The Hidden People of North Korea (36 page)

Although military-first politics may be good for Kim, it is bad for the North Korean people. It focuses their attention on a bogus enemy, distorts their view of reality, and gradually exhausts them. It deprives the economy of badly needed resources and gives too much power to the military, which tends to abuse this power by lording it over civilians. The ultimate danger is that militarizing North Korean society may ultimately provoke the very international conflict that the regime claims it wants to prevent.

New Thinking

The “new-thinking” campaign, launched in early 2001, three years after the introduction of military-first politics, has already been discussed in connection with North Korea’s economic policies. The first thing to notice is that this new economic campaign does not follow from, nor is it consistent with, the foregoing military-first propaganda campaign, once again highlighting the Kim regime’s desperate, almost random search for ways to revive its economy while keeping its politics stable. In addition to changing the structure of the economy by shifting economic responsibility to local administrations and ultimately to individuals (in the 2002 Economic Management Improvement Measures), the campaign encourages people to find creative ways to solve their economic problems. They are instructed to free themselves of “outdated ideas” so as to give “full play to the superiority of our way of socialism.”
²⁹
The glory days of the 1950s and 1960s, which are often presented as a model for economic reconstruction, are relegated to history because “there have been major changes in the conditions and environment of our struggle.” A key idea of the new-thinking campaign is that people should employ modern technology to improve their productivity (although they are not told where they can find such technology).

The new thinking is consistent with
Juche
self-reliance—not at the national level but at the local level and on the part of individuals. Ironically, in adopting capitalism, people are unwittingly following the example of Kim Jong-il, who has all along been a fat-cat capitalist, a man whom
Forbes
magazine in 2002 listed (presumably on the basis of little hard evidence) as a billionaire.
³⁰

New thinking, as interpreted by the people, turns North Korea’s world of values upside down. Whatever people have previously been told is right turns out to be wrong. Selfless devotion and blind obedience to the party are not to be rewarded—at least not materially. Individual endeavors, egotism, and selfishness are what turns a profit. Materialism and the pursuit of money, which the party has always condemned, become the guiding values. Even the relative value placed on husbands and wives in marriage changes as women become the main breadwinners in many families, thanks to the relative freedom they enjoy to do business in the new marketplaces while their husbands are stuck in useless jobs.

What People Believe

The era of public opinion polling has not come to North Korea (although according to one defector, party officials are requested to make reports about public sentiments and send them up to party officials in Pyongyang). Consequently, in order for outsiders to assess North Korean beliefs, it is necessary to talk to North Koreans after they have defected. South Korean social scientists have conducted many opinion surveys of defectors. For example, in 2002, 163 North Koreans residing at Hanawon, the government’s halfway house for defectors, were asked about life in North Korea.
³¹
In 2006, 314 defectors at Hanawon were asked to evaluate the durability of the Kim regime.
³²
Using these sources and testimony from defectors we have interviewed, it is possible to estimate the strength and stability of those beliefs that supposedly serve as the cornerstone of North Korean society under the Kim regime, namely, socialism,
Juche
, nationalism, and the legitimacy of the Kim family’s rule.

Many North Koreans no longer believe that socialism is a workable economic system. In the 2002 survey, 38 percent of defectors thought North Korea’s choice of socialism as an economic system had been a mistake, and of those, 60 percent believed that the problem lay in how it had been implemented. Some 48 percent believed that the North Korean economy’s troubles could be attributed to government and party mismanagement, whereas 47 percent blamed the Americans for trying to “crush” the North Korean economy.
³³
Indeed, the 2006 defector survey suggests a steady decline in beliefs in the collective lifestyle since 1996.
³⁴

Years of poverty that prove North Korea cannot take care of itself have damaged belief in
Juche
as national self-reliance, and by now, most North Koreans are aware that their country receives foreign food aid. In the 2002 survey, 60 percent of defectors said they were very or a little bit familiar with foreign aid coming from South Korea, compared to 39 percent who were not too well or not at all familiar with it.
³⁵
In the 2006 survey, belief in the value of national independence showed a steady decline since 1996, when food aid began to arrive in the country.
³⁶
In the markets, foreign-made goods superior in quality to anything that North Korea can produce are flooding in from China and other countries.

North Koreans seem to have an inflated opinion of their importance in the international community, thanks to their isolation from international opinion and the fact that the media praise their country to the skies. For example,
Nodong Sinmun
boasts that “Korea continues to walk on its own road, standing right in the center of the world as strongly as a mountain.”
³⁷
And, “Our Pyongyang today maintains a firm grip on the justice and conscience of the world and brightly illuminates the path of independence, as something like the ideological center and source of light of our planet.”
³⁸
Undoubtedly, some of this feeling of importance can be attributed to the impact of North Korea’s nuclear weapons on the international community. In recent years, the leaders of China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea, as well as a U.S. secretary of state, have visited Pyongyang. North Koreans can take the major powers’ devoting so much attention to their country as proof that although they may be small and undergoing hard times, they are an important country nonetheless.

