Kim Il-song's North Korea (review)

Welcome to North Korea, land of the———! Free? Brave? Chuch'e (self-reliance and independence)? Songbun (socioeconomic class)? Cult of Kim Il Sung! Kim Il-song's North Korea by Helen-Louise Hunter reads like a book with the title "Inside the Third Reich." It has the qualities of an exposé joined to the dryness of a C.I.A. report, which is what it originally was.

The book covers a wide range of topics with an "everything-you-wanted-to know-about" North Korea, soup-to-nuts scope: from the socioeconomic class structure of society to family life, children, leisure, hoodlums, real life, and consumer goods and services, to list the names of some of the chapters. There is a comprehensiveness about the coverage that leaves few areas untouched and creates a sense of the author's authority to write about the country, despite her never having been there. This expert status rests primarily on her twenty years as a Far East specialist for the C.I.A. Currently she is in private practice with an international law firm (name not given) in Washington, D.C. She is glowingly described by former Congressman Stephen J. Solarz, who is "stunned by her sociological analysis" (p. x), which was prepared for him when he went to visit North Korea (dates not provided but from other comments this was in the spring of 1980). Solarz has worked for years to get her report released to a public that he feels needs to know more about the "politically repressive and psychologically crushing realities of daily life in the dprk" (p. ix).

One of the strengths of the book is its first chapter, on songbun (socioeconomic class). The rigid hierarchy of North Korea is truer to the social structure of Korean society before the Japanese occupation than that of South Korea. South Korea, due to the Japanese occupation, disruption of the Korean War, and the migration of Koreans from the north, has developed greater social mobility. South Korean society is still concerned with status and class, but access to status is more open and dependent more upon economic success than birth. Hunter comments that North Koreans have completely remade the previous social order in terms of the criteria of stratification but not the nature of the rigid hierarchy (p. 5). "Kim must be judged to have accomplished one of the most successful and intensely coercive social engineering feats of modem times" (p. 4). Songbun is not something the government is trying to overcome to promote a communist classless society but is something that the party has defined as a way to stratify the society and reserve the best of things for party members. Thus the rigid, class-stratified society of prewar Korea is maintained in a new guise in postwar North Korea. While this is impressive, it is not admirable. She appropriately stresses the importance of understanding the influence of songbun on a family's or individual's opportunities. She deplores the lack of using talented people in positions of leadership because they are of the formerly privileged class (which is described as a talented elite although it, too, was defined by birth not individual ability. I think she ascribes qualities of leadership and talent to the former elite that may not have been present).

She also does a good job of explaining the role of work and membership in a work unit on the life of the individual and the way the primacy of work-unit membership impacts family life and personal leisure. In some ways, this has reduced the control of the family over the individual and promoted a sense of individualism in the culture. She deplores this as a communist plot to destroy the family. This primacy of work in the life of individuals is also something that has developed in Western societies, to which the author makes no reference and no comparisons, and it is not mentioned as a...