Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (161 page)

2.
“One of the important factors in South Korean success is the introduction of the mass mobilization movement in the 1970s, which South Korea probably borrowed from the successful experience of the North Korean mass movement during the 1950s. This moral incentive worked quite well because it was practiced for a relatively short period of time. Through the measure, the gap between urban and rural income narrowed. Both Korean experiences suggest that a mass mobilization technique based on moral incentive can be a successful measure, as long as it is only implemented for about seven to ten years. The idea is that in human nature any firm determination cannot last too long a time. … Mobilization of the general populace, even if successful for a short period, has economic limitations in the long run. It proves to be more advantageous at the early stage
development where development can be achieved by expansion of the utilization of natural resources and unemployed labor. Except in the areas of such highly labor-intensive projects as food processing, irrigation facilities, and construction of unpaved roads, continued substitution of labor for capital will produce, after a point, very small or near-zero marginal output, so that it seems to fall behind in productivity and efficiency at the later stage of intensive development where productivity must be raised through more advanced technology” (Kim,
Two Koreas in Development
[see chap. 1, n. 2], pp.
147–149).

3.
“[T]he critical factor for the failure in the first seven-year plan in the 1960s was troubled relations with the Soviet Union, the major capital and technology supplier to Pyongyang. Under the six-year plan in the 1970s, North Korea brought in capital from Western countries, including West Germany, France and Japan.” See “Pyongyang Continues to Rely on Juche Economic Policy,”
Vantage Point
(August 1994): p. 3.

Sweden was a major supplier, receiving orders for hundreds of millions of kroners’ worth of goods. Besides factory equipment, the North Koreans ordered 1,000 Volvo sedans (including the one I rode in for most of my 1979 visit, after rejecting as too expensive to rent a higher-status black .Mercedes that my hosts first provided). Swedish companies pressed successfully for the establishment of an embassy in Pyongyang. For a delightful and informative account of the first ambassador’s two tours of duty, see Eric Cornell,
North Korea Under Communism: Report of an Envoy to Paradise,
translated by Rodney Bradbury (London: Rout-ledgeCurzon, 2002).

4.
South Korean scholar Byoung-Lo Philo Kim observes, “Both South and North Korea experienced an authoritarian transformation of the constitutions and states in 1972. … In North Korea, a new ‘socialist’ constitution was promulgated. The new constitution declared Kim’s political thought,
juche,
to be the ideology of the state. The formal authoritarian adaptation of both Korean states in 1972 was the result not only of the economic situation per se of each side in the late 1960s, but of the ‘comparison effect’ formed by the awareness of each other through the Red Cross Conference in 1972. … North Korea contrasts with South Korea in that economic growth slowed down in the late 1960s. Economic activity, which depended on only mass mobilization, needed to be revitalized by introducing Western capital, which led to a more authoritarian transformation of and surveillance within North Korea so as not to be exposed to the external world”
(Two Koreas in Development
[see chap. 1, n. 2], pp. 123–124).

5.
“The economists are considered to be fulfilling only secondary and administrative functions,” said a former North Korean newspaper editor, who had defected to the South and become a prominent analyst of Pyongyang affairs (Kim Chang Soon, “Korea Today”
Vantage Point
[.March 1979]: p. 12).

6.
“Except for minor and scattered cases of innovations which tend to be stop-gap devices, the North Korean system has not diverged fundamentally from the Sta-linistic command system. …”
(Chung, North Korean Economy
[see chap. 6, n. 16], p. 155). “Unlike the Soviet Union and other East European countries which tended to decentralize business management gradually, North Korea adopted in 1961 a policy of further centralizing and tightening up entrepreneurial control and management” (Cha, “Financial Structure of North Korea” [see chap. 7, n. 13], p. 3).

7.
Speech quoted in “Bankers Given 5-Point Guideline,”
Vantage Point
(January 1979): pp. 23, 24.

8.
Byoung-Lo Philo Kim estimates South Korean per capita GNP of $518 versus $605 in North Korea in 1975, the last time he thinks the South was behind
(Two Koreas in Development,
p.
66).

