Authors: Andrei Lankov
B00BY4HXME EBOK (16 page)
Take the story of Yi Y
ŏ
ng-guk, the former bodyguard of the Dear Leader himself. Disappointed in the North Korean system, he fled to China and attempted to defect to South Korea. He was caught by North Korean agents in China and sent back home. In the not-so-distant times of Kim Il Sung, the fate of such a high-profile defector would have been sadly predictable: torture and death awaited any person who betrayed the
personal
trust of the Great Leader. But in the liberal 1990s, Yi was treated with surprising leniency: he was sent to a prison camp and then released (yes, released!) following the intercession of Kim Jong Il himself. He used the opportunity to repeat his escape attempt and reached Seoul.
9
T
HE
N
EW
R
ICH
North Korea is a poor place, no doubt. Nonetheless, 2012 Pyongyang has a booming restaurant scene and the traffic on its broad streets—once notoriously empty—is steadily increasing in volume. Well-fed North Koreans are frequenting newly opened sushi bars and beer houses as well as a local hamburger joint. On the streets of the North Korean capital, one can see a lot of visibly undernourished people, but also a number of women clad in designer clothes.
These sights can be encountered not only in Pyongyang but also in a number of other major North Korean cities. The growth of “grassroots capitalism” predictably brought in a remarkable income inequality.
Who are they—the North Korean new rich? How did they make money—and do they spend this money nowadays?
Take, for example, Mr. Kim, who is in his early 40s. Mr. Kim is a private owner of a gold mine. The gold mine is officially registered as a state enterprise. Technically, a foreign trade company owns it, and in turn it was managed by the financial department of the Party Central Committee. However, this is a legal fiction, pure and simple: Mr. Kim, once a mid-level police official, made some initial capital through bribes and smuggling, while his cousin had made a minor fortune through selling counterfeit Western tobacco.
They then used their money to grease the palms of bureaucrats, and they took over an old gold mine that had ceased operation in the 1980s. They hired workers, bought equipment, and restarted operations. The gold dust was sold (strictly speaking, illegally) to Chinese traders. The cousins agreed with the bureaucrats from the foreign trade company on how much money they should pay them—roughly between 30 to 40 percent. They then used the rest to run the business and enjoy life.
One step below this, we can see even humbler people like Ms. Young, once an engineer at a state factory. In the mid-1990s she began trading in Chinese second-hand dresses. By 2005 she was running a number of workshops that employed a few dozen women who made copies of Chinese garments using Chinese cloth, zippers, and buttons. Some of the materials were smuggled across the border, while another part was purchased quite legally, largely from a large market in the city of Rason (a special economic zone that can be visited by Chinese merchants almost freely).
Ms. Young technically remained an employee of a nonfunctioning state factory, which she was absent from for months on end. She had to pay for the privilege of missing work and indoctrination sessions, deducting some $40 as her monthly “donation.” This is an impressive sum when compared with her official salary of merely $2.
The North Korean new rich might occasionally feel insecure. They might be afraid of the state, because pretty much everything they do is in breach of some article of the North Korean criminal code. It is a serious breach indeed—technically any of the above-described persons can be sent to face an execution squad the moment the authorities change their mind. They provide officials with generous kickbacks, and in recent years massive crackdowns have been infrequent. Yet the fear lingers nonetheless.
It is, however, difficult to say that they try to keep a low profile. On the contrary, nowadays one can see a lot of conspicuous consumption in North Korea.
It is no surprise that the new rich enjoy consumption. Some kinds of consumption activities are impossible—for example, overseas trips are out of the question, and domestic tourism seems to be unfashionable: North Koreans, rich or poor, usually travel out of necessity, not for pleasure.
However, there are many outlets that cater to the needs of the “masters of money” (
tonju
), as North Korean entrepreneurs are known. The new rich frequent restaurants where a good meal would cost roughly as much as the average North Korean family makes in a couple of weeks. They buy and renovate houses—technically the sale of real estate is illegal in North Korea, but in the last two decades North Koreans have developed many techniques that allow the circumvention of these restrictions. The new rich buy all kinds of household appliances, flat screen TVs, computers, large fridges, and motorbikes. Even private cars—an ultimate status symbol, a North Korean equivalent to a private jet—have begun to appear, and since around 2009 one can see traffic jams on the streets of Pyongyang, once famously empty.
In good old Confucian spirit, the new rich invest in the education of their children. A good teacher of a popular subject—like, say, English or Chinese—might earn a decent income nowadays. Less practical subjects are also in demand, although piano and dance lessons are deemed suitable for girls only.
From the mid-1990s, North Koreans began to move to China in large numbers. It was not that difficult because most of the length of both the Yalu and the Tumen is shallow, narrow, and frozen in winter.
This being the case, between 1998 and 1999, when the famine was at its height, it was estimated that anywhere from 150,000 to 195,000 North Koreans were hiding in China.
10
After 2005 the numbers shrank dramatically, but it is estimated that at any given moment, there are still between 20,000 and 40,000 North Korean refugees hiding in China.
11
Most of these people hide in villages and towns along the border, where ethnic Koreans constitute a majority of the population. Refugees do all kinds of odd jobs that were avoided by the locals: they wait tables at cheap eateries, work at construction sites, and labor in the timber industry. Since women constitute a majority of refugees, many of them cohabit with Chinese men—sometimes being abducted but more frequently through personal choice.
Many of these unions result in disaster, while others work just fine. Indeed, it might benefit both sides: a Chinese-Korean man of advanced age and moderate income gets a wife, while a North Korean woman gets a sense of security and a standard of living unthinkable back home. The local Chinese authorities usually turn a blind eye to such unions, especially if the couple has children. Nonetheless, a North Korean common-law wife (such unions cannot be registered officially) is still not free from the worst fear of any North Korean refugee in China: arrest and deportation.
