Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (33 page)

In 1972 North Korea adopted a new constitution, which mandated a switch to a presidential system. Kim Il-sung gave up the premiership to take the presidency. Thenceforth, the premiership would be a useful lightning rod for the regime. The incumbent premier could be dismissed to take responsibility for any recognized policy failure—even though President Kim continued to dictate the policies. At the end of 1977 Kim reorganized the government, implicitly acknowledging the North’s failure to regain the economic lead over the South. While men of military background previously had served as premier, this time he put an economist, Li Jong-ok, into the job. The question was how much lee-way Li and his technocrat cohorts would have. After all, real power continued to be held by President Kim, who had established a politics-first ideology and who kept around him men who had served with him as anti-Japanese guerillas.
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Despite the problems, Kim stuck stubbornly to—and even intensified— his policy of Stalinist centralism.
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Micromanagement from the top had become less and less effective with the economy’s expansion, but still it seemed that no detail was too small to concern Kim Il-sung. At a meeting of financial and banking workers in December 1978, he gave an hour-long address that
delved deeply into the minutiae of the country’s economic administration. He complained, among other things, about the way people were misusing a synthetic textile, vinalon. “During my survey on waste of cloth, I found that vinalon strings in Yanggang Province were used for hop-vine supports, which could easily be replaced with something made from hemp or barks of lime trees,” Kim said, advising that “vinalon strings should be used for webs only”
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Why didn’t Kim do more to change his system and ideology in response to the Southern challenge, once it became apparent in the 1970s? My 1979 visit to the country gave me considerable food for subsequent thought about this question.

When I met Kim Yong-nam near the end of that visit, the party foreign affairs secretary noted that I had been touring his country. “As you have seen,” he said, “we have built and constructed a lot in a peaceful atmosphere. Why should we destroy all these successes and fight with our own people?” I thought he had a point. It was not that my visit had turned me into a true believer. Indeed, I was deeply troubled to learn in my stops at North Korean schools, cultural agencies and even health-care facilities of the extent to which Kim Il-sung’s attempts to remake the minds of his subjects were still going strong—and apparently succeeding. Overall, however, it would have been difficult for me, or any other newcomer, to avoid being favorably impressed by the achievements that North Koreans showed off to visitors. Even though South Korea probably had pulled ahead of the North in per capita GNP by 1979,
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the overriding impression was of Northern success up to a point—not failure.

Both building anew and restoring the mighty infrastructure that the Japanese had bequeathed to them, the North Koreans had achieved considerable industrialization. At the same time they had irrigated, fertilized and mechanized in their struggle to squeeze from a largely mountainous land enough food to sustain them. The parts of the country that I was permitted to see did not appear to bear out the totally negative appraisals—“economic basket case,” for example—that had started to appear in Western studies and press reports. People appeared adequately housed and clothed. Although few besides the president and his son were fat, I did not notice any obvious signs of malnutrition. There was austerity, apparently rather evenly shared, but I saw no signs of destitution. All this seemed to set North Korea apart from other developing nations.

The movements of foreign visitors were minutely controlled—probably because of fear that we would learn something the authorities did not want us
to know, plus fear that we would spread alien knowledge and opinions that might call into question Kim Il-sung’s leadership. I was assigned to stay in the Potonggang Hotel. Disappointingly, a large surrounding park planted with willow trees isolated the hotel from the daily life of Pyongyang. I kept asking if I could not just wander around by myself, but my handlers politely forbade it.

If I wanted to go anywhere, to see anything, my guide and interpreter said, they would happily “help” by going with me. One or the other or both of them waited near the hotel’s single exit. If I tried to venture out, they would join me, escort me to a waiting Volvo and tell the driver where to take us. Generally this was explained in terms of hospitality—I was a guest, new to the country, and needed guidance—but occasionally someone would allude more or less gently to the fact I came from a country that was officially an enemy of theirs. I waited for an opportunity to escape from my handlers for some unguided sightseeing. In the meantime, I preferred taking the guided tours to spending more time watching the table tennis matches.

