Routledge Handbook of Contemporary North Korea

Adrian Buzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429803994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary North Korea presents a comprehensive picture of contemporary North Korea, placed in historical context and set against the overlapping fields of politics, economy, culture, society and foreign relations. Spanning a period of significant transition for North Korea, this volume provides accurate analysis and applications of both historical and institutional perspectives.

The volume's chapters are representative of the growth in North Korean studies that has occurred since the 1990s, in parallel with the growing maturity of the field in South Korea, as well as with far greater levels of access to North Korean sources. The volume is divided into five Parts, each reflecting an emergent area of debate and research:

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• The political perspective

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• The North Korean economy

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• Foreign relations

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• Society

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• Culture

This is the first anthology of North Korean studies to demonstrate a clear understanding of North Korea as North Korea, as opposed to a dimly perceived and threatening rogue state. It features both Korean and non-Korean contributors, many working from primary source material. As such, this handbook will prove a valuable resource to students and scholars of Northeast Asian studies, modern Korean history and politics, and comparative politics more broadly.

1

INTRODUCTION

Understanding North Korea

Adrian Buzo

Introduction

This volume presents a broad picture of contemporary North Korea, placed in historical context and set against the overlapping fields of politics, economy, culture, society and foreign relations. It cannot claim to be a comprehensive account, for space dictates selecting only a number of key topics and approaches which are capable of feeding into a broader narrative. These are clearly times of significant transition for North Korea, and they beg both the accurate analysis of this process and the application of historical and institutional perspective. Few if any countries are known internationally through more severely selective and partial media coverage, and, given the nature of its impact on the international community, few, if any, are in greater need of more detailed study. The key element here is an ideology and political system that have led to an absolute priority being accorded to the building of a credible nuclear threat against its neighbours and their more distant allies. Such is the all-embracing nature of this priority and the militarism that has induced it that it reaches out and touches almost every corner of society, in the process, generating manifold obstacles to contact and understanding.

The contributors to this volume are representative of the noteworthy growth in North Korean studies that has occurred since the 1990s. In the Republic of Korea (ROK), the end of military-backed authoritarian rule in 1987 and far greater levels of access to the North have allowed a much larger, more sophisticated space for debate and research to open up, and this has been of enormous benefit to all scholars. Outside the ROK, the field has also grown. Not too long ago, sources for up-to-date, reasonably useful material on the North were sparse, and in search of nuggets of useful information one had to wade through reams of misinformation or disinformation. These baleful twins are still very much with us, but their influence has been sharply diminished by a vastly more sophisticated stream of information, not just emanating from Seoul but also from United Nations agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), refugee interviews, defector debriefings, and sleuthing along the now-porous North Korea border with China. This information now passes through the hands and minds of a mainly younger cadre of analysts and academics, Korean and non-Korean, most of whom work from primary source material, and whose clear focus is on understanding North Korea qua North Korea, not as some chessboard piece in the realm of international relations. We have moved on quite a ways from the days when former US Vice-President Walter Mondale could feel moved to assert that “Anyone who tells you that they are an expert on North Korea is either a liar or a fool”, though not so far as to give the lie to Brian Myers’ recent observation that we always know we’re at a North Korea conference because we can’t tell the political scientists from the international relations people.

This leads in turn to the obvious point that our studies begin with our sources, and the written record as it applies to North Korean society consists of what is produced inside and outside the system. The inside literature consists mainly of the self-serving official output of the regime, which in so many areas of the national life insists on the continuing absolute paramount nature of the truths revealed to the Korean minjok through the lives and deeds of Kim Il Sung and his descendants, and which accordingly demonstrates a habitual lack of interest in, if not a downright fear of, what its citizens might actually be thinking and feeling. Personal accounts by refugees from the North typically cover small, individual areas of experience, and the lingering credibility issues that afflict some of these remind us that they offer limited insight into the systems and structures that govern daily life, where more typically the lack of legal protection against state terror has led ordinary citizens to work within a raft of informal institutions and structures which leave little or no written record. Nevertheless, in their varying ways, the chapters by Peter Ward, Rüdiger Frank, Alek Sigley and Tatiana Gabroussenko demonstrate how useful internal sources can be.

Outside North Korea, serious scholarship must contend with the usual constraints of modern academic practice, but also with the popular addiction to congenial narratives. The media and other opinion-makers always appear prepared to seek these out as a short-hand way of filling in space and time, and an environment marked by the absence of historical perspective, detailed knowledge and first-hand experience enables superficial narratives to proliferate. Foremost among these are tales of purported North Korean eccentricities and barbarities, usually based on sources that are at once both contentious and unverifiable. Also prominent are misapprehensions and overestimations of change and flexibility in various areas of state policy. Such stories are, of course, more truly “news” of the man-bites-dog variety and bid more convincingly for column space than the dog-bites-man enumeration of the many constraints on any movement towards significant change. The end result is usually little more than the further mystification of the country, its leaders and its society.

