If she is lucky — if her husband or children can slip away unnoticed to the riverside, nearer the Chinese telephone masts — Chae Un-ee can talk to her family each day. “Talk” is perhaps an exaggeration; they end the call, made on a smuggled handset and SIM card, almost as soon as it begins.
“They have to be very quick because otherwise the phone can be tracked down,” she said. “It’s mainly just to hear their voices. If they don’t call me I worry, because the situation is very tense there.”
“There” is North Korea. Chae is not a dissident, or even a defector — only a mother working abroad to feed her family. Yet North Korea’s control of its citizens is such that even her presence in China, the country’s only significant ally, could result in harsh punishment.
Six decades after its creation, North Korea remains a totalitarian state, controlling not just the expression and movements, but also the livelihoods, media viewing habits and even haircuts of its citizens.
A UN report released last month warned that the “gravity, scale and nature of [human rights] violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”
Pyongyang’s media outlets portray a country beset by hostile forces, but unified in its devotion to its leader, Kim Jong-un. In reality, North Koreans’ faith has finally leached away, according to citizens interviewed in China.
“Twenty years ago, North Korea was better — life was comfortable and people didn’t have bad thoughts. Now everybody is angry,” said Chae, 50.
Others are equally clear and damning: “Of course no one believes. Those who say they want a better life inside North Korea? I think they’re just lying,” said one person who requested anonymity.
No one would dare to speak this way to a foreigner inside North Korea. However, in recent years some of the country’s 25 million inhabitants have traveled to China — usually to work illicitly, with the aim of returning to their families, although sometimes hoping to reach refuge in South Korea.
Some enter on valid visas, while others slip across the river border. Most stay in the north, in Yanji, Jilin Province, which has a large ethnic Korean population. They face repatriation and severe punishment if caught; Chae, like other recent arrivals who spoke to reporters, did not give her real name.
By working as a maid, she can make up to 2,000 yuan (US$320) a month; enough to feed her family for four months.
Interviewees described their envy of China’s relative wealth: modern kitchen equipment, plentiful rice, a constant supply of gas and electricity.
“You can just shower at home, any time, whenever you want,” said Chae Young-hee, a care worker also in her 50s.
The greatest shock is China’s freedom.
China has one of the world’s most extensive and sophisticated censorship systems. It regularly jails activists and dissidents. However, you can use the Internet; you can watch foreign movies. You can wear what you like and travel abroad. You can grumble to neighbors about officials without looking over your shoulder.
“The biggest difference is that here, they respect human rights. You can sell whatever you want and go to foreign countries and do whatever you want; everything is free here. There is no control,” Chae Yong-hee said.
In the 1960s, North Korea was wealthier than its neighbors. In an era of East Asian authoritarianism, its political controls were less extraordinary. Older North Koreans recall that they felt blessed.
However, the economy began to slip, and the devastating famine of the 1990s — which killed hundreds of thousands — crushed hopes of a reversal. The country’s command economy collapsed. About three-quarters of household income is now believed to come from the private sector.
“Before, it was true that the state provided all the income and food. All you see now is the state getting in the way,” said Hazel Smith, an expert on the country at the UK’s University of Central Lancashire.
Kim Myong-eul’s husband should receive 10kg of rice twice a month for working as a laborer; instead, they get rations just a few times a year.
“Everybody’s trading — there’s no other way,” Kim said.
COVET THEY NEIGHBOR
The political connections of members of the Workers’ Party of Korea mean they are best able to leverage the market: “The activity of every one of those people in every workplace and neighborhood is a living contradiction of every one of the government’s statements every day,” Smith said.
Periodic crackdowns — one reportedly followed the purge of Kim’s uncle in November last year — breed further resentment.
“They take everything away,” Chae said. “Everything is limited by the government, but people have to buy 100 percent of their things at the market to survive.”
Though economic data on North Korea is notoriously hard to come by, its growth is estimated at 1.3 percent over the past 15 years. More than four in five households have borderline or poor food consumption, according to the World Food Program, but where once “there were bodies lying in the streets — now there are traffic jams” in Pyongyang, said Andrei Lankov, of Kookmin University in Seoul.
