South Korean host bars – for women

Posted on 18 September 2012 by admin

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19570750

Red Model Bar

South Korea’s rapid economic development has meant some startling changes within its conservative social structure, including the rise of so-called host bars, where wealthy women pay the equivalent of thousands of dollars for male company.

In the dim light of an underground room, a dozen perfectly groomed young men kneel in rows, calling out their names.

Muscular, with shiny boy-band hairstyles, they cram side by side into the narrow space, waiting for us to make our choice. Outside in the corridor, more of their colleagues are arriving for another night at work. It is 2am, and we are their first customers.

Hidden beneath the pavements of Seoul’s ritziest postcode, Gangnam, the men at Bar 123 are part of a growing industry, which grew out of the long traditions of Japanese geisha and Korea’s kisaeng houses but with one crucial difference – the customers here are all women.

Known as “host bars”, these all-night drinking rooms offer female customers the chance to select and pay for male companions, sometimes at a cost of thousands of pounds a night.

One of the women I meet at Bar 123 is Minkyoung, a waitressing manager for a five-star hotel. She says she comes to host bars once or twice a month.

Minkyoung is very pretty and her clothes are immaculate. She does not look like someone who would need to pay for male company. But the allure of host bars can be subtle. Here, she says, she has more attention from her male companions, more choice and, crucially, more control.

“In regular bars the guys who drink with me have only one goal – to have a one-night stand. But I don’t want that, so that’s why I come here, I want to have fun,” she says.

Hosts are hired by bars like this one to provide companionship and entertainment. Officially that means pouring drinks for their customers, talking and dancing with them, and singing karaoke.

Sex is not officially on offer in most host bars. That would be illegal but even Minkyoung seems happy to touch and flirt with her host, and the men here estimate that around half the customers want to pay for sex, either on or off the premises.

James has been working at Bar 123 for a couple of years. In Korean culture, he says, there is a lot of pride and negotiating a price for sex is never done explicitly. Instead, he tells me, it is all down to the host’s own assessment.

“The guys here are pros – we know what we’re doing,” he says.

“After talking to a girl for an hour we basically know how much money she makes and what she does for a living. We’ve already analysed her personality and what she’s willing to give.”

James and other hosts say their customers include some of South Korea’s elite, and that the money and perks on offer are unbelievable. One client James met, during his first week in the job, asked him to sign himself over to her for two years.

“She said ‘let’s make a contract. I’ve got this piece of paper and I’ve numbered it 1-5. Whatever you write down next to those numbers, I’ll get you.'”

James says at the time he took it as a joke but since found out the same woman spent £60,000 ($97,000) on another host.

“If it happened now, I’d do it – I’d be thinking straight.”

Ironically perhaps, host bars grew out of one of Korea’s most entrenched and, some say, misogynist business traditions – the room salon. These are private drinking rooms where groups of men select, and are served by, attractive female hostesses.

It was the hostesses’ need to let off steam after work, says veteran host Kim Dong-hee, that created the initial demand for host bars, with all-male staff.

“What these hostesses want is to [make us] do the same thing they had to do in their own workplace. These girls are forced to do things they don’t want to do for money.

“I think a lot of them are in pain, and a lot feel lonely. Simply put, they want to buy our time and our bodies.”

Hostesses still make up a large percentage of the customers at host bars here, but at Bar 123, for example, up to 40% of the customers on a given night are now from other walks of life.

The reasons for that growing appeal are tied up in South Korea’s rapid economic rise. Within 50 years, the country shifted from post-war devastation to OECD member.

But, according to Jasper Kim, head of the Asia-Pacific Global Research Group in Seoul, something important was lost along the way.

“I think that with all this fast growth comes fast change, and Koreans just don’t know how to cope with it. Increasingly, capitalism is overtaking basic societal norms that you would expect a couple of decades ago.”

Jasper Kim says South Korea’s notoriously long working hours have left many Korean women feeling lonely, while the country’s technical advance has left many people feeling detached.

“The human element of Korean society that existed before simply doesn’t exist today. People are focused on technology, people are focused on their jobs, they aren’t focused on human relations anymore.

“In many ways, Korean society today kind of reminds me of 1960s society in the US, where it’s on the verge of some type of cultural revolution.”

