Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (158 page)

6.
“Mass movements, exhortations, political campaigns, ‘socialistic competition,’ and the like have been widely and consistently relied upon as substitutes for
pecuniary incentives. … [T]hese movements tend to create sectoral imbalances, secondary disruptions, overambitious targets, and planning errors. Defaulting of product quality is another consequence. .Moreover, mobilization of the general populace, even if successful, would have economic limitations. Except in the areas of such highly labor-intensive projects as food processing, irrigation facilities, and construction of unpaved roads, continued substitution of labor for capital will produce, after a point, very small or near zero marginal output. Eventually, expansion in labor must be accompanied by an increased supply of capital or other inputs” (Chung,
North Korean Economy
[see chap. 6, n. 16], p. 155).

As for the use of titles and medals, “an authoritarian character has been inherent in the national character of the Korean people,” observes Prof. Koh Young-bok of Seoul National University. “The socialist version of authoritarianism is combined with the traditional base to reinforce and intensify their common authoritarianism. The titles of ‘hero’ and many other medals and honors so freely lavished upon the people contribute to breeding and furthering the authoritarian trend in north Korea” (Koh, “The Structure and Nature of North Korean Society,”
Vantage Point
[December 1979]: p. 10).

Kim’s “Chongsan-ri method” in agriculture sought to get the bureaucrats from the local level to stop shuffling papers in their offices and go out to guide the farm leaders directly. See Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea
(see chap. 2, n. 28), pp. 562, 575.

7.
Hwang Jang-yop,
Problems of Human Rights (2)
(see chap. 6, n. 104).

8.
He first used the term in a report whose main purpose was to “slander” several returnees from the Soviet Union, Lim Un alleges. “In this report, there
’were
a few points which emphasized national pride, but the basic purpose was to inspire an anti-Soviet and an exclusionism spirit”
(Founding of a Dynasty
[see chap. 2, n. 59], p. 301).

9.
Suh,
Kim Il Sung
(see chap. 2, n. 35), p. 144, and Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
pp. 624–635.

10.
Baik II, p. 3.

11.
Translated in Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
p. 660.

12.
Kim,
Two Koreas in Development,
p.
66.

13.
“As far as is known, the military spending of North Korea jumped from around 19 percent in the early 1960s to over 30 percent in 1967–71. (In 1968 it hit a high of 32.4 percent.) With the beginning of the south-north dialogue it dropped to below 20 percent” (Cha Byong-gwon, “The Financial Structure of North Korea—Its Characteristics,”
Vantage Point
[January 1979]: p. 5).

14.
Here is a South Korean explanation of how the South prospered while the North stagnated: “The wide discrepancy in the economies of south and north Korea today resulted from the phenomenal growth of the south Korean economy through successive development plans in the 1960s and 1970s, which have reached the stage of heavy and chemical industries. On the contrary, north Korea failed in its economic planning in the 1960s, lost much of its overseas market in the 1970s, brought in increased foreign capital and equipment in excess of its debt-servicing and managerial capacity and spent too much for military purposes to realize its Four .Major Military Policies. These factors combined to delay the growth of production” (Kim Chang Soon, “North Korea Today,”
Vantage Point
[March 1979]: p. 11).

15.
In an interview conducted by the author in 1992, Prof. Zhao Fengbin, a North Korea specialist at Jilin University in China, implicitly backed Pyongyang’s version. Zhao said North Korea had overemphasized its heavy industry—and as a result had fallen behind the South economically by the early 1970s—because of concern aroused by American policies in the 1960s in Cuba and Vietnam.

Hwang Jang-yop, a former Workers’ Party secretary who defected to South Korea in 1997, is quoted as having said that the Cuban Missile Crisis sparked Kim’s policy of simultaneous development of the economy and the military. “Money in your own pocket is better than money in your brother’s, and it is always best to keep one’s wallet full,” Kim said after he heard of the crisis, Hwang is said to have recalled (“Preparations for War in North Korea” in
Testimonies of North Korean Defectors: True Picture of North Korea According to a Former Workers Party Secretary
[Seoul: National Intelligence Service], an undated summary that was posted on the NIS’s Web site as of May 17, 2002, but is no longer available there).

