Possible North Korea

What do we know about North Korea, and how do we know it? In much of the Western scholarship and media that discuss the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), this basic epistemological question is answered in contradictory ways. On the one hand, North Korea is portrayed as the most opaque society on earth, where information is carefully regulated and tightly controlled by a state that prevents both outsiders from looking in and its own people from knowledge of the outside world. Yet on the other hand, there is no shortage of pundits in the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Europe who will state definitively that they know exactly what North Korea is all about: a ruthless totalitarian dictatorship, a rogue regime bent on military provocation and nuclear mischief, the world’s worst human rights disaster, etc. How North Korea can be both completely known and completely unknown is never explained. North Korea has even been described by a prominent American political scientist as an “impossible state,” surely an oxymoron for a state that clearly does exist and is therefore by definition possible.¹

There is, of course, a significant if still limited body of scholarship that takes a careful and nuanced view of North Korea. But most studies, and certainly most popular media analyses, of the DPRK suffer from four shortcomings. First, they fail to consider the complexity and diversity of North Korean society. Second, North Korea is usually portrayed as static and unchanging, when in fact it is changing very rapidly. Third, they usually subscribe to the cliché that there is little reliable information about North Korea accessible to outsiders, when in fact there is a wide range of sources available that can reveal a great deal about the DPRK, if one were to bother to look. Finally, perhaps worst of all, North Korean people are rarely taken seriously as active agents of their own—as opposed to passive victims of a totalitarian state, either brainwashed automatons or oppressed would-be rebels.

In their recent books, Hazel Smith, Daniel Tudor and James Pearson, and Sandra Fahy each in their own way reveal the complexity of North Korea and the remarkable social and economic changes the country is currently going through. Each of these books attempts to get past leadership-focused totalitarian stereotypes and uncover the lives of ordinary people in the DPRK. The authors’ backgrounds and disciplinary fields are quite diverse, and lend themselves to very different kinds of analyses. Smith is a professor of international relations in the United Kingdom who spent a number of years doing humanitarian aid work in the DPRK; Tudor and Pearson are British journalists based in South Korea; Fahy is a US-trained anthropologist based in Japan. Yet there is a considerable convergence among the authors’ conclusions, even if their methodologies and information bases are widely different.

All the authors agree that the famine of the 1990s, which killed something on the order of one million people, was the crucial event that marked the end of any functioning centrally planned economy (the “Kim Il-Sung system” in Smith’s terms) and the beginning of a new economy increasingly dominated by market activity.² Smith’s book is by far the most academic of the three, and although she does not utilize any Korean-language sources—or any sources not in English, for that matter—she draws on a wide and comprehensive range of materials from the secondary literature on modern and contemporary Korea, English translations of North Korean sources, and reports from UN agencies and non-governmental organizations. Having been one of the most clear-eyed and prolific observers of the...