The Real North Korea

The Real North Korea
Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia

Andrei Lankov
Oxford UP © 2014
315 pages
[@] getab.li/31303
Book:
Rating Take-Aways
9
9 Importance • North Korea’s regime will experience an inevitable and sudden fall.
8 Innovation • Hardly madmen, North Korea’s leaders have proven shrewd and effective
9 Style Machiavellian manipulators.
• North Korea’s economy is a failure; the country depends on foreign aid to survive.
• North Korean society includes about 10,000 party insiders who live in relative luxury
Focus and 24 million common people who live in destitution.
• North Korea’s rulers maintain power through complex systems of control, including
Leadership & Management censorship, propaganda and brutal political persecution.
Strategy
Sales & Marketing
• The populace is almost entirely ignorant about the outside world and its own history.
Finance • Information leaks into North Korea via commercial relationships with China, radio
Human Resources broadcasts and smuggled DVDs.
IT, Production & Logistics
• The regime’s most significant problem is South Korea’s economic success.
Career & Self-Development
Small Business • North Korea employs its nuclear weapons in diplomatic schemes to obtain foreign aid
Economics & Politics and to deter attack. It will not give them up.
Industries
• To foster change, inform North Korean citizens and refugees about the outside world.
Global Business
Concepts & Trends
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Relevance
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What You Will Learn
In this summary, you will learn:r1) How the North Korean regime functions, 2) How common North Koreans
live, 3) Why North Korea won’t give up its nuclear program, 4) What the future holds for North Korea and 5) Whether
change is possible in North Korea.
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Recommendation
Insight into North Korea’s regime is in short supply. If the Kim rulers were irrational or mad, it would be hard to
explain why their dynasty has outlasted the communist governments of Eastern Europe, how it has survived famine
and economic failure or how it has held its own through decades of tensions with the world’s superpowers. Professor
Andrei Lankov lifts the veil on North Korea and sheds vital light on the reality of its regime, its society and its strategic
computations. Lankov, a highly respected scholar on Korea, draws on decades of research, including communications
with diplomats and refugees, and his experiences in North Korea as a university exchange student. Although some
critics accuse Lankov of offering a Soviet-centric analysis – he was born in Leningrad and received his education
in the Soviet Union – he provides a rich, nuanced, accessible overview of North Korea’s history and contemporary
society, and a sobering analysis of its possible future.
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Summary
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North Korea’s Regime
A “National Stalinist” dictatorship has ruled North Korea since the late 1940s. In 1945,
the Soviet Union took possession of Korea’s northern half. Moscow chose Kim Il Sung,
getabstract a Soviet Army captain, to lead the new “People’s Republic.” The Korean Workers Party
“The North Korean (KWP) held political control.
elite are neither zealous
ideologues nor sadistic
killers – even though Through purges during the 1950s, Kim Il Sung replaced Soviet government appointees
they occasionally look
like (and indeed want with his own loyal men – former guerrillas like himself – and members of his family. The
to look like) both of Kims had a vision of a Maoist communist state, where abundance would arise from selfless,
these.”
getabstract patriotic work and the state would provide all basic needs. Kim Il Sung created a personality
cult similar to those in China and the Stalinist USSR, but his went much farther.
When Kim Il Sung died in 1994, his son Kim Jong Il succeeded him. When he died in 2011,
his son Kim Jong Un came to power. North Korea is – unique in the world – a “communist
monarchy.” Today, about 10,000 party members form an elite upper class. Between one
and two million more North Koreans work for the regime out of a total population of 24
million, most of whom live in poverty. North Korea’s leaders have been shrewd, effective
getabstract and brutal – “perhaps the most ruthless and Machiavellian leaders in the world today.”
“Counterintuitively,
the slow but palpable
improvement in the The most significant geopolitical fact for North Korea’s regime is the prosperity of South
economic situation Korea. In large part thanks to Japanese investments in northern Korean industry and
in North Korea might
actually prove to be the infrastructure during the 1930s, North Korea economically outperformed South Korea
regime’s undoing.” until the 1970s. But South Korea’s fantastic economic success from the 1960s through the
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1980s and North Korea’s simultaneous economic decline spurred the gap between their
economies. The per capita income ratio between the two countries is somewhere between
15:1 and 40:1. North Korean leaders fear that if their people learn how their southern
neighbors live, they might revolt and topple the regime, as happened in East Germany.
The Real North Korea getAbstract © 2017 2 of 5

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This fear largely accounts for the isolation North Korea’s leaders impose and explains the
regime’s resistance to reform.
Korean Daily Life

