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Children enjoy International Children's Day, a North Korean public holiday, at Taesongsan Funfair in Pyongyang in this June 2, 2004 file photo.
/ Korea Times File |
By Andrei Lankov
One of the most common misperceptions of the Korean Left is to see North Korea as an embodiment of social equality. This indeed used to be the case in the first decade of its existence, but nowadays this perception is very far from the truth.
When the Communists took power, they brought about a hitherto unprecedented social mobility. Children of workers and farmers were recruited to positions of power while descendants of the former elite were discriminated against (they often still managed to come through, thanks to their better education). The ambitious and the gifted from among the former underdogs used these opportunities to their full extent and naturally welcomed the new system. But the problem that other grand reformers encountered reared its head in the North: once the former underdogs took power they did not necessarily act differently from their predecessors. In due time, these aging ``recruits of the revolution'' grew old and became less enthusiastic about ``affirmative actions,'' like the old elite, they wanted their children to inherit high status. This was, strictly speaking, against official ideology, which places great emphasis on an egalitarian spirit and equal opportunities, but the ideology could be quietly discarded.
So, in the USSR by the 1970s everybody knew the joke: ``Can a general's son become a Marshal? No way, a Marshal has his sons, too!'' Indeed, by around 1970 social mobility in the USSR had decreased, and the children of officials usually became officials (and also dissenting intellectuals ― a surprising number of anti-communist underground leaders were scions of bureaucrats) while workers' sons remained workers. There were exceptions to this rule, as the fate of the author, the son of a single working class mother, testifies. But these were increasingly rare exceptions.
In North Korea a similar process began very early, perhaps, earlier than in all other Communist countries. I've seen a 1950s' document in which a Russian diplomat described his conversation with Yu Song-hun, the then president of Kim Il Sun University. The man (a prominent intellectual and educator who soon afterwards ran afoul of Kim Il-sung) complained about the severe pressures on his University's admission policy. He said that there were ``queues of cars'' waiting near his office during admission period - and cars were signs of extremely high position in the North Korea of 1956. The top officials lobbied for their offspring with such persistence that precious few places were left for gifted individuals who arrived without powerful backing.
No comparative studies have been made, but it appears that North Korea was more prone to such problems than other Communist countries. Perhaps, hereditary habits at the top increased the opportunities for lesser officials to transfer their power to their children. If the Leaders' superhuman wisdom and benevolence was transferred to his son, it is only reasonable to presume that the ``revolutionary enthusiasm'' and ``unbreakable loyalty'' of his steadfast ministers and party secretaries was inherited by their children, too. The special role of social background, the notorious songbun system, also encouraged the process.
The Kim family itself is well represented in the highest reaches of power. Below Kim Il-sung's assorted relatives, there are two major groups at the helm of the North Korean state. They are known as ``people of the Paektu Mountain'' and ``people of the Naktong River.'' The first group is considered superior and includes the descendants of the guerrilla fighters who fought alongside Kim Il-sung in the 1930s. The second group consists of children of prominent military leaders who led the North Korean armies during the war. A large proportion of top officials came from one of these two groups, or at least had close connections to them (usually through marriage).
The children of the elite spend their entire lives in a world markedly different from that of humble commoners. They attend privileged schools, including the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, a boarding institution open only to the elite, and occasionally to children of national heroes. Then they go to prestigious schools, including Kim Il-sung University, from which they proceed to high-level jobs. Of course, they never have to subsist on the mix of maize and low-quality rice, which was a staple food of the masses before the Great Famine (after which conditions went from bad to worse).
North Korea has much in common with an aristocratic feudal state, where the descendants of the ruling dynasty, and those who once rode with the founding warlord, enjoy privileges as their birthright. This fact explains a lot about the elite's indifference to the suffering of the populace: after all, inhabitants of medieval castles did not care too much about the destitution of their serfs.
This system is well understood by North Korean commoners, who do not harbor many illusions about their own chances of social promotion. They despise this inequality. But I am sadly cynical: even when (I would not say ``if'' but ``when'') the current system is toppled, commoners will not get many more opportunities for social mobility. They will probably be ruled either by the same people (loudly professing a completely different set of believes), or by South Korean supervisors who are not likely to win much popularity. Indeed, the post-Kim transformation of the North will be time-consuming and painful. But that will be another story…
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