Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

It is baffling how a nation of 23 million people can appear as vacant as the oceans. North Korea is simply a blank.

North Korea’s defense budget eats up 25 percent of its gross national product—as opposed to an average of less than 5 percent for industrialized countries. Although there had been no fighting in Korea since 1953, the country kept one million men under arms, giving this tiny country, no bigger than Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest military in the world.

Among the millions of North Koreans who took part in the mass display of grief for Kim Il-sung, how many were faking? Were they crying for the death of the Great Leader or for themselves? Or were they crying because everybody else was? If there is one lesson taught by scholars of mass behavior, from the historians of the Salem witch hunts to Charles Mackay, author of the classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, hysteria is infectious. In the middle of a crowd of crying people, the only natural human reaction is to cry oneself.

It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic.

By some estimates, three quarters of the roughly 100,000 North Korean refugees living in China are women and more than half of them live in arranged unions with Chinese men. Stories abound of those who were beaten, raped, held in chains, or worked like slaves.

When denied nutrition, the body directs its resources toward the head and torso at the expense of the limbs. In famine literature, the syndrome is called “stunting.” A 2003 study by the World Food Programme and UNICEF found that 42 percent of North Korean children were permanently damaged in this way.