Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (73 page)

The studio was filming a swashbuckler, set in olden times, featuring a hero who employed swordplay and the Korean martial art of taekwondo to wipe out dozens of enemies at a time in the style of Hong Kong kung fu epics. Apparently the film was aimed more at light entertainment value and box-office appeal than heavy political ideology. It was not difficult to imagine that Kim Jong-il would need all the box-office appeal he could muster to deal with what lay ahead.

One day during the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students, my guide excitedly said I “would be meeting a high official. “The Dear Leader?” I asked. No. The VIP turned out to be Professor Kim Jong-su, who soon arrived and invited me to a folk festival. In a lovely woodland setting, the site of the ancient tomb of a dynastic founder, we watched performances of traditional skills such as spear-throwing and then tucked into a copious picnic feast.

Once again I decided not to bring up the matter of my host’s dual identity. In any event, he did not repeat his orphan story this time. Indeed, in the course of our chat, it turned out that Kim Jong-su had a mother, then still living. I mentally noted that interesting fact but said nothing, making allowance for the likelihood that one who had lost only his father might be considered orphaned, particularly in that patriarchal, still Confucian-oriented society.

Kim Jong-su quoted his mother on the extent of improvement in living conditions since the old days, when inferior grains had to be substituted for scarce rice. He recalled that, in his own youth in the 1940s and 1950s, times were so hard that a kind of grass or hay had to be mixed in to make pounded-rice cakes. Recently, he said, his children had been complaining about how bland everything tasted. He had given them some old-fashioned rice cakes with just a little hay in them, he said, and the youngsters had pronounced the taste wonderful.

Throughout my visit, North Korean officials had been denying persistent reports of food shortages. Officials acknowledged that rice was rationed,
but the figures they gave for rations (700 grams a day for an adult, 500 for a child) seemed adequate assuming they were accurate. The question was what the diet might include beyond the staples (grain and beans, mainly) and kim-chee, the national dish of spicy pickled cabbage, cucumbers or other vegetables. Foreigners living in Pyongyang said that eggs were available but that meat was a rarity on most North Korean tables. Visitors to the youth festival did not confront any shortage personally—far from it. Our hosts fed us great quantities of meat, fulfilling the dictates of traditional Korean hospitality even as they sought to persuade us that meat was plentiful in the diet of ordinary Koreans.

At the picnic, country air and an endless supply of the local beer sharpened my appetite, which even normally was large—but as soon as I finished off one plate of roasted meat, another appeared. I was skeptical of Kim Jong-su’s assurances that food had become plentiful, but I did not know at the time just how bad the situation had become. Later, when I learned more, I felt ashamed of having pigged out at Kim’s picnic. The truth was that the food supply was miserably (although not yet disastrously) bad. The regime had come up with special supplies for the festival, but soon North Koreans once again would be eating grasses out of necessity, not nostalgia, and not mixed in with their rice but instead of rice.
¹

Even while I was there, a look at North Korea’s agriculture suggested that the country was stuck, dabbling in slight changes to the formula but unwilling or unable to commit wholeheartedly to reforms that would deviate seriously from the original line of Stalin and Kim Il-sung—now, in its basics, the line of Kim Jong-il as well.

That official line contradicted the clear evidence of-what worked best. In small private plots, to take the most readily gauged example, the corn was taller than corn growing in nearby fields that were farmed collectively. Despite such visual proof the authorities publicly continued to denigrate those private plots, and the markets at which their produce was sold, as shameful relics of the bad old pre-socialist days. While other communist countries were experimenting with private enterprise, North Koreans still were allowed to cultivate privately only their patches of dooryard. The proclaimed long-term policy was not to expand that tiny private sector but to phase it out, to collectivize farming even further—in other words, to redouble approaches that long since had passed the point of diminishing returns.

Travel outside Pyongyang during my 1989 visit revealed that North Korean farmers were cultivating practically every available square inch of arable soil. Soil appeared generally not particularly good, and in places very poor—red clay or sand, with little or no topsoil cover.
²
The land available was used not for pasture or fiber production but overwhelmingly for growing
grains and other foods for direct human consumption. I saw few animals. Those I did see, in almost all cases, were not meat or dairy animals but oxen for plowing and pulling carts.

At Haksan Cooperative Farm north of Pyongyang, rice paddies, green and glistening in early July, filled the lowlands while corn was planted on steeper land. Houses and apartment buildings clustered tightly together on high ground to conserve land. I met farm director Kim Ho-sok, who said he was in charge of 2,600 farmers cultivating 15 million square meters and living in 1,100 households. Kim boasted that harvests had continued to increase in the previous decade,
³
but the farm director’s claims conflicted with the picture of North Korean agricultural stagnation that foreign and South Korean analysts were painting.

Haksan’s dooryard private plots were limited to
66
square meters each. Farm officials said free markets were held every ten days where farmers could sell or barter some of the produce of their private plots—but the officials insisted those markets were a dwindling, unwelcome holdover from the bad old days and would not be needed any longer once the country achieved full, pure communism. “Gradually the free market is declining now” said farm director Kim. After all, he explained, “the state supplies the people with the necessities of life.”

Reminded that the Soviet Union was emphasizing
glasnost
and
perestroika,
and along with China had been increasing the use of free markets, Kim replied: “We don’t know much about that, but we don’t want to follow their lead. ‘Openness’ and ‘reform’ are for the Russians and Chinese. It’s their style.” In theory, at least, farmers collectively owned the so-called cooperative farms such as Haksan, which sold their produce to the state. But cooperative farms were supposed to be converted soon into “state farms.” Their land would be owned by the state and the farmers would become salaried employees of the state, director Kim said with evident pride.