My guide took me to sites on the approved itinerary, such as the Kum-song tractor plant near Nampo. En route, a sign at a farm village proclaimed: “All for conquering the 8.8-million-ton grain goal this year!” Mechanization was an important element in the effort to meet that goal. Another sign, closer to the tractor factory, exhorted the people to achieve the Three Revolutions— ideological, technical and cultural. But the tractor plant was a success story that predated the current Three Revolutions campaign.

Kim Il-sung’s self-reliant
juche
policy on more than one occasion had meant borrowing—or, as Western patent lawyers would say, pirating—foreign designs. North Koreans were far from apologetic about this. My guide, Kim Yon-shik, told me that the country had imported tractors up until 1958. The need, however, overwhelmed North Korea’s ability to pay Fellow socialist countries were in no position to make up the difference because “they also had planned economies.” The solution was to produce tractors at home, but North Korean engineers predicted problems of high cost and poor quality.

Kim Il-sung told the engineers that the problems would diminish with experience. He asked them to take a crack at it. Their first challenge was to come up with a design. Foreign suppliers, not interested in abetting an import-replacement scheme, refused to lend blueprints. “You can buy the tractors from us,” they told the North Koreans. “There’s no need to make them by yourself.” And so, my guide related, “our workers used an old, worn-out tractor to draw up blueprints. … They used the rasp and the hammer to make the first tractor, and in forty days they made one.”

There was just one big problem with that first North Korean tractor prototype based on a pirated Soviet design: The tractor ran fine in reverse gear but would not move forward. Nevertheless, said Kim Il-sung, “the important
thing is that the tractor is moving.” Indeed, the indigenous tractor industry expanded rapidly from that point. between 1970 and
1976,
output increased 8.7 times. The government claimed to have enlarged the fleet sufficiently to average seven or eight tractors for each 100 hectares of farmland. The Kum-song tractor plant had been rebuilt from the ruins of a small chemical fertilizer workshop in
1954,
and had produced agricultural implements until the first Chollima (“Flying Horse”) tractor rolled out in 1958. By the time I visited there, the 28-horsepower Chollima represented only 30 percent of production. A newer model, the 75-horsepower Poonnyun (“Bumper Year”), accounted for the remaining 70 percent.

Among younger workers at Kumsong I saw far more women than men, although I was told that women made up only about 30 percent of the approximately eight thousand workers of all ages.
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When I asked my guide where all the young men were, he replied that they were “still growing up,” studying in colleges and universities. I knew that the real answer was that they were in the army. The military’s drain on the young male work force was helping perpetuate a countrywide labor shortage that had begun with the casualties and migrations of the Korean War era. South Korean figures said women made up nearly half the labor force.
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Foreign intelligence agencies estimated that about seven hundred thousand men, or one in every twenty-four North Koreans, were in the various military services. Officials in Pyongyang denied that there were that many, but indirectly acknowledged that maintaining a huge and costly military force put a crimp in economic development efforts. “It’s difficult to do something with one hand tied behind our backs,” one told me.

In this tractor plant, as elsewhere, the authorities had compensated by introducing a remarkable amount of automation. Hong Ju-son, head of the administrative department, proudly showed off a large stone monument to “on-the-spot guidance” that Kim Il-sung had given to the factory. Thirty-one times Kim had visited to offer such advice, and 570 other times he had sent “teaching.”
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The basic thrust of Kim’s messages, Hong said, had been “to free the workers from their burdens of great work.” During the new seven-year plan (1978–1984), said Hong, “our main task is
juche
orientation and scientification and modernization. The main content of
juche
is thinking about man. Automating the plant means freeing the people from heavy labor, and also producing more products.”