Until the mid-1990s, every North Korean who had crossed over into China and was unfortunate enough to be extradited back would face a few years of imprisonment and, upon release, lifelong discrimination. This is not the case anymore because border crossing itself is seen as a minor offense. When people are extradited from China, they are usually investigated for a week or two (this investigation usually involves some beating). Investigators want to make certain that the suspects have had no contacts with South Koreans and non-Chinese foreigners during their stay in China, and that they were not involved with any Christian missionary group. If no such suspicious connections are discovered, the extradited
refugee spends a few months in a milder type of labor camp and is then released. Upon release, many of them flee again. After all, they often have families and jobs back in China.
Some refugees decide to move further, to South Korea, though this is not as simple as it sounds. Long gone are the times when every North Korean who decided to defect and was lucky to get overseas could just walk into the nearest South Korean consulate or embassy and inform the cheerful staff that he had just “chosen freedom,” as the Cold War cliché went. Nowadays, while a two-star general of the North Korean air force or a district party secretary can still count on an enthusiastic welcome, the same does not hold for a middle-aged housewife from a rural area—and such a housewife is the typical defector of the past decade. As a rule (there are exceptions), South Korean missions in China prefer not to deal with the average refugee. This is explained in terms of a fear of diplomatic complications with China, but the South Korean government also is not all that enthusiastic about the increasing number of refugees in the South. At the same time, the fiction of “one Korea,” still maintained by both Seoul and Pyongyang, means that every single North Korean is automatically eligible for South Korean citizenship and consular protection. For a majority of the refugees the only way to reach South Korea is to get to a third country (usually Thailand or Mongolia) where South Korean diplomatic missions, sometimes reluctantly, process refugees and issue them with travel documents and air tickets to Seoul.
This, however, means that a refugee has to traverse all of China first, then illegally cross the Chinese border into Mongolia or Laos. Such a trip is almost impossible for the average refugee who speaks poor if any Chinese and has little money and no local knowledge. The only way, therefore, is to make a deal with a professional escape specialist known as a “broker.” Such a broker assembles a group of 5 to 15 aspiring refugees, arranges transportation and safe accommodation, and then escorts them to China’s southern border (if the final destination is Bangkok) or to Mongolia. There, he or she arranges a border crossing and then accompanies the refugees on their perilous trip across the Gobi Desert or the jungles of Laos.
Brokers usually do not work for the actualization of some lofty ideal. Some of them might have ideological convictions, but in the main, defection has long become a commercial operation, pure and simple. For a “no thrills defection,” one must pay between $2,000 and $3,000, while a VIP version of the service would cost between $10,000 and $15,000. This expensive option would involve a fake South Korean or Chinese passport, North Korean border guards escorting the defector across the border, and a comfortable air trip from a major Chinese airport straight to South Korea.
12
The cost of even the cheapest defection is exorbitant for the average North Korean refugee in China whose wages are between $50 and $100 a month. Usually the sum is provided by relatives in South Korea or elsewhere overseas, most frequently by a family member who has managed to defect to the South first and probably now waits tables in Seoul restaurants (as we will see, most defectors are not exactly successful in South Korea).
As of early 2012, there were some 23,000 North Korean refugees living in South Korea. It doesn’t sound like a large figure, especially if we consider that between 1961 and 1989—during the years of the Berlin Wall—an average of 23,000 East Germans crossed into West Germany
every single year
. However, it sounds far more impressive if we remember that as recently as 2000 there were merely 1,100 refugees residing in the South. This is by no means an exodus, but, for the first time since the end of the Korean War, there emerged a significant group of North Koreans who managed to get away from “the loving care of the fatherly leader.”
These people are very different from the Communist bloc refugees who arrived in the West during the Cold War. Cold War refugees from the Eastern bloc tended to be well educated and were usually motivated by political convictions—at least partially. Conversely, most North Korean refugees are women from impoverished areas along the border who were looking for a better income and security rather than for the realization of some lofty political ideals. Elite refugees exist, but they are well below 10 percent of the total. With a touch of somewhat frivolous generalization, a typical refugee of the Soviet Union in the 1970s might be described as a young, brilliant, Jewish chess player. In contrast, the average refugee from North Korea is a rural housewife in her 50s.
It is important to mention, however, that refugees remain in touch with their families back home. It helps that most refugees come from borderland areas whose population can cross the border more easily. People frequently call their families using Chinese cell phones, which work perfectly well on the North Korean side of the border. From around 2003, a number of relay stations were built just on the border and this greatly increased mobile phone coverage (signals can be received miles away). This being the case, Chinese cell phones have become common among more affluent North Koreans in the borderland, most of whom earn an income through legal and not-so-legal trade with China. Monetary remittances from South to North Korea constitute a blatant violation of both South Korean and North Korean laws, but nonetheless seem to be fairly frequent: a majority of refugees in the South use brokers to send money back to their impoverished native villages and towns. Brokers charge 25 to 30 percent per transaction, but the system is remarkably reliable and fast. The total annual amount of such transfers has been recently estimated at some $10 million—by no means an insignificant sum for the tiny North Korean economy.
13
The fate of refugees in South Korea does not bode too well for the post-unification population of North Korea (assuming that unification will happen one day). Most of them will find themselves in a low-income bracket, often the object of discrimination by their newly found brethren.
North Korean refugees are eligible for aid that is quite generous by the standards of South Korea, a country where the social welfare system remains underdeveloped as compared with Europe and the United States. For the first few years, refugees are paid a small stipend—not enough to live on but still of help. They are also provided with subsidized rental housing and scholarships for vocational training. Those who are young enough can apply for university admission. They do not compete with South Korean high school pupils. Rather, they sit for their own, easier, exams.