9.
At a hothouse growing vegetables for the residents of Pyongyang, most of the workers likewise were women. “Our principle is, if it’s easy work we give preference to women because they are not so physically strong,” an official told me. Hothouse gardening was considered light work.

10.
Forty-five percent in 1981, according to the Souths National Unification Board. By 1989 (as demographers Nicholas Eberstadt and Judith Banister reported in
North Korea: Population Trends and Prospects
[Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990]), the far greater participation of women in the North’s workforce was reflected in a total participation rate for both men and women of 78.5 percent. That compares with an official South Korean workforce participation rate for the same year of 58.3 percent (Byoung-Lo Philo Kim,
Two Koreas in Development,
p. 92).

11.
This factory evidently was one of the installations most frequently visited by the Great Leader. A guide at the industrial and agricultural exhibition in Pyongyang told me, “The respected and beloved leader Chairman Kim Il-sung visited 199 units 699 times in the fields of heavy industrial factories,” which averages out to about three and a half visits per factory.

The pride shown by hosts at factories, farms, and schools in the president’s historic visits to give “on-the-spot guidance” seemed unaffected, although close questioning of recipients of those visits usually revealed that the leader had offered little more than compliments, words of encouragement and general suggestions.

12.
I got a similar answer at a suburban hothouse, officially a state farm, which produced off-season vegetables and fruits for Pyongyang residents. “I’m not a specialist in financial matters,” said a management official whom I asked to tell me the annual budget.

13.
Baik II (see chap. 4, n. 24), p. 161.

14.
“Although lagging far behind industry and ridden with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, growth in agriculture has not been unimpressive. However, self-sufficiency in food has not yet been achieved; North Korea is a substantial net importer of food”
(Chung, North Korean Economy,
pp. 151–152).

Cornell reports
(North Korea Under Communism,
p.
44)
having heard during the mid-1970s from East European diplomats that “food production in the country was only sufficient for twenty-five daily rations a month.”

15.
“At an expanded plenary session of the Party’s Kangwon Provincial Committee held on October 5–6 in Wonsan, the capital of the province, Kim put emphasis on farming, fishing and industry. ‘For effective transportation of farming tools in the countryside,’ Kim said at the meeting, ‘more trucks and tractors are needed in the province.’ He also said that every household should plant at least two persimmon trees in its yard to increase the production of fruits.’ He praised the great achievements’ of East Coast farmers despite various adversities and personally set the next year’s production goal for grains” (“Kim .Makes On-the-Spot Guidance Tours,”
Vantage Point
[November 1978]: p. 26).

16.
Kim supposedly spent fifteen days at the more famous Chongsan-ri in 1960, thinking through what was later named the “Chongsan-ri .Method.” A foreign journalist visiting that farm eighteen years later heard a guide explain that
method, “still used today,” involved “the cadres coming to the workplace to stimulate the ardor and the creativity of the peasants.” See “ ‘Market Economy Doesn’t Apply to Our Country’: Visit to NK .Model Farm,” AFP dispatch in
Korea Times,
May 4, 1995.

17.
“Summing Up of the 1970s,”
Vantage Point
(December 1979), quoting North Korean Premier Li Jong-ok. The plan’s goal was to increase electrical power generation to 56–60 billion kilowatt hours, coal production to 70–80 million tons, steel production to 74–80 million tons and the grain harvest to 10 million tons.

18.
At the time, examined in historical context, that seemed to some foreign analysts a strong possibility. For example, “South Korea … for all its belated ‘miracle growth,’ is a house built on sand, utterly vulnerable to the storms of the world economy, a classic example of extreme dependency. The crucial point is that, contrary to the advocates of so-called ‘export-led growth,’ there is no evidence of any Third World country having attained self-sustaining growth on the basis of an open export economy” (Foster-Carter, “Development and Self Reliance” [see chap. 6, n. 15], pp. 85–86). Foster-Carter added (p. 98), “Far from signifying an economy in deep trouble, they [North Korea’s debts] may paradoxically testify to its long-run advance and strength despite short-term problems of cash flow.”

