The invisible hand of capitalism is slowly strangling the world’s most totalitarian regime, and Kim Jong Il knows it. Most of Kim Jong Il’s machinery of repression survived The Great Famine, but his monopoly on the food supply did not. The state’s Public Distribution System is only a vestige of what it was in 1990. By 2009, the markets, known in Korean as jangmadang, were the main food source for perhaps 80% of North Koreans. Some of the food sold in them was grown in small private plots, or stolen from collectives or state warehouses. Some of it is international food aid that the regime, or corrupt regime officials, sells in the jangmadang to raise cash. Increasingly, much of it is also imported or smuggled in from across the Chinese border.
A jangmadang in the city of Chongjin
Although there’s plenty of contraband sold in the jangmadang, it is not entirely accurate to call them black markets. The shiny metal roofs over the long rows of stalls are visible in most North Korean cities on Google Earth. The authorities know where they are, and the security forces spend plenty of time there hassling pitiful kkotjaebi (homeless orphans) or shaking down merchants for violating any of the many arbitrary rules that are often promulgated and sometimes enforced. There are rules about what can be sold, and for how much. There are restrictions on the age and gender of who can sell sell there. Occasionally, the authorities try to shut down the markets entirely. Yet the markets have proven exceedingly persistent.
Markets first came into the open during the Great Famine. Initially, the regime tolerated them. Between 2002 and 2004, advocates of “engagement” with Kim Jong Il’s regime were fond of characterizing this as “reform,” but in fact, what they were seeing was a reluctant insurrection by desperate, expendable people with no other way to survive. Similarly, not all of the up to 300,000 North Koreans who illegally crossed into China during the famine years intended to defect. Most probably crossed temporarily to find food for their families, or to survive. Government officials were hungry, too, and many turned to corruption:
A woman in her 40s from Hoeryong, North Korea, described how about a third of her income from markets was taken by various officials.”The housing official, the electricity official, the water official … as soon as they smell your money, they are on you,” she told me. “They will find some excuse, some violation you have committed. You have to pay up. There is no avoiding them.”
Border guards were no exception. As cross-border trade became more lucrative, so did the acceptance of bribes to overlook it. The corruption of the border guards became so brazen that they have been photographed while smuggling in broad daylight. Even field-grade officers, and most strikingly, members of North Korea’s intelligence services, went into the smuggling business:
The restriction of movement, with which North Korea controlled its population, began to break down. “I began spending my days not watching people but trying to find food for my family. The rations I received were not enough. We were desperate,” a former intelligence official from North Korea described the hunger that even he, a member of the elite, could not escape.
Together, these three developments — the mainstreaming of the black market, border crossing, and corruption — broke the state’s monopolies over food and information. North Koreans were influenced by their exposure to South Korean culture, but the state-to-state engagement of the Sunshine Policy had almost nothing to do with it. Instead, the engine of change was smuggling across the Chinese border, in spite of the regime’s best efforts to seal it. The available evidence suggests that what North Koreans have learned from smuggled information has changed how they think. Refugees report that most North Koreans know that South Koreans live better than they do. Almost no one still believes the official propaganda, which still insists that most South Koreans are starving beggars. And unlike some left-wing academics in America, North Koreans blame their own leaders for their misery. In one telling anecdote, a party official in the border town of Hyesan found that a harangue to this effect was the best laugh his audience had had for quite a while:
The speaker reportedly responded through his own laughter, “You know the lecture material always reads like this. You can well understand the situation and know what I am saying, right?” The source said that “his comment sent people rolling in the aisles,” and pointed out, “The situation showed how absurd the propaganda released by the authorities is.”
Kim Jong Il’s minions did not stand by passively for long as capitalism grew from the barren soil under their boots. In 2004, they tried to force people back to their work units, often at factories that were still idle. In 2005, the regime tried to reconstitute the Public Distribution System and restrict market activity with confiscatory taxes. The efforts failed; the system still could not feed the people. Unable to close the markets entirely, local officials tried to slow their growth by placing new restrictions on them. In some cases, these restrictions caused mass demonstrations — something that had been almost unthinkable in North Korea since the 1950’s.
