North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors
James Pearson
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0804844585
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
**Named one of the best books of 2015 by The Economist**
Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors.
North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly pursues the development of nuclear arms, which periodically incites risky military clashes with the larger, richer, liberal South, and which forces each and every person to play a role in the "theater state" even as it pays little more than lip service to the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority.
With this deeply anachronistic system eventually failed in the 1990s, it triggered a famine that decimated the countryside and obliterated the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people. However, it also changed life forever for those who survived.
A lawless form of marketization came to replace the iron rice bowl of work in state companies, and the Orwellian mind control of the Korean Workers' Party was replaced for many by dreams of trade and profit. A new North Korea Society was born from the horrors of the era—one that is more susceptible to outside information than ever before with the advent of k-pop and video-carrying USB sticks. This is the North Korean society that is described in this book.
In seven fascinating chapters the authors explore what life is actually like in modern North Korea today for the ordinary "man and woman on the street." They interview experts and tap a broad variety of sources to bring a startling new insider's view of North Korean society—from members of Pyongyang's ruling families to defectors from different periods and regions, to diplomats and NGOs with years of experience in the country, to cross-border traders from neighboring China, and textual accounts appearing in English, Korean and Chinese sources. The resulting stories reveal the horror as well as the innovation and humor which abound in this fascinating country.
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2. Government control of information flow will also have aided the regime in the short term. To illustrate, the Tiananmen Square massacre became known to some Pyongyangites simply via word of mouth, but most North Koreans would never have heard about it at the time. By contrast, they were most certainly allowed to hear about the 1980 Gwangju massacre in South Korea. 3. There is much debate over the final human cost of the famine. Official UN population figures show no significant decline in the.
Ruling family’s 200-foot (60-meter) yacht. Unlike his father, the younger Kim reportedly favors French red wine over cognac. Pyongyang’s Sunan Airport in 2010 before undergoing comprehensive renovations in 2014. The arrivals board shows no flights, but national carrier Air Koryo and Chinese carrier Air China currently schedules fairly regular flights in and out of the country, and regular chartered flights in the summer to the Chinese cities of Yanji and Changchun. North Korea restarted.
Sanitized. Then there are the songs that no young person really wants to listen to at all: those that praise the ruling family, exhort the listener to work diligently, or deliver nostalgic memories of home towns and mothers.29 Sometimes, people even make jokes out of these songs; one interviewee talks of university students in Pyongyang singing an old propaganda song “Nagaja, nagaja” (roughly, “Let’s go forth”), in a comical way whenever they had to leave a room. South Korean pop is about love,.
Reorganization, gross profit margins were around 80 percent on an average revenue per user of almost US$15 per quarter. With a user base of over two million ordinary registrants, the share of profit accruing to the state will be in the low tens of millions per year. Added to that are the huge margins earned on handsets, which are marked up by two or three times their real value.4 According to accountants Deloitte, Koryolink has built up US$422 million of cash (presumably from core business.
Quasi-public, quasi-private business with Chinese counterparts—kept their earnings in foreign currency. But again, the long-term result has been to push North Koreans even further beyond the orbit of state economic control. Ordinary people now increasingly seek out the yuan and other currencies as stores of wealth. They have learned not to trust the government and its currency, the won. At the same time, they have learned that trading and saving in yuan can shield them from the consequences of.