North Korea enjoys Southern makeover By Andrei Lankov
SEOUL - A small-scale scandal rocked Seoul educational circles in late July
when it was discovered that the Busan chapter of the influential Korea Teachers
and Educational Workers Union was using North Korean propaganda booklets to
"educate" its members about the supposedly true nature of the communist state.
This "true image" was that of a great society led by a benevolent and
omniscient leader. This revelation produced the usual righteous indignation of
the local right. The union's trademark leftist nationalism is notorious.
However, one cannot help but wonder why so much fuss about the use of the North
Korean material when numerous South
Korean publications deliver very similar messages to the reading public.
One only has to read Korean to discover that Seoul bookshops are well stocked
with books whose authors go to great lengths to persuade their readers that the
North is not a brutal dictatorship with particularly inept economic system, but
rather a misunderstood society that has its own manifold merits. This is seen
as "progressive" these days, while references to North Korean human rights or
the incurable inefficiency of Stalinist economy are usually rejected as signs
of conservatism and inability to follow the spirit of times.
A recent visit to a major Seoul bookstore provided a small gem, a great
specimen of this new school of historiography - a book titled Living in Two
Koreas, One Nation, Two Lives (this is how its authors translated the
title, the book itself is in Korean). This is a final volume in a long series
dealing with the history of daily life in Korea since time immemorial, and its
intended readers are obviously high-school students with a serious interest in
history. Truly wonderful discoveries await these young minds in this volume,
produced by a large group of young (and, obviously, very "progressive")
professors.
The first part deals with the history of the South. From the beginning, there
are things that raise eyebrows. For example, the authors do not mention the US
decision to dispatch troops to Korea after the North Korean invasion in June
1950, and they describe the Seoul takeover in September 1950 thusly: "The South
Korean Army, which had retreated to the Namgang River under the ferocious
attacks of the North Korean forces, reversed the situation through the Incheon
landing on September 15." US forces comprised the overwhelming majority of the
troops during this amphibious operation, but their participation in Incheon is
not mentioned.
The American soldiers are not quite absent from the book, however. A large
drawing shows an evening near an entrance to a US military club about 1955 -
grinning US soldiers accompanied by desperate and helpless Korean women who are
obviously driven to prostitution by despair. Somewhere in the background a
particularly sinister American is dragging an under-age Korean girl, with
implication of a possible rape. The coffee-table format allows for wonderful
richness of details on a double-page illustration.
The authors explain why massive US aid, although somehow useful to South Korea
of the 1950s, was not that good after all. After a page dedicated to the aid
and the role it played in saving people's lives, they spend another page or so
explaining what was wrong with it: the Americans gave what they wanted to give
and not what Koreans needed most, the aid adversely influenced agriculture and
nurtured corruption. These accusations are largely true (and it's also true
that US bases after the Korean War did play a major role in the growth of
prostitution), but the particular combination of emphasis and distortions is
quite remarkable.
But perhaps we should not spend too much time on the South Korean chapters. In
spite of calculated understatements and habitual anti-American bias, these
parts of the book give a reasonable picture of South Korean life in 1955-2005,
the remarkable and controversial era of record-breaking economic growth, police
persecution, poverty, the race to education and the struggle for democracy. The
real surprises begin when readers turn to its second part, the one that deals
with the North.
The authors tell their readers that the North was building socialism relying
exclusively on its own forces, even though the economic disaster of the early
1990s clearly demonstrated that the much-trumpeted "self-reliance" of the North
Korean economy was purely fiction. Massive Soviet and Chinese aid paid for the
speedy post-war recovery of the North and then kept the country afloat in
subsequent decades. However, this aid was never reported in the North Korean
media. The book keeps repeating the outdated propaganda, which fit extremely
well into the South Korean leftist-nationalist mythology. Instead, the authors
extol the achievements of the North, which were supposedly "achieved in such
difficult and isolated situation".
Then young readers are provided with a depiction of the daily life in North
Korea under Kim Il-sung's rule, from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The book
mentions that some goods and food were rationed, dress was poor and monotonous
and houses were small. But is this bad, a Seoul teenager might ask? Not
necessarily, the book readily explains. Since all houses are government
property, "there is no need to worry if you delay a rent payment, the state,
being the owner of all houses, guarantees you a job". It's true, but it is also
true that people are frequently evicted not by the landlords, but by the
above-mentioned benevolent state: life in the North includes large-scale
expulsions of residents who are sent from Pyongyang to the countryside because
the authorities decide they are not good enough to reside in the capital. No
references to this, however.
The authors also don't mention that about 0.5-0.7% of North Korea's population
is in jail for political crimes. A young reader of the book will learn a lot
about political persecution in the South under the military governments, but
nothing about the persecution in the North, even though the latter was on an
immeasurably greater scale.
Another topic avoided is the personality cult. Readers will not find references
to the manifold manifestations of the cult, including regular visits to the
Great Leader's statues or omnipresence of portraits of Kim. In one case when a
portrait is mentioned, the authors explain that its presence simply reflects
the great respect North Koreans feel toward their late leader.
Nothing is said about songbun, the feudal-like system of hereditary
classes where one's future is largely determined by his or her family
background. The book fails to mention inminban, the mutual surveillance
groups that feature so prominently in the daily lives of North Koreans. The
book also doesn't mention the endless mobilization campaigns.