16.
Hwang Jang-yop, quoted in “Preparations for War.”

17.
See Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
pp. 638–641. By the time he made a key October 1966 speech, “The Present Situation and the Task Confronting Our Party” the authors relate, Kim Il-sung “was dispensing criticism against
both
major Communist states in almost equal amounts, and in neither case was the criticism trivial. The attitude that one took toward US imperialist aggression in Vietnam,’ proclaimed Kim, showed whether or not one was resolutely opposed to imperialism, and whether or not one actively supported the people’s liberation struggle. … The importance Kim attached to the Vietnamese issue is manifest in the prominence given that issue in his speech, the urgent tone used in discussing it, and such passages as this: ‘If all the socialist countries assist the Vietnamese people in shattering U.S. aggression, U.S. imperialism will be doomed like the sun setting in the west and the revolutionary movements of all countries in Asia and the rest of the world will surge forward greatly. ”

18.
Wen-ko T’ung-hsün
(Gwangjou), February 15, 1968, translated and cited in Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
p. 641.

19.
A formerly top-secret 1958 update of the U.S. statement of policy on Korea includes the following three items regarding North Korea:

• “Make clear that the United States does not regard the North Korean regime as a legitimate regime.
  

• “Encourage the non-Communist states and the UN to continue to refuse to recognize the North Korean regime, and to treat it as a non-legitimate regime condemned for aggression and discourage any non-Communist political or economic intercourse with North Korea.
  

• “Encourage the people of North Korea to oppose the Communist North Korean regime and to sympathize with the Republic of Korea” (NSC 5817 [see chap. 6, n. 99], p. 491).
  

Halliday and Cumings note that the United States “maintains its toughest embargo
vis-à-vis
any state in the world on North Korea.” They argue, “This long-term attempt at isolation reflects powerful and unresolved psychological and political issues left over from the Korean war”
(Korea
[see chap. 4, n. 60], p. 216).

20.
One Yi Dynasty ruler in the seventeenth century outlawed the mining of silver and gold to reduce foreigners’ interest in intruding into the country.

21.
Izidor Urian, “The 10 Years I Spent in Pyongyang,”
Chosun Ilbo
(Seoul), January 1, 1991, translated in
Vantage Point
(January 1991): pp. 15–18. Urian’s diplomatic duties kept him in Pyongyang intermittently from 1963 until 1983. During that time he rose to the position of chargé d’affairs.

22.
“The highly publicized 1968
Pueblo
and 1969 EC-121 incidents
’were
preceded by thousands of clandestine operations and electronic surveillance missions launched from U.S. bases in Japan” (from Frank Baldwin’s introduction to
Without Parallel
[see chap. 4, n. 1], p. 24).

23.
An enlightening discussion of this and related issues may be found in McCor-mack, “Kim Country” (see chap. 3, n.
44).

24.
See Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
pp. 564, 590–595, 647–653.

25.
Ibid., pp. 596–597, 601, 609.

26.
Baldwin, “Patrolling the Empire” (see chap. 5, n. 23), p. 73, n.
66,
citing hearings held by a Senate subcommittee. Baldwin (pp. 63 ff) asserts that the North Koreans adopted a harder-line policy in response to American and South Korean initiatives. North Korea
“did
increase pressure along the Demilitarized Zone from October 1966, and encouraged subversive and guerrilla activity in the South. … Nevertheless, an objective examination of the Korean situation and the Pueblo incident indicates that North Korea was
reacting
to … U.S./South Korean provocations” (italics in original). Besides espionage gathering, those included covert North-South warfare. Baldwin gives few details on the subject of “a private, covert war between North and South Korea,” but he cites an exchange in a hearing in which Senator J. William Fulbright asked, “Have there been no raids from the South to the North? No action?” In reply, William J. Porter, ambassador to South Korea, said, “Nothing on the scale that could be called as provocative as that which, for example, the North launched in 1968 against the residence of the President of South Korea.” Later the ambassador denied that there had been any South Korean raids on the North.

