Tech fetishism in N. Korea

By Andrei Lankov

A few weeks ago, I witnessed a discussion between a prominent historian and a young leftist with moderate pro-North Korean sympathies.

The young firebrand said that North Korea ''clearly wants to change things, they are sending engineers to study overseas." The historian was quick to retort that ''it is clear that they do not want to reform, precisely because they sent people overseas to study engineering, not finance, management or economics."

Indeed, the North Korean government (and, for that matter, many other Leninist regimes worldwide) share a peculiar feature which for want of a better word I would describe as ''technological fetishism." They believed ― and in North Korea's case still believe ― that all of their social and economic problems can be solved through the acquisition of the right technology.

From a classical Marxist point of view, such an attitude is naive. Both Marx and his disciples never tired of emphasizing the significance of social structures and stressed that no amount of technology can make up for a deficient social structure. However, these ideas are lost on people who in many other regards position themselves as faithful followers of Karl Marx.

This contradiction is all too understandable in many regards. Russian and Chinese disciples of the great German philosopher, when in power, were all too cognizant of the economic deficiencies of their respective countries. They knew that their system did not work as intended.

For outsiders (including authentic Marxists), it was quite clear that the major reason for these problems was a seriously distorted social structure, bad pricing mechanisms and a lack of economic incentives.

But this could not be admitted by the top Communist decision-makers themselves. Their system was supposed to be perfect, and anyone who doubts its infallibility is a criminal element. Therefore, they were instead drawn to technological miracles as a way of getting out of the economic crisis they faced.

Mao's China saw a great number of crazy technological experiments. In the late 1950s, the Chinese government tried to dramatically increase agricultural productivity by increasing the amount of seeds planted in the same field (the notorious ''close cropping"), and also by trying to annihilate the entire sparrow population of the country. Neither scheme worked and the result of such efforts was not a bumper harvest but famine.

The Soviet Union also had its dreams of technological miracles. In the 1940s, Stalin pinned hopes on re-forestation. Khrushchev believed that agricultural output would be dramatically increased by the introduction of corn, which he saw as a wonder plant. Brezhnev ― arguably, the most realistic of late Soviet leaders ― still believed in Computer Numerical Control (CNC).

None of the above-mentioned technologies were useless but none of them were anywhere near as economically significant as the respective Soviet leaders hoped they would be. Without structural reform, their impact was quite limited.

Technological fetishism has reached its logical extreme in North Korea, where all talk of social reform has remained taboo for decades. Kim Il-sung placed great faith in terraced fields and the intense application of fertilizer. Both policies contributed to economic disaster in the late 1990s. Terraced fields were washed away by torrential rains in 1995-96 and the sudden halt of Soviet subsidies led to a dramatic drop in fertilizer production.

Kim Jong-il believed in computers. It is not widely known but since the 1990s the North Korean government has gone to great lengths to popularize computer technology. They even at one point used mock computers with wooden keyboards to teach rural children some basics of information technology and data input (now, a computer or two can be found even in remote village schools in the North). Obviously Kim Jong-il believed that the wonder technology he so desired was somehow connected with computers or information technology.

The rise of his son Kim Jong-un was marked by an intense propaganda campaign about the greatness of CNC. Ironically, the present author witnessed a very similar campaign some 35 years ago in the Soviet Union of the mid-1970s, where CNC was also seen as a possible panacea.

Perhaps we should thank North Korea's decision-makers for their stubborn naivety. Their misplaced belief in the miraculous powers of technology ensures that computers (and mobile phones, too) are remarkably common in North Korea ― even though these contraptions are rather dangerous for the regime's stability.

Nonetheless, the historian I mentioned at the top of this piece seems to be right. When North Korea's leadership starts sending economic managers and bank specialists overseas, we can take this as a sign that they are serious about structural change. For now though, they continue to send engineers whose task is to search for some technological treasure trove, which unfortunately does not exist.

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.