console. Those with regime ties—high-ranking military and party officials—have reaped the most benefits. Using those connections, they have amassed fortunes by overseeing Kim Jong Un’s numerous infrastructure and building projects, often exploiting foreign contacts that they cultivated when working overseas. Aspiring entrepreneurs rely on proximity to the regime’s inner circles, where kickbacks are the name of the game. In the words of the journalists Daniel Tudor and James Pearson, “In a sense…the top leadership of North Korea is operating a protection racket.”
The visibility of the wealth generated by the donju and the jangmadang generation is probably reinforcing the view among his people and the outside world that Kim Jong Un is living up to his own rhetoric of improving the quality of life for North Koreans. Indeed, Kim seems to be encouraging people to improve their condition through their own grit to overcome the realities of frequent electrical outages and lack of public goods and services.
Jean Lee, the former Associated Press bureau chief in Pyongyang, has articulated how the regime has been using soap operas and films to help disseminate the regime’s priorities. In her fascinating study of North Korean soap operas produced under Kim Jong Un, she comments on how these television shows reflect changes in the regime’s vision of North Korean life—from the dreary, battlefield dreams of the days of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, to the uplifting ideals of a happy middle-class proletariat. Episodes show scenes of homes in newly built apartment complexes, “fussily decorated with curtains, clocks, wallpaper, table lamps, flowers and plants….Tables overflow with food.” The men wear fancy gold watches and the women wear smart blouses and skirts; students learn in classrooms filled with technology such as computers, microphones, speakers, telescopes, and recording devices. The characters’ days are filled with schoolroom hijinks, women gossiping, and neighbors plotting to play matchmaker and helping one another out by lugging water up the stairs when an electrical outage causes the elevator to stop functioning. The North Koreans, from Kim’s perspective, are “young, bright, clever, loyal and sometimes mischievous—innocuous versions of the leader himself.” They celebrate when the December 2012 rocket launch succeeds and neighborhood rivals “forget momentarily that they despise one another and dance in a circle.”
But even as the regime tacitly allows formal and informal markets to flourish, there are risks both for the entrepreneurs and for Kim. North Korean citizens have to walk a fine line between the acceptable and unacceptable and pay a premium in bribes and fees for the privilege of carrying out their businesses. They also face the constant threat of running into trouble, of inadvertently crossing officials or fellow citizens who could make gains at their expense, not unusual occurrences in a system that rewards corruption and extortion. For the regime, the messy hybrid world of private-public enterprise allows for interlocking webs of elites and moneymakers who are invested in the survival of the current system, even as the cult of personality and the revolutionary ideology might be weakening. But that market activity inherently involves access to outside sources of information, whether in the form of DVDs or USBs smuggled into North Korea, as part of the travels and conversations with foreigners that are a necessary aspect of many entrepreneurs’ businesses.
The seepage of information into the country began during the famine years and has deepened skepticism about the regime over the past two decades. One doctor who started a business selling Chinese goods described how, in 1999, he went to China with a Chinese businessman, bribing border guards along the way. “The first, most shocking thing I saw in China was a market in a tiny, rural town. It was filled with poor people, but they weren’t that thin. And this market had everything! Rice, oil, bananas, meat—anyone could just buy and eat these….I realized that something was very wrong.” One defector said that he was amazed when he watched a popular South Korean movie with a friend. Regime propaganda had indoctrinated people into thinking that South Koreans lived in abject poverty, while North Koreans lived in paradise. Instead of the South Koreans who “seduce people and abduct them…kidnap foreigners and take their blood,” he saw in the movie how in South Korea “there were nice cars on the street….People were so well off, and the Seoul-ites’ way of speaking Korean was so interesting, so elegant….I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
In November 2017, The Washington Post compiled a report, “Life under Kim Jong Un,” cataloging defector