27.
Baldwin (ibid.) suggests that the American use of South Korean troops in Vietnam from 1965, with the seasoning it gave those troops, brought about “a dangerous shift in the military balance in Korea” and thus was seen by Kim Il-sung as another provocation.

A Hanoi-datelined .March 29, 2000, dispatch by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said that Yonhap reporters, “in a joint search with the South Korean embassy here for evidence of North Korea’s participation in the Vietnamese war, found Wednesday a graveyard of North Korean soldiers killed in the war near here. … The graveyard, with a memorial monument erected in honor of 14 North Korean air force soldiers killed in the war, is located in Bac Giang, 60 kilometers north of the capital city. … The 14 North Korean soldiers killed in the war included 11 fighter pilots and three mechanics and included in the pilots were Ri Chang-il and Pak Tong-jun. People in Bac Giang said the North Korean soldiers fought against U.S. fighter-bombers during U.S. air raids on Hai Phong in 1967.”

Scalapino and Lee
(Communism in Korea,
p. 595) say that, for Pyongyang, using the Vietnam strategy “would require substantial preparations. A southern branch of the Party and a substantial guerrilla force would have to be built, and the north would have to be guarded against retaliation when the military pressures
upon the south mounted. In short, South Korea was not South Vietnam at this point. Kim and his generation were determined to liberate’ the south on their terms, and a full decade might be required.”

The same authors add (p.
647)
that “there is some reason to believe that the major shift in priorities undertaken in December 1962, and the new emphasis upon large-scale militarization, were directly connected with a decision that South Korea had to be liberated’ in the early 1970s at the latest. The frustration of being unable either to take advantage of Rhee’s overthrow or to prevent the subsequent military takeover undoubtedly contributed to this decision. But there was also rising concern over Japan’s potential role in Northeast Asia. Later, the increasing signs of economic growth in South Korea were to have the same effect. With respect to their public, political formula for unification, the Communists stood by their proposals at the Fourth [Workers’ Party] Congress [in 1961]. However, it was also in that Congress that Kim had called openly for the establishment of ‘a true .Marxist-Leninist Party’ in the south, and asserted emphatically that Korea would be ‘peacefully unified’ only when the Americans had been driven out of South Korea and the [Park Chung-hee] government overthrown. This, Kim certainly implied, would require a revolution, and a violent one. Thus the renewed liberation’ drive was to be conducted on the pattern of Vietnam, not the Korean War. The north would serve as a training and infiltration base while a revolutionary movement was constructed in the south. Only when that movement had become strong would further steps be taken, combinations of legal and illegal action, as well as guerrilla warfare. At this later stage, North Korea could determine its role in accordance with the circumstances, supposedly secure in the knowledge that its internal defenses were impregnable.”

28.
Biographer Robert A. Caro quotes Johnson as having made the comment to an unnamed
Time
correspondent on January 22, 1968 (Caro, “The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson,”
The New Yorker,
April 1, 2002). (The rest of the quotation, which Caro used to illustrate Johnson’s ambivalence on racial issues: “It is just like you driving home at night and you come up to a stoplight, and there’s some nigger there bumping you and scraping you.”)

29.
See Trevor Armbrister,
A Matter of Accountability: The True Story of the Pueblo Affair
(London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970). For the basic account of events of January 21–23, including the Blue House raid and the capture of the
Pueblo,
see pt. 1, pp. 3–78. Reference to the
Chesapeake
is on p. 350. Armbrister covered the case as a journalist and interviewed a great many of the participants. Commander Bucher and his second in command also published, separately, their own memoirs.