In addition to being a strong deterrent for potential aggressors, a nuclear arsenal is relatively cost-effective compared to legions of obsolete weaponry and a massive defense force, a senior party official explained to me.
WILL NORTH KOREA STRIKE GOLD?
For all the errors and mismanagement, there’s reason to be hopeful for the future. The North Koreans are very pragmatic people, coming from a long tradition of industrialism in its economic alliance with the Soviet Union. During the cold war, the DPRK even boasted a higher percentage of industrial workers than its former socialist ally, which is an important measure of “socialist progress.” That factor, combined with the population’s 99 percent literacy rate, can bring about a swift reconstruction of industry once economic reforms are carried out.
All over the countryside I saw that people were in some ways not living agrarian lives. Their skills were clear, for example, when they would weld with pinpoint precision, something only well-trained and experienced craftsmen do. More extraordinary was their ability to weld in the dark, despite not having undergone professional training. Factories were better organized and cleaner than those I’ve seen in other socialist countries in the past, such as those in Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
I was also impressed by the electrical and mechanical engineers who explained to me how they built a hydropower station, which included turbines and generators. The construction was based on one dam in a simple 1970s Russian leaflet with a few photos, but without detailed drawings and technical specifications. A team of ABB experts whom I led on a delegation were amazed at the ingenuity and called the station an engineering masterpiece.
The good work ethic comes from the party’s sophisticated governance system, which uses awards and high-level visits. One system, called the Ch’ŏngsan-ri management method, started in the 1960s. It was first introduced in the Chongsanri agricultural cooperation in 1960 before it was applied as an agricultural management system for collectivized farms. Essentially, the system was designed to give workers ideological and spiritual rather than material incentives. It urged officials to emulate Kim Il Sung by doing field inspections during which they addressed farmers’ grievances and listened to their ideas.
For factories, the Taean work system was introduced and aimed at streamlining bureaucratic management. This system was first introduced in 1961 at the Taean Electric Machinery Plant, which put a party committee at the head of an enterprise. The members were to debate and decide collectively the directions and methods to be applied in the company. As in the case of Chongsanri, the party committee had not only a supervisory role but also an inspirational one to permanently motivate workers to achieve production goals. Observers in the West may see an approach like this as paternalistic and backwards, but stripping it of all moral judgments, it gave North Koreans reason to work hard when times were difficult.
These socialist management systems were, with the exception of those of Mao’s China, the most radical ones. Even Stalin’s Soviet Union gave material benefits to high-performing workers. In addition to these methods, mass production campaigns like the Chollima movement that started in 1958 were introduced, which exhorted the workers to achieve production targets. To this effect it included “socialist competition” among industries, companies, farms, and work units, where the winners earned praise for their outstanding socialist and patriotic deeds.
The Korean Workers’ Party also has mass campaigns extolling workers to labor and to meet the planned targets. And last but not least, the top leaders regularly inspect factories, farms, shops, and military units, where they offer guidance and mix with exemplary workers, farmers, and soldiers. To memorialize such a historical visit, the local committee always erects a commemorative stone at factory entrances, schools, and other places that have what they would call the privilege of benefiting from the leader’s personal guidance.
The most exemplary workers are honored with the award of a “labor hero” title, while others get other awards and medals. State-run factories, companies, and army units are also given Kim Il Sung medals and Kim Jong Il medals “in the struggle to construct the state,” as the award reads. A small elite of senior party cadres, artists, sportsmen and sportswomen, and scientists who have done extraordinarily great deeds for the country are honored with golden watches carrying the leader’s signature, cars with the leader’s birthday number (216) on the license plate, and sometimes even houses. On a side note, material objects also, such as buildings, tractors, trucks, etc., are “rewarded” with stars and other symbols of recognition when their planned life span has been exceeded.
Everybody in the production line, from regular workers to chief engineers all the way up to senior ideological leaders, held a fervent belief in technology. They believed that it could solve pretty much every problem in their businesses. It’s a myth that has been cherished by all socialist countries—that science and technology can bring about an affluent socialist society—which also has influences in Confucianism. They constantly chattered using trendy acronyms like CNC (computer numerical control, meaning computer-controlled machine tools) and IT (information technology), and terms like “biotech,” implying some level of sophistication.
In 2009, I began hearing choirs sing a propaganda song praising the greatness of CNC machines. It was striking that the North Koreans, otherwise proud of conserving the purity of the Korean language, used even the English expressions CNC and CAD (computer-aided design) and not a Korean euphemism stripped of any foreign tinge. That was because everybody agreed, at least on the surface, that the DPRK did not require social and economic reforms. The fatherland was perfect, but the economy suffered because it didn’t have state-of-the art technologies. They blamed that problem on Western embargoes.
North Korea has the potential to experience a windfall of wealth from natural resources—but the problem is, unfortunately, that it’s not selling metals and minerals systematically. An important cause of this is the lack of electricity and materials, along with the worn-out equipment, antiquated facilities, and poor maintenance. This made even the country’s most important facilities operate at about 30 percent or less of their capacity only in the mid-2000s, according to the assessment of some mining equipment companies I represented in North Korea. The country has impressive deposits of more than 200 different minerals.
North Korea’s magnesite reserves are the world’s second largest after China’s, and magnesite is a particularly valuable mineral because of its importance for industry. It has a wide range of uses such as in insulating material in the electrical industry, as slag in steelmaking furnaces, and even in the preparation of chemicals and fertilizers.
The country’s iron ore mine in Musan, near the Chinese border, is Asia’s largest. Iron is the most commonly used metal, used for construction, including bridges and highways; means of transportation, such as cars, trains, ships, and aircraft; and tools such as machines and knives.
Its tungsten deposits are likely the sixth largest in the world, and North Korea is China’s second-largest coal supplier. While coal is primarily used for producing steam in electric power plants or by the steel industry for coke making, tungsten is used for mining and drilling tools, cutting tools, dies, bearings, and armor-piercing projectiles. In countries like the United States and Germany, tungsten is widely used in the production of cutting tools and wear-resistant materials.
North Korea is also home to substantial deposits of rare earth minerals, which are difficult to find around the globe but are increasingly in demand from growing powers such as China and India. They are particularly valuable because of their omnipotent potential: they’re present in pretty much every piece of consumer electronics, such as computer disc drives, X-ray imaging, flat-screen televisions, iPhones, wind turbines, halogen lights, and precision-guided missiles, to name but a few. The country is also home to an estimated 2,000 tons of gold, 500 billion tons of iron, and 6 billion tons of magnesite, with a total value running into the trillions of U.S. dollars. At least that’s according to a 2009 report titled Current Development Situation of Mineral