North Korea feared losing control of its glamorously valuable natural resources, and as such was reluctant to sell raw materials to neighboring countries. As a result, only a few foreign and North Korean-invested mining joint ventures have been doing the extractions in the last ten years. When I suggested upon my arrival in North Korea to the senior officials in the then-Ministry of Metal and Machinery Industries, which owned the large Musan Iron Ore Mine at the Chinese border, to open it up to Chinese investment and exploitation, the answer was that “it is a part of the Korean heritage which we cannot give away.” Over the following years I witnessed the government turn down a dozen or so foreign requests to invest in mines.
But change is in the air, and North Korea is getting serious about profiting from metals and minerals. The China People’s Daily reported in September 2011:
According to China’s General Administration of Customs, the value of direct exports to China from the DPRK last year was $1.2 billion, a 51 percent increase year-on-year, attributed to China’s robust demand for iron ore, coal, and copper. At present, the DPRK mainly imports grain and oil from China. In 2010, China’s exports to its peninsula neighbor reached $2.3 billion, an increase of 21 percent from a year earlier.
The prospect was unthinkable just a couple of years earlier, but North Koreans are now rolling out the red carpet for Chinese investors. They’re also building manufacturing outposts along the border where China can hire cheap North Korean labor, where dealings are more relaxed than in Kaesong. (More on Kaesong later.)
China is making an effort, too, to develop its desolate northern provinces by taking advantage of cross-border exchanges. These provinces are now booming with factories along with a construction frenzy to build roads and railways that move outside of North Korea, but China supports the construction and maintenance of some roads into North Korea as well.
Some unlikely spots are being developed for joint manufacturing projects. Hwanggumpyong, a farming and military-focused island south of the Chinese border city of Dandong, and Wihwa, a smaller island in the middle of the Yalu River, are due to be turned into hubs for manufacturing, tourism, and logistics. So far, disagreements between the North Koreans and the Chinese have led to delays.
Russia, too, has moved in with construction projects that will give it access to the ice-free North Korean port of Rajin. Moscow’s hope is to export Siberian coal and import Asian goods that it will eventually transport to Western Europe. (Russian Railways operates the world’s second-largest network after that of the U.S., reaching from North Korea’s border well into Western Europe.) Of course, North Korea stands to get significant cuts from the project.
Many South Koreans fear that China is encroaching on North Korea with money, hoping to swallow it up and turn it into a de facto Chinese province. The accusations are unfounded; I just don’t see convincing evidence that the investments—made by individual companies and not the government itself—are part of a political conspiracy driven by common defense interests or a grand geopolitical strategy on the Korean Peninsula.
Trade and investment are bigger priorities for China. That will improve the standard of living of its northeastern provinces, as well as promote stability in its immediate neighborhood. Too much pessimism can block out this sort of objective view, and there’s much to look forward to in China-North Korea relations.
NOTES
1. Data from http://www.country-studies.com/north-korea/agriculture.html.
2. Data from U.N. agencies and The World Factbook 2013-14. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2013.
Chapter 3
Look to the Party, Young Revolutionary, and Buy
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by
the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The
masses have to be won by propaganda.
—Hannah Arendt
"He looks like a monkey,” Mr. Kim, a customer, said while giggling during our lunchtime one day, as he watched a Western aid worker at another table. I laughed as I found both the foreigner funny as well as the reactions of the two Koreans.
The foreign aid worker had piercings all over his face, on his eyebrows, nose, lips, and even cheeks. His untidy long hair was patched with dyed colors. He wore a ridiculous-looking cap that was too small and had a zany insignia, and tattered clothes, including the typical torn jeans in vogue for Westerners.
He wasn’t the only unkempt Westerner I knew in the expatriate community, and people like him reinforced the stereotype. They seemed to forget that they were, in fact, guests in a foreign country, and not there to take advantage of some tributary vassal state in the Far East.
Mr. Kim’s superior, Mr. Son, looked at him sternly, disapproving of his remarks. Mr. Son probably thought exactly the same thing. But Mr. Kim was not supposed to express his thoughts about a foreigner in front of another foreigner. Reading between the lines, I understood what both of them were really thinking. What Korean would ever want to become like him?
Meanwhile, patriotic songs were constantly blaring on public loudspeakers, on television, and at military parades. But one piece in particular got stuck in my head, played over and over as the country’s most popular melody. At a gymnastics performance, the tune buzzed on once again, prompting me to turn to a friend for an explanation.
Mr. Pang, a chief beer brewer working at a beer factory, responded that he was shocked that this Swiss expatriate wasn’t familiar with it.
“You don’t know this tune?” he answered with genuine surprise. “It’s called ‘No Motherland without You.’”
“What is it about then?” I inquired.
He went into an impassioned but short speech, showing off his patriotism for the fatherland. “It’s about our General Kim Jong Il. It says without him we cannot exist, as he has extraordinary talents and virtues, and that’s why we Koreans love him. It was him who further developed the Juche idea created by our Great Leader president Kim Il Sung, and it was him who introduced the Songun (military first) politics to protect our motherland and the Korean people.”
Mr. Pang then translated the core sentence that is repeated in the song: “We cannot exist without you, Comrade Kim Jong Il! The motherland cannot exist without you!”
For all his faults, Kim Il Sung did everything in his power to preserve Korean arts and culture. His ideas were even supported by ardent overseas Koreans who opposed the regime.
North Koreans consider themselves to this day as ethnically pure and intrinsically superior, far more than do the people of other nationalistic regimes in Japan and China. They believe that they are the world’s most upright people living in the world’s most exceptional nation.
The mindset is a natural extension of their history. A national experience of foreign dominance by China, Japan, and the U.S. has, in the eyes of the North Koreans, wrecked the purity of their southern neighbors; today, North Koreans have taken sole guardianship of what they see as true “Koreanness.”
The attitude is reflected in North Korean propaganda, and taking a look at the myriad of posters and leaflets reveals much about the mindset. Pyongyang is home to the Korean Workers’ Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, which controls far-reaching ideological campaigns. The state sees propaganda as particularly valuable, giving it the needed resources that take up a good chunk of the gross national product—although the precise data haven’t been published.
To be fair, all over the world businesses engage in another form of propaganda: advertising. The only difference is that it advances a cause of consumerism rather than politics. North Korea had banned the unsocialist practice until 2002, when advertisements were allowed. The opening suggests at least a partial embrace of market ideas.
Still, it’s only a little creek compared to the vast sea of state-sponsored information: PyongSu,