Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (69 page)

Kim then returned to his concern about the failure of the regime’s incentives to make North Korean movie industry people work hard. He had more than an inkling that the North Korean system was at fault. “What I’m saying is that this—ever since the end of the Korean War, speaking in materialistic terms, what you call, eh—unless we make them have desires, uh—I think it is related with the system. What I’m saying is that even if only one piece is written in a year, living expenses are still given. When a piece is written, only the cost of the paper can be earned. It should be their main job but it is only a side job. Eh—-what one has to really, really do [for a living], that is a side job while even if one does not do this, living expenses are still given by the government. Thus the people have no desire or need. So if we say, ‘Write three pieces
a year,’ thus they’ve already become too full in the stomach. Then they say that they can’t write it at their home and thus request that they be sent to a resort. That’s how people have become.” Once, Kim said, “I called on my propaganda department workers and said to them that the socialist system is said to be good, but that there are a lot of internal discrepancies that must be resolved. Yes. So what I’m trying to say is that they have no motivation to work.”

Months later, after one of their new films won an award at a festival in Czechoslovakia, Kim invited Choi and Shin to his office—and again the couple managed to tape the conversation. This time, Kim broadened his economic analysis a bit to touch upon aspects beyond his beloved movie studios: “Ten years ago, twenty years ago, what did we say? ‘People should tighten their belts. In a situation where the North and the South are separated, we must ourselves prepare a revolutionary capacity. Thus we must tighten our belts and work to build our defense.’ ”

From this historical note Kim abruptly shifted his thoughts to the competition from South Korea, which was then getting favorable world-wide publicity for its success in launching an indigenous automobile industry. Kim felt the praise was undeserved because the Southern automakers relied heavily on overseas suppliers of components. “Localization, localization is what they claim, but in engine development the South Koreans, the South Korean people, in producing a motorcycle they import the engine, bring in this and that. … It is basically an assembled good. The automobiles, what do they call it [perhaps he was attempting to recall the name of the Hyundai Pony which was the Model-T Ford of South Korean industrialization], even those are completely assembled. What they claim as localization is only 40 percent. How can they call what they assemble localization? They themselves—-we shouldn’t do it that way We must show the machines in the planning stages. Show this, show them from the first stages, then the reporters will go to the South and will compare our factory to the South Korean one.”

Kim then returned to his earlier theme: “So now, in what direction are we heading? Yes, the defense industry or heavy industries are our priority. While encouraging this, what else should we do? It’s time to raise the living standards of the people. This is because tightening the belts of socialist people is—I have said already. Look at our comrades.”

Kim continued his monologue, harking back to popular support for the socialist system at the time of the Korean War—and in the process acknowledging to Shin that the North had attacked the South, something that the South Korean would have known very well but that most North Koreans were not permitted to know. “How were the sentiments of our people when the war broke out in 1950?” he asked rhetorically. At the time, he asserted, people in both North and South had favored the Northern system and opposed what he asserted was the system below the 38th parallel: “a society for a minority of capitalists and mid-level people. Thus because they said the
[socialist] system at the time was favorable at the time, what did we have? There were only a few weapons given by the Soviets. Because we knew that the system was good, we went out to secure it. Thus in South Korea there were capitalists, landlords and comprador capitalists. Thus we said, ‘Let’s go and liberate.’”

Things had changed, though, in the intervening period, Kim acknowledged. “After doing socialism for thirty years, feeding the people cannot be done without reaching out to the Western world. We are definitely behind the Western world. So the people, this livelihood problem—this ideological problem—is very important. To overcome this, Eastern European countries are having a hard time.”

It seems Kim still did not fully understand how the South had done so well, and would in coming years do so well, economically. He wanted to improve living standards for North Koreans, sensed that socialist methods were failing in his country and elsewhere in the communist bloc—but at the same time he rejected integration into the market economy that South Korea had joined. He still thought it possible to stick with his father’s
juche
approach, producing everything at home from scratch.

The Chinese continued to work on him, though. Hu Yaobang had made a return visit to North Korea since Kim’s earlier recorded conversation with Shin and Choi. During that return visit, Kim told Shin, Hu had asked him: “Why aren’t you doing the tourism industry? The tourism industry brings in a lot of money.” Kim acknowledged the rationality of the argument, although in the same breath he expressed ambivalence about the issue: “I understand, so we will do the tourism industry now. We will start now. But it wasn’t because we didn’t want to do it—of course we didn’t want to do it—but now I’ve decided to do it.”

Kim agonized over the opening of his country that would be necessary if he should go after tourist dollars. Speaking to Hu Yaobang, he said, he had worried aloud that North Korea was so small, with so much of its territory fortified, that it would be difficult to show off tourist sites without giving enemies a clear view of its defenses. “In your case,” he said he had told Hu, “since you have a vast continent you can do whatever you want. In our case the border and the shoreline aren’t very long, and are tightly fortified. If this is opened up to tourism, how would it be different from withdrawal of troops? If everyone comes and looks over everything, if everything is opened up—ha ha! And if Pyongyang is opened up in the end it will be the same as calling back the forces from along the border. Next it will, must be in Pyongyang. It’s the same as being disarmed. Being the same as disarmed—I propose this after we reunite. But with your [China’s] experience, like your case, we will do it. We will do it, and there is a way We will do tourism.”

Kim had figured out, he said, that at most he could open certain east coast areas to tourism: the port city of Chongjin and parts of Kangwon
province. “I said to this Hu Yaobang: ‘Now we will pursue the open door policy. We will initiate the open door policy”—but only in those limited areas. “Yes, we will do tourism.” He quoted Hu as having replied: “Let’s see you do it.” And, said Kim, “I promised him.”