Certainly, North Korea is challenging, and certainly, it has many layers, but the mosaic that is presented through this collection contains a composite picture of a state and society shaped by specific, identifiable historical and political forces. In this connection, the need to range across a number of different topics is of paramount importance.

A brief anecdote: some 30 years ago, I had a wonderful conversation with one of the first South Korean scholars to write comprehensively on North Korean society on the basis of refugee and defector interviews. This was pre-famine North Korea, and my final question to him was whether his research had caused him to assess that the North might collapse sooner than he had thought rather than later. His emphatic response was, “Oh, sooner – no doubt”, and looking back 30 years on, his response reminds me how easy it can be to allow the sheer weight of anecdote with its wealth of vivid, personal stories to affect our judgement on huge, complex issues such as the overall nature and extent of societal change in the North and its potential political consequences. I have always remembered this exchange not, of course, as a reflection on my colleague’s judgement, but as a cautionary tale on how delving into the minutiae of North Korean society and culture may involve the risk of misreading the extent to which North Koreans have the capacity to become independent actors within the system who carry the potential for generating change.

And so if there is one overarching conclusion that emerges from the diverse array of articles and perspectives assembled here, it is the folly of viewing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) through the lens of single issues. Kim Il Sung planned and achieved a society where the parts were rigid so that the whole could be more responsive to his will, and the resultant tightly interlocking nature of the political and social spheres precludes single-issue focus. Thus one can hardly begin to understand the North’s brand of illiberal marketization without placing it first within the broader political goal of elite survival, and the same applies across many other fields, ranging from the detailed features of its nuclear weapons programme, to its interaction with the global economy, and to its artistic and literary output.

Part I The political perspective

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea took definitive shape under the leadership of Kim Il Sung (r. 1945–1994), and his shadow remains long. The debate here hinges on whether the evidence supports a view of Kim as essentially an anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist nationalist leader in the same mould of a Mao Zedong or Ho Chi Minh, who somehow contrived to run off the rails, or else as the puppet of the regime which began to be installed by the Soviet Union in August 1945, and, when placed in these terms, the politicized contours of North Korean history quickly become obvious. Early accounts of divided Korea and of the emergence of the North tended to emanate from within the peninsula, and reflected the interests of the occupying powers and the competing claims to legitimacy of the two states they shaped, each state stressing its own nationalist credentials and its rival’s puppet status. This was in any case not an environment or an age which favoured objective scholarship, and notwithstanding some notable monographs during the 1960s, it was not until the publication of Scalapino and Lee’s Communism in Korea in 1972 that a broader methodology focusing, in their words, on “communism, development and tradition” provided a thorough account of both the pre-1945 history of the Communist movement and its post-1945 fate in the North. In the 1970s, scholarship which challenged these views and which stressed Kim as an authentic nationalist with broad grassroots support also quickly established itself, culminating in the work of Cumings, which may fairly, if inadequately, be described as revisionist in the breadth of its challenge to prevailing views of Kim Il Sung and the formation of the North Korean state.

In the main, access to archives in the former Soviet bloc as well as expanded access to Chinese scholarship have forced considerable rethinking in the revisionist school, as the work of Lankov, Szalontai and Tertitskiy has shed greater light on the nature of the civil society the Soviet occupiers imposed themselves upon, as well as bringing to light a good deal of eye-witness evidence which had previously been hidden. Quite early on in his career, Kim Il Sung retreated from the intellectual task of grasping the principles of Marxism-Leninism and applying them to state-building, and as he assumed complete control in the late 1950s, by and large, the North made plans and policy without the benefit of large organizing ideas other than building the means to resume the Korean War. In this volume, in Chapter 2, Szalontai leads us through the period of Soviet domination and outlines the growth of the Kim Il Sung dictatorship.

Kim died some five years after the Soviet Union began its final death spiral and the almost universal expectation was that the North, with its combination of Soviet dependence and domestic economic failure, would pass into history along with most of the rest of the socialist bloc. However, the strength of the system that Kim had built and the brutality with which he had enforced it meant that his son and successor, Kim Jong Il (r. 1994–2011) was remarkably free from pressure for change either by challenge from below or moral compunction from within his own class, and so he entertained no new policy direction other than continuing confrontation with a broad array of designated enemies. Andrei Lankov’s Chapter 3 highlights the role that unbending rivalry with the South has played in shaping Kim Jong Il’s options, and describes the harrowing march through the trials and tribulations of the 1990s that would have killed off a less determined leadership. Both the contours of Kim’s rule and the wellsprings of his personality have been routinely trivialized in external commentary on the North, and it is important that we reassess his considerable achievement of state survival against all odds. People cite many factors for the survival of the DPRK, but one is indisputable: the leadership of Kim Jong Il.

