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It was just another research interview of the type I have experienced more or less every week for years.
A North Korean woman in her early thirties was talking about her (and her parents) frantic search for a suitable husband in North Korea during the early 2000s. The North Korean woman said with disappointment, "My parents would have liked me to marry a guy from the secret police, but our social background was not good enough for me to attract such an individual."
This remark is actually quite typical. One of the most striking features of the average North Korean defector is the remarkable lack of hostility they show toward the North Korean state in general and its repressive system in particular.
This is clearly not applicable to politically active refugees, who are frequently featured in the media. However, the politically motivated constitute a small fraction of the 24,000 strong refugee community in Seoul.
The average refugee is apolitical and rather different. Around three-quarters of defectors are women and they harbor few illusions about the system. Officials are seen as greedy and corrupt and it is universally understood that there are few avenues of upward social mobility for the average person.
Yet this seldom becomes active or even passive opposition to the system itself. Female refugees often speak of how they once dreamed of marrying party officials or secret police officers ― and envied friends who managed to be accepted into men from such powerful families. Men often say that their dream was to join the party because this is the only way to move up the social ladder (unless you are born in this position). Neither men nor women express much ambiguity or remorse about such career expectations ― even after coming to South Korea.
There seems to be surprisingly little hidden dissent and even passive rejection of the system in North Korea nowadays.
To an extent, such a docile attitude can be explained by history and politics. Before the introduction of the Stalinist system in 1945-1948, North Korea was not a flourishing democracy. Rather it first was a conservative aristocratic society, and then became a colony of a foreign country.
Additionally, the self-imposed isolation policy ― another idiosyncratic feature of the North Korean state ― also plays a role in maintaining the attitudes described above. People have been kept ignorant about the outside world and therefore cannot learn about the existence of attractive alternatives to their impoverished and regimented lifestyles.
The absence (or near absence) of opposition-minded intellectuals is also important. Both in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, critical thinking survived among a large and influential intelligentsia, whose existence was tolerated by the ruling regimes. This is not the case in North Korea where even closet dissent has been deadly risky for decades and where intellectuals are much less influential socially.
That said, these historical explanations are purely of academic significance. What we must realise is that the average North Korean usually does not perceive his/her life as a hellhole existence. He or she does not see a viable alternative to the present system, and hence is willing to accept it, however grudgingly.
It seems that the vast majority of North Koreans do not perceive the Kim family regime as an obstacle to be removed; rather their attitude to the state is comparable to that of someone's attitude toward bad weather. Harsh conditions are not something to be changed, but merely a thing to be grudgingly accepted or when possible, adjusted to (say, by dressing properly).
Of course, one should not read too much into the obvious docility of North Korea's silent majority, since history has demonstrated that people can be politicized very quickly. After all, there were many enthusiastic participants in massive pro-government rallies in Russia in 1914, which marked the outbreak of the First World War and the popular enthusiasm for the Tsar and Tsarina. Many of these people joined communist forces only four years later. Thus, things might change really fast.
Nonetheless, one should not see all North Koreans ― or even the majority of them ― as closet dissenters. Most of them, I would dare to say, are people who do their best to live normal lives in a rather abnormal situation, and who also sometimes might be rather opportunistic in their pursuit of a little individual happiness.
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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