Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (34 page)

Journeys outside Pyongyang—chaperoned journeys, always—revealed towns and small cities, each a miniature Pyongyang, the men neatly dressed in Western-style suits or in Mao suits with Lenin caps, the women often garbed in the colorful Korean traditional dresses, the children marching to or from school in the uniforms of the children’s corps. In the countryside I passed neat rice paddies, vegetable fields and orchards lined with irrigation canals, the trucks and tractors greatly outnumbering the bullock-pulled carts and plows, the farmers housed in substantial-looking apartment complexes or clusters of tile-roofed, masonry-walled houses. I was told that 560,000 dwelling units had been built at state expense for farmers.

One day early in the rice-planting season my handlers took me to Chonsam-ri, a cooperative farm near the east coast port of Wonsan. At dusk I came upon scenes that might have made a nice poster to promote socialist agricultural policies. The glistening water atop the knee-deep mud of the farm’s paddies showed reflections of the conical, orchard-topped hills punctuating the plain. A man wearing a Lenin cap piloted a chugging rice-planting machine across one of the paddies. Two kerchiefed women, perched
on the back, fed seedlings into the device, which plopped them, upright and evenly spaced, into the fertilized and smoothed ooze. Two helpers slogged along.

Beyond a stone-banked irrigation canal and a narrow road bordering it, kindergarten children sang and danced to the accompaniment of a pump organ played by a woman teacher. In the nursery next door, toddlers chanted in unison the name of the place where Kim Il-sung was born, Mangyongdae. Otherwise, there was little activity and there were few sounds. Most of the five hundred or so adults who did the farming work were nowhere to be seen. The children, it was said, had stayed late so that they could perform for me.

Perhaps the farmers had retreated into their tile-roofed houses to leave the sensitive contact with the foreigner to ideologically sound and reliable colleagues. Could it have been that enthusiasm for the collectivization of farming was not yet universal among its practitioners? But there was a more mundane, less conspiratorial possibility that could explain the adults’ absence. Only a few days remained before the height of the transplanting season—the time when, as an old Korean saying goes, “even a stick of stovewood moves.” Perhaps the unseen farmers were resting in preparation for those hectic days when army units, students and office workers from the cities would be mobilized to help out on farms like this one.

Recall that, before the post–World War II partition of Korea, the northern part had specialized in mining and industry while depending on the granary of the mineral-poor southern part for food. Now there was no exchange between the communist North and the capitalist South. The North must attempt to feed itself, despite its mountainous topography. The goal of self-reliance in agriculture had led to extremely labor-intensive additions to acreage through land reclamation. Irrigation channels, the result of Kim Il-sung’s “grand plan to remake nature,”
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totaled some forty thousand kilometers— long enough to girdle the world, as I was told. And Kim had taught that “fertilizer means rice; rice means socialism.” Fertilizer output was reported to have increased two and half times between 1970 and 1978. Farmers were applying more than 120 kilograms of chemical fertilizer per person per year—equivalent to twice the weight of every man, woman and child in the country.

With the right timing, hard work and the water from rain-swollen reservoirs, North Koreans hoped to approach the goal of harvesting 8.8 million tons of grain for the year—although previous harvests had made clear it was difficult for the three-quarters mountainous country to produce enough food to sustain 17 million people.
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In 1954, after the Korean War, the three hundred or so peasant families who were farming in Chonsam-ri owned two cows among them, my hosts told me. The fields were hilly and unevenly laid out. There were only a few farm implements. The peasants had suffered greatly from the fierce war sweeping back and forth across their country. In accordance with the party line dictating collectivization of all agriculture, the lands owned by the peasants of Chonsam-ri were pooled that year to make a cooperative farm. All members would own the cooperative in common. Youngsters who grew up and decided to stay on, or outsiders who might come from the cities and ask to join, would be given equal shares of the ownership automatically.

The crops would be shared among the members, not equally but according to work performed. The party leaders in Pyongyang did not think the country was yet ready to live by what communist ideology considers a loftier principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Along with the transition from cooperative to state-owned farms, that was to come later. (A quarter century later, those changes still had not come.)

If the farmers had yet to achieve ideal communism, nevertheless there had been plenty of other advances, as Chun To-kun was happy to point out. Chun, who looked a little like a skinny young Paul Newman, was introduced as deputy chairman of Chonsam Cooperative Farm. One of his duties was showing the occasional foreign visitor around. The government’s reservoir-building program and irrigation work had allowed farming “without any worry about water supply and without receiving any influence from drought,” Chun said. Farmers had smoothed out the 1,360 acres of paddy field and divided them into neat rectangles. They had terraced the hills, evenly planting 370 acres in vegetables and an equal area in persimmon orchards. The farm had the use of twenty-six tractors. “Our Great Leader provided them,” Chun said.

Kim Il-sung had promised that his regime would enable everyone to live in tile-roofed houses. Indeed, the Chonsam farmers’ neat white masonry houses were all roofed-with ceramic tiles—the traditional Korean status symbol that only well-to-do farmers had been able to afford in the old days. The state had built the houses and turned them over to the farmers. Schools, a small hospital, a barbershop and a laundry served the 1,500 people living on the farm. About a quarter of the 270 households had television sets, Chun said, and the cooperative paid from its culture fund to bring in films to show on its three projectors.

