COVER STORY Northern Exposure
North Korea is a monolithic black box to the rest of the world, but stress cracks can be seen in the aspiring nuclear power
Twilight Time for the Sunshine Policy
Will President Kim Dae Jung's signature engagement strategy, the "Sunshine Policy," be displaced by a "Nuclear Winter Policy"?
Look Who's Got The Bomb
Confronted by the U.S., North Korea brazenly admits it's building nukes. Now what does President Bush do? (October 28, 2002)
The Hermit Kingdom's Bizarre SAR
Having failed to build a communist utopia, North Korea plans to create a capitalist one with its own elected officials and a wall to keep out the riffraff (October 7, 2002)
Accounted for, at Last
North Korea admits it abducted Japanese citizens to help train its spies and says some are still alive (September 30, 2002)
Northern Exposure — page 3
Pyongyang isn't quite a worker's paradise, but for people like Li (a pseudonym), life there can be quite pleasant. Fashionably dressed and carefully coiffed, she is the kind of hip twentysomething single you might see on the streets of Seoul. She's even had her eyelids tucked Western-style, a popular form of cosmetic surgery in the capital. She uses eye shadow from South Korea, watches Western and South Korean movies on her VCD player and enjoys dining out, although she complains that the restaurants charge expensive prices in dollars these days. Speaking with a foreigner over dinner in China where she spends part of her time, she complains constantly about the quality of the food even as she's wolfing it down. Asked if she knows how people live in the North's provinces, she says she avoids leaving Pyongyang when in her home country. "I hate spending money where it is so boring," says Li. "There is no culture there. They eat and sleep. They live like pigs."
But Li's friend, who is wearing a vinyl windbreaker—a trendy item in Pyongyang right now—says many citizens, even those living in the capital, face hardship. Top Party and military officials still get government handouts of meat and eggs and other rations. Most people, however, stopped receiving these perks 20 years ago, she says. The average worker's wages went up from 66¢ to $11 a month recently, but now everything from utilities to kindergarten fees is no longer free. Prices for food and household goods are 30 times higher than before the reforms. "People feel nervous and off-balance," she says. "Life is more difficult."
North Korea has always been a class-conscious society. In the late 1960s, the government categorized all individuals by their songbun (background) and graded them according to their political reliability, says Helen-Louise Hunter, a former North Korea analyst for the cia. About a third of the population were considered loyal communists—with a little work they could land plum jobs reserved for the élite. Another third or so were considered fairly reliable and could move up in society with a little luck. The bottom third—the deposed, prerevolution privileged class and their descendants—were barred from university and the army, and were usually assigned to collective farms or factories. Party apparatchiks even had an informal terminology for their communist-style apartheid. The die-hard believers were "tomatoes": red to the core. Those in the broad middle class were "apples": red on the outside but in need of a little ideological buffing. People in the pariah class were called "grapes": no red in them at all.
While color coding was abandoned in the 1980s, songbun still rules. When a newborn is registered, files on his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are attached to his record, according to a North Korean doctor now living in Seoul. But there are fewer tomatoes and a lot more apples and grapes these days, say North Korea watchers and defectors in Seoul with contacts in the North. Kim has a different kind of family background problem. He comes from the right one, of course. But he has never commanded as much respect as his father, Kim II Sung, did. The Great Leader fought the Japanese during the colonial period, founded North Korea with Soviet help, and is still the official President even though he died in 1994. His son merely inherited the top position. He consolidated his hold on power by currying favor with the military and promoting scores of officers loyal to him.
But to run a dictatorship you need to be able to keep your people ignorant—blissfully so. These days, it isn't just the élite in Pyongyang that has access to the outside world. Chinese Koreans are bringing in cell phones and leaving them with North Korean relatives living near enough to China to piggyback their calls on the mainland cellular network. North Koreans are watching South Korean TV in China, then going back into the country and spreading the word about life on the outside. The regime's propaganda machine used to claim that South Koreans were beggars living under the oppressive heel of capitalists and American imperialists. These days, North Koreans know South Koreans and Chinese are rich. Many dream of escaping to those countries, says Yu Jong San, a defector who arrived in Seoul earlier this year. "Seventy percent of North Koreans know what is going on outside (their) country. They aren't brainwashed robots anymore."
Defector Choi says even an average person can buy goods smuggled in from the South and Japan, at least if they act before merchandise sells out. She doesn't have a VCD player, but she watches banned Western movies at the house of a family friend who is among the 1 in 70 households with such equipment. She can't understand the English dialogue, but a university student is usually around to translate. Choi admits to being moved by what she sees. "All human beings feel the same way," she says. "When we see people enjoying a high standard of living, of course we want to live like them too."
