Ordinary North Koreans are hustling, just like the rest of us
When I meet new people and it becomes apparent I’ve covered the North Korean economy as a journalist, a common question is, Are they really all just acting, out of fear? My new friends are curious and recalling looped footage of mass rallies. Soldiers and citizens marching and saluting in eerie lock step.
Now a new, ground-level report released this week from Daily NK, an online newspaper devoted to North Korea, sheds light on ordinary citizens’ daily lives including market activities. And by market I mean places where consumer goods (rice, beer, school supplies, clothes, often sourced from China) are sold for hard currency. Bottom-up market forces. Grass-roots capitalism. Inside North Korea. And it’s only growing.
In the report cover photo (above) you can make out women selling food in a stall. They appear healthy, not malnourished. Well-clothed. Quite normal looking. Women play a dominant role in market activities but more about that later.
As widely followed North Korea watcher and scholar Stephan Haggard noted in a post this week, the “must-read” report is based on 32 informants.
And a third of the specially-trained informants reported from inside North Korea.
The sources hailed from all of the country’s provinces and Pyongyang, the North’s capital and largest city. Read: Markets are growing and located everywhere, from urban areas into the countryside. (Haggard also authored the report’s forwarding remarks.)
As a point of context, information and data about North Korea generally comes from sources including experts, scholars, visitors, interviews from defectors and what economists call “mirrored” statistics. Leader Kim Jong Un and the regime aren’t releasing GDP reports or any other economic data for that matter. So economists can use data from surrounding countries like China and Russia to reflect and piece together an economic profile of North Korea. So to get such a detailed report, sourced from people inside the North, is rare.
Footage of stalls selling snacks, winter clothing in Chongjin City in North Korea. I personally would go for the “Star Pies,” kind of like Mallomars or MoonPies. The video was published to YouTube in May 2017.
What’s the big deal about markets?
It’s a place to access goods and unfiltered news and information from the outside world. Just think about your local farmers’ market. You buy stuff, gossip. Exchange info about what’s happening in the nabe, where you might have traveled. What did you see … over there?
Keep in mind while the government tolerates North Koreans buying food and supplies in these markets, technology and outside media (DVDs, thumb drives downloaded with outside news and films) are forbidden and punishable offenses. But such technology and information find their way into North Korea through the porous, 880-mile border it shares with China. Someone knows someone who got access to a thumb drive with outside news and a movie, maybe “Charlie’s Angels.” You might watch it on a small tablet (likely from China) under the cover of blankets at night. Then the thumb drive gets discreetly passed around to someone else, another family, another friend.
Markets gained a foothold in the 1990s, and were induced by famines. North Koreans’ universe is divided into two periods: before and after one of the 20th century’s worst famines. The devastation killed roughly 2 million people, though estimates vary widely. Starving in the ’90s, North Koreans turned to nascent, outdoor markets that had emerged in the previous decade. Industrious housewives hawked kitchen utensils for handfuls of rice in the black markets. The goal was simple. Secure food for the day, period. A certain amount of this market activity was eventually decriminalized.
Now years later, the markets are widespread and entrenched in the North Korean economy. Daily NK verified the existence of 387 officially-sanctioned markets within the country, with residents selling from over 600,000 stalls within these marketplaces.
“In population terms, over 5 million people, or 20% of the population are either directly or indirectly reliant on the General Markets, solidifying their place in North Korean society as an integral and irreversible means of survival in the wake of the collapse of the state’s Public (food) Distribution System,” according to Daily NK.
As one defector Yeonmi Park told me in 2014, “Most people are now involved in the black market because if they don’t go to the black market to do business, they cannot survive.” In her 20s, she’s part of what’s sometimes called North Korea’s black market generation — millennials who didn’t grow up during the famine years and can’t recall a regime that ever fed them regularly. Yeonmi and other millennials are growing up surrounded by markets and hustling for food and money. She went on to write an incredible biography (In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom) about her years-long journey to freedom. She’s petite and huggable. But her grit is palpable.
“While the regime continues to suppress fundamental civil and political rights, nascent freedom of mobility has improved markedly thanks to North Korea’s fledgling marketization,” according to Daily NK.
Will the regime ever unravel?
These markets aren’t going away. And the larger question is how does Kim Jong Un and the regime manage the markets, while keeping a grip on its citizens? “The report suggests that the economy is also much more open — and thus vulnerable — than the leadership might even fully appreciate,” according to Haggard.
That’s because as anyone who’s survived a closed society knows, it’s hard to un-learn knowledge of the outside world. Once you crack open the door to outside information, a window opens. An idea forms. When a North Korean watches a smuggled copy of “Rocky,” they’re noticing the food in the large refrigerator. When they see “Titantic,” they’re grasping the storyline of two adults ignoring scripted destinies and expressing free will through love. And not love for the regime or a cult leader, but romantic love for another person.
The future is female, and other report highlights:
Many women play a central role in broad marketization forces. North Korean men often serve the regime in some kind of bureaucratic capacity. So women are left to run the household and are effective breadwinners.
Markets have also grown in size to roughly 1,500 stalls per market, according to the report’s sources. And there’s no way this expansion happened without official support. The government has provided physical infrastructure, and has also benefited from its ability to tax transactions.
Different kinds of markets that extend beyond consumer goods have emerged. There are markets in services, real estate, finance and labor.
The Daily NK report includes these details and more that collectively suggest a complex, tiered market system that extends far beyond housewives and small mom-and-pops, as Haggard points out. This layered landscape includes wholesale operators. Fixed investments. Accumulation of capital. A state-private, hybrid model.
And this broad, functioning market system ultimately makes direct articulation of opposition to Kim Jong Un comparatively unusual, according to the report. The research findings suggest a government likely to keep its grasp on power. “The North Korean economy is open to China, and this has lessened the need for internal economic reform,” according to the report.
If you can access clothes, food, even a beer in the markets, would you revolt or start an uprising? Maybe not. That said, unfiltered information from the outside, and the ability to make money in markets and drive your own destiny to a certain extent are powerful ideas now planted in the minds of the North Korean people.
The detailed PDF Daily NK report can be found here. (It can take a moment to download) The report is the culmination of research between 2014–2016.
I wrote about North Korea’s black market generation here.