By 2009, North Korean socialism had become a facade. Husbands continued to report to their work units in factories and mines that often barely functioned, in exchange for meager and irregular pay and rations. Others simply bribed their bosses into letting them miss work to pursue more profitable occupations. Often, it was their wives who supported their families by trading in the markets and saving what they could to survive through the lean months of the winter and spring. To most North Korean families, the state had ceased to be a provider and had become an impediment to survival. People who were liberated from their work units were also liberated from political indoctrination and were harder to keep an eye on.
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The regime, recognizing this trend as an existential threat, decided to act decisively to reestablish its control over the economy and the food supply. Its response was a series of economic measures designed to paralyze trade, destroy private savings, and shut down markets — measures that I collectively call The Great Confiscation. The first signs came in the summer of 2009, when the regime began to remove Chinese and other foreign consumer goods and food from the jangmadang. In September, North Korea closed the country’s largest unofficial market, on the outskirts of Pyongyang. Then, in late November, North Korea summarily canceled and replaced its currency, instantly extinguishing the savings of millions of people. The state ordered citizens to turn in any savings exceeding a small ceiling — initially, the equivalent of $20. The new currency was also redenominated, with two zeros dropped from the official exchange rates. To maintain secrecy, the regime made no plans to reprice the goods in the official shops, which remained closed for weeks while bureaucrats haggled over what the prices should be. To ensure that the people did not merely shift to dollars and Chinese yuan, foreign currency transactions were banned. This meant in practice that for once, the elite shared the pain, for many of them had begun to keep savings in foreign currency.
I suggested then that currency replacement might cause a popular backlash. Subsequent events bore this out. Riots and protests were reported to have broken out in several North Korean cities, and many North Koreans are said to have burned piles of the now-worthless currency — a serious political offense, given that the notes bear the image of Kim Il Sung. As before, these disturbances were isolated enough for the regime to crush them quickly, but public anger at the Great Confiscation was so universal and so bitter that it pushed back the social barriers that held back the open expression of discontent.
Not everyone was angry at first, because in theory, state workers would get the same wages as before, representing a hundred-fold pay raise in the new redenominated currency. Soon, however, runaway inflation eroded the buying power of the new money. For the first time in years, both state stores and the jangmadang were closed. Trade was paralyzed; buses didn’t run, and even foreign embassy workers couldn’t buy food. There were fears of another famine. The popular rage reached such a level that the regime was forced to do something unprecedented: apologize to the people. Reports circulated that the official whose idea this had been was sent to a firing squad, although those reports were called into question later. The regime partially relented in its invalidation of the old currency by raising the exchange limits, slightly. But neither the regime’s crackdown on dissent, nor its climbdown in the face of it, was enough to restore popular obedience. So many North Koreans now complain about their government’s incompetence that the regime cannot silence all of them. The system of terror that holds the regime together is becoming overloaded. In February, there were even reports that angry North Koreans had attacked and killed members of the dreaded security police.
The new North Korean won
Inevitably for a society as closed as North Korea, these reports are anecdotal hearsay and only begin to acquire the ring of authenticity in quantity. But some statistical data suggest that discontent was already rising before The Great Confiscation. The economist Marcus Noland, the political scientist Stephan Haggard, and the researcher Yoonok Chang have recently published a stream of new research about what North Koreans really think of their government. In 2005, Chang interviewed more than 1,000 North Koreans in China, a remarkable accomplishment given that her subjects were constantly on the run from Chinese police trying to send them back to die in North Korean gulags. Admittedly, predicting North Korean opinion based on surveying refugees and migrants might well be like trying to guess the next governor of Kansas by polling every Kansan in Greenwich Village. The authors readily admit this, though they take pains to at least match the demographics of their survey population to estimates of North Korea’s own demographics. Even so, the data, collected between 2005 and 2009, show us some interesting trends. Within the refugee/migrant population itself, North Koreans are increasingly negative about their government, skeptical of what it tells them, and both willing and able to access foreign broadcasts at great personal risk. Here is Noland and Haggard’s ultimate conclusion:
The surveys’ results suggest that the regime’s discomfort might be well founded. Countries such as North Korea, where people routinely hide their true opinions, are prone to sudden, explosive political mobilizations like the ones that swept Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1980s. Those mobilizations happen when nascent expressions of discontent cascade — each person who sticks their head above the parapet encourages another to do the same. And in North Korea, the market appears to be just such a semiautonomous zone of social communication (and potentially political organizing) beyond the state’s reach.