The grandfather of Seoul’s host bar scene, Kim Dong-hee, agrees that many of the women who come to host bars are not paying for sex but for companionship, which is why he opened a new chain of freshly-marketed outlets aimed at the mainstream market – called Red Model Bars.

“Men want to have visual pleasure and want to feel things, they’re tactile. Women like to talk and to listen. And that’s why I thought of opening a bar like this – a kind of dialogue bar.”

Red Model Bars are different to traditional host bars in one key respect – there is a no-touching rule. Hosts sit on one side of the table, customers on the other, and no physical contact is allowed, and certainly no sex.

Perhaps as a result there is a lack of furtiveness among the people who work or drink here – the lights are low, the decor mainly dark red and the space is divided into discreet booths, but it is an open-plan room and hosts and customers are divided in each booth by a large table.

This new business model depends entirely on women paying the equivalent of hundreds or even thousands of dollars to talk to good-looking young men over a drink. Still, it seems to be working – three new branches are due to open this year.

Sitting at a table at one end of the bar was one of their regular customers, a florist called Kim Nayu. She tells me she comes here every day to meet her favourite host and discuss issues she is having at work.

The price for this slice of male attention is $487-650 (£300-400) a day.

“Talking to friends would be cheaper” she admits, “but they don’t listen as much. They’re busy, and in a hurry to talk about themselves. Here, people will pay attention to me and they’ll listen to me.”

“I spend a lot of money but it’s worth it for what I get emotionally. People pay to go to see a psychologist or psychiatrist, so it’s similar but less stressful.”

Nayu’s favourite host Sung-il says it can be hard to keep his personal and professional life separate.

“Honestly I’d be lying if I say I haven’t been tempted to take things further with some customers, because we’re human, we’re men, but there are rules.”

One of his customers talked a lot to her husband about him and when the three of them met, Sung-il and the husband became close friends.

“No one hides – the workers don’t hide that they work here, and customers can be open too.”

This openness is posing a new kind of challenge to South Korean society, different from the sometimes seedy underworld of traditional host bars and their hinterland of male prostitution.

By offering women a “respectable” way to challenge traditional gender roles and flex their economic power, these new bars ask questions of Korean society that are becoming harder to ignore.

A Writer Evokes Loss on South Korea’s Path to Success

Posted on 7 September 2012 by admin

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/world/asia/shin-kyung-sook-mines-south-koreas-sense-of-loss.html

LIKE so many South Korean parents at the time, Shin Kyung-sook’s mother saw education as her daughter’s best chance of escaping poverty and backbreaking work in the rice fields. So in 1978 she took her 15-year-old daughter to Seoul, where Ms. Shin would lie about her age to get a factory job while attending high school at night to pursue her dream of becoming a novelist.

Seoul-bound trains at the time, like the one mother and daughter boarded that night, picked up many young rural South Koreans along the way — part of the migration that fueled South Korea’s industrialization but forever changed its traditional family life.

It is that social upheaval that Ms. Shin evoked in her most famous novel to date, “Please Look After Mom,” which earned her the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize and a commercial success attained by few other Korean writers. (Sales in South Korea passed two million this spring, and the book has been published in 19 other countries, including the United States.)

That book and a more recent one, “I Will Be Right There,” about friendship and love set in the country’s political turmoil of the 1980s, are part of a body of work over three decades that has set Ms. Shin apart as one of the most accomplished chroniclers of modern South Korea.

“In her novels, readers have the chance to pause and reflect upon the other side of their society’s breakneck race for economic growth, what they have lost in that pursuit and upon people who were left behind in the mad rush,” said Shin Soo-jeong, a professor of Korean literature at Myongji University in Seoul.

In “Please Look After Mom,” an elderly woman from the countryside travels to Seoul to visit her adult children and gets lost in what is quite literally a mad rush: the scramble to get on a Seoul subway. Reviewers have called her disappearance a metaphor for the profound sense of loss in a society that hurtled from an agrarian dictatorship to an industrialized democracy within a single and often tumultuous generation.

That feeling has not overwhelmed South Koreans’ pride in their country’s accomplishments, notably its rise from abject poverty to the world’s 13th-largest economy. But the sense of loss taps into a growing unease over some of the costs of that success, especially a widening gap between rich and poor and a generation of elderly people left largely to fend for themselves as their adult children work in cities.