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“North Korea’s Oxen still form the basis for agriculture. As of 2010, steam locomotives from the 1930s
leaders are fighting pulled trains on the North Korean railways. Anecdotally, North Korean officials who visited
a losing battle,
trying to preserve a certain Manchurian industrial town were reportedly “shocked and overwhelmed” at the
what is, essentially, town’s “bright lights and nightlife.” North Korea’s per capita GDP is probably on a par with
unsustainable.”
getabstract Kenya’s or Chad’s. Household monthly income might lie in the range of $25 to $40.
Kim Il Sung established state control of people’s work, consumption, place of residence
and travel. The government required men to work in state-assigned jobs. The now-defunct
“public distribution system” (PDS) for rationing and distributing food and basic consumer
goods determined how much and what kinds of food each person or family received.
Farmers were allowed tiny private plots, one-tenth the size that Stalin’s USSR allowed.
Travel outside one’s city or county required a permit.
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“It might be that the Every person joined an organization – the KWP or a trade union, the Women’s Union or a
worst is still yet to youth organization – and had to attend long, frequent meetings. These meetings consisted
come – for both the
North Koreans and for of indoctrination, “self-criticism and mutual criticism,” where participants confessed to
outsiders.” misdeeds. Every person also belonged to an inminban (“people’s group”), in which an
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official monitored members’ incomes, purchasing habits, travel and radio sets. North Korea
employed paid informers and still does; today it has as many as 300,000, or one for every
50 adults.
Kim Il Sung portrayed himself as “the founding father of North Korea” and “the Greatest
Man in the Five Thousand Years of Korean History,” and his personality cult extends to
his son and grandson. Kim Il Sung invented the philosophy called Juche, which became
official ideology in the 1960s and mainly serves propaganda purposes. Every household
getabstract must display portraits of Kim Jong Il (the “Great Leader”) and Kim Il Sung (the “Dear
“The North Korean
elite…cannot be bribed Leader”). State propaganda extols these portraits and encourages North Koreans to risk
into changing their their lives to protect them. Every person older than 16 must wear a badge portraying Kim
country, nor can they
be blackmailed into
Il Sung.
reform.”
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Propaganda
North Koreans may own radios, but must disable the tuning mechanism so they get
state broadcasts only. Access to libraries’ foreign collections requires security clearance.
Libraries restrict access to back issues of many periodicals, including North Korean
newspapers. For decades, the state engaged in intense internal propaganda misinforming
its people about conditions in the outside world, especially in South Korea, and about their
country’s history. For example, Kim Jong Il was born in the Soviet Union, but North Korean
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“The North Korean propaganda insists his birthplace was a guerrilla camp on Mount Paekdu, “the holiest of
leadership is stuck in a Korean soil.”
bind. Without reforms
the country’s economy
will go bankrupt, but The Caste Hierarchy
reforms are fraught Kim Il Sung introduced the sŏngbun system, which sustains a hereditary caste hierarchy.
with the danger of
systemic collapse.” – Authorities researched the actions of every North Korean’s male ancestors. They assigned
Kim Jong Nam each person to a category: “loyal,” “hostile” or “wavering.” This classification determines
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a person’s social status and educational and job opportunities. Classifications pass down
along the male line. Because punishments for dissent will affect generations of the
offender’s family, the system provides a powerful means of suppression. As of 2012, North


Korea’s political prison camps held some 100,000 inmates. North Korea discarded Soviet-
style “show trials” in the 1950s. Since then, political criminals simply disappear. In Kim Il
Sung’s day, according to the “family responsibility” system, the state imprisoned all of a
getabstract political criminal’s family members. This has happened less frequently since the 1990s.
“North Korea remains
a problem for the
outside world because Events in the 1990s caused crises in North Korea, during which the state loosened controls.
in order to survive, its With the fall of the Soviet Union and other changes in the geopolitical world, North Korea
decision makers have
no choice but to live lost much of its aid from the USSR and China. The North Korean economy collapsed.
dangerously.” The state no longer could support its low-level functionaries. Those who remained became
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corrupt or merely lenient, and the private market exploded. Many aspects of political
control, while still on the books, have lacked strict enforcement, including those on speech
and travel. Even crossing the border into China is now only a minor offense, as is owning
a radio with functional tuners. Today, mutual criticism and indoctrination meetings are less
frequent, and it’s even possible to skip them by paying a bribe.
getabstract Famine and Illegal Fields

