Three Blind Men and an Elephant, Part III
Of the three correspondents, Andrei Lankov, writing in the Korea Times, has the greatest depth of experience. Lankov focuses on the aspect of North Korea’s reforms–unstoppable if you believe Brooke and abortive if you believe Macintyre–that interests me most, the psychological impact on the North Korean people. Lankov finds that materially, things have changed not at all or gone backwards, but that psychologically, North Koreans are much more open than in the past. He begins near his alma mater, Kim Il Sung University.
A small crowd near the Chinese Embassy wall attracted my attention. People were carefully studying something inside a large window on the wall: some finished and went away, only to be replaced by others. Of course, I came closer. The people’s attention was attracted by the pictures which were put into the Chinese Embassy’s “information window”. The pictures were large and colorful, but otherwise absolutely unremarkable. The photos and captions were no different from the stuff the cultural attaches across the globe put on the walls of their embassies ““ the usual boring fare about growth of shrimp production, new computer classes and state-of-the-art chicken farms. However, in North Korea of 2005 such mundane matters would attract a crowd. Those pictures gave a glimpse of the overseas life. This small episode was a sign of what was in the air in North Korea of 2005: people are eager to learn more about the outside world.
. . . .The conversations with people clearly demonstrate that over those decades Pyongyang has changed ““ or rather its people [have] changed. It was the same city, but a different society. People were frank ““ not as frank as they would probably be in most other countries, of course, but still much franker than in past. When none of our supervisors was hanging around, it was possible to strike a meaningful conversation with a North Korean. And in a matter of minutes the conversation would slide to issues nobody was insane enough to approach 20 years ago. People wanted to know how the life overseas looks like. They asked about salaries and prices, travel and housing. Well, these questions might sound a bit too materialistic for some of our readers. Perhaps, but the North Korean government has always insisted that it is second to none when it comes to meeting material demands of the populace. And it seems that the North Koreans are beginning to feel doubts about truthfulness of these long-standing claims. There are good reasons for such doubts. Even grossly privileged Pyongyang does not look like a rich city, to put it mildly. Of course, statistics about the large and growing gap between two Koreas (approximately 20-fold if per capita GDP is used) is widely known, but it is altogether different matter to see this disparity with one’s own eyes.
Lankov then shifts his focus toward the countryside, where real poverty is apparent:
We could catch a glimpse of it on our way to the city of Kaesong. Compared to destitute north-eastern provinces, this is still the privileged part of the country, but the picture was disturbing. The Pyongyang-Kaesong highway is a road of reasonable quality (albeit with bad paving), but it was completely empty, with hardly a dozen vehicles encountered over hundred kilometers. There were almost no signs of agricultural machines in the fields, with harvesting made by bare hands of farmers and city dwellers who are mobilized to join the “battle for the harvest”. The landscape was free from all those intrusive details of modern civilization which so often annoy tourists (of course, the tourists assume that they would have access to such amenities back home). No mobile phone antennas, few motor vehicles, very few powerlines. . . . And these people looked bad ““ worse, actually, than 20 years ago when a motor harvester was still a usual sight in a North Korean paddy field. People in the countryside were undernourished, badly dressed, their brown seemed faces covered with deep wrinkles.
Lankov wonders how people in places like Kaesong would react upon learning the truth of how people live in the South, and how difficult the adjustments of unification may eventually prove to be. Lankov, like Brooke, encountered Western businessmen in North Korea, men who were not only untroubled but enthusiastic about financing a regime that starves its disfavored citizens by the millions and pitches hundreds of thousands more into gulags where few emerge alive. Lankov, too, seems untroubled by this, calling it a “reason[] for hope. Yet these foreign businessmen had sense enough to operate discreetly. Not all in their home countries could be expected to share their business ethics. Those ethics have found fertile ground in North Korea, which they describe as increasingly corrupt. Even in sight of foreign visitors, North Korea’s pretense of mandated equality has broken down.
Elsewhere, Lankov is quoted by the L.A. Times to buttress a story of the increasing availability of banned Western movies in the North. The story breaks little new ground and is occasionally painful to read–the author helpfully suggests that Green Day’s music would be consistent with North Korean propaganda themes–but does contains some interesting grafs:
[N]orth Korea is discovering that no country can completely seal its borders against electronic intruders.
Although the demilitarized buffer zone to the south still provides protection against illegal imports from South Korea, the real action is to the north. North Korean defectors say DVDs of foreign music and movies have accompanied the increase in trade and traffic with China over the last few years, leaking across the 850-mile border.
From South Korean television dramas to Chinese martial arts movies and a smattering of Hollywood hits, they are giving North Koreans a break from the relentless pro-regime, anti-U.S. propaganda and a peek into how the much-wealthier outside world lives.
“For decades, this country was second only to Albania, or even second to none, for keeping out all information about foreign countries,” says Andrei Lankov, a Russian academic based in Seoul who lived in Pyongyang in the 1980s. “But the old state supervision, where the police would do random checks looking for things like radios, collapsed over the last decade. It was too expensive to run.”
The relaxation means that more North Koreans are acquiring cheap secondhand VCRs and even cheap DVD players from China. This year, a former North Korean smuggler now living in Thailand described to a Los Angeles Times reporter how he used to sneak 1,000 DVDs at a time across the border into North Korea, laid flat in a trunk under cigarette cartons.
There was healthy demand for American action films such as “Con Air,” said the smuggler, who used the name Park Dae Heung, but his strongest trade was in South Korean fare: TV dramas such as the romantic “Winter Sonata” and action flicks such as “JSA” (for Joint Security Area), about the slayings of two North Korean soldiers in the DMZ.
As more images of well-fed, well-dressed foreigners filter into this downtrodden land, the emerging question is whether they can sow doubt in a population that has endured 60 years of unchallenged propaganda about the perfection of their own lives and the evils of the West.
Such films may sow doubt, but whether they can inspire actual opposition is less certain. Lankov sees danger for the regime:
This widening exposure to the world carries risks for a regime that has inculcated its people with the belief that they live in a paradise.
“It is a misjudgment by the regime,” Lankov argues, adding that the dictatorship’s survival depends on the country’s isolation. “It is still only a small part of the population that can watch South Korean TV, but they can’t ignore the huge difference in their lifestyles. People see it.
“Kim is right to be paranoid about foreign culture,” Lankov continues. The Communist leaders of Eastern Europe were praised for showing flexibility as their rule waned, he points out. “And look what happened: The system collapsed.
“Those countries are doing well now,” he notes. “But what happened to their leaders?”