Cracks in Kim's World

The government is trying to rein in the new freewheeling spirit. Under a criminal-code revision last year, Pyongyang explicitly banned "individual commercial activities" and explicitly made it a crime to participate in real estate brokering, money lending and private hooch production. Authorities in Hoeryong last month confiscated video tapes and rounded up the families of those North Koreans who had defected and sent them to prison camps, according to refugees living in Seoul who have contacts with the North.

The risk for Kim Jong Il is that citizens with new access to radios and VCRs are learning that their miserable status is not inevitable. "Now people's minds are more open," says Park, the television trader. "They are all demanding better living standards." Dragging a color TV from China to sell in a Korean market may not be the way that revolutions normally start. But such flickers of enterprise may yet light a fire that could consume the regime. --By Donald Macintyre/ Seoul