Daniel Tudor - North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors

Thanks and Acknowledgments

Many wonderful people were kind enough to share their time and insight with us during the writing of this book. Unfortunately, some of them would get into trouble if we thanked them for that here. But those who we can thank publicly are, in no particular order:

Michael Madden, Shirley Lee, Sokeel Park, Jang Jin-sung, Andrei Lankov, Chris Green, Matthew Reichel, Curtis Melvin, Simon Cockerell, Andray Abrahamian, Monique Macias,

Those who we have not thanked above, you know who you are, thank you.

Also the authors wish to thank the following friends, coworkers, and relatives who provided support or tolerated canceled appointments and the like, or who are just nice people to whom we wish to express our appreciation.

Daniels thanks: Mum and Dad (and all my family), Kang Kyung-nam, Kang Se-ree, Ku Min-jeong, Kim Bo-yeon, Yoo Je-hoon, Ku Young-shik, Chun Su-jin, Kim Jong-hyuk, Lee Seung-yoon, Jung Young-sun, The LFG family, Kim Namhoon, Lee Yoon-hee, Yoon Sun-oo, Kim Yong-moon, Han Sang-hyuk, Lee Ji-eun, Sung Ki-wan, Song Jeong-hwa, Moon Jung-hee, Park Soo-jin, The Korean, Tom Coyner, Lee Jaewoong, Lee Seong-hee, Sohn Mi-na, Song Ji-na, Bobby McGill, Yang Sung-hoo, Kim Hee-yoon, staff and patrons of The Booth (our fine craft beer establishment!), David Maltby, Kwon Yong-ho, Andrew Barbour, David Chance, Naomi Rovnick, Tyler Cowen, Michael Freeman, Ryan Anderton, Geoffrey Cain, Jung Yoon-sun, Park Jae-uk, Lee Seul, Lee Yoojin, Lee You-kyung, Chris Backe, Kang Jeong-im, Ji Bae and family, Zachi Schor, Guy Biran, Cho Young-sang, Andrew Salmon, Cho Sung-moon, Pyo Chul-min, Heo Eun-sun, David Pilling, Lin Lin, Krys Lee, Kieran Ridge, Hannah Bae, Darren Long, Chico Harlan, Bill Miller, Antti Hellgren, Robert Koehler, Ambassador Vishnu Prakash, Dennis Vartan,

James thanks: Mum, Dad, and the extended Pearson-Mantle family and friends; Hyojin Kim; Doris Carding; David Chance, and the Reuters Seoul Bureau, especially colleagues Jack Kim and Ju-min Park, and Darren Schuettler and Sebastian Tong in Singapore; the Department of East Asian Studies at Cambridge especially John Swenson-Wright, Mike Shin, and Barack Kushner; Korea and China folk at SOAS especially Jim Hoare, Michel Hockx, Xuan Li, Jaehee Cho, Jae Hoon Yeon and Kyung Eun Lee; all at the British Association of Korean Studies, and the British Korean Veterans Association; the Korea Foundation in Seoul; at NK News Chad OCarroll and Gianlucca Spezza; a special mention to Simon Cockerell, Curtis Melvin, Sokeel Park, Michael Madden, and old friends near and far of whom there are far too many to mention.

The following English language sources were invaluable to us. The keen reader may note that they collectively represent a wide range of the ideological spectrum on North Korea analysis, but all individually possess very strong merits, and thus we recommend them for anyone seeking to know more about how North Korea works:

Books & Publications

Collins, Robert. Marked for Life: Songbun (2012)

Cumings, Bruce. Koreas Place in the Sun (2005)

Haggard, Stephan & Noland, Marcus. Famine in North Korea (2009)

Jang, Jin-sung. Dear Leader (2014)

Kang, Hyok. This is Paradise! (2007)

Kretchun, Nat & Jane Kim. A Quiet Opening: North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment, InterMedia (2012)

Lankov, Andrei. North of the DMZ (2007)

Martin, Bradley K. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader (2004)

McEachern, Patrick. Inside the Red Box: North Koreas Post-totalitarian Politics (2011)

Myers, B.R. The Cleanest Race (2011)

Websites

38 North website (38north.org)

Daily NK website (dailynk.com)

New Focus International website (newfocusintl.com)

NK Economy Watch (nkeconwatch.com)

NK Leadership Watch blog (nkleadershipwatch.wordpress.com)

NK News website (nknews.org)

North Korea Tech (northkoreatech.org)

Rimjin-gang/ASIAPRESS (asiapress.org/rimjingang/English)

Sino-NK (sino-nk.com)

Both authors also tweet about North Korea:

Daniel Tudor @danielrtudor

James Pearson @pearswick

A note on the romanization of Korean

North and South Korea differ on the romanization of Korean. Where possible, the authors have used North Korean convention in the romanization of North Korean names, places or concepts. South Korean convention is used for South Korean names and places, and for expressing spoken sentences in Korean. So Kim Jong Un (not Kim Jeong-eun) lives in Pyongyang (not Pyeongyang).

Chapter 1

The North Korean Markets:
How They Work, Where They Are, and How Much Things Cost

C ommunist, and collectivized are utterly outdated labels for a North Korean economy that now heavily relies on thriving, person-to-person market exchanges in which individuals buy and sell private property for the purpose of generating profit. Private trade has become so prevalent in recent years that it permeates all levels of society, from the poorest through to the Party and military elites. But as with sex in Victorian Britain, there is a double standard with capitalism in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK): while everybody does it, few publicly admit to its existence.

Though markets in some form have always existed in the DPRK, the declining official role of the state in economic activity means that private trade has never been as widespreador necessaryas it is today. The reason for this is simple: the state can no longer provide for the people in the way it once could.

As we shall see, the horrific famine of the mid-1990s was the turning point. Regular, government-supplied food rations all but disappeared during this period, and never fully returned. The lesson that survivors took from this experience was one of self-reliancenot the self-reliance of Juche ideology, but rather self-reliance through by-hook-or-by-crook capitalism. Private property and private trade remain illegal, but for post-famine North Korea, there is but one real economic rule: dont follow the rules. Sixty-two percent of defectors surveyed in 2010 stated that they had engaged in work other than their official jobs before leaving North Korea, and a thriving gray market that uses unofficial currency exchange rates is now the de facto way of setting prices, even for the elite.

The Breakdown of the System

From the foundation of the DPRK in the 1940s, North Korea was almost food self-sufficient for many years. Under the Public Distribution System (PDS), farmers turned over a majority of their harvest to the government, which then redistributed it to the wider population. During the earlier and middle years of Kim Il Sungs rule North Koreans were not wealthy, but they at least did not starve en masse. Older Chinese living near the DPRK border have been known to remark that they envied the living standards of North Koreans in the 1960s and 1970s.

The North Korean economy, in fact, performed quite well throughout the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. The Norths command economy was stronger than the Souths state-capitalist model on a GDP per capita basis until around 1973. This was partly due to historical circumstance: due to its proximity to Manchuria and China, the colonizing Japanese (19101945) had elected to industrialize the northern part of Korea, whilst using the south as an agrarian breadbasket. Thus, the North had a head start over the South in the form of superior infrastructure. This, combined with a general fervor to rebuild a battered and divided nation, helped drive the North Korean economy in those early years.