In Chapter 4, Rüdiger Frank draws us into the era of Kim Jong Un who, like his father, assumed leadership amid both widespread derision in the international media and scepticism that he could remain in power for very long. And like his father, so far he has confounded expectations. Frank’s work also demonstrates to us one of the prime tools of the North Korean specialist, namely, the parsing of opaque official documents, in this case, Kim’s annual New Year Address, the full text of his speech to the Seventh KWP Congress in 2016, and documentation from the annual Supreme People’s Assembly session. The sources illuminate many of the key issues confronting the DPRK as its nuclear weapons programme continues to propel it into conflict with the region as well as the broader international community, and as Kim endeavours to achieve a balance on both the practical and ideological levels between his father’s “military-first” (son’gun) line and his own enhanced reliance on a partially marketized economy.

Part II The North Korean economy

Congenial narratives are to hand to tell us that the inefficiencies of the Soviet-style socialist economy eventually give way before the relentless efficiency of the marketplace, and that this in turn offers a wedge for political transformation. Events in Eastern Europe have borne this out, but current trends in China do not support this view very neatly, nor does the recent economic history of North Korea, where a significant process of marketization has been under way for some time now, without a noticeable impact on the political system. Be that as it may, most observers would accept that in spite of some quirks specific to the North Korean experience such as the volume of military-related production, any understanding of this marketization process obliges us to locate this process on the spectrum of historical economic transitions elsewhere. In Chapter 5, Peter Ward offers a broad-based description and analysis of how the DPRK economy has assumed its present shape, from its almost cashless command economy days to the first shoots of aberrant practice involving cash transactions between domestic parties in the light industry sector in the 1980s. He then traces the generalization of such practices, from the 1990s on, when economic units began to operate with an increasing degree of independence in the face of dysfunctional state planning mechanisms, to the present day. To complement this account, Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein provides in Chapter 6 an account of post-famine developments in the key agricultural sector, a sector in which a process of reform is widely referred to in the secondary literature but is rarely analysed. Silberstein offers the rather sobering conclusion that this sector remains significantly bound by ideological constraints, while change has been fitful and uncertain.

The story of DPRK economic management today continues to be one of contending pressures, as the state authorities, well aware of the dangers emanating from a market sector they can no longer directly control, attempt to both extract rent from the process but also assess what they can and cannot live with, especially as this process increasingly and unwelcomely invites Chinese inputs to play an increasingly important role in the North. At a time of hope that strong UN-mandated economic sanctions may induce policy change in the North, Justin Hastings outlines in Chapter 7 a further important element in the picture, namely, the growing sophistication of the DPRK’s predatory strategies in its interaction with both China and the international economy as a whole. Decades of praxis and institutionalization have entrenched a set of practices that has firmly anchored the DPRK at the very bottom of international corruption assessment tables, to the extent that Hastings sees the current array of practices as currently precluding the emergence of conventional trade and development strategies.

Part III Foreign relations

Kim Il Sung’s reliance on Soviet backing in 1945 in consolidating his leadership was underpinned by a close identity of views and goals in foreign policy: Stalin wanted and needed a close and compliant ally on the Korean Peninsula and Kim wanted and needed strong Soviet backing to eliminate the South. It also helped that Kim shared Stalin’s entrenched view of Japan as an inherently aggressive state. However, within a decade, a number of factors had transformed the relationship – the 1949 victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese civil war, strong Chinese support during the Korean War which contrasted with more guarded Soviet support, the death of Stalin and the emergence of Soviet revisionism under Nikita Khrushchev, and the acquiescence of both Beijing and Moscow in the stalemate outcome of the Korean conflict, a position that was bitterly resented by Kim Il Sung, who remained committed to ultimate victory. Kim thus based his subsequent foreign policy on the achievement of the maximum possible freedom of action independent of both allies, a stance that remains in place to this day, and which has a nuclear weapons programme as its centrepiece. Shane Smith’s Chapter 9 describes how the possession of nuclear weapons and associated delivery systems have come to define DPRK foreign policy, tracing an arc of policy evolution that began with both military and diplomatic goals, but which responded to circumstances and ultimately narrowed down to the all-embracing goal of assured nuclear retaliation. At the same time, he points to the many inconsistencies and logical lacunae that surround this programme, as well as significant and unresolved technical, economic and security issues that will continue to challenge Pyongyang.

Leszek Buszynski complements Shane Smith’s nuclear-focused perspective with a consideration in Chapter 10 of the various ways in which the DPRK has sought to use its nuclear weapons to gain diplomatic and economic leverage, leading to the current stand-off. He assesses that to date the DPRK has been remarkably successful in this pursuit, a success driven by the secrecy of its own policy formulation proces...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: understanding North Korea
• Part I The political perspective
• Part II The North Korean economy
• Part III Foreign relations
• Part IV Society
• Part V Culture
• Index