The happy inhabitants of North Korea are free not only from worries about being
evicted by their landlords. They also enjoy other enviable benefits, such as
early retirement. The pension system is explained at some length, but the
authors forget to tell their readers that even in the best of times older
people were entitled to merely 300 grams of grain a day. Although the public
distribution system is mentioned, many sentences create a false impression of
what a North Korean can actually buy in the state-run shops. The book states
that in their spare time Pyongyang residents can drop into a cafe where they
can sample "bread, yoghurt, cheese and other Western food". (They can if they
have access to foreign currency and are ready to spend about a half of the
average worker's monthly salary on a meal.)
Thus a South Korean teenager will understand that North Korean life has a
somewhat idyllic quality: job security, free housing, an iron-proof system of
old-age pensions and, of course, the omnipresent collective spirit that is
extolled at great length. No wonder all illustrations in the "North Korean
pages" depict smiling faces that present such a dramatic contrast with
depressed, angry or outraged Southerners shown in pictures in previous
chapters.
This idea is driven home by a story about an allegedly "typical" North Korean
family, which turns out to be a family of a high-level official, whose two
daughters held very privileged jobs: one is a graduate of Kim Il-sung
University and employed in publishing, while the other works in a hard-currency
coffee shop. This is quite like explaining a "normal" Seoul lifestyle through
experiences of a rich lawyer and his family. Still, it is a clever trick, since
teenage South Korean readers would hardly realize how privileged the latter job
is in North Korean society: in the South, there is nothing glamorous about
being a coffee-shop employee, while in the North anyone working with hard
currency is considered privileged.
But one cannot write about the North without some reference for the great
famine of 1996-99. Not quite. Two pages are devoted to the crisis, complete
with a large photo of a crowded railway carriage and a caption that explains
the reasons for the disaster. According to the book, it has nothing to do with
the slow-motion collapse of state-run agriculture, which began in the 1980s.
Instead, the authors simply relay the official North Korean explanation: this
disaster was solely a result of an exceptional flood which "happens once in 100
years".
But young readers should not worry excessively about the fate of the North,
since the final pages depict a fast and complete economic recovery. We can see
girls singing karaoke, boys playing with computers (another very expensive
item, available only for the top 1% - but readers are not supposed to realize
this). Another drawing shows a crowd of foreign businessmen who obviously just
arrived in Pyongyang airport to strike deals. Remarkably, most visitors are
depicted as Caucasians, while only two or three of a dozen figures might be
construed as being Chinese or South Korean. This might indeed help to persuade
the readers that the "republic is opening its doors", as the chapter's title
states, but hardly conforms to the statistics, which say that about 90% of all
North Korean economic exchanges are conducted with either South Korea or China.
In short, the authors carefully construct the image of the North as a slightly
poor but proud country, busily building a society based on the equality and
collectivism, even at the cost of some (minor) infringements on democracy and
consumer choice. And this is exactly the image of the North that a large and
increasing number of South Koreans are willing to accept. The book is neither
exceptional nor particularly radical, since its authors rely on understatements
and omissions rather than on direct distortions.
Even a cursory look through recent publications testifies that a whitewashed
image of the North is increasingly prevalent in the South Korean mainstream
these days. To a large extent this is a reaction to the hysterical propaganda
of the authoritarian regimes that once used militant anti-communism as
justification for their existence. The South Korean left came to believe that
the military strongmen of the past were the embodiment of evil and refuses to
accept that opponents of these regimes might be much worse. To be too critical
about the North is a taboo for many self-styled "progressives", since such
critique reminds them of the official propaganda of their own dictatorial
regimes.
There are other reasons why such fantasies are readily accepted by the young
Seoul sophisticates. Honest admissions about the North Korean reality would
make South Koreans face some unpleasant moral and political dilemmas about
their country's policy toward Pyongyang, and many of them prefer not to raise
these uncomfortable questions. It is much more pleasant to believe that one's
tax money is being spent on poor and misunderstood siblings, if the alternative
is to admit that in the current political situation feeding a murderous
dictatorship might actually serve South Korea's national interests.
There are few doubts that some well-fed and well-clad people sitting in
Pyongyang's high offices are happy about such a turn of events and pin some
hope on this slow growth of pro-Pyongyang illusions among the educated South
Korean public. I am not sure if their optimism is well founded. Sooner or later
the ugly truth will get out, and it is very possible that the former admirers
of the Kim family regime will instantly become its major accusers. We have seen
this in Western Europe where the people who were Josef Stalin's eulogists in
the 1950s became the most militant anti-communists in the 1970s. However, on
this stage these illusions are powerful, and they definitely influence the
South Korean policymaking.
Perhaps another, subtler part of the message will last longer. The negative
image of the US military presence and US political influence will probably
survive the crush of the North Korean myth. Among the Korean educated youth it
is trendy to be an anti-American. In a decade or so the readers of this and
many other similar books will begin to vote, and it is not too difficult to
imagine what they will think about the United States and its role in Korea.
Americans might feel offended by such ingratitude, but it is clear that long
gone are the days when most South Koreans saw them as guarantors of Korea's
security. This is the message that is increasingly delivered by the South
Korean media, from teenage books and academic publications to mainstream
newspapers, and there is no doubt that it will keep adversely influencing the
already-strained relations between Washington and Seoul.
The alliance must be based on the shared perception of the threats and somewhat
similar vision of the world, but as books such as this testify, no such
perception and vision longer exists.
Dr Andrei Lankov is a lecturer in the faculty of Asian
studies, China and Korea Center, Australian National University. He graduated
from Leningrad State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and China,
with emphasis on Korea, and his thesis focused on factionalism in the Yi
Dynasty. He has published books and articles on Korea and North Asia. He is
currently on leave, teaching at Kookmin University, Seoul.
