A History of Korea (91 page)

Such a social hierarchy reflected, of course, the distribution of political power as well. But as time passed, evidence surfaced that the regime, despite its outward appearance, stopped short of becoming a monolithic structure, particularly after the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994 following half a century (!) of rule. Even before this staggering event, the military, party leadership, individual bureaucracies, and local agencies appear to have established their own power bases that relied upon corruption, black marketeering, and international trade for funding. The divisions and rivalries between these power centers might have played a role in the circumstances surrounding Kim’s death and will likely resurface stronger than ever upon the death of his son Kim Jong Il. Kim Jong Il, who was officially introduced as the successor in 1980 while in his late thirties, has in fact always relied on his association with the army. His preferred official title as the military’s supreme commander was bestowed upon him just three years before his father’s death, and later he was commonly referred to as “The General” despite having no military background. And the public proclamation of a “Military First” state policy beginning in the 1990s appeared as a tactic to ensure the support of this powerful institution. Despite his ostensibly unquestioned supremacy, Kim Jong Il never enjoyed the same aura of authority as his father. Kim Jong Il’s own successor, whether a son or someone else, will face even greater difficulties in establishing legitimacy, for legitimacy was always based on the recognition of Kim Il Sung’s personal heroics.

Even more daunting for the next regime will be to maintain its delicate balance in foreign relations. While people outside of North
Korea have prioritized this regime’s impact on the outside world in attempting to understand the country itself, more illuminating is the question of how external forces or, more precisely, the perception of these forces, have determined the internal workings of North Korea. On the one hand, of course, the regime exercised stringent control over its people’s exposure to the larger world, for it depended on the belief, within the country, of North Korea’s relative superiority. Here, ignorance was a powerful tool. On the other hand, the regime found the threat of foreign forces useful in reinforcing the foundations of its rule. The everlasting Korean enmity for Japan was stoked whenever necessary, for example, given that it served as the basis of Kim Il Sung’s historical claims, and hence the state’s claims to legitimacy.

The US, too, readily served as a bogeyman for North Korea’s constant vigilance, based on the populace’s grim memories of the Korean War and occasional skirmishes with the US military in Korea thereafter (
Chapter 22
). In the mid-1990s, this chronic hostility suddenly reached the level of an emergency, as American detection of North Korean activities to reprocess nuclear fuel at their plant in Yongbyon triggered a crisis. The response of the North Korean regime to international calls for inspections was to withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to intensify the public vilification of American intent. Just as tensions in the summer of 1994 reached the stage of imminent military confrontation, former American President Jimmy Carter traveled to Pyongyang and came away with an agreement, which was eventually signed later in the year as the Agreed Framework. The Agreed Framework’s call for North Korean allowance of inspections in exchange for fuel and food aid, however, failed to stop the nuclear program, mostly due to the regime’s attempts to stall indefinitely while extracting as many concessions as possible. But the Americans shared the blame. Indeed North Korea’s relentless push to develop nuclear weapons was historically fated to prick and preoccupy the US, for the genuine fears of an interventionist American military drove much of its nuclear ambitions. American leaders who engaged in juvenile name-calling of North Korea while remaining painfully ignorant of these larger circumstances only exacerbated the North’s
fears and therefore strengthened the effects of the regime’s propaganda for internal consumption.

And finally, South Korea, the so-called American puppet, was steadily condemned as a prime example of the shame of foreign domination, despite the occasional breakthroughs in reconciliation such as the 2000 summit in Pyongyang with South Korea’s president, Kim Dae Jung. What outsiders called North Korea’s isolation, then, was touted internally rather as a manifestation of the country’s fierce independence. Following the famine and economic collapse of the latter half of the 1990s, however, the country had to open up sufficiently to entice foreign capital and know-how, including, as noted above, from South Korea. Even Internet and cell phone traffic was made available to a privileged few. But the wariness of the slippery slope potentially leading to the collapse of the system itself remained, and this delicate balance between too much exposure and too much hardship promised to suffer even greater stresses.

MONUMENTAL LIFE

One begins to understand, then, the paramount significance of maintaining the impression of North Korean superiority, and hence also the extraordinary lengths undertaken to enforce this narrative. This furthermore accounts for the eerie monumentality of life in North Korea that developed in the closing decades of the twentieth century: the mind-numbing proliferation of over-the-top propaganda, gigantic memorials and construction projects, and ever-stupendous claims about the country and regime. In a classic case of overcompensation, such grandiosity and myth-making that lay at the core of North Korean existence, in which everything was said to be “perfect,” seemed to intensify the more it diverged from reality. North Korea, and in particular Pyongyang, turned into not only an Orwellian society, but an uncannily precise realization of Orwell’s vision in the novel
1984
. All the elements were there, including the viral surveillance, the double-talk and absolute control of information, the relentless vigilance and incapacity to turn off the propaganda, the erasure and fabrication of history, the ritualized
hatred of a bogeyman enemy, the submission of the self into the mass, brutal punishment for nonconformity and political crimes, and, of course, Big Brother.

