Dear Reader: In order to view all colored text and non-English text accurately, please ensure that the PUBLISHER DEFAULTS SETTING on your reading device is switched to ON. This will allow you to view all non-English characters and colored text in this book. —Tuttle Publishing
A CAPITALIST IN
NORTH KOREA
A CAPITALIST IN
NORTH KOREA
MY SEVEN YEARS IN THE HERMIT KINGDOM
FELIX ABT
TUTTLE Publishing
Tokyo | Rutland, Vermont | Singapore
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
Copyright © 2014 Felix Abt All images in this book are the property of the author, unless otherwise noted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938523
ISBN: 978-1-4629-1410-4 (ebook)
Distributed by
North America, Latin America & Europe
Tuttle Publishing
364 Innovation Drive
North Clarendon
VT 05759-9436, USA
Tel: 1 (802) 773 8930
Fax: 1 (802) 773 6993
[email protected] www.tuttlepublishing.com
Asia Pacific
Berkeley Books Pte Ltd
61 Tai Seng Avenue #02-12
Singapore 534167
Tel: (65) 6280 1330
Fax: (65) 6280 6290
[email protected] www.periplus.com
Japan
Tuttle Publishing
Yaekari Building 3rd Floor
5-4-12 Osaki Shinagawa-ku
Tokyo 1410032, Japan
Tel: (81) 3 5437 0171
Fax: (81) 3 5437 0755
[email protected] www.tuttle.co.jp
18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1405RP
Printed in China
TUTTLE PUBLISHING® is a registered trademark of Tuttle Publishing, a division of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
Contents
Preface: On the Verge of Glasnost?
Chapter 1 Into the Heart of Darkness
Chapter 2 Malaise into Opportunity
Chapter 3 Look to the Party, Young Revolutionary, and Buy
Chapter 4 Healing the Great Leader’s Children
Chapter 5 Same Bed, Different Dreams
Chapter 6 A Manchurian Candidate?
Chapter 7 Southerners, Yankees, and “Chinese Lips”
Chapter 9 Flowers of the Nation
Chapter 10 Nurturing Revolutionaries
Chapter 12 Partying, Pyongyang-Style
Chapter 14 The Loss of Innocence
Preface
On the Verge of Glasnost?
In December 2011, North Korea’s long-time leader, Kim Jong Il, collapsed on a train and died from a heart attack. Western intelligence agencies had been speculating for about two years that the Dear Leader’s health had been deteriorating. Still, by most accounts, the news came as a shock to Korea watchers. His youngest son, Kim Jong Un, immediately took the throne from his father, who was declared, in the unique North Korean tradition of necrocracy, the “eternal general secretary” of the Korean Workers’ Party.
“Lil’ Kim,” as Time magazine jokingly called him on its cover, set out to reform one of the world’s last five communist countries. Coming off the retrenchment of state-centric conservatism since the mid-2000s, he curbed the power of the military and surrounded himself with a top-level civilian cadre interested in a glasnost for the country. “Officials should work with a creative and enterprising attitude … [and] resolutely do away with the outdated ideological viewpoint and backward method and style of work,” he declared before a crowd. John Delury, a Yale-educated historian of China at South Korea’s Yonsei University, compared that rhetoric to Deng Xiaoping’s famous December 1978 speech that launched China’s reforms, in which he called on party members to be “pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways, and generate new ideas.”
For seven years, I worked in North Korea, hoping that injecting a business culture would help the regime nudge itself toward the world. But my romantic longing only made my life harder. People called me a “useful idiot” for one of the world’s most isolated and militarized