Asia Times: PYONGYANG WATCH Tourism: The silent revolution



	September 10, 1999	atimes.com

The Koreas

PYONGYANG WATCH
Tourism: The silent revolution
By Bradley Martin

1. Manufacturing's a sucker's game; all hail tourism

TOKYO - The low-wage manufacturing model for developing an economy definitely has its drawbacks. Why pack your people into sweatshops to inhale fumes from the benzene used for glueing together athletic shoes? After all, the greedy foreigners who finance and oversee such enterprises and sell the products abroad will grab the lion's share of the profit. And as soon as your people start demanding higher wages and better treatment, those foreigners will close up shop and head off to Somalia or some other godforsaken place where they can hire workers even cheaper.

If you were a top North Korean official considering the matter, you would add another argument: those foreigners, if you let them into your country to oversee their manufacturing businesses, would corrupt your hitherto carefully isolated and brainwashed people with alien notions sure to highlight the enormous gap between the regime's teachings and reality as it is known to the rest of the world. The process sooner or later would threaten the continued existence of the regime. And if the business people coming in happened to be South Korean - as are a large percentage of outsiders doing business in the North now - the problems would come to a boil sooner rather than later because they share a language with the North Koreans.

Pyongyang officials appear to have been pursuing some such line of reasoning. According to a report by Oh Seung-ryul, research fellow at Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification, the North is consciously moving away from manufacturing as its key legal means of earning foreign exchange. (Presumably this has no effect on the illegal means, such as smuggling heroin and printing and passing counterfeit US currency.)

And the substitute? Tourism. The shift can be seen in the Rajin-Sonbong ''free economic zone'' in North Korea's far northeastern corner, adjoining the Chinese and Russian borders. There a new casino has just opened, mainly targeted at people coming across the border from China. ''North Korea is modifying the function of the Rajin-Sonbong area from a manufacturing base to a tourist attraction and center for transit trade,'' Oh says. In the past year, he says, the Pyongyang regime has banned South Koreans from visiting the zone and has begun taking down advertisements for Western businesses there.

In the Rajin-Sonbong case, the danger of ideological contamination probably was not the only factor miiltating for a change. (There's some question why it should have been a factor at all, if one can credit reports a few years ago that the regime had moved all the original residents out and replaced them with people considered super-loyal to Pyongyang and relatively immune to foreigners' blandishments.) The other big factor was that outside investors had not been enthralled with the zone's remote location. Their investments from 1991 to 1997 totaled only a disappointing $62 million, according to South Korean government statistics.

While it's too early to predict whether tourism and gambling will do the trick for Rajin-Sonbong, advantages to the regime of relying on tourism can be seen clearly in the case of tours to North Korea's scenic Kumgang mountains. The organizer, South Korea's Hyundai Corporation, pays Pyongyang $150 million annually for its permission to run the tours. On top of that, each visitor pays a $100 admission charge. Try to beat those figures by manufacturing textiles or assembling television sets.

Earning mountains of forex is not the only advantage of permitting Kumgang tourism. Yu Tong-yol, director of Seoul's Institute for Northern Society Studies, lists these others in an article in a South Korean government-affiliated publication, Pukhan:

''The Kim Jong-il regime can enhance its international status,'' combating the image of an isolated, forbidden land by letting outsiders come in;
North Korea can use the comings and goings of the Hyundai ships as cover to move its clandestine agents from the South for consultation with the head office (or, in extreme cases, escape), and messages can be sent easily to and from such agents;
Pyongyang can compile dossiers on as many as half a million South Koreans expected to join the tours each year, since it requires them to provide personal information as part of their applications. The information can be analyzed to try to find South Koreans who might be of use to the North in its operations against the South.

But don't South Korean tourists pose the same sort of ''contamination'' threat as businessmen? Not since June, they don't. That's when North Korean authorities arrested and questioned for several days a touring Seoul housewife and mother. They accused the woman - who says she innocently chatted to a North Korean park ranger about the lives of North Korean defectors in the South - of being a spy. Reported to have begun psychiatric treatment for the trauma she endured, she told interviewers for The Korea Herald that she believes she was set up.

There are indeed indications that Pyongyang was looking for a tourist who could be made an example, in order to scare future tourists into reticence. If that was the intention, it certainly worked. The tour was suspended for 45 days. When it resumed recently a columnist for the Seoul daily Chosun Ilbo went along and later reported: ''On the cruise ship, on the bus and whenever there were a small number of people gathered together, Hyundai personnel continuously asked the Kumgang mountains tourists not to say anything to the North Korean tour guides other than 'hello' and 'thank you'.'' The tourists complied.

2. New image needed for Korean residents' group in Japan

Keeping the Kumgang tourism money flowing in is particularly important to Pyongyang in view of a threat to the regime's other more or less legal major source of foreign exchange: remittances from ethnic Koreans in Japan. Japanese authorities have talked of cutting off that money pipeline if North Korea test-launches a Taepodong II missile.

It's useful to bear that threat in mind while considering how to assess a recent series of reports by Japan's Mainichi newspaper. The paper asserted that no less a North Korean personage than Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, at a meeting in April in Pyongyang, told the first vice-chairman of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan to change its image: rather than being seen as a Pyongyang puppet outfit, aping North Korea in everything from propaganda to the style of stage musicals it produces, it should come across in a manner appropriate for an organization of people who have lived in Japan for several generations.

Officials of the association, which is called Chongryon in Korean, stormed over to the offices of Mainichi editors to deny many of the specifics contained in the articles. As a Chongryon spokesman told Pyongyang Watch, ''Kim Jong-il didn't say such a thing.'' The spokesman added that there's nothing new about trying to make Chongryon fit in with its Japanese surroundings; the organization on a ''constant'' basis has been ''deciding policies in accordance with the realities in Japan''.

Regardless of when it started, other North Korean sources confirm to PW that there indeed is an effort to give Chongryon a more independent image. The effort could help Pyongyang on two fronts. First, a reported decline in Chongryon's membership numbers could be halted or slowed - since a new image would appeal to ethnic Koreans who, turned off lately by seeing Chongryun treated as Pyongyang's cash cow, have been contemplating or taking up Japanese citizenship or otherwise leaving the fold. Second, distancing Chongryon a bit from Pyongyang might inspire Japanese authorities to relax their intense surveillance of the organization, especially their scrutiny of financial dealings with the motherland by Chongryon and its members.

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