Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

(A statistic one often sees quoted is that the economic disparity between the Koreas is at least four times greater than that between East and West Germany at the time of German reunification in 1990.)

For the 1,300 years prior to the Japanese occupation, Korea had been a unified country governed by the Chosun dynasty, one of the longest-lived monarchies in world history.

Before the Chosun dynasty, there were three kingdoms vying for power on the peninsula. Political schisms tended to run north to south, the east gravitating naturally toward Japan and the west to China. The bifurcation between north and south was an entirely foreign creation, cooked up in Washington and stamped on the Koreans without any input from them.

In 1948, the Republic of Korea was created under the leadership of the seventy-year-old Syngman Rhee, a crusty conservative with a PhD from Princeton. Kim Il-sung, an anti-Japanese resistance fighter backed by Moscow, quickly followed suit by declaring his state the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—North Korea.

line along the 38th parallel would solidify into a 155-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide thicket of concertina wire, tank traps, trenches, embankments, moats, artillery pieces, and land mines.

Before dawn on Sunday morning, June 25, 1950, Kim Il-sung’s troops stormed across the border with Soviet-supplied tanks. They quickly captured Seoul and swept southward until all that was left of South Korea was a pocket around the southeastern coastal city of Pusan.

The daring amphibious landing at Incheon of forty thousand U.S. troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur in September reversed the Communist gains.

As they approached the Yalu River, however, Chinese Communist forces entered the war and pushed them back. Two more years of fighting produced only frustration and stalemate.

By the time an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, nearly three million people were dead and the peninsula lay in ruins.

The chaos of the war years had thoroughly mixed the Korean population. Fearing persecution by the Communists, tens of thousands of Koreans from north of the 38th parallel had fled south—among them landlords, businessmen, Christian clergymen, and Japanese collaborators. A smaller number of Communist sympathizers fled north. Countless others with no political agenda were simply pushed up or down as they fled the fighting.

Kim Il-sung took the least humane elements of Confucianism and combined them with Stalinism. At the top of the pyramid, instead of an emperor, resided Kim Il-sung and his family. From there began a downward progression of fifty-one categories that were lumped into three broad classes—the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class.

Japanese Koreans, who were known as kitachosenjin, after the Japanese term for North Korea, Kita Chosen, lived in a world apart. They had distinctive accents and tended to marry one another. Although they were far from rich by Japanese standards, they were wealthy compared with ordinary North Koreans.

But Kim Il-sung rejected traditional Communist teachings about universalism and internationalism. He was a Korean nationalist in the extreme. He instructed Koreans that they were special—almost a chosen people—and

the Ministry for the Protection of State Security. This ominously named agency is effectively North Korea’s political police. It runs an extensive network of informers. By the accounts of defectors, there is at least one informer for every fifty people—more even than East Germany’s notorious Stasi, whose files were pried open after German reunification.

North Korea was (and remains as of this writing in 2009) the last place on earth where virtually everything is grown on collective farms. The state confiscates the entire harvest and then gives a portion back to the farmer.

Dr. Kim’s frustration spilled out into the open in 1993 when she had her first serious clash with hospital management. She had been asked to treat a twenty-seven-year-old man who had been convicted of an economic crime—meaning he’d been engaged in private business. He had served three years of a seven-year term before he was transferred from prison to the hospital. He was bruised and badly malnourished, his ribs protruding. He suffered from acute bronchitis. She wanted to give him an antibiotic. Her boss overruled her. “He’s a convict. Let’s save the antibiotic for someone else,” he told Dr. Kim. Dr. Kim was furious. “He’s been admitted to the hospital. A patient is a patient. We can save him. He will die without it,” she snapped back.

But North Korea’s Great Leader picked a convenient time to die, one that would prevent his legacy from being tarnished by the catastrophic events of the coming years. Had he lived a moment longer, North Koreans today would not be able to look back with nostalgia at the relative plenty they had enjoyed during his lifetime. His passing coincided with the last gasps of his Communist dream.

BY 1998, AN ESTIMATED 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans had died as a result of the famine, as much as 10 percent of the population.

THE BORDER BETWEEN China and North Korea extends for 850 miles along two rivers, both originating at the dormant volcano known as Mount Paektu to the Koreans and Mount Changbai to the Chinese.

kwanliso— which translates as “control and management places.” These are in fact a colony of labor camps that stretch for miles in the northernmost mountains of the country. Satellite intelligence suggests they house up to 200,000 people. Emulating the Soviet gulag, Kim Il-sung set up the camps shortly after taking power to sweep aside anybody who might challenge his authority. Rival politicians, descendants of landlords or Japanese collaborators, Christian clergymen.

But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

ARTICLE III OF its constitution, South Korea holds itself out as the rightful government of the entire Korean peninsula, which means that all of its people—including North Koreans—are automatically citizens. The right of North Koreans to citizenship was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1996. The reality, however, is more complicated. In order to exercise the right of citizenship, North Koreans must get to South Korea by their own volition. A North Korean cannot demand the right at the South Korean embassy in Beijing or at one of the various consular offices. Out of residual loyalty to its Communist ally and also to prevent millions of North Koreans from streaming across the border, China will not permit asylum seekers to present themselves at these diplomatic offices. The Chinese are aware that an exodus of East German defectors through Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1989 forced the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German government.

South Korea’s per capita income of roughly $20,000 per year is fourteen to fifty times greater than North Korea’s.

While most North Koreans are unaware of the existence of the Internet, South Korea has a higher percentage of homes on broadband than do the United States, Japan, and most of Europe. North Korea has been frozen culturally and economically for the last half century. Their languages are no longer the same; the South Korean version is now peppered with words borrowed from English. Physically, too, the people have grown apart. The average South Korean seventeen-year-old male, fed on milk shakes and hamburgers, is five inches taller than his North Korean counterpart. North Koreans talk and eat like South Koreans did in the 1960s.

The most Christian country in Asia after the Philippines, South Korea sends missionaries spreading the gospel and dispensing humanitarian aid throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

if North Koreans managed to sneak across the Chinese border into Mongolia, they would be arrested by Mongolian border police and turned over to be deported—to South Korea. Getting arrested in Mongolia was in essence a free plane ticket to Seoul.

Upon his father’s death, Kim Jong-un had become the world’s youngest head of state, plucked from obscurity to perpetuate the Kim dynasty. The third of Kim Jong-il’s confirmed sons, he was a dark horse to assume the leadership. As a child, he had attended middle school in Bern, Switzerland, disguised as the son of a diplomat in the North Korean embassy.