The image and memory of Kim Il-sung are still very much alive among North Koreans, although references to him in the North Korean media are diminishing. Few North Koreans are aware of the universe of lies that makes up the Kim Il-sung cult, and most still believe he was a great man. All North Korean defectors have some opinion about Kim Il-sung, even those who are too young to have a clear memory of what their country was like during Kim Il-sung’s time. After they arrive in the South, most defectors still express a positive opinion of the senior Kim; to do otherwise would be to admit that they have been fooled their entire lives. Yet, comments about Kim are often defensive: “Kim Il-sung was not a bad person”; “Not a bad human being”; “Can’t hate him”; “Everyone cried when he died.” All defectors agree that material life in North Korea was better while the senior Kim was alive. Remote as he was, by selectively appearing among ordinary people, Kim successfully fostered the impression that he cared for them. He was “a politician for the people,” as one defector said. One of the few negative comments about him called him the “original sinner” because he was responsible for appointing Kim Jong-il as his successor. In the 2002 defector survey, 67 percent of the respondents said their former countrymen still considered Kim Il-sung to be the “greatest mind of humanity.”
³⁹
The reasons given for Kim’s high standing were that he liberated North Korea from the Japanese (41 percent), built a socialist state (8 percent), won the Korean War (8 percent), improved the economic lives of the people (7 percent), and created the
Juche
ideology (2 percent).
⁴⁰

On the other hand, defectors almost uniformly voice negative opinions of Kim Jong-il, although they concede that he is smart. The most common complaint is that he doesn’t care about the people the way (they thought) his father did. As a North Korean saying goes, “Kim Il-sung took the ‘people’s train,’ but Kim Jong-il took the ‘military train.’ ” Another complaint is that since Kim Jong-il took over from his father, the economy has suffered, although whether Kim can be held responsible for the downturn in the economy is something that few North Koreans are in a position to know. The consensus among foreign economists is that the economy was on the way to collapse long before Kim Il-sung died. In the 2002 defector survey, 55 percent said Kim Jong-il was not liked because of the bad economy, 12 percent thought it was because he did not earn his leadership position but was appointed to it, and 9 percent thought he was disliked because he lacked the capacity to be a good ruler.
⁴¹
In the same survey, 70 percent of the respondents said Kim Jong-il was respected only because he was Kim Il-sung’s son.
⁴²
Defectors show varying susceptibilities to the Kim Jong-il cult propaganda. Some actually believe he works all the time and lives on rice balls and short naps. Others never believed this. A few defectors (from the elite class) had heard rumors of Kim’s luxurious life style and his multiple lovers and wives, but this information didn’t seem to bother them.

Attitudes toward the United States are decidedly negative. The notorious Sinchon Museum, which graphically portrays American soldiers killing Koreans during the Korean War, has strongly influenced generations of North Koreans. News coverage of the United States is uniformly negative. To support the image of Americans as imperialist aggressors preparing to invade their country, the media remind their audience of past American invasions of small countries, including Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In addition to the destruction and cruelty of the Korean War, the media blame the Americans and their economic embargo for North Korea’s current economic problems. When the lights go out due to power failures, people curse the American “bastards.” One defector said he even found credible the rumor that the Americans had caused North Korea’s perennial rice shortage by buying up the world’s rice harvest and spitefully dumping it in the ocean. Few North Koreans seem aware that the United States has been one of North Korea’s principal food donors. In the 2002 defector survey, 31 percent said North Korean perceptions of Americans were improving, 12 percent said they were more negative, and 53 percent said they were the same as in the past, which is pretty bad.
⁴³

North Koreans do not have a very high opinion of any country, for that matter. Whereas Americans are the number one enemy, the Japanese rank number two. As the North Koreans see it, the Japanese are always preparing to reassert their military dominance in the region (many South Koreans would agree). It does not help Japan’s image that thousands of American troops are based there. Attitudes toward China are also negative, although North Koreans have a grudging respect for the great strides that the Chinese economy has made. Several decades ago, North Koreans pitied the Chinese as poor; now almost all North Koreans believe that the Chinese are wealthier than they are.
⁴⁴

Attitudes toward South Korea have changed over the years. North Koreans formerly believed that South Koreans were virtual slaves of the Americans, living a life of abject poverty. In the 2002 survey, fully 80 percent of North Korean defectors said that when they lived in North Korea, they would have agreed with the statement “South Korea is a colony of the United States.”
⁴⁵
The North Korean media continue to project this image, but thanks to South Korean goods and humanitarian aid that began to reach the North in the 1990s, most North Koreans have come to realize that South Koreans are quite wealthy.
⁴⁶
However, South Koreans are criticized for being materialistic (a common criticism against people of wealth) and too much influenced by foreign cultures. It is true that the dialect of Korean spoken in the North is largely devoid of foreign words, whereas Korean as spoken in the South is peppered with them. Yet, many younger North Koreans are picking up the South Korean dialect from smuggled audio and videotapes and discs. Young women, in particular, like the Southern dialect, which is considered softer in tone than the Northern dialect.

The people almost universally hated inside North Korea are security agents. One defector’s husband, who worked for the State Security Department (SSD), told his wife that if people knew he worked for the SSD, “they would kill [him].” Despite years of being exposed to Kim Jong-il’s military-first politics, which upholds soldiers as models for the rest of society, many civilians consider them bandits and thieves. Government and party officials are viewed as corrupt slackers, a reputation that even the press occasionally promotes in order to shift the blame for the bad economy away from Kim and onto party and government officials.

To learn what North Koreans like and dislike and hope and fear in their daily lives, the second author of this book, Kongdan Oh, interviewed a sample of defectors who came to South Korea between 2002 and 2005 and who held white-collar positions in the North, which is to say, they were from a relatively privileged class. When asked what they liked most about their former lives, several mentioned the lack of competition in socialist society. Until the 1990s, doing one’s job according to the relatively low standards of government service was sufficient to earn a decent living. Defectors who were party and government bureaucrats also said they were proud of their jobs and enjoyed the deference shown to them by less successful people. Some defectors also remarked that North Korea is a simpler and purer place than South Korea. The language is not filled with foreign words, and there are few electronic gadgets to master. Defectors also missed the simplicity of the market in North Korea; after coming to the South, they were overwhelmed by the wide variety of products in the marketplace.