Choco Pie Revolution

Fictional account of North Korea 9 months after Gaeseong Industrial Complex Closure

By Oh Young-jin

President Park Geun-hye was watching YTN coverage of a CNN feed about a North Korean refugee crisis along the border near the Chinese city of Dandong.

Outside, it was snowing, unusual for early November. A couple of hours ago, she talked to the nation of her decision to accommodate North Koreans crossing the Demilitarized Zone in an orderly manner. She was told that there was a coup in Pyongyang, in which North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un was “incapacitated.” A junta was taking over. An effort to establish a contact with the new leadership in Pyongyang was under way.

She was planning to speak with U.S. President Barack Obama and President-elect Hillary Clinton as well as Japan’s new Prime Minister Yuriko Koike, former defense minister under Shinzo Abe. She briefly felt amused to think of the best example of women empowerment.

South Korean businesses have pulled out of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex, the inter-Korean economic cooperation project, in retailation to Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile tests. The picture shows a convoy of cars heading home through a border checkpoint in Paju, northern Gyeonggi Province. / Yonhap

Already, Park talked to Chinese President Xi Jinping, making clear her opposition to the entry of People’s Liberation Army into the North, asking Xi not to treat the refugees harshly.

The two’s relationship has improved since their spat earlier this year over Xi’s failure to back her for tougher U.N. sanctions against the North after its alleged H-bomb and long-range ballistic missile tests.

Then, remembering what triggered the collapse of the North, she couldn’t help feeling a great sense of irony. It all came down to Chocho Pie, a snack cake, weighing less than 40 grams per pop, made of marshmallow inside and a chocolate layer outside and, more preciously to sugar it provided for about 50,000 North Korean workers and, by extension, 200,000 residents in Gaeseong, the border city where a South-North industrial park was located.

Two big confectionary firms ― Orion and Lotte ― sold up to 6 million Choco Pie to North Korean workers per month or 120 per worker. The North Korean authorities made their own versions, “Choco Pi,” and provided them for the workers in 2013, unilaterally terminating the contracts for being too expensive. The workers liked the South Korean snacks but managed to live with their own products not out of patriotism but because of their addiction to sugar.

Three months after the closure, the Gaeseong residents ran out of their hidden supplies of Orion and Lotte Choco Pies and rations of the government-issued ones also came to a complete stop. They tried to get hold of anything sweet in black markets by using their stashes of cash squirreled away from wages they received while working for South Korean factories. This didn’t last long.

The tougher their life became, the stronger their craving for sugar, the memories of things South Korean.

Then, harassment from soldiers made their life more miserable. The North Korean People’s Army moved its 6th, 64th Divisions and 62nd Artillery Brigade back into the site of the industrial park, with its commanders demanding the city residents cough up protection money, while pillaging machinery from the factories.

Many of the Gaeseong residents were also branded as reactionaries just because of their history

of working for South Korean companies.

They couldn’t reconcile themselves with the reality that all of a sudden, the entire city virtually became jobless. More than 50,000 breadwinners were left without work, their earnings, about $100 million per year, were gone. Although the Workers Party took most, they were still happy to have the leftovers. The party treated them as patriots who made hard currency for the impoverished fatherland with some of it used for missile and nuclear development.

When their dissatisfaction came to a boil, some of the residents were executed in public for their ideological corruption. It was hard to know who started but people collectively chanted in defiance, “Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men … It is the music of people who will never be slaves again.” The rebellion spread throughout the city and many were slaughtered by the troops brought in to quell them but the soldiers became sympathetic and turned their guns away from them.

The unrest was spreading from city to city but, although it didn’t reach Pyongyang, the young North Korean leader panicked. It was hard to make heads and tails out of what happened to him. Unconfirmed intelligence had it that in one of his many hideaways, he was assassinated by a close lieutenant. The assassin claimed that he followed the late Kim Jong-il’s instructions that even his son should be killed if he deviated from the North’s founding “juche” or self-reliance thought. A conflicting account was that it was the work of a U.S. drone.

President Park felt tempted to ask Hillary Clinton when they talked over the phone but was distracted when it came across her mind what could have happened if she had not decided to close Gaeseong. Critics claimed that $100 million the North got from the South for the operations there accounted for very little in the North’s overall foreign currency income, but she knew that any amount of money was insignificant to the impoverished country.

She couldn’t settle for such a sense of vindication because she had to deal with the new regime in the North, for starters.

Oh Young-jin is The Korea Times’ chief editorial writer and can be contacted at foolsdie5@ktimes.com.