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This blog depends heavily on good journalism and among my favorites are Daniel Tudor and James Pearson. Tudor worked for a number of years for the Economist in Seoul and is the author of Korea: The Impossible Country. Pearson is with Reuters and has done particularly good work on the border region. They have a raft of British degrees between them, and Tudor is into craft beer to boot. They have written a new single-volume account of North Korea-- North Korea Confidential—that is reminiscent of Andrei Lankov’s North of the DMZ and The Real North Korea: books that try to capture not only the bigger trends but daily life as well.
The subtitle pretty much gives away the book: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors. The private markets section is akin to our notion of marketization from below, with a particularly interesting focus on financial issues: the dollarization (and yuanization) of the economy; the remittance flows; the border economy and the emergence of larger scale activities such as construction that necessarily involve state/military/private partnerships. The book has a particularly nuanced and specific account of the penetration of South Korean cultural products: the soap operas and cartoons that have trended recently, drinking and moonshining habits, and house parties. A strong theme is how the new market economy is giving rise not only to economic inequality but to consumption—and conspicuous consumption—among a rising commercial class and their children; the last substantive chapter is titled Social Division. Another chapter tracks the subtle penetration of Western styles through the lens of fashion. An interesting tidbit: precisely because it is far away from Pyongyang, Tudor and Pearson claim that Chongjin is often the entry point for foreign fashion trends. They also note that import-substitution is taking place, as local small-scale firms respond to demand.
On the bigger themes, the book has a solid chapter on the political system. They concur broadly with the New Focus International line on the centrality of the Organization and Guidance Department. But they have a good feel for how factions emerge in such systems not over ideology or policy but over rents and personal connections. Near and dear to our hearts (see my piece with Marcus Noland here), the book has a chapter on the horrors of the country’s sprawling penal system, a focus of the recent Commission of Inquiry process.
The short concluding chapter draws an important substantive conclusion from the overview of daily life: that the system—while oppressive—is unable to stifle initiative. But the result, perversely, is that society may adapt as the regime engages in a tightly calibrated forbearance toward the market and private life. They conclude that the changes afoot may solidify rather than weaken the regime.
A nicely done single-volume overview that provides a much better introduction to the country than our more focused—and turgid—monographs.