The filial guilt that suffuses the novel is universal, but also has a particularly Korean spin.

Until a generation ago in South Korea, at least one adult child — usually the eldest son and his family — lived with aging parents until their deaths. Now, a growing number of older people live alone in their rural villages or in the nursing homes that are springing up across the country. Often, they have little money left, having invested their savings in their children’s educations with the expectation that the children would prosper and eventually care for them.

The children, meanwhile, living in a hypercompetitive society where people work some of the longest hours in the world, often lament that they are too harried to visit their elderly parents. Many also fear using too much vacation time, afraid of being seen as disloyal to their companies.

IN what Ms. Shin says is probably the most important sentence in her novel, the missing mother expresses what many guilt-ridden readers imagine as their own mothers’ sense of helplessness at having been effectively abandoned by their children. In a scene in which the old woman imagines meeting her own dead mother, she wonders: “Did Mom know? That I, too, needed her my entire life?”

Ms. Shin’s life, which tracked the trajectory of her country’s rise, prepared her well for her role as an interpreter of her generation. Born in the countryside like so many characters in her novels, Ms. Shin, 49, now lives in an expensive residential district in Seoul. Her husband is a college professor as well as a poet and literary critic. They have no children.

From an early age, she was a voracious reader, hiding herself away with books her elder brothers brought home. (She was the fourth of six children.) By the time she was 15, she was increasingly certain she wanted to write for a living.

After their arrival in Seoul on that night train in 1978, her mother left her in the care of an older brother in a crammed room in a slum. While he worked in a government office by day and attended college at night, Ms. Shin worked in an audio and television parts factory and attended high school in the evenings.

She was one of the youngest employees in the factory, where she witnessed the labor discontent that sometimes rocked South Korea as its economy galloped ahead but many workers toiled in sweatshop conditions.

“The girl sitting next to me at the night school had no fingerprints; she worked all day wrapping candies in a confectionery,” Ms. Shin said in an interview. “Most of my classmates sent part of their meager wages back home to support their little brothers’ and sisters’ education. When they came to class, they were so tired most of them dozed.”

At her own factory, a clash involving one of the country’s growing number of labor unions turned violent as managers deployed their own security guards, who joined with the police in cracking down on workers organizing for higher pay and better conditions.

Ms. Shin stayed inside, amid the idled conveyor belts, taking her mind off the mayhem by copying a new novel about the urban poor in longhand.

In the end, Ms. Shin was the only one in her high school class to win admission to college, as a creative writing major. She eventually wrote about life at the factory in “A Lone Room,” one of her most acclaimed novels. Its French translation won the Prix de l’Inaperçu in 2009.

“I wonder what would have become of me in those days if I hadn’t had the goal of becoming a writer to hang on to,” she said. “I was determined that one day I would write about what I saw and felt.”

FOR several years after college, she supported her writing with odd jobs: writing scripts for a classical music radio station and reading books to blind people. But by 1993, she was successful enough to be able to write novels and short stories full time.

She also was able to fulfill a personal promise: to repay her own mother’s sacrifices for her children. The day they went to Seoul, she remembers, her mother’s face was etched with weariness.

“I promised myself then that one day I would write a beautiful book for Mom,” she said.

That book, “Please Look After Mom,” solidified her standing as one of South Korea’s finest living novelists and won her accolades.

Her mother’s reaction was decidedly more muted, typical of a generation of women who pushed their children hard to succeed but were accustomed to restraining their own emotions, even when those children met or exceeded their family’s high expectations.

As Ms. Shin recounted, “She only said, ‘My dear, you have done well.’ ”

When opposites attract (a preview of Ahn Eun-me’s Princess Bari at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival)

Posted on 18 July 2011 by admin

Tradition and the avant-garde clash in Korean choreographer Ahn Eun-me’s gender-busting new show, hears Mark Brown

The Herald

IT’S REIGNING MEN: Androgyny and gender play are to the fore in Princess Bari, with male and female dancers wearing the same costumes and a male lead, Hee-Moon Lee. ‘He has a voice like a female,’ says Eun-Me Ahn.

