Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (54 page)

Kim Il-sung was hooked on adulation, and it was Kim Jong-il’s job to keep it coming. As the elder Kim would write in his memoirs: “A man who enjoys the love of the people is happy, and a man who does not is unhappy. This is the view of the nature of happiness which I have maintained throughout my life.”
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He gloried in all his tributes, seemingly never tiring of sycophancy. Unlike Hitler, who refused to allow growers to name giant strawberries for him or proud parents to name their baby daughters Hitler-ine,
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Kim happily became the namesake of a flower, developed by a foreign botanist, called “kimilsungia.”

Further generations of children would undergo Kim Jong-il’s indoctrination programs in the new orthodoxy. Memorizing Kim Il-sung’s life story and thoughts, they would follow orders and hymn the praises of Kim the father, Kim the son and the holy spirit
of juche
—all this at dreadful cost to an economy that desperately needed new ideas and a decentralization of decision making. Every Korean suspected of being a closet Deng Xiaoping would be vanquished.

Propaganda alone, of course, was not sufficient to enable Kim senior and junior to gain and maintain unprecedented control over their subjects. The police state apparatus was modeled on the Soviet one, with similarities to that of the Imperial Japanese. But it became—thanks in part to North Korea’s compact and homogeneous population—even more pervasive and thorough.

According to Hwang Jang-yop, the former party secretary who defected to South Korea in
1997,
armed police at the beginning of that decade numbered about three hundred thousand. Those were divided between the regular police force, under the Ministry of Public Security, and the secret police of the Ministry of State Security. The police were considered so important to regime maintenance that they were kept outside the cabinet’s administrative control. Both Public Security and State Security belonged directly to the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party.

Agents from both ministries were “stationed at every level of the administrative agencies, right down to the lowest level,” Hwang wrote. “They are in charge of monitoring the movements of the residents, especially those under special surveillance. Even the smallest act that is out of the ordinary is a cause for arrest,” and people attracting the authorities’ attention “become sacrificial lambs in the agents’ overzealous urge to show off their accomplishments.” Agents at the post office intercepted and inspected letters and packages. Bugging and wiretapping were used to keep tabs on even
high-ranking officials. People of common sense knew “not to voice their innermost thoughts, even at home.”

Hwang offered as an example the police infiltration of Kim Il-sung University, of-which he had been president for a time. Each of the police organizations had established there a branch equivalent in size to a county government organization, he said. Each police unit at the university “had dozens of agents under its command, and the agents in turn were put in charge of supervising and monitoring all the university departments and administrative units.” For leverage, they persuaded students to watch one another. Public Security “organized small groups among the students and controlled these groups.” Mean-while, “one out of every five students was a secret agent of the State Security branch.”
¹

Chong Ki-hae, a Japanese-Korean whom we met in chapter 6, had not wanted to repatriate in 1960. He had studied Korean at school in Japan but, intent on fitting in like any other youngster, he had seldom spoken his parents’ language outside. Discrimination against Koreans living in Japan had eased after the war, and “the whole idea of a motherland didn’t mean much to me,” he told me. Besides, the family’s fortunes in Japan had changed for the better, thanks to an elder brother who owned
pachinko
—Japanese pinball— and other successful businesses. But his parents, fired with bitter nationalistic feelings, were adamant that the family would move.

Sent to a small, rural North Korean community, Chong sorely missed the bright lights of Tokyo. But “I had no choice,” he recalled. “I had to go where they sent me.” He had dreamed of a career as an entrepreneur like his successful brother. He laughed as he confessed to the unreality of the notion of himself at seventeen—-with no skills but only aspirations—starting a business in a country whose economy was centrally controlled and highly collectivized.

When I met Chong he was wiry and tanned. I inquired about that and he told me his skin color was not the result of nutritional deficiency. He had cultivated a tan after moving to South Korea. He came to the interview wearing a sharp glen-plaid suit, white-on-white shirt and figured tie, an Yves St. Laurent buckle on his belt. He said he had not even wanted to “touch the clothes” in North Korea. “I don’t want to brag, but people from Japan are more fashion-conscious and like nicer fabrics.” In his decades in North Korea he never had come to believe in communism, never had grown to worship Kim Il-sung. “For someone like me, who’s had a taste of capitalism, it’s difficult,” he said. “I could never be one of the ordinary people. They have no access to information, so they believe they’re in a paradise.”

Because the Chongs had brought with them knowledge of a better life abroad, “Public Security had spies planted in the neighborhood, always watching us. When I first got there, someone would come by twice a month.

At first I didn’t know who they were. Neighbors said they were from Public Security. They just chatted about how our life in North Korea was turning out. After I told them about my disappointments, they would say ‘But look, Kim Il-sung has done this, this and this for the people. It would be ungrateful of you to feel disappointed.’ The whole community all the neighbors, watched each other. Even I watched the people next to me.”

Chong used to travel from his rural county to Pyongyang, where he could use his Japanese money to buy delicacies such as ham or sausage in the hotels. There he met some other returnees from Japan. Seven returnees took to meeting for casual discussion of the problems they encountered living in the North. They agreed that they did not want to stay there forever but would like to return to Japan. In 1965 Chong was arrested and jailed for four months. It turned out that one member of his group had been a police spy. The spy had given the authorities a record of all of Chong’s meetings and contacts. While he was in jail the authorities asked Chong to spy on his neighbors. “They figured I would be pliable, since they had me on charges,” he said. Although he could not reject the request, “in fact I just decided not to talk to other people so I wouldn’t be in a position to get them into trouble.” From the 1965 incident, “I realized I should trust no one, talk to no one. I only concentrated on my studies.”