Are the North Korean people only now becoming disgruntled, or does the decay of Kim Jong Il’s information blockade just mean we’re learning more about how disgruntled North Koreans really are? It’s probably a bit of both. My best guess is that public anger at the regime first became widespread during the Great Famine, and subsided as the markets restored the food crisis to a state of marginal equilibrium, where it more-or-less stayed until the end of 2009. After the Great Confiscation, discontent appears to have raged even more than it did during The Great Famine, a humanitarian catastrophe on an infinitely greater scale.
The markets have proven far more resilient than confidence in the regime. After the market disruptions of the Great Confiscation, there was a rise in large-scale food smuggling, with hundreds of tons of food brought across the frozen Yalu River by the truckload. The intelligence and security services overlooked the smuggling, presumably because they were either involved or getting a cut of the profits. Some reports suggest that today, just six months later, the jangmadang in some cities have already recovered completely.
Within a day of the announcement of The Great Confiscation, it was reported not by The New York Times or The Washington Post, but by Open News for North Korea, founded by Ha Tae Kyoung, an enigmatic South Korean ex-leftist and political prisoner and acquaintance of mine. Ha, who goes by the name Young Howard in the English-language press, broadcasts into North Korea on medium-wave frequencies from transmitters in locations he prefers not to discuss. Just as importantly, his service also broadcasts news from North Korea to the outside world, using a network of clandestine correspondents. This, too, would have been unthinkable three years ago, when news from North Korea took months to emerge, if at all. Any North Korean caught informing to Open News can expect to face a firing squad for espionage. Yet North Koreans still choose to take that risk.
Open News is not the only guerrilla news service operating inside North Korea. Radio Free North Korea, The Daily NK, Rimjingang, PSCORE and other organizations also report from North Korea, as does the liberal South Korean Buddhist charity Good Friends. Today, thanks to legislation sponsored by Senator Sam Brownback, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Rep. Ed Royce — and stalled for years by Condoleezza Rice’s State Department — many of the guerrilla news services receive funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. The European Union and NGO’s like Reporters Without Borders provide more funding. Collectively, these services are breaking the North Korean regime’s information blockade.
“Technology made this possible,” said Sohn Kwang-joo, the chief editor of Daily NK. “We infiltrate the wall of North Korea with cellphones.” [....]
Mr. Sohn [...] has South Korean “correspondents” near the China-North Korea border. These volunteers, many of them pro-democracy advocates during their student years, secretly meet North Koreans traveling across the border and recruit underground stringers. The volunteers use business visas, or sometimes pretend to be students or tourists. “It’s dangerous work, and it takes one or two years to recruit one,” Mr. Sohn said.
The clandestine services also claim to be recruiting more North Korean officials as sources:
“These officials provide news because they feel uncertain about the future of their regime and want to have a link with the outside world, or because of their friendship with the defectors working for us, or because of money,” said Mr. Ha, who also goes by his English name, Young Howard.
All these news outlets pay their informants. Mr. Ha pays a bonus for significant scoops. Daily NK and Open Radio each have 15 staff members, some of them defectors, and receive U.S. congressional funding through the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as support from other public and private sources. Recently, they have been receiving tips from North Koreans about corrupt officials.
North Koreans could not have played such an important role in telling their story just a few years ago, yet we have hardly begun to pry at these cracks in the state’s information blockade. With more funding and training, guerrilla correspondents could broadcast reports from inside North Korea, and even provide international coverage of resistance activities. The implications of guerrilla journalism go well beyond reporting the news. If it is now possible to establish durable links between clandestine journalists inside North Korea and newspapers on the outside, a political underground inside North Korea can be linked to a base of support in South Korea, something I’ll discuss in more detail in tomorrow’s installment.
