Insightful new book on N. Korea
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By Andrew Salmon
Having covered the Koreas for more than a decade, I am often exasperated by the stories editors demand about the sad state lying 35 miles north of my office.
Like many Seoul correspondents, I find myself filing endless pieces about nuclear weapons, strategic missiles and speculation about the Kims, spiced with silly (and usually fictitious) rumors ― traitors being eaten alive by dogs, dictators scoring holes in one, etc.
Still, we have it better than journalists who spend big to "report” from Pyongyang: Their articles tend to be as informative as tourists’ blogs.
Books about North Korea broadly fall into two categories. One attempts to pierce the opacity surrounding the Kim’s secretive leadership; the other is the defector memoir.
The problem with the first is that it is virtually impossible to write definitively about the regime’s inner workings. The problem with the second is that with defector numbers in the South representing around 0.01 percent of the North’s population, their recollections are hardly representative samples of North Korean life experiences.
So, precious little reporting or authorship paints a picture of the Kimdom’s average Kim, Park or Lee. Meanwhile, arguably the biggest, most underreported story in modern Asia is the "new North Korea.”
Pressured by the fall of European communism and the murderous famines of the mid-1990s, North Korea’s socialist state distribution system imploded. Desperate North Koreans turned to trade ― cross-border and internal ― to survive.
The resultant market infrastructure, culture and practices outlived the famines and today, de facto if not de jure, has transformed North Korea’s economy and continues to impact its society. Alas, this is little known overseas. Instead, everyone from presidents on down prefer to focus on the leadership, strategic weapons and human rights abuses of the supposedly "communist” or "Stalinist” state.
Hence a new book, "North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors” by Seoul-based reporter James Pearson and ex-Seoul-based reporter Daniel Tudor is timely and important: This work probes deeply into North Koreans’ real lives and livelihoods.
As a journalist, I am familiar with what they outline on the macro level: the rise of a market economy; the breach in the state information dyke that has allowed DVDs and thumb drives loaded with South Korean and U.S. pop culture to flood in; and the nationwide corruption that lubricates transactions and overrides laws.
So, I was happily surprised to learn much I did not know on the micro level. Some examples: Earrings were banned until 2010. Blue jeans are not permissible; black jeans may be. Due to power shortages, low floors are more desirable than high ones in Pyongyang apartments. TV repairmen, who modify sets to receive outside broadcasts, make an enviable living.
More? Pyongyang is still not connected by road to all its provinces. Trains are where transient North Koreans speak frankly. North Koreans praise South Korean TV soaps for their "realism” (which says everything about the credibility of North Korea’s state media).
And discussing Pyongyang’s cosmetic surgery fad, the authors nicely sum up the new North Korea: ``It is illegal; it is informal; it corresponds to basic human needs; and it is 100 percent capitalist.”
Although they do delve into dark matters beloved of editors ― the North Korean penal system and the shadowy "Organization and Guidance Department” (which may or may not counterbalance Kim Jong-un’s executive power) are discussed; they even reveal a secret radio station in western Seoul broadcasting codes to Southern spies up North ― the strength of their work is its illumination of North Korean capitalism.
It is not perfect. The lack of basic, introductory chapters on North Korea, the Korean War and the Kims place it beyond the ken of the average reader, and it could be better referenced: The words "reportedly” and "apparently” are endlessly repeated.
Still, the authors ― Pearson, who speaks Chinese and Korean and who nearly became a spook for the Royal Navy, and Tudor whose ``Korea: The Impossible Country” may be the best-selling non-fiction tome on Korea ― have delivered a potentially game-changing read.
Global policies focus on Pyongyang’s ossified polity ― perhaps explaining why the North Korean problem remains so intractable. However, North Korea’s economy and society are awash with change, and here ― policymakers take note! ― is where vulnerabilities and opportunities lie. Pearson and Tudor’s dissection of these transformations is long overdue, narrated in plain, unadorned prose. The authors’ matter-of-fact style, however, in no ways detracts from their fascinating findings.
This book will force many to question the outdated, sensational and often plain-bloody-wrong ``conventional wisdom” about the Kimdom. For wonks, pundits and Asian watchers, ``North Korea Confidential” offers an important look inside the "new North Korea.”
Buy it before the CIA purchases the entire print run.
Andrew Salmon is a Seoul-based reporter and author. Reach him at andrewcsalmon@yahoo.co.uk.