A visit to a farm family’s home illustrated both the old-style incentives that were still considered ideologically correct and some financial incentives that the regime scorned but had to tolerate during the “transitional” period. Kim Myong-pok showed off an apartment of three rooms plus kitchen that she said her farming family had occupied since the previous year. Haksan’s farmers were gradually moving out of old fashioned, single-story houses into such newly built, modern apartments, similar to those of city-dwellers. Mrs. Kim explained that her husband had been high on the list to get the new housing because he was a “labor hero.” She was watching a Japanese Toshiba television set that she said had been donated by the Great Leader to the husband for his labor heroism. Heroes got their special awards based on effort, for going all out.

On the other hand, cash payments to Haksan’s farmers were based on time worked, skill level and unit-wide production. The previous year,
Mrs. Kim had made 3,400
won
and her husband 5,200
won,
she said. The total, 8,600
won
for a year, was two or three times as much as a typical urban-dwelling, two-income couple might bring home for factory or white-collar work. Since there was no need for farmers to spend money on housing or on food, Mrs. Kim said, theirs went for home furnishings, or into savings to pay for their children’s weddings, parents’ wedding anniversary parties and other foreseeable social obligations.

North Koreans insisted that financial incentives were passé, but their actions suggested the opposite. By 1989, reports had reached the outside world of self-seeking behavior among the country’s supposedly puritanical communists. For example, high-ranking officials demanded that underlings bribe them with scarce goods such as color television sets in exchange for promotions.

One diplomat who was stationed in Pyongyang intermittently for years illustrated the change that was taking place by citing two identical incidents when his family visited a beach resort and an adventurous child swam out too far, so that the concerned diplomat had to ask a lifeguard to row out and bring the youngster back. The first time that happened, in the mid-1970s, the lifeguard had to be pressed to accept some lollipops as a gesture of thanks. When it happened again more than a decade later (an amazing coincidence, but that’s the diplomat’s story), the lifeguard refused the proffered candies, asking to be re-warded instead in U.S. dollars.

I had a similar experience in 1989 when one of the North Koreans assigned to help foreign newsmen asked me to give him some American currency. He said he wanted dollars to spend for foreign goods that were for sale in the special hard-currency shops established for the youth festival. Some Adidas sports shoes, in particular, seemed to have caught his eye. I reflected at the time that he might have been instructed to ask for money as part of the regime’s efforts to accumulate foreign exchange. But the amount involved was insignificant, so I leaned toward the explanation that he had made the request on his own initiative and for his personal benefit. This instance of seemingly individualistic behavior reinforced a sense that the regime had given up some of its rigid control, perhaps to a greater degree than planned. And I thought that the authorities had better brace themselves for a sharp rise in consumer expectations, now that Pyongyang residents attending the festival had seen what they were missing.

On the level of official incentives, the regime had paid a bonus of one month’s salary to the country’s workers before the festival opened in recognition of their hard work in a “200-day speed campaign” to meet production and construction goals. In practice, then, the gradual shift was continuing from the old-style “moral” incentives, such as medals for labor heroes, to financial incentives. The latter were officially keyed, to be sure, to group
rather than individual performance. Even such relatively mild heresy, however, was not something the regime’s ideology permitted it to take pride in.

Chinese followers of Deng Xiaoping by then had become communist in name only as they pursued economic reforms nakedly intended to unleash the individual’s profit motive, but North Koreans were still required to praise the communist ideal of selfless behavior. “All for one and one for all” was the rule.

The propaganda machine promulgating such beliefs, heavy-handed though it was, still succeeded “well enough that even in 1989 North Koreans were reciting their collectivist catechism smilingly and with evident sincerity. Whatever bourgeois sins they might be tempted to commit, they gave every appearance of believing in—or believing that they ought to believe in—old-fashioned communism, tied closely to the leader cult. Call it brain-washing or education, or credit the art of a host of-well-trained actors; no matter how the authorities had managed to pull it off, a visitor was left with the feeling he had traveled to the center of a great and still-burning faith. Instead of Pyongyang it could have been Teheran.

Again, as in 1979, national beliefs were nowhere more accessible to visitors than in Pyongyang’s theaters, and it was on this trip that I saw one of Kim Jong-il’s “new type” revolutionary operas,
The Flower Girl.
In New York a few days earlier I had seen and been moved by the Broad-way version
of Les Miserables.
Almost certainly the creators of that hit musical had not seen the North Korean production, and vice versa. Yet the similarities between the two were remarkable. Both were beautifully staged melodramas, evoking with consummate skill that hatred of privilege that was the ideological starting point of both the French Revolution and Kim Il-sung’s regime. The stage version of
The Flower Girl
struck me as world class—much better than the 1972 movie version, which itself had been singled out for considerable praise at home and abroad. If what I saw was fairly representative of the genre, Kim Jong-il had much cause for pride.

The plot of
The Flower Girl
is simple: In the 1920s, cruel landlord-usurers take advantage of a small loan of rice to enslave the family of heroine Ggot-bun. Reduced to going to town to sell flowers in the street in order to buy medicine for her sick mother, she is insulted and molested by Japanese colonialists and their Korean henchmen. One moonlit night she is falsely charged with theft. The police whip her as punishment, and she happens to learn that the landlords are about to sell her into bondage. Returning home, she sings about her sad fate: