DPRK Travellogue: INTRODUCTION

Where should I begin? I have been obsessed with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for 3 years. I can tell you when it started, July 5^th 2006; I forgot the North Korean cover story for the missile test when my guide asked me why I was interested in the DPRK. I just asked her if she had ever heard of the Taepodong missile. I didn’t know at the time that the North called the tests a military drill.

At the time I was 17, I had recently gone through a profound family crisis that had lead to an obsession with Classical music (which continues to this day); I was studying the Soviet Union in history class, and had become completely absorbed with its alienness. To be honest, my despair with contemporary London suburban living has much to do with it; I rather hate daily life in its mundanity. Added to that I have found dictatorships very interesting for many years, I found the Nazis fascinating when I was 15, the Soviet Union when I was 17 (and still today). The DPRK is so very interesting because it is the information black hole, the most perfect Stalinist society in history (or it was until the 1990s). So when I first encountered it, I was instantly attracted; culturally Korea is very alien, the language, the look of the people when compared to the west, which made it doubly attractive.

The DPRK is much more interesting when you get into what we actually know; the western media is filled with rather bland hyperbole about it being the “last Stalinist” this and the “mysterious” that. Yet we do know plenty, about Kim Il Sung’s rise to power from fighting the Japanese as a guerrilla in Manchuria. We know about the purges against his domestic opponents in the wake of the Korean War, and the emergence of the Juche idea in the 1960s. We have plenty of information not merely derived from North Korean propaganda. My North Korean guides did not understand why I was so insistent on getting hold of a copy of “On eliminating dogmatism and formalism and establishing Juche in ideological work” (a speech by Kim Il Sung). This is the first time Kim uses the term Juche as an ideological term. My North Korean guides merely know the contemporary propaganda narrative, of Kim expounding the idea in the early 1930s, when he was a teenager. The speech was in Volume 9 of Kim Il Sung’s collected works (only €5, what a bargin!).

Western scholars mainly focus on the nuclear issue in North Korea, this is rather boring. If you have ever studied international relations then you understand why I find it boring; strategic balancing, sanctions etc. It’s rather drab and technical. However it is the major reason why North Korea is so well known, how many people have heard of Turkmenistan or Sapurmurat Niyazov? Many more will have heard of Kim Il Sung or at least Kim Jong-il, for the very good reason that they are perceived to be a threat to the peace and security of the Pacific region.

The other main issue that takes up the bulk of writings in western scholarship is Human Rights. Human Rights are an interesting Western concept; personally I think they are a very useful fiction. We should believe that all humans have an entitlement because they are human, to certain fundamental rights. The major human rights abuses in the DPRK are extrajudicial execution, generational punishment, cruel and unusual punishment, and the absence of basic freedoms. These human rights abuses have been well documented, and are harrowing if extremely interesting reading. The best report around can be found here: http://www.hrnk.org/hiddengulag/toc.html . I gave up after about 20 pages, but I read enough to come across some useful Korean terminology like Kwan li so. Human rights are a very liberal concept; each human has rights on an individual basis, but no specifically codified duties to their community. Personally I prefer to think of humans as social, who exist within a community not in opposition to it; in an ideal society which these charters appear to want to create, humans have responsibilities to each other, not rights to demand of each other. It might sound like semantics, but it is very different to demand of your mother the right to milk rather than she says to you that she has a responsibility to feed you. One is a self-centred concept, “what is owed to me?” the other is a concept based on giving. I prefer the idea of responsibilities, it means we actively help each other rather than demand that we are not impeded. This isn’t my idea; it’s just me reversing the ideas of Isaiah Berlin, the famous liberal thinker who had two concepts of freedom. The freedom from something e.g. coercion (what he called “Negative freedom”), this is the basis of modern human rights; and the freedom to do something e.g. be educated (what he called “positive freedom”).

The problem with the human rights literature is that it is an analytic dead end; it recognises the symptoms of a perverse society like North Korea, but that is its main focus, it does not focus on the causes and the historical roots of the DPRK. This is my main interest, how can such a society be created, and remain so stable in the face of extreme hardship. Bruce Cumings has called it a “post-colonial society” and this a fair term. Colonisation in my very limited knowledge seems to have one of two political effects when the coloniser leaves. Often the national unit that the coloniser has created is inheritently unstable; it is merely the product of what Edward Said calls “imagined geography” or the competition between colonial powers for territory. Look at countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, there are at least 250 distinct ethnic groups; now certainly this is not the only reason why the country has such a brutal contemporary history, but nonetheless this is part of the issue.

Korea is the alternative; it is one of the most ethnically homogenous societies on earth, linguistically and culturally. The historical roots of this can be traced back to two significant events in Korea’s recent history. The Imjin War of 1592-7 is key to explaining where the modern Korean suspicion and hatred of the Japanese comes from. Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded the Korean peninsula on his way to Ming China. Chosŏn Korea relied on the naval genius I Sung-shin (his famous turtle ships), and peasant (Sangmin in Korean) militias known in English as the Righteous Armies (Ŭibyŏng in Korean). However this created a problem of political legitimacy for the Korean king, reliance on the lower orders and a military figure made the monarchy look very weak. So the Kings of Korea would exaggerate the role of Ming China in repelling the Japanese invaders from Korea in order to disempower possible alternate centres of political power and opposition. Thus Korea became more fawning in its praise and respect for the Ming Chinese East Asian order. Ming China became the father to the Korean Kingdom; its emperor was accorded the same filial devotion by the Korean Kings as sons gave to their fathers in a Confucian society. This relationship is known as a Suzerain-tributary relationship, where one state is nominally subservient to another in order to attain approval from the stronger state.