In December 1984, Kim called the couple to his office and told them that “he”—Kim Il-sung—-was “very satisfied” with their work. Having received Choi’s letters every year, the Great Leader now “would greet them on New Year’s Day, 1985. They took along their tape recorder when they went to the palace for the reception. The conversation they recorded there reveals much about the attitudes of the man who remained North Korea’s ultimate ruler, for the time being, even as he was ceding more and more authority to his son.

Kim Il-sung and first lady Kim Song-ae engaged Shin and Choi in small talk about their movies, and then the president quickly changed the subject. He wanted to talk about a recent international proposal that North Korea and South Korea enter the United Nations at the same time. That would divide Korea “forever,” Kim Il-sung complained. “Instead, what we are proposing is to retain the systems and autonomy of North and South while uniting [in a confederation], and enter the UN as one country. That way would not perpetuate the division.”

Then the Great Leader got in a dig at South Korea, in the process proving that he understood South Korea’s economic success and prospects no better than his son did—perhaps not even as well as his son did. “It’s impractical to ask the South Korean government to get rid of the rotten system there overnight,” Kim Il-sung told Shin and Choi. “They have a $50 billion debt. Fifty billion: think about it! Fifty billion is not a simple problem. Our debt is $1 billion. We are going to earn foreign currency and thus within a couple of years we are going to fully pay it back. Do you know what [Japanese lawmaker] Tokuma Usunomiya said to me? The Japanese give a lot of money to South Korea, but that amount is equivalent of what the South Korean government has to pay each year as interest on its loans!”

The receiving-line conversation with Shin and Choi ended there, as a North Korean functionary offered his New Year’s greeting: “Long live the Great Leader!”

“Thank you,” replied Kim Il-sung.

It was around that time that the balance tilted in the relationship between the president and his heir-designate. Mainly involved with matters of ideology and propaganda previously, Kim Jong-il from the mid-1980s is reported to have taken day-to-day charge of the party, the military, the administration— even international affairs. “By 1985, Kim Jong-il had in reality taken complete control of most of the areas in politics,” according to Hwang Jang-yop, “and he got his men to spread the word that he was top leader in North Korea.”
¹⁹

The extent of his new responsibilities and the amount of-work involved seem to have required him to face up to the need that he change his behavior. “From 1985, Kim Jong-il’s lifestyle changed totally,” elite defector Kang Myong-do told
JoongAng Ilbo
in Seoul. “His life of no constraints ended and the number of Happy Corps members declined. There was a lot of work to do from 1985. Each day he had thousands of reports to take care of and had to work until 1 or 2 A.M. sometimes. He adopted a routine. On Monday he would take care of the party propaganda department’s work; Tuesday the Korean People’s Army; Wednesday the president’s office and party finances; Thursday government officials; Friday the Central People’s Committee. Weekends, he would rest.”
²⁰

If there was any hope for the country short of a major regime change, then, it was that Kim Jong-il would turn out to be a reformer. Pyongyang offered tantalizing clues that he might. Here is what an unofficial spokesman for the regime wrote about Kim’s modernizing ways in the Hong Kong–based magazine
Far Eastern Economic Review:
“An enemy of regimentation, Kim Jong-il views it as contradictory to the concept of man as a free, independent and creative being. He advocates modern lifestyles while preserving traditional values. He even encourages people to date more openly, in a traditional manner. Since he first appeared with a modern hairdo, such things have been in vogue among North Korea’s young people. City and rural barbers and beauty parlors cater to customers with dozens of different hairstyles. People are encouraged to wear a variety of fashionable and colorful costumes, both traditional and modern.”
²¹

Beyond such superficial matters, there were some changes in economic policies, including a 1984 law intended to encourage foreign investment in joint ventures in North Korea. But positive change in substantive matters came slowly through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Part of the reason has to be that, as we have seen in this chapter, Kim Jong-il was not completely clear in his own mind about the direction in which he should take the country.

In fairness, we should note that he still did not have full power. While Kim Jong-il was running things on a day-to-day basis from 1985, one former elite official told me nearly a decade later, the younger Kim inevitably encountered some conflicts with his father, who was still the president and the Great Leader. “Kim Jong-il will be the successor, but Kim Il-sung is not handing over power all at once. Kim Jong-il may want it faster. Since Kim Jong-il is younger he’s more open-minded regarding foreign affairs than Kim Il-sung. Even if he wants to change the policy, though, he has to go through Kim Il-sung.”
²²
The former official’s point is well taken. Still, even if Kim Il-sung had died in 1985 and left the whole family business to Kim Jong-il, we may doubt based on what we know of him that the younger man would have moved immediately to change the system in a major way.

In 1989, during a brief thaw in the otherwise mostly unremitting enmity between Pyongyang and Washington, the first delegation of North Korean “scholars” visited the East Coast of the United States. At a dinner party in their honor in a friend’s New York apartment, I was introduced to the North Korean delegates including their leader, Professor Kim Jong-su. Something about him, perhaps the oval yet strong-jawed face, or the sardonic look of his downward-turned mouth, looked familiar. Kim and I looked at each other for a while, and it was he who spoke first to ask: “Haven’t we met before?” Indeed we had, I replied—but I had been with
The Baltimore Sun
at that time, in 1979. Now, ten years later, I was working for
Newsweek.
I decided not to mention that I had known him the first time not as Professor Kim, deputy director of a scholarly think tank called the Institute for International Studies, but as Bai Song-chul, the orphan who had been brought up by Kim Il-sung to become a diplomat working for the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.