In 1982, Kim Il-sung turned seventy and the authorities used the occasion for a crackdown. “From March 15, for one month, people who were politically incorrect were supposed to confess or be reported,” Chong told me. “I was reported again by Public Security for my 1965 crime and was classified as a ‘traitor to the people.’ I decided to volunteer to move to a more rural area. At that time I was very sick. The place I suggested going to is very mountainous and no one who went there ever returned. So they thought there was no problem sending me where I asked to go.”

Partial rehabilitation was at hand. From the mid-1980s, Chong said, North Koreans were exposed to visiting Chinese merchants and people from Japan. Seeing that visitors from abroad had money, “people began to realize that North Korea-was not so great compared-with the rest of the world. People got lazy. Compared with others, I was considered a diligent worker. So in 1987 they made me a party worker and in 1988 a deputy to the People’s Assembly of Unhong County, Yanggang Province, where I lived.”

Probably the regime “wanted to set an example,” Chong said. “About half the population were families of political offenders and others with bad backgrounds, like me. The idea was to show that if we worked diligently, we could succeed despite such backgrounds. They gave some very important jobs to us to provide incentives. This was one of Kim Il-sung’s methods: forgive and show off.”
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Chong, unlike many other returnees, had no relatives left in Japan. All had repatriated to North Korea. That meant there was no one to send money
after what he and his family had brought with them ran out. He started getting hungry in the 1980s. “I don’t have an enormous appetite,” he told me, “so it wasn’t a huge problem to me, but it was very hard for my kids—two sons and three daughters. In Yanggang Province I secretly cultivated and harvested food—so probably we were better off than we would have been in the city. But real starvation started around 1990. Farmers had gotten lazy. They had no motivation. The return was always the same regardless of how hard they worked. Only between 2.5 million and 2.8 million tons of rice were produced in North Korea. The question for me was whether I would live or starve to death. In March 1993 I had no prospects for the future so decided on suicide. I had some pills that needed to be dissolved in water, and I hid those in a closet. My daughter found them. She said maybe the whole family should commit suicide. I thought about sending the whole family to China but couldn’t because I was a deputy. We would be noticed and caught. So I went by myself, as if I had simply disappeared.”

In North Korea, Chong said, “they won’t allow you to hope for a better lifestyle. I just wanted a normal life with my family: food, the basic necessities. In socialism, they won’t accept the whole idea of a person.” He made his way to South Korea. “I can’t forget about Japan, but there was no one waiting for me there.”

The police spying had continued “the whole time, right up to the day I defected.”

George Orwell’s
1984
is no mere literary fantasy. If you were North Korean, Big Brother would watch you. Pyongyang’s internal spies and thought police were everywhere.

Lee Woong-pyong used to be one of them, although all he wanted to do was fly airplanes. “My cousin was a pilot, and from the time I entered middle school it was my dream to become one, too,” Lee told me decades later.
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“Pilots are among the highest-status members of society. While the South Koreans might think lawyers and doctors have the best jobs, in North Korea those are no better than ordinary-workers.”

Born in 1954, the year following the armistice in the Korean War, Lee grew up in Pyongyang. His father taught at a police academy and served as a city assemblyman. Although those positions and the father’s party membership placed the family in a social stratum that ordinary North Koreans would have envied, times were almost as hard for the Lees as for most others in the country. “I can recall from around the early ’60s,” Lee told me. “Pyongyang was underdeveloped, with cows wandering around, cow dung everywhere. There were no railroads. There wasn’t much plastic; it was only after entering elementary school that I got a plastic school bag.” Clothing tended to be hand-me-downs. Lee’s father was issued a new uniform every two years.

“When he got a new one we would dye the old one a different color and someone else in the family would wear it.” The grain ration came mainly in the form of flour, which went into dumplings and flat noodles. Many people ate food donated by the Soviet Army. Food “was never enough,” Lee told me. “I dug into rat holes to get the rice the rats had accumulated. We led a very thrifty life.” But “happiness doesn’t mean the absolute value of wealth,” he added. “It’s comparative. Everybody was poor at that time. That was considered happiness. I was just an ordinary kid leading a very ordinary life. People’s expectations weren’t advanced.”

The ten members of the family including a grandmother, shared a standard two-room, sixty-square-meter unit in one of the apartment buildings built out of the ashes and rubble of wartime Pyongyang. “We all slept together. Even when I was in higher middle school I slept with my parents. The mentality was different. We didn’t imagine that each person should have a separate room. It seemed normal for all of us to be in together.”

Getting to know one’s neighbors was assured; residents of the building bathed communally and two or three apartments shared each coal-fired furnace. (“There were many disputes about stealing coal,” Lee remembered.) In one of the downstairs units lived the Workers’ Party commissar of Lee’s school. When Lee was sixteen and finishing higher middle school, the commissar selected him to become a pilot trainee. Donning an air force uniform, Lee went off to Chongjin on the east coast to enroll in a five-year program that started with theory and moved through flight training. He trained in YAK 18 trainers, then MIG 15, MIG 17 and finally MIG 19 fighters.