“For North Korea’s In the mid-1990s, North Korean agriculture faltered along with the rest of the economy.
leadership, its nuclear
weapons program is A series of heavy rains cut harvests in half. In the ensuing Great Korean Famine, the state
not an end in itself suspended the PDS system and up to one million people died. Farmers began to cultivate
but rather one of
many strategies they illegal private fields, called sot’oji. Food production on such fields now accounts for about
deploy to achieve the 20% of North Korea’s harvests. A private economy burgeoned in the 1990s as people
overriding goal of
regime survival.”
struggled to survive by producing and selling handicrafts.
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Women emerged as the mainstay of private commerce, because by law, men had to continue
to attend their jobs, even if they had no work to do. The patriarchal North Korean society
controls women’s behaviors in many ways – such as in dress, hairstyles and bicycle riding
– but has allowed them freedom to engage and succeed in private business.
Often, these businesses operate across the Chinese border. Merchants import Chinese
getabstract consumer goods and food, and export such items as minerals, delicacies and products
“The existence of the
highly successful South that the Chinese use as medicine. According to a 2008 estimate, 78% of North Koreans’
Korea has created average total household income comes from informal economic activities. This fueled
nearly insurmountable
problems for the North
development of a middle class. Since the late 1990s, citizens have enjoyed the use of
Korean elite.” cellphones, inexpensive VCRs and DVD players and, to a lesser degree, computers.
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Foreign Aid
North Korea’s Stalinist-state socialist economy is a failure, hamstrung by the heavy
militarization of the nation’s society and a notion of self-reliance that discourages
specialization. North Korea depended on Soviet and Chinese aid from the early 1960s until
the early 1990s. That aid dried up with the end of the Cold War. Rather than pursuing
economic reforms, North Korea deploys diplomatic schemes to obtain aid – food, fuel and
funds – from South Korea, Japan, China and the United States.
getabstract North Korea’s leaders will not pursue significant economic reforms, such as Chinese-style
“Only the North
Koreans themselves can reforms, or “developmental dictatorship” strategies, for several reasons. Pyongyang’s elite
change North Korea.” would not personally benefit from reforms, as the regimes of the Soviet Union, China
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and Vietnam did. Reforms would most likely prove destabilizing. They would require
the regime to relax controls and surveillance and to allow foreign contacts. This would
undermine the state’s control of information and allow North Koreans to learn the truth
about the outside world – including the truth about South Korea’s affluence.


North Korea’s economy is comparable to Ghana’s, but North Korea receives much more aid.
From 2002 to 2007, it received a yearly average of 850,000 metric tons of food aid. The aid
it obtains comes largely free of conditions – a priority for Pyongyang, because the regime
had to be able to distribute the aid to abet its political strategies. To obtain this aid, North
getabstract Korea effectively used “nuclear blackmail.” The regime creates a crisis by making threats
“Now is the time to – veiled or overt – or conducting tests or missile launches. With tensions high, Pyongyang
start considering what
will happen after the negotiates and frequently obtains aid and concessions in return for merely returning to the
Kim family regime status quo.
passes – and what
should be done to
make the recovery less Pyongyang has made promises – such as to freeze its weapons program or submit to
tortuous.” monitoring – but often has not kept them. Because North Korea’s regime successfully uses
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nuclear threats to extort aid and concessions, it will not give up its nuclear capability.
Washington’s tactic of “strategic patience” commenced in 2008, when the US decided to
stand by and do nothing until North Korea takes palpable steps toward denuclearization.
Dealing with North Korea

The best way to foster change in North Korea is to educate North Koreans about the
world. This will generate internal pressure for change. Information can enter North Korea
getabstract through digital media and radio transmissions and via connections between North Koreans
“We should not believe and North Korean refugees living in South Korea. The most effective channel is official
that the demise of this
inefficient and brutal exchanges such as cultural or academic programs, because these involve the elite, who
regime will herald influence change. Fostering the growth of a “second society” of North Koreans among the
the immediate arrival
of eternal bliss and
refugees in South Korea is also vital. These people can become a source of dissent today
happiness.” and form a new intellectual elite after the Pyongyang regime falls.
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Military means are not likely to achieve desired results in North Korea. Military strikes are
impractical because its nuclear materials and weapons are in underground facilities. Seoul’s
vulnerability to attack means war would cause devastating losses. Sanctions are impractical
because Pyongyang’s elite values the stability of their regime above all; sanctions would
likely hurt only the common people. “Strategic patience” has limited use, since North Korea
can stir trouble – and advance its nuclear program – until it obtains a response.
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“Human rights and What Does the Future Hold?
the like might be a
great idea, but if we The demise of the North Korean regime is inevitable; it will probably not last another 20
start explaining it years. Kim Jong Un faces a choice: whether to attempt reforms that might extend the life
to our people, we
will be killed in no of the regime – at the risk of destabilizing the country – or to maintain the status quo.
time.” (Anonymous The regime’s fall is likely to come without warning and to be violent. “Regime collapse
North Korean
bureaucrat)
will mark the beginning of a long, difficult, and painful period of recovery for North
getabstract Koreans.” Because North Korea’s instability poses global risks, other nations will send
in peacekeeping forces. The dictatorship’s end would be likely to lead to unification with
South Korea, but that would be complex and costly. “It will take decades to clean the mess
created by the Kim family regime’s long misrule, and some traces of the sorry past might
be felt for generations.”
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About the Author
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Andrei Lankov is professor of History at Koomkin University in Seoul, South Korea. A native of St. Petersburg, he
studied in North Korea as an exchange student. His books include North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North
Korea and From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945-1960.


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The Real North Korea

Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia

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