The cult of personality quickly reached absurd proportions and eventually went beyond the scale of other totalitarian regimes in its attribution of extraordinary powers to both the father and son, but especially the latter, who was not only showered with adulation but credited with superhuman intelligence. There is evidence that Kim Jong Il viewed this narrative, much of which he himself probably crafted, more soberly, and repeated the explanation of other North Korean officials in rare moments of candor: the lessons from Korean history, especially in the modern period, required resolute mobilization for the cause of preserving national independence and dignity, and a heroic leader was necessary to rally and properly channel this energy. Tellingly, however, the personality cult in North Korea, as well as political rule itself, also took on a hereditary nature, an understandably rare occasion for communist regimes subscribing officially to an ideology, socialism, with pretenses to perfect rationality. While some commentators detected an unmistakably Christian tenor in the droning public worship of the father–son tandem, the most common and plausible explanation was to observe simply that the North Korean ruling system revived the Korean kingship. In addition to preserving power within a given family, the North Korean monarchy tapped into a basic longing for stability, national pride, and autonomy (however imaginary), as well as for a symbolic leader whose leadership was expressed in familial overtones.

But this kind of mythology required constant reinforcement, especially as reality intruded upon it. Hence the erection of enormous monuments celebrating the system, its ideology, and especially its leader. The round-numbered anniversaries of Kim Il Sung’s birthday of April 15, 1912 seem to have triggered the most memorable memorials. In 1972, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, a 20-meter bronze statue of his most majestic pose was unveiled close to the banks of the Taedong River. His seventieth birthday in 1982 brought forth a staggering trio of monuments that still dominate the visitor’s impression of the city: the Arch of Triumph, a little taller
and wider than the one in Paris after which it was styled, in celebration of Kim’s struggle against Japanese colonialism; the Tower of the Juche Idea, a paean to the official ruling ideology of self-reliance that has simply been called “Kim Il Sung-ism,” so transparently did it serve to rationalize the Kim monarchy; and the splendid Grand Study House of the People, a public library that still stands as the largest building in the traditional Korean architectural style.

It was hoped that the Ryugyong Hotel (see Image 25) would be completed in time for the next super-great birthday celebration, Kim Il Sung’s eightieth in April 1992. Groundbreaking for this one-of-a-kind structure, towering over 100 stories, took place in 1987, at the height of the feverish competition over which Korea could outdo the other in presenting itself to the world ahead of the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics. In addition to planting a bomb in 1987 that destroyed a South Korean airliner with over a hundred souls on board, the Northern regime prepared its own international sports festival, for which the world’s largest stadium, with a seating capacity of 150,000, was built and actually completed. The Ryugyong Hotel, however, ran into troubles, and construction stopped midway in 1992 due to astronomical costs and, as widely suspected, problems
in the building’s structural integrity. Thereafter it remained an unsightly skeleton, a 300-meter hollow pyramid of concrete. Visitors to Pyongyang remarked, though almost never flatteringly, on its unavoidable presence, visible from just about everywhere in the city. Some observers described it as “hideous” or “monstrous,” while one American magazine dubbed it “the world’s worst building.” Others, however, found the superstructure a tremendous curiosity and remarked on its distinctive shape with three extended wings, each grounded by a smaller pyramid at the base. The hotel, then, appeared to mimic the layout of the Egyptian pyramids of Giza, although many have commented that it looked like a giant rocket ship ready to launch. After a fifteen-year dormancy, construction on the hotel was revived in 2008, this time targeting for completion April 2012, the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth— or Year Juche 100, according to the North Korean calendar.

Image 25
   Ryugy
ng Hotel in Pyongyang, 2003. (Courtesy of Tae Gyun Park.)

In the meantime, the unfinished Ryugyong Hotel turned into the unwitting symbol of North Korea itself: the fantastical and megalomaniacal ambitions, economic bankruptcy, and disabling stagnation, waiting only for collapse itself. And as with North Korea’s historical development and ultimately its survival, the Ryugyong Hotel project became a matter of utter will, dedication, delusion, and mobilization. Like the Ryugyong Hotel, North Korea passed the turn of the new century an empty shell, a testament to misplaced priorities (and funds) for the sake of preserving a fantasy. The problem, of course, was that this historical experiment, while grounded in Korea’s past, harmed millions of people.

As noted above, it is difficult to gage how the people of North Korea actually led their lives, as so much that foreign visitors observed was carefully staged. But sufficient evidence suggests that, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, the modicum of economic development and political stability produced enough to eat as well as a modern lifestyle, at least for Pyongyang and the cities, not terribly different from that of other communist societies. People pursued their routines of work and family life, followed long-established modes of social interaction, enjoyed leisure and play, engaged in romance, and in keeping with Korean passions, often went picnicking, singing, and dancing. They also partook in popular culture
by revisiting traditional tales such as the “Tale of Ch’unhyang” through grand theatrical, musical, and filmic productions. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and famine of the 1990s, however, came deprivation and resignation, and an intensified dulling of the senses from the relentless monotony and closure to the external world. Exposure to the outside was the purview of the privileged minority who had the most to lose in any dramatic change: the elites of the army and Communist Party, who grew dependent on the system of permanent exploitation and radical difference between the haves and have-nots. For the rest of the country’s people, existence might have been occasionally satisfactory but likely debilitatingly hollow—intellectually, psychologically, and spiritually. In the face of the overarching primacy of formality in the ruling
Juche
ideology, correspondence to reality was less significant than the collective will to forge an ideal.