Information is crossing North Korea’s borders in both directions. Today, all the kids in Pyongyang want portable MP4 players to share music and movies. The security forces have orders to confiscate them, but they’re still widely available in the jangmadang. No wonder, given their obvious subversive potential. North Koreans must have a great hunger for frivolous entertainment, including music, movies, and literature. Other messages could be more explicitly subversive — news, religious sermons, and documentaries that would explain the true origins of the Korean War, Kim Jong Il’s culinary and sexual gluttony, and the causes of the Great Famine. To expose Kim Jong Il as a dependent and puppet of China, where North Korean women are sold by traffickers and often raped by the police, would be particularly devastating to a regime that prides itself on independence and cultivates extreme nationalism. At the same time, South Korea’s economic, technological, and cultural example would show the people how much better their future could be without Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Eun. (I credit my good friend Professor Andrei Lankov for many of these ideas, but only the good ones.)
It often takes days for an ordinary North Korean to send a censored letter to a friend or relative in another city, but within a year, smugglers could flood the jangmadang with tens of thousands of cheap cell phones that could call or text internationally or domestically. A portable base station like this one, raised to an altitude of 1,000 meters just south of the DMZ, could theoretically provide cell phone service to North Koreans as far north as Pyongyang. This would effectively end the regime’s isolation of its population. For the first time, North Koreans could talk to their relatives in the South, spread news from city to city, facilitate trade all over the country, and even organize politically. The operators of the network could also send text messages to every North Korean user. If cheap cell phones appeared in quantity in Chinese border cities like Dandong, smugglers would do the rest (though a little bribe money would do wonders). The regime could not possibly monitor such a sudden explosion of information. For areas out of reach of the signal, new satellite phones are now available for $235 retail. The machinery of repression would be overloaded, and once the regime loses its capacity to control ideas, speech, and thought, the precise manner of its extinction will come into focus.
Coincident with this flood of subversive information, completely non-violent methods could take a heavy toll on the morale and readiness of North Korea’s security forces, keep them off-balance, and even force them to redeploy to remote parts of the country. Today, for example, a group of defectors called Fighters for Free North Korea floats radios, DVD’s, money, and leaflets across to North Korea with large helium balloons. If it weren’t for the regime’s obsession with the control of information, this would be nothing more than good media theater. How much harm could a few balloons possibly do? Plenty, apparently, because the regime mobilizes army units to gather up every item that falls from them. One way to raise the strain on the security forces’ morale, maintenance, and fuel supply would be to expand this leafleting campaign. Another would be for South Korea to remove the anti-personnel mines from less strategic sections of the DMZ, leaving the anti-tank mines and barriers intact, and setting up refugee reception centers at a safe distance south of the line. The regime could prevent mass defections of refugees, but only by redeploying a part of its thinly stretched border guards to its southern border.
In time, the modest network of smuggler’s ratlines across the Yalu and Tumen Rivers and the mountainous region between them could be the Lee Myung Bak Trail of this decade. If all of the resources of the United States cannot stop the flow of people, money, weapons, and drugs across the Mexican border and the Caribbean, a North Korean regime under the pressure of tighter economic sanctions cannot be sufficient to stop the flow of food, money, medicine, or information across its borders. There are hundreds of villages and thousands of small boats along North Korea’s two long coastlines. If Somali pirates can hijack container ships and tankers in broad daylight, on seas patrolled by the world’s greatest navies, determined North Korean smugglers could also move goods from offshore drop-sites to the rugged coastlines of their homeland. Obviously, corruption and disillusionment within the security forces would play important roles in this plan, but sheer attrition on the regime’s security forces could sap much of their strength before the first round of return fire.
South Korea, with America’s backing, can help the North Korean resistance deliver a message that the people of North Korea are prepared to accept — a message of free markets, accountable government, and reunification with the South. This process will continue to progress even without the assistance of interested governments, but it might progress much more quickly with enough cell phones, MP4 players, fast boats, and bribe money.
What I have not explained yet is how opening North Korea’s borders can force Kim Jong Il, who is protected by one of the world’s largest standing armies, from power. That will be the topic of Monday’s discussion.
Joshua Stanton blogs at OneFreeKorea.
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