Those improvements have increased disenchantment, he believes, because people now have time to talk and think instead of focusing on survival.
“In 2007 or 2008, it became clear that the attitude of people had changed,” Chae said. “Before, people said a lot of really bad things about South Korea, they don’t any more. Also, you just see people disappear, it often means they have left North Korea. If you are with people you are very, very close to, you might express your position, you might say, ‘I’d like to leave if I could.’”
“People started knowing how the world was,” Chae added. “People have been watching videos from overseas for a while and a lot of people have gone abroad and come back and talked about how life is [outside].”
She recalled watching all 40 episodes of a South Korean drama in three days, covering her walls with blankets so no one could see the light from outside. However, crackdowns have restricted foreign media and her area no longer has electricity.
The messages in North Korean media are drilled into people through endless meetings in schools, workplaces and through official organizations
“We heard South Korea was very violent and [South] Koreans were always having their human rights violated and American tanks were around the cities, driving over people... And that there were all these demonstrations because rent and taxes were too high,” 37-year-old Han Myong-hee said.
“When you are living in North Korea, half of you thinks the South is developed and has a good life and would like to go there — but half of you, because you received this kind of training, wonders if it’s not a really terrible place,” Han added.
Border regions inevitably have more contact with the outside world, and interviewees acknowledged that those in other areas were more likely to retain faith in the system. However, across North Korea, disaffection has been compounded by years of hollow promises.
“The government said by 2002 we were going to have a good life. That came and went. Then they said by 2008. Then they said 2012,” Han said. “Even in 2008, most people realized it was a lie.”
The real tipping point, many believe, was 2009’s disastrous currency reform. Designed to rein in markets and reassert state control over the economy, it wiped out savings and sent food prices soaring due to hoarding. “Afterward it got crazy; life was very difficult and people started criticizing the government openly,” Song Eun-byul said.
BURNING MONEY
“There were reports saying spies intervened in the process and that it was not the government’s fault. Nobody really cared why it happened, but they were very unhappy,” Song added. “There were people who burned or threw away money or gave it away. The government lost a lot of its authority.”
Then came November’s dramatic purge and execution of so-called “traitor of the ages” Jang Song-thaek, Kim Jong-un’s uncle.
“Something like that was incredible. Ordinary people became terrified because a high-ranking official died,” Kim Myong-eul said, shaking her head at the thought of it.
Fear has propped up the regime since faith ebbed. Last month’s UN human rights commission report concluded: “The key to the political system is the vast political and security apparatus that strategically uses surveillance, coercion, fear and punishment... Public executions and enforced disappearance to political prison camps serve as the ultimate means to terrorize the population into submission.”
The UN report accused Pyongyang of multiple atrocities, including “murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence.”
Pyongyang’s ambassador to the UN told other countries to “mind your own business” and has claimed that lies and hostile forces spurred the commission.
Lankov said North Korea had 80,000 political prisoners, but was significantly less oppressive than before.
“Your entire family is immediately dead if you say something that goes against official lines? That’s not going to happen any more. Of course, if you make a joke about Kim Jong-un’s sexual habits, you’re dead,” he said.
That shift may reflect the regime’s knowledge of the growing disaffection, as may the hints of economic reforms — though similar proposals have emerged before.
“I have been notorious for repeating two ideas: the chances of Chinese-style economic reforms are low, and the chances of a popular revolution are essentially zero. Now I’m changing my mind,” Lankov said.
If North Korea’s government begins to embrace economic reform, he said, it can deliver growth — but it will never satisfy a public that has seen Chinese lifestyles.
Even so, he said, the Soviet Union survived for decades after disaffection set in.
“I think the fissure points in the system are not the population at large, but the elite; and we still don’t know enough about what interests are tied up with whose and who stands to gain or lose from all the shifts,” Smith said.
Ordinary people can only watch and wait.
“I wonder how things will be in future; will they be harder or improve a little bit? I think they’ll just get worse,” Kim Myong-eul said. “There’s conflict with the world and people are controlled. We need freedom to make things better.”
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