citizen to be an obedient member of the Kim family. “Our people are a happy people who have an absolutely perfect guarantee for their destiny as a result of having joined their blood vessels of life with the great heart of the nerve center of the revolution.”1 That nerve center and “supreme brain of the revolution” is none other than Kim Jong-il. Nor are the people of South Korea (officially, the Republic of Korea, or ROK) excluded from this appeal: “The entire fellow countrymen uphold the respected and beloved General Kim Jong-il, the sun of the nation and outstanding military-first brilliant commander, as the center of national unity.”2

  But something has gone terribly wrong with the unity campaign. The regime’s economic system of centrally controlled socialism collapsed in the 1990s, and at just that time, Kim Il-sung, the revered founder of the nation, died, leaving his son to address the nation’s crippling economic problems. When the people discovered that the son was not up to the task, even though he had been running things behind the scenes for many years, they gave up on the regime and on socialism. It is difficult, after all, to unify around failure. Of course not everyone abandoned the regime: the political elites, including the top military officers, continued to support Kim Jong-il, and thanks to their support, North Korea remains in form much as it has been since its founding in 1946. But a closer look reveals that the country is eroding on the inside. The North Korean people are no longer socialists; nor do they respect their leader. It is not easy to describe what their political and economic beliefs are or how they live from day to day.

  In 2000 we wrote a book titled North Korea through the Looking Glass.As the title suggests, the book illustrates how different North Korea is in terms of ideology, politics, economy, and foreign policy from the kind of society that most of us are familiar with. Not just different, theirs is in many respects the complete opposite of our society. Instead of individualism, they have a collective lifestyle; instead of a regulated market economy, a regime-directed economy; instead of democracy, a dynastic dictatorship; and instead of a foreign policy of alliance and influence, isolation and belligerent contradiction. Even the Chinese, who are North Korea’s strongest supporters and closest “friends,” admit that their neighbor is backward and strange.

  Kim Il-sung’s social design is seriously flawed from the viewpoint of the millions of North Koreans who constitute the powerless “masses.” The “great leader” so dominated North Korea that when he died in 1994, the central government practically closed down for three years, during which time 5 to 10 percent of the population died of starvation brought on by severe floods and worsened by the country’s collapsed infrastructure. From the rubble of that economic collapse, a new North Korea is slowly taking shape, hidden behind the regime’s façade of ideological unity.

  Those who survived the great famine of the 1990s did so because they ignored what Kim had taught them. They looked out for themselves—the very opposite of what he had always told them to do. If you will, they walked back through the looking glass to our side. Their survival techniques were unofficial and even illegal, including growing crops on patches of appropriated land and trading goods in neighborhood marketplaces. And because their everyday activities were hidden from outsiders, and often from the regime itself, the emergence of this new North Korea only became apparent when defectors began streaming out of the country in the late 1990s. In our previous book we described North Koreans as “double-thinkers” who, like citizens of other totalitarian states, had learned how to mouth the teachings of the regime even while harboring quite different ideas in their minds. When Kim Il-sung died and the government stopped operating, North Korea’s double-thinkers became double-doers.

  A decade and a half after Kim’s death, North Korea is still surpassingly strange—strange in the sense of being different, not irrational or bizarre. Almost everything about North Korean society is designed to strengthen the control and further the longevity of the Kim dynasty. This top-down view of North Korea constitutes the counterpoint theme of our book. Even as the people are beginning to take responsibility for their own lives, the regime is doing its best to preserve the original social design. These two social forces, change and conservatism, create a drama in North Korea today. It is not the drama of a glorious revolution but rather a kind of guerrilla economic warfare that pits the politically powerless masses against an increasingly demoralized ruling political class. Chronologically, this book takes up where the last one left off, around the turn of the present century. The society we described in the late 1990s, that is, the society as it was designed and built by the two Kims, was to some extent a façade, but now even the façade is cracking.

  The two books take up parallel topics. The earlier book focused on the society and the system, whereas the present book looks more closely at how people live and work. Instead of a chapter on ideology, this book has chapters on the range of information available to North Koreans and how that information challenges and shapes their beliefs, although ideology is still discussed because it plays an important role in the information environment. The chapter on North Korea’s economy has been updated and supplemented by an additional chapter on food, health, housing, and employment. The Kim regime’s social-control measures, which were the topic of a chapter in the first book, are now viewed in terms of human rights, the law, and the experience of the defectors who choose to escape that control. Instead of a chapter on North Korea’s military power, we now describe the life of North Korean soldiers. Both books devote a chapter to the North Korean leadership, but the present book focuses almost exclusively on Kim Jong-il. And finally, both books end with a brief chapter laying out our modest recommendations for American policy toward North Korea. Readers will find that these recommendations have not changed; nor, for that matter, have they been adopted with any conviction by Washington policy makers.

  Social Regimentation

  North Korea has not experienced anything like the political, economic, and social changes that swept through the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe a decade ago or even the more gradual economic and social changes that have been transforming China since the early 1980s. North Korea remains the world’s most regimented society. And it is also the most secretive. According to one defector, Kim Jong-il has told his people that if they wrap themselves in mystery, their enemies will be filled with uncertainty, and by “enemies,” Kim means all foreigners.3 For many centuries, Koreans jealously guarded their privacy, repulsing invasions from Japan and paying tribute to the distant imperial Chinese court in order to preserve a measure of Korean sovereignty—hence the nickname “hermit kingdom.” Korea has never been the destinati
on of waves of foreign immigrants; nor until South Korea industrialized in the latter part of the twentieth century have Koreans actively participated in the international community. Even today, North Korea, unlike its neighbor to the south, has established relatively few commercial, political, cultural, or social ties with other peoples.

  Although North Korean society is largely hidden from view, in some respects, North Koreans are easier to describe than, say, Americans because they have preserved in large measure their cultural and racial homogeneity. There are ever so many Kims and Lees and Parks but hardly any families with foreign names. The Korean people, especially the North Korean people, are proud of their cultural purity, as is illustrated by a heated exchange that took place in May 2006 at a meeting between North and South Korean military officers. The two lead negotiators were engaged in small talk about farmers going out into their fields for the springtime planting, and the South Korean general noted that because the rural population in South Korea was declining, farmers sometimes took foreign brides (usually from Mongolia, Vietnam, or the Philippines). At this, the North Korean general snapped, “Our nation has always considered its pure lineage to be of great importance—and I’m concerned that our singularity will disappear.” The South Korean replied that this influx of foreigners was “but a drop of ink in the Han River” (referring to the river that runs through Seoul), whereupon his North Korean counterpart yelled, “Not even one drop of ink must be allowed to fall into the Han River.” And so another inter-Korean dialogue got off to a rocky start.4