The changes had been slow in coming at first, leaving Chonsam-ri one of the more back-ward of North Korea’s cooperative farms. The big breakthrough, Chun said, came with 1959 and 1961 visits by Kim Il-sung. At that time there was no road into the farm and the hills were covered with pine trees. The state had begun to promote the planting of orchards only in 1958. “Our Great Leader pushed through the trees and grasses and taught
us how to develop our farm,” Chun said. Monuments commemorated those first visits by President Kim to give “on-the-spot guidance.” Another monument recalled his only other visit since then, in 1976. In the fall of 1978, just a few months before my visit, Kim had held forth on farming questions at a party committee meeting in Wonsan, the nearby capital of the province. There he had instructed everyone to plant persimmon trees.
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“Whenever our Great Leader visited and saw our farmers working in the paddy fields with crooked backs, weeding with hands and hoes, he told us that he couldn’t eat rice with an easy mind when he saw such hard work,” Chun said. “So he sent to our farm various kinds of insecticides, weed killers, weeding equipment, agricultural equipment. He sent these things to all cooperative farms, but he paid special attention to this farm because of its backwardness.” Still, Chonsam-ri was only an ordinary North Korean cooperative farm, Chun insisted—not a model farm such as the famous (and, to the Western ear, confusingly similar-sounding) Chongsan-ri, where the country’s agricultural policies had been incubated.
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Indeed, three visits by the peripatetic leader were not, relatively speaking, very many.

Model farm or not, Chonsam-ri had a prosperous look to it. The previous year, Chun said, the farm had produced 4,200 tons of crops including 3,600 tons of rice. The average share of each family was six tons of grain, which could be sold to the state, and cash in the amount of 3,000
won
($1,754 at the official exchange rate). That would have made the Chonsam-ri farmers slightly better off than average wage earners in the cities and towns. “During the past, the young people preferred to go to the city to work,” the farm official said, “but now young people from the city are coming to the countryside because the living standards of cooperative farmers have improved.”

Farmers shared in the cooperative’s income according to a formula setting norms for what would be considered a day’s work in a particular task. Hand transplanting of rice seedlings is backbreaking work, and there were not enough rice-planting machines in operation in North Korea yet to make the old way obsolete. Bending to plant one hundred seedlings was considered a day’s work. A farmer got due credit, in the form of added fractional “days worked,” for overfulfilling the quota. On the other hand, plowing was mechanized and a day’s work was considered planting one hectare (two and a half acres). Farmers shared the grain crop, and cash earned by the cooperative from sales of vegetables and fruit, according to each family’s total days worked, officials said. But first, the cooperative took a portion out for the common fund to finance the next year’s farming and development projects. The farm had to buy fertilizer and tractor fuel from the state and pay the state for water supply and tractor rental.

The work on the farm remained hard and long. The farmers followed the old East Asian custom of taking a day of rest only every ten days. In the winter, though, there was a day off once a week, and each family could take
fifteen days’ leave each year for a vacation at a state-provided beach or mountain resort. “Our farmers,” Chun said, “are receiving great benevolence from the state.”

Children inherited household effects from their deceased parents, Chun told me, and could stay on in the family homes if they wished. The typical family kept savings of about 10,000
won
($5,850 at the official exchange rate) in a state bank in the name of the head of the household. By custom another family member could use the money. Money in a savings account drew interest of about 4 percent a year. In the cooperative’s early days, Chun said, farmers had borrowed money from the bank, but later they had found it unnecessary to do so. The farmers did not have much need for their savings, aside from financing weddings and the like, Chun said, because “thanks to the solicitude of our Great Leader, the state provides the goods needed for our farmers’ life. Even raincoats are supplied for work at very cheap prices.”

I knew that outsiders’ reports of North Korea’s economic shambles, even if exaggerated compared with the real situation in 1979, had their basis in genuine difficulties. Drought had affected harvests for several years. And, of course, the country had failed to repay its foreign trade debts. But officials’ talk during my visit was upbeat. Rains in that spring of 1979 had filled the reservoirs, they said. They predicted a bountiful harvest. And they claimed the country would be able to pay off its foreign debts by 1984, the end of the current seven-year economic plan.

Obviously there had been a great deal of construction already—I took a trip by car on a recently completed and nearly empty multi-lane high-way across a hundred miles of mountainous terrain between Pyongyang and the east coast port of Wonsan. Generally, what I saw of North Korea had a built-up and well-tended look. The seven-year plan for 1978–1984 called for nearly doubled electrical power output and steel production.

But many outsiders were skeptical about the chances of meeting the new plan’s goals—especially since the capital-short regime counted on increased labor efficiency to power three-quarters of the increase.
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Certainly there was no sign of a real boom such as capitalist South Korea had been experiencing for several years. Missing were the signs of rising affluence that could be seen in the South: streets and high-ways clogged with private cars and taxis, new hotels opulent enough for Dallas or Palm Springs going up in the heart of the capital, a vibrant stock market fueled with cash from a new middle class. But neither did one see in North Korea slums, prostitution, street waifs hawking chewing gum—signs easily found in the South of 1979 that some segments of society had been left behind.

North and South Korea each claimed per capita gross national product of more than $1,200. Western and South Korean estimates at the time
placed the Northern figure at only about half that amount, giving the twice-as-populous South an enormous advantage in the overall weight of its economy. While it was possible that estimates from sources unfriendly to the North had overstated the difference—and while it was hard to compare the two quite different economic systems—it did seem that there was a gap in the South’s favor, one that might well continue to widen.

But then again, the vagaries of the international economy and then-rampant inflation might conceivably take a heavy toll in the South.
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North Korean officials claimed their economy was immune from such forces, and on that basis they seemed to hope that time was really on their side. A planned economy, with virtually no private sector beyond the farmers’ small, household vegetable plots, meant that the state set prices. Necessities were cheap. Rice, the basic dietary staple, went for the equivalent of two cents a pound at the official exchange rate. Anything deemed a luxury, on the other hand, was very expensive. A black-and-white television cost the equivalent of $175— more than three months’ wages for the average worker. The state provided housing, health care and education without levying taxes.