Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (70 page)

It was an extraordinarily pleasant evening. The North Korean guests and a group of Korean-American scholars joined together to sing Korean songs around the piano after supper and talked of their hopes for reunification. Everyone was in shirtsleeves and relaxed. At one point Kim Jong-su asked sociably if I had been back to North Korea.

That was just the question I had been waiting for. Kim Yong-nam, the foreign affairs secretary, had told me during our interview in 1979 that
I ought to revisit North Korea in the future, as I had “made many friends” in his country. “Later on we’ll have much opportunity to meet again,” he had assured me. But then the North had rolled up the welcome mat. Over the following decade I had written and cabled Kim Yong-nam and others in Pyongyang asking permission to revisit the country but each request had been ignored. The World Festival of Youth and Students was scheduled to open in Pyongyang just a few days after this New York dinner party and I had applied to cover it, but the prospects did not look good.

When I explained all that to Kim Jong-su, he unhesitatingly offered to intercede on my behalf, assuring me that I would be admitted. He was as good as his word and soon I was back in Pyongyang, ensconced once again in the Potonggang Hotel.

In the decade since my previous visit to North Korea, rival South Korea’s gross national product had expanded to nearly $5,000 per capita while economic performance in the North had continued to lag. Persistent reports reaching the outside world had told of serious food shortages in the North, although the regime did not acknowledge them. Indeed, it had not talked much about such occurrences since the hard times of 1946, the year after liberation, when Kim Il-sung had told his countrymen: “Everything is short with us—foodstuff, personnel, materials and so on. But this is no reason for us to be idle.” In 1989 it was not yet clear to outsiders that what had been intended as a propaganda gesture to South Korea had instead confirmed the North on a collision course with famine. Kang Myong-do reported in 1995 that North Korean organizations responsible for destabilizing and spying on the South had come up with the idea of publicly offering massive rice aid in 1984 when the Southerners were hit with floods. The assumption was that Seoul as usual would reject the offer. To the Pyongyang leadership’s horror, the Southerners accepted. In Pyongyang, “Kim Jung-lin, the person in charge, was exiled,” Kang reported. “He dug privies for six months.”
¹

Now Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il seemed determined to banish any problems by intensifying the same old approaches. Communist leaders in China, Hungary and elsewhere were experimenting with individual incentives and free markets. The Pyongyang leadership mean-while dreamed up ever more costly and elaborate schemes to burnish prestige with grandiose monuments and extravagant festivities, hoping to persuade its subjects that their sacrifices were worth-while. But the evident confusion and panic within the Northern leadership increased as old allies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union cast off communism—and with it, their special relationships with Pyongyang.

One by one, countries that had favored North Korea or tried to maintain equal relationships with the two Koreas were wooing the South and all but
ignoring the North. For those countries, North Korea no longer had much to offer. South Korea on the other hand was a model of capitalist development, a potential source of trade, investment, technology, advice and aid. The trend could be glimpsed from the time Hungary and South Korea set up trade offices in each other’s capitals starting in late 1987. Other East European countries followed Budapest’s lead, and diplomatic recognition followed trade.

From early in the decade the Northern leaders had responded to the signs Pyongyang was losing the contest with Seoul by resorting to terror. There was the 1983 Rangoon bombing, in which North Korean agents assassinated South Korean cabinet members. In 1987, Pyongyang agents bombed a Korean Airlines civilian passenger jet, killing all 115 people aboard. The attack was an effort to spoil Seoul’s plans to host the Olympics. The two agents swallowed poison when they were caught, but one survived. Under South Korean questioning she said she had been told by her superior in Pyongyang that her orders came directly from Kim Jong-il. (Former party secretary Hwang Jang-yop has blamed Kim Jong-il for the incident, without giving details.)
²
Maddeningly for Pyongyang, the South went on to increase its lead over the North not only economically but also politically. In 1987, student-led demonstrations forced President Chun Doo-hwan to agree to free elections. Permitting the South’s people to choose their leaders tended to neutralize Pyongyang’s chief remaining talking point.