Evidently the regime found it politic to justify automation as a productivity measure and, especially, as a humanitarian gesture to improve working conditions, rather than mentioning the military-related—and therefore taboo—labor shortage that had made it so necessary. In the tractor factory, Hong said, a-whole department of experts looked out for safety and “we never spare anything to provide protection of our workers.” Yet, throughout the 55,000-square-meter processing and assembly building the lighting was dim,
workers wore no helmets or goggles and many cutting machines had no safety shields. Nonetheless, as Hong told it, the workers had been so deeply moved by “the solicitude and warm care of our Great Leader” that they had erected the monument to his visits.

Whatever the motive for installing it, I was impressed by some of the machinery. A lone woman operated a 100-meter-long system for making the tractor’s gearbox, peering down from a car riding on rails above. Another lone woman operated the console that controlled the engine block machining. “Every machine and piece of equipment in the factory was produced in our own country,” Hong said proudly. With a million “intellectuals,” including engineers, North Koreans “can solve our problems.” Hong noted Kim Il-sung’s personal approval of the gearbox-making system: “Our Great Leader said this is one of the great creations.”

Despite the considerable automation already accomplished in the factory, I thought the tractor assembly line still moved slowly, compared with automotive plants I had visited in other countries. The workers had a lot of waiting-around time on their hands. Officials said the factory produced one hundred tractors a day, which seemed a low figure considering that this was mass production of just two basic models. Officials obviously agreed: They wanted greater productivity. A colorful sign exhorted workers: “All should come out to fulfill the resolutions of the Seventeenth Session of the Fifth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party.” One of the resolutions was predictable: “Produce more!” The sign praised model workers, showing their pictures and describing their feats. One woman “did her job 200 percent.”

The factory operated six days a week, on two shifts. It wasn’t clear how many hours an actual shift might be. Hong, when I asked him about it, replied: “In principle, according to the labor law, we do not allow them to work more than eight hours.” The general rule of thumb, he said, is “eight hours’ work, eight hours’ study and eight hours’ rest.” Overtime work requires “approval from higher administrative organs.” Considering the many reports of all-out work campaigns pushed by higher-ups in the party and government, it was easy to speculate that an eight-hour workday “in principle” could often stretch out longer in reality.

Retirement ages, Hong said, were sixty for men and fifty-five for women—typical figures for East Asian countries, including Japan, at that time. I asked if many people of retirement age stayed on in the workplace for whatever reason.
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I hoped the answer would hint at whether there might be pressure to postpone retirement to counter the shortage of younger workers. Hong said an occasional person of retirement age would stay on as a part-time “advisor,” drawing both pension and salary. In fact I had not seen many obviously elderly people working in his tractor factory or elsewhere. If such a practice was actually rare, that might have been one measure of the extent to which Confucianism, with its deference to age, remained a cultural force
in the North—or it might simply have meant the people were wearing out early by contemporary Western and Japanese standards.

Workers made an average of 90
won,
or about $53 at the official exchange rate, per month, Hong said. But he quickly added that the wage was just frosting on the cake, since “the material and cultural life of our people is provided by the state.” Thus, “if we calculate the solicitude and benevolence they are receiving from the state—such as vacation facilities, free medical treatment, free education—the workers’ actual income is much more than their cash income.”

Wage differentials were based on position and degree of skill. While college graduates made up the management corps, workers with ability could be promoted to team leader and workshop leader. “But the difference is not so much,” Hong said. The entire range ran from about 80
won
for beginners up to about 150
won
for the factory manager and highly skilled technicians. I heard of similar pay ranges at other enterprises, including a hothouse.

Amazingly, Hong could not say how much the Kumsong plant’s tractors cost to produce. “We don’t calculate the cost of the tractors,” he said. “The Agricultural Committee takes care of that.” The factory supplied the tractors directly to the counties’ agricultural managements. Asked about the plant’s annual operating budget, Hong replied, “As I am not in charge of the plant’s budget, I don’t have a figure.” I hoped someone had some idea about the costs—if only in order to figure a rational selling price for the portion of output that was being sent abroad, mostly to Third World countries, particularly in the Middle East.