Halfway through a video from North Korea, the camera pans to a propaganda portrait of Kim Jong-il, North Korea's leader, magnificent in his general's dress uniform with gold epaulets. Scribbled in black ink across his smooth face is a demand for "freedom and democracy."
If genuine, the graffiti speaks of political opponents willing to risk execution to get their message out. If staged, the video means that a North Korean hustler was willing to deface a picture of the "Dear Leader" to earn a quick profit by selling it to a South Korean human rights group.
Either way, the 35-minute video is the latest evidence that new ways of thinking are stealing into North Korea, perhaps corroding the steely controls on ideology and information that have kept the Kim family in power for almost 60 years.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
The construction of cellular relay stations last fall along the Chinese side of the border has allowed some North Koreans in border towns to use prepaid Chinese cellphones to call relatives and reporters in South Korea, defectors from North Korea say. And after DVD players swept northern China two years ago, entrepreneurs collected castoff videocassette recorders and peddled them in North Korea. Now, tapes of South Korean soap operas are so popular that state television in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, is campaigning against South Korean hairstyles, clothing and slang, visitors and defectors have said.
"In the 1960s, in the Soviet Union, it was cool to wear blue jeans and listen to rock and roll," said Andrei Lankov, a Russian exchange student in the North at Kim Il-sung University in 1985, who now teaches about North Korea at Kookmin University here in the South.
"Today, it is cool for North Koreans to look and behave South Korean, as they do in the television serials. That does not bode well for the long-term survival of the regime," he said.
Interest in the political hold of the Kim family has spiked since the North's claim that it has nuclear weapons and will continue to boycott disarmament talks. Analysts of the North usually focus on the governing elite, and some cracks have appeared there in the past year: the demotion of Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law, the defection of a few high-ranking military officers, the huge explosion that destroyed a rail station a few hours after Kim's train had passed through, and what appears to be the start of a succession battle among his three sons.
Analysts are debating the importance of Kim's visits to military bases, which accounted for almost two-thirds of his 92 publicly divulged appearances last year, compared with one-third in 2003. With North Korea closed to US journalists, it is hard to decipher whether Kim is shoring up his power base in the army out of fear of a foreign attack or of an internal coup.
Past predictions that Kim's power was ebbing have not been borne out.
"We have very meager intelligence resources, and we're sort of flying blind," Howard Baker said on Feb. 16 in Tokyo in his final news briefing as US ambassador to Japan. "My country has no alternative but to assume that Kim Jong-il will continue in power. There won't be any significant change in the governance of that country."
Reviewing North Korea's political elite, "we see no big change," said Noriyuki Suzuki, director of Radio Press, a Japanese government monitoring service that focuses on the North Korean media.
"But the bigger worry for him should be not in the core part of his power structure, but any move of distrust or dissatisfaction with the regime among the general public," Suzuki said, referring to Kim. He cited a recent joint editorial published in North Korea's three most important newspapers "strongly warning against the flow of information from outside the country, warning against the inflow of capitalist elements through travel outside."
In the recording studio of a radio station here, Seong Min-kim, a former North Korean army captain who is now the director for the South Korean radio station Free NK, explained how Chinese cellphones in North Korea have enabled him to nurture sources there.
"He just dials 0082 to get the Korean-speaking Chinese operator, then makes a collect call to here," Kim said of one source. The prepaid cellphones are usually paid for by journalists in South Korea, he said, and the North Koreans go along largely out of curiosity or to try to make business deals. He added: "They are getting more and more tech savvy. Now they are asking for cellphones with cameras attached."
At a human rights conference here on Feb. 15, defectors estimated in interviews that about one-third of the defectors in South Korea regularly talk to family members back in North Korea, calling owners of prepaid Chinese cellphones at a prearranged time.
To counter this, North Korea has reportedly started border patrols using Japanese equipment that can track cellphone calls. Reporters tell stories of their contacts who only make calls from their private garden plots in the hills, burying the cell phone in the ground after each call.
While Chinese cellphones only work a few miles inside North Korea, the videocassette phenomenon has reportedly spread throughout the nation, reaching into every area where there is electricity.
"They are within the reach of the average family," said Lankov, who regularly interviews recent defectors. "They watch, almost exclusively, smuggled and copied South Korean movies and drama. Only a few weeks after airing here, they will go throughout North Korea."
More than showing middle-class family lifestyles, which can be staged in a studio, the soap operas also provide images of a modern Seoul -- the forest of high-rise buildings, the huge traffic jams, the late-model cars.
With such images showing a stark contrast with primitive conditions in North Korea, Kim ordered the formation of a special prosecutor's office last November to arrest people who deal in South Korean goods, largely videotapes, or who use South Korean expressions or slang, analysts in South Korea say.
To crack down on home viewing of imported videotapes, the North Korean police developed the strategy of encircling a neighborhood in the evening, cutting off electricity, then inspecting players to find videotapes stuck inside, according to Young Howard, international coordinator of the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, a Seoul-based group. Recent defectors have also told Howard that police cars with loudspeakers have patrolled neighborhoods, warning residents to maintain their "socialist lifestyle" and to shun South Korean speech and clothing and hair styles, he said.
Aggressive moves by the US have added to the information leaking into North Korea. Last fall, Congress unanimously approved the North Korea Human Rights Act, which provides for increased Korean-language radio broadcasting to North Korea and for helping North Korean refugees in China.
The law has been a favorite target of harsh denunciations from North Korea. In January, the official radio network blamed the US for societal decay, accusing Washington of increasing the broadcasting hours of Radio Free Asia toward North Korea and "massively infiltrating" into North Korea "portable transistor radios and impure publications and video materials."
Inside North Korea, social, political and economic controls have been eroded by two other changes over the past decade: private markets and a breakdown in travel restrictions, Lankov said.
"You have private money lenders, you have inns, you have brothels, you have canteens," he said, adding that most North Koreans survive through a combination of foreign aid and a fledgling private economy.
Draconian controls on internal travel and on travel to China have been breaking down, he said, and hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have traveled to and from Korean-speaking areas of China, exposing them to a thriving market economy and more South Korean television broadcasts.
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