19.
“A rapid expansion in investment in human capital, especially in technical education, … must have substantially contributed toward productivity gains. North Korea was reportedly successful in eradicating illiteracy within a few years after the division of Korea. … Since 1967 North Korea went even farther by adopting a free nine-year compulsory system of education with greater emphasis on technical education, the first such program in the Far East. (Both China and Japan have six-year compulsory systems with tuition partially free.) Beyond the level of primary education, North Korea has exerted all-out efforts to increase the supply of technical-scientific personnel by expanding the enrollment at and resources of technological colleges, vocational schools, and ‘factory colleges,’ and by sending selected groups of students abroad (primarily to the Soviet Union) for scientific and technical education. The whole educational system seems to be geared to the goals of industrialization” (Chung,
North Korean Economy,
pp. 158–159). Chung cites statistics showing the numbers of engineers, technicians and specialists increasing from 21,872 in 1953 to 293,506 in 1964. Source:
Choson chungang yongam, 1965
(Korean Central Yearbook) (Pyongyang, Korean Central News Agency, 1965), p. 482.

20.
Baik II, pp. 359–360.

21.
Viewing the home as “the hotbed of outdated institutions, outdated ideology and outdated customs,” the state undermined the family’s role through a variety of policies. The virtual abolition of private land ownership—and its inheritance— was the most obvious. That chipped away at the authority of the family patriarch in a country where Confucian patriarchal teachings had reigned supreme for centuries. Korean custom required city-dwelling families to return regularly to their hometowns and villages for ancestral memorial services—which were also reunions promoting close family ties. But the regime’s system of restrictions on freedom of movement, perhaps the most stringent in the world, took a heavy toll on such observances. The old custom in which parents arranged their children’s marriages gave way to a new system in which the party’s intervention superseded that of the parents (“Building a Socialist Culture,”
The Principles of Kim
Il-sungism
[Propaganda Bureau of the Unification Revolutionary Party Central Committee, 1974], p. 182, cited in Park Yong-hon, “Cultural Policy of North Korea,”
Vantage Point
[August 1979]: pp. 10–11).

22.
One defector in a 1994 interview assured me that what I had seen out the school window was typical. See chap. 21 for his remarks.

23.
Kim,
With the Century
(see chap. 2, n. 2), vol. 3, pp. 302–303.

24.
Kim Il-sung’s youthful organ playing may help to explain the curious taste in music that, since liberation, has channeled the talents of countless North Korean youngsters into playing the accordion—a portable version of the instrument that would have been found in a small Korean church in those days, the pump organ. The Kim Il-sung regime’s ties to Eastern European communist countries where the accordion was in favor, and the frequent cultural exchanges accompanying those ties, may also have been a factor.

25.
Hwang Jang-yop,
The Problems of Human Rights in North Korea (3),
trans. Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights (Seoul: NKnet, 2002), http://www.nknet.org/en/keys/lastkeys/2002/9/04.php.

26.
“His teachings covered the whole realm of literature and the arts. They became the programmatic guide for each branch in upholding its Party spirit, class spirit and popular spirit and raising its artistic quality. The ‘golden arts’ which peoples of the world admire today had their new beginning immediately after liberation under his wise guidance, and by his boundless effort and proper guidance, the northern half has now come to full bloom in its national culture, built and consolidated on the democratic base, rock-firm” (Baik II, p. 223).

27.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, p. 5.

28.
Kim, “Building a Socialist Culture,” in Park Yong-hon, “Cultural Policy,” p. 2.

29.
“Stalinist ideology did have one thing to teach the Koreans that fit like a glove with their own preconceptions. This was the Platonism of Stalin, the architectonic, engineering-from-on-high quality that marked his thought and his praxis. Stalin was a hegemon in the era of late’ heavy industrialization, and his discourse, like his name, clanked with an abased, mechanical imagery that valued pig iron over people, machines over bread, bridges over ideas, the leader’s will over the democratic instincts of Marx. When he had Zhdanov impose his suffocating doctrine of socialist realism on the cultural realm in 1932, the metaphor of choice was that artists and writers should be ‘engineers of the soul,’ and that may serve as a general metaphor for Stalin’s rule.