When Ming China was superseded by Qing China in the early 17^th Century this created a major problem for the Korean monarchy. Qing China was ruled by non-Chinese Manchu ‘barbarians’; Ming had been like the father of Chosŏn Korea, and maintaining a similar relationship with Qing China would be like a son loving his father’s killer like his own father. However the Manchu’s made it clear through two invasions in 1627 and 1637 that they would not tolerate anything but the continuance of the existing tributary relationship. This created a major issue for the Korean monarchy; Korean society was and is founded on the fundamental concept of filial piety. Thus sons and daughters are loyal to their parents, their parents are loyal to their social superiors and they are all loyal to the king. The king is loyal to the emperor (of China). If the emperor is toppled and replaced with a barbarian and the king shows the same loyalty to the new emperor then it fundamentally undermines the concept of filial piety. The king is basically saying that superiors are replaceable, and therefore loyalty can be conditional. To resolve this crisis of legitimacy the Korean kings sought to isolate their country completely from the outside world; Korea became what William Griffis would call the “Hermit nation”.

The impact of this isolationist policy was to hermetically seal Korea from cultural, linguistic and racial interactions with the outside world. Certainly some of the aristocracy travelled to Beijing and brought back modern science and the bible and there were western landings in Korea. But for most of the common people there was no significant interaction with the outside world for centuries. This had the effect of fostering near complete ethnic homogeneity. There are no significant minority ethnicities in Korea who are citizens of one of the two Korean republics.

Modern Korean nationalism and the vehement assertion of Korean cultural identity was partly a product of this homogeneity. However it was through the crucible of colonialism that “Koreaness” became actualised and realised. Japan took control of Korea from 1905, and through their brutality and attempts to Japanise the peninsula they created a Korean national consciousness that still defines both sides of the peninsula today. The North often accuse the south of flunkeyism (Sadaejuui in Korean), seeing the Americans as being like the Japanese.

But back to the original point, Korea was not ethnically divided in 1945; it was divided by ideology and by class. The elite had enriched themselves through Japanese sponsored industrialisation, whilst the common people had become cannon fodder for the Japanese war effort, as well as being further pauperised in the drive to produce grain and weapons for the Japanese. The intervention of the Soviet Union in the Pacific war and their subsequent annexation of the northern half of the Korean peninsula is the other half of the explanation behind the DPRK. It emerged from a combination of Soviet ideology, vehement post-colonial nationalism and as a result of class polarisation.

The DPRK until before the collapse of the Soviet Union was what my hero Andrei Lankov has called the “most perfect Stalinist society” in history. The third ingredient that created this society was the anti-Japanese guerrilla struggle that Kim Il Sung waged in Manchuria in the 1930s; his militia background and those of his comrades would create the most militarised society in the world. An oft repeated slogan in the DPRK was to toil with “arms in one hand, hammer and sickle in the other”. This has not changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

However much has changed since 1989 in the DPRK as a result of the collapse of the USSR. The DPRK maintained its ability to feed its population through subsidies from the Socialist bloc in the form of oil, and fertiliser. However with the collapse of the Soviet Union such goods would have to be henceforth purchased at market price. This lead to famine as the DPRK prioritised arms over food; it is often claimed by the DPRK that the famine of 1995-9 was as a result of natural disasters. This is false; the government started a campaign encouraging people to eat “two meals a day” in 1991, food shortages had started when the USSR first reduced its aid to the DPRK in 1987. I have anecdotal evidence from teachers that there were already people dying in the streets in northern towns and villages well before 1995. The main causes of the famine was the end of Soviet aid, the government not intervening by getting food aid sooner, a lack of systemic agricultural reform and misallocation of capital resources toward prestige projects (more on that later), the military and the palace economy.

The famine resulted in 600,000-1,000,000 excess deaths according to Marcus Noland and Stephen Haggard. It lead to the end of the stranglehold of the state economy over the everyday lives of all North Koreans; most state run factories had to close or lay idle and instead those who survived peddled at the market place to make enough money to eat. Those who couldn’t either starved or migrated.

The military rose as the new “vanguard of the revolution”, North Korea ceased to be a Marxist-Leninist state in terms of political organisation, the working class was no longer the guiding light of the revolution. This is called Songun politics in North Korean parlance, which literally translates as “Military First”. Simon at Koryo Tours was quick to correct me on this point when I said that North Korea was still Stalinist.

North Korea is no longer Stalinist; instead it is a Nationalist military dictatorship of sorts. What’s left of the state economy that funds the military and elite life is controlled by the leading military generals such as O Kuk-ryol. However the Kim clan still maintains power over the party and state, and connected with the military, the secret police network is still active and still maintains a relatively tight stranglehold over the populous. Legitimacy is still derived from post-colonial nationalism and the government is now seeking to reassert its control over the populous through the re-Stalinisation of food distribution. This is a brief introduction to the DPRK, my interest in the place and its history.