Among South Korea’s successes, none galled the North’s leaders more than the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which celebrated and spotlighted the South’s newfound international status. Pyongyang first tried to muscle in on Seoul’s act, demanding that it be allowed to co-host the Olympics. The South agreed to discuss the matter, but negotiations collapsed. Then came the bombing of the Korean Airlines plane. Finally, North Korea’s leaders decided to use their turn to host the World Festival of Youth and Students—a sports-and-ideology bash well known in the socialist world but virtually unheard of in the United States—as a showcase of their own. (The psychology of that decision was typically Korean. In the South, for example, a recurring problem for economic planners was that if one top
chaebol
—big business combine— went into, say, the automobile business, then the others felt they must do exactly the same. Their prestige depended on it, in the Korean way of thinking.) Having kept Western journalists at a distance in response to the largely unfavorable coverage at the time of the 1979 table tennis tournament, Pyongyang officials decided once more to admit a press contingent.

Like so much else that the leadership had tried, the scheme to stage the festival as a means of enhancing North Korea’s international prestige backfired badly. Through an accident of timing, the Pyongyang festival opened right after the Tienanmen Square massacre in China. Not only journalists but also delegates from European countries with relatively moderate socialist movements focused on obvious similarities between the human rights
situations in China and North Korea. Those of us who attended the festival’s opening ceremony, in a brand-new stadium, witnessed an astonishing demonstration that may have been the first in decades to oppose the regime. As Scandinavian and Italian delegates marched around the stadium, they briefly held up signs questioning human rights policies in North Korea and in China. Danes in the audience who brandished a sign just as Kim Il-sung began speaking found themselves in a scuffle with male North Koreans—students who acted spontaneously not police, Kim Jong-su assured me later. (“We are a hot people,” he explained, using the incident as an illustration that the people were not automatons as some foreigners thought.)

Alerted in advance, North Korean officials clearly were concerned about the foreign criticism. A day or two before the opening ceremony a group of foreign correspondents asked a taxi driver to drive to the Italian delegation’s headquarters, where a party was scheduled. We expected to get news there of the coming protest. The driver indeed took us for a ride—out into the countryside. For an hour, he pretended to be lost. Eventually he returned us to our hotel. It may be that he had exceeded his brief; one of our handlers apologized and said it had been a mistake. Before the evening was completely gone, we were duly ferried to the Italians’ party.

The demonstration in the stadium was, to be sure, a foreigners’ protest. The assumption must be that the North Koreans witnessing it were members of the privileged class of loyalists permitted to reside in the capital, and therefore were unlikely to be inspired to action by the protesters’ signs. Not only did the Pyongyang residents fail to join in the foreigners’ demonstration; foreign residents I talked with said they had seen no evidence of indigenous protests, either. “Oh, they might complain about a policeman who stops their car,” one foreigner said, “but I’ve never heard anyone criticize the policy or the system.” North Koreans insisted, as in 1979, that they enjoyed complete freedom. What about the reports by human rights groups that tens of thousands of citizens were imprisoned for political offenses? “There is no one against the government in our country” a festival guide replied. “It’s a lie.”

North Koreans also insisted that their country was virtually crime-free. During the festival, uniformed guards carrying automatic weapons continued to patrol both in the cities and at bridges, airstrips, rail-ways and other sensitive sites in the countryside. But checkpoints between the city and its airport were left unmanned, perhaps to give less of an impression of Big Brother–style interference.

In any case, just as other communist-ruled societies had faced enormous challenges that forced them to deviate from the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Mao, North Korea was experiencing frustrations that in time might turn
even avid revolutionaries against their government. Economic problems had continued, and there were some signs that the regime’s handling of the economy had begun to cause popular disaffection. Defectors to South Korea and other countries had complained, for example, that people were exhausted from the almost constant demands for “voluntary” labor and “speed campaigns.”
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At Kim Chaek University of Technology, officials in an interview denied a report from a human rights group that forty students at Kim Chaek and another college campus had been arrested a year before the festival, after posters appeared questioning the regime’s economic policies.

