News from Inside North Korea

NK Gulag may have better info about life inside North Korea than any other NGO or media organization. They have sent me some interesting updates on goings-on inside the Land of Oz. First, they discuss recent reports that the Nork border guards have built up the fences along the border, and even added tiger traps:

North Korea recently ordered the construction of a two-meter high wooden fence along 393 kilometers of its border with China. This area is largely mountainous or uninhabited land that was divided into small plots for personal cultivation. Local inhabitants are bewildered by the huge barricade, erected in a barren area that has no trees and is overgrown with weeds.

Criticism from the local residents has grown increasingly bitter. The border security unit has also built traps along the border at places known for frequent border crossings. These traps consist of pits with sharp iron spikes implanted on the bottom. Such traps were previously used only at political prison camps, but now they are being used to keep ordinary North Koreans citizens imprisoned in their own country.

Given the high percentage of defectors who are kids, there’s nothing I really need to add to that. Then, there’s Kim Jong-Il’s answer to what Stalin called the “New Economic Policy,” allowing limited amounts of capitalism for those whose ranks the government deems it has already thinned enough (Stalin later ditched the NEP and shot most of its proponents, but the Soviet system realized that capitalism could feed people and allowed varying degrees of it throughout its history).

North Korea is reportedly considering a drastic change in their farming system, which will allow for more private farming. They are considering the transition from a governmental unit of land to the individual unit, allowing a family to own a personal field.

They are currently testing a new system, called “family-owned farming.” Substantial changes, however, are unlikely as the underlying basis of the government’s property-based farming system remains in place.

Sources are also reporting rumors of a change in the distribution system after harvests. At present, all harvests are collected and distributed by the North Korean government. The rumored change may allow farmers to keep their harvests and pay only a percentage of their harvests to the government. This system was used in Korea after its independence from Japan.

If you want to understand Kim Jong-Il, study Lenin and Stalin, not Mao. The ideological and historical parallels can be strong, and for a good reason. The elder Kim was a Soviet officer and clone, and the younger Kim was born in Khabarovsk during Stalin’s rule. The U.S.S.R. attracted a great many foreign communists in the 1930s, but Stalin viewed their ideologies with great suspicion, and many left their bones in the Kolyma camps for expressing “impure” ideas. Somehow, Kim managed not to say the wrong thing.

For a long time now, I have been predicting that the food distribution system would be the spark that would ignite a peasant rebellion in North Korea. I had long expected hungry farmers to withhold their crops or attack food warehouses. Indeed, I’d bet money that such things have happened on a limited scale, and they certainly happened during Stalin’s rule. If the regime really loosens its grip on the food supply, it will have a hard time tightening it again.

History has repeatedly shown that oppressive regimes must maintain two things to stay in control: terror and faith. Loosening of control means loss of terror. Kim Jong-Il knows that; hence the tiger traps. Obviously, he doesn’t think that loosening controls on food supply will cost him political control. The personality cult of the Kim dynasty is the “faith” side of the equation, which is why the regime would never last if Kim Jong-Il meets an untimely end. Perhaps the death of Kim Il-Sung was the end of the older generation’s faith.