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North Korea has got its bourgeoisie ― and in North Korean terms it is relatively large in number and powerful. The North Korean rich class was born amid the devastation of the 1990s, when dead bodies could be seen alongside countryside roads and when the grand edifice of control collapsed almost overnight.
North Korea's new rich started by bartering household items for food, smuggling Goryeo-era antiques and counterfeit Chinese cigarettes, and stealing and reselling items from their workplace.
Those criminal days are all but gone now. While entrepreneurial activity remains illegal in the North, it is tolerated ― not least because entrepreneurs are able to bribe officials to turn a blind eye.
The North Korean new rich have a relatively good life: they live in spacious air-conditioned houses, ride motorbikes and increasingly drive cars, and dine in expensive restaurants. Nonetheless, they remain second-rate citizens and according to the letter of the law, pretty much every single member of the entrepreneurial class should face a firing squad.
This makes many suspect that this group must soon become a revolutionary force that will challenge the existing Stalinist elite and lead a popular revolution. After all, black market operators of the former communist bloc were not known for their fondness for the Communist Party. And landlord dominated states often fell victim to the rising urban bourgeoisie.
This logic may be well founded, after all party bureaucrats and black market entrepreneurs clearly see one another as parasites. For the party faithful, the new rich are people whose existence has been made possible by what the party sees as a passing but grave crisis in its otherwise perfect system of state socialism and a planned economy. For them, private entrepreneurs bring chaos and anarchy, exploiting loopholes in the perfect system and perhaps exacerbating current difficulties.
The feeling is mutual. The new rich see the party bureaucracy as a group of corrupt and indolent people, unable to do anything meaningful or productive. To them, bureaucrats are mere passive consumers of bribes and kickbacks, and specialists in racketeering and blackmail.
There is however one important feature of North Korea's society often overlooked by foreign and perhaps domestic observers. For all of their mutual distrust, party bureaucrats and the new bourgeoisie share one crucial common interest: they both have a vested interest in keeping North Korea a separate state, or, to be blunt, they both have very good reasons to oppose the idea of unification with the South.
Taking into consideration the demographic and economic gap between the two Koreas, there is good reason to believe that unification will amount to the absorption of the North by the South. If this happened, North Korea's officialdom is highly unlikely to remain in power. They will most likely be pushed aside, and some of them may be held responsible for North Korea's terrible human rights record. North Korea's bureaucrats understand this, and this is one of the reasons they are willing to do whatever it takes to maintain the status quo.
Surprisingly, North Korea's bourgeoisie is in the same boat. These people need protection from foreign competition in order to grow into a modern entrepreneurial class. A North Korean woman who is now running two corner shops and a restaurant has some chance of eventually becoming the CEO of North Korea's largest supermarket chain ― if she is smart, charismatic, power hungry, hardworking and cunning enough.
However, she can only do this as long as E-mart and Home Plus are not allowed to move into North Korea. If they were to, this woman with her meager savings would have little chance of prospering. She would consider herself lucky if her corner shops even survived the post-unification onslaught of the giants.
The same is applicable to pretty much all other members of North Korea's emerging bourgeoisie. These people need protection against possible South Korean competition, and it seems that only the continuing existence of the North Korean state may provide them with such. Thus, contrary to perceived wisdom, both the old and new North Korean elites share a core interest. Do they understand this? If so, to what extent will such an understanding influence how they treat each other?
Right now, these questions are impossible to answer, but such questions may be of singular importance for North Korea and the entire Korean Peninsula.
Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. You can reach him at anlankov@yahoo.com.
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