Electrical power was in permanent shortage, so stores were not switching on their lights except during weekends and on special occasions. The entire period of the youth festival was a special occasion, though, with huge amounts of power used to light up Pyongyang and cool the visitors. The practical effects of the shortage could be seen when trolley buses stopped one morning as the result of an apparent electrical blackout.

Consumer durables clearly were a problem, although here again the regime sought to counter the impression. During the youth festival the authorities stepped up shipments to the stores. I doubted that the stores shown to foreigners were representative of those where ordinary North Koreans routinely shopped. In any case, the department store displays in 1989 were an improvement over the dreary selection seen a decade earlier. Designs of some goods such as women’s handbags had clearly improved. Clothing, especially women’s garments, showed more color and variety. The improvements, however—-whether real or contrived—had done no more than to bring those stores up to the fairly low standard of department stores in Beijing when I had lived there from 1980 to 1982, before the Chinese economy’s new direction had started to show major tangible results.

Despite the shipments for the festival, some items were notable for either their unavailability or their poor quality. One currently popular item among North Koreans was a stereophonic portable cassette-tape player, but the shortage was severe. Not a single one could be found in any of three downtown Pyongyang department stores. Instead shoppers were offered tinny-sounding, primitive phonographs. Predictably, those elicited little enthusiasm.

Department stores emphasized what they had. Piles of buckets, basins, bowls and other plastic house-wares in bright colors occupied the most prominent ground-floor displays. A buyer could select from some twenty-five styles of women’s shoes, all made of vinyl; a shopper insisting on leather shoes would need to come up with some foreign exchange to buy them in a special hard-currency outlet for foreign goods. At the Changkwan Department Store a bicycle was 175
won
—a good month’s pay A small North Korean-made refrigerator cost twice that, 350
won.
A Daedong River-brand black-and-white television cost 620
won.
A Japanese-made National-brand
color set was priced at l,400
won,
more than the annual salary of a starting North Korean worker (90
won
a month).

Although North Korea on my previous visit had seemed to be ahead of China economically the Chinese since then had benefited from ten more years of economic reform. With no major reform program of their own, the North Koreans had far less to show for the intervening decade than the Chinese had. On paper, still, North Korea remained far ahead on a per capita basis, by comparison with Beijing’s own official economic statistics. The visual evidence suggested, however, that the Chinese had overtaken the North Koreans decisively. (The suspicion that the statistics failed to tell the real story got support at the end of 1992 when an Australian government report challenged the Chinese figures.)
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Mean-while, traffic remained very light by the standards of other developing countries. High-ways might have five or even seven lanes (the center one reserved for Kim Il-sung, I had heard), but very few vehicles used them. The lack of traffic allowed sweepers to keep both city streets and high-ways spanking clean. City streets lacked the bustle of even a Beijing, with its swarms of people and bicycles and carts; the automotive traffic jams of a capitalist metropolis would have been unimaginable. Aside from a few Soviet and Japanese models, most of the cars in use were Mercedes-Benz and Volvo sedans imported for the elite.

North Korea did not produce the ultimate consumer durable, civilian passenger cars—but clearly wished it did. I had grasped the symbolism of the automobile during my 1979 visit. When I had asked the Chonsam-ri cooperative farm’s deputy chairman about the lack of private cars on his farm and in North Korea generally, he had minimized their importance. The Chonsam-ri farmers did not need them, because there were plenty of farm trucks and buses. Maybe so, but the eyes of one group of Pyongyang officials who ranked high enough to rate chauffeured imported sedans had lit up during a discussion of the relative merits of various foreign makes. Those officials had listened with evident fascination to my description of South Korea’s fast-developing automotive industry, then assured me that the North one day would have mass-produced private cars.