ARRIVING at a beautiful traditional Korean restaurant in the centre of Seoul to meet the renowned choreographer Eun-Me Ahn is a deeply confusing experience. On the one hand, the restaurant — which is called Pulhyanggi (meaning “the scent of grass”), and decorated with delicate images of flying cranes and other pastoral scenes — is a haven of tranquillity in the midst of one of the world’s most buzzing cities. On the other, Ahn — her head shaved, resplendent in bright green and red, her fingers adorned with huge floral rings — is the living embodiment of that cliche, a force of nature.

The choreographer is a woman of extraordinary personality, colour, humour and energy; elements very pany presents at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.

The Princess Bari story is a central narrative in Korean culture, with shades of the Greek tales of Oedipus and Orpheus, and even of Alice In Wonderland and Pinocchio. Thrown to the sea by her father, the King, because she is the seventh daughter of a queen who bore no son, Bari (the word means “discarded” in Korean) is saved and raised by a fisherman. In her teens, the intrepid girl learns of her regal origins and undertakes an epic journey to the royal palace. And that is as far as Ahn’s Edinburgh production (the first of two pieces telling the entire story) takes us.

However, as Ahn is keen to emphasise as she holds court in the restaurant (seeming very much like a precocious, somewhat mischievous princess herself), the key to the show is not the tale, but the highly imaginative way in which she has recreated it for the 21st century.

The piece is an irresistible combination of the traditional (including the song of Korean pansori and the movement of Japanese butoh) and the avantgarde, the minimal and the exuberant, the anguished and the comic.

It is typical of Ahn’s sense of artistic freedom that Ban is played not by a woman, but by the multitalented and remarkably androgynous young male singer Hee-Moon Lee. “He looks like a girl,” the choreographer agrees. “He’s a small man, and he has a voice like a female. Sometimes he looks like a baby, sometimes he looks like a girl, and sometimes he looks like a man. It’s amazing. He’s a good actor.”

Androgyny and gender play have long been of interest to Ahn, in her life (she started shaving her head to make her own gender more ambiguous) and her work. It’s an attitude which infuses Princess Bari, in which male and female dancers perform in the same brightly coloured dresses and spotty underpants.

“I don’t want to divide costume between women’s and men’s,” she explains. “The dress is very convenient to dance in, and allows for very quick changes.” Her choice of costumes is also a delight for the male members of the company. “Men love dresses. It’s something they never experienced before.”

If playing with gender is part of her aesthetic, Ahn also sees a thematic justification for casting Lee in the title role. “I figured out why Princess Bari was thrown out,” she declares. “It’s because she had both female and male sex organs.”

It will, no doubt, come as something of a shock to generations of Koreans to discover that Bad — a much-loved figure from their childhood —is, in fact, a hermaphrodite. Which is not to say that Ahn’s reinterpretation is an act of disrespectful iconoclasm. Rather, like her wonderfully rich and diverse show as a whole, it speaks to the choreographer’s intelligent and fascinating combination of the traditional and the modern.

This is exemplified in her approach to traditional Korean music and song, which is used in truly astonishing ways in the show. Although Ahn’s background is in dance, she is not afraid — any more than was her late friend, the great German dance director Pina Bausch — to roll up her sleeves and mould other forms to the requirements of her choreography.

“We love this [traditional Korean] song,” Ahn says, “but we have been listening to this one song for ever. So, we are also getting sick and tired. I’m trying to achieve a different sound from the traditional vocal techniques.”

There is something fabulously Bauschian in Ahn’s combination of dancing singers and singing dancers (including, at points in the show, herself). Her means of auditioning singers, such as Lee, for the company is typically unorthodox. “We don’t do only dance and movement,” she says. “I don’t care about that. We go drinking and we go to karaoke. I want to see their natural power, which is their personality.”

Although Ahn, who began her formal training in traditional Korean dance at the age of 12, creates work which is strongly connected to the culture of her homeland, the comparison with Bausch’s choreography is one that she embraces. Ahn recalls her time at Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal (where she presented three solo works in 2001) with great affection. “Pina Bausch and I just loved each other,” she re-members. “We had the same female energy. As a person, she was quite slow, and I’m very fast, but the energy of our work is of a similar level. That’s why I think we could talk. She loved watching my kind of energy in talking. She loved drinking until 3am. We’d sit and talk about everything.”

Talking with Ahn, who is an extremely engaging, animated conversationalist, it isn’t difficult to see why Bausch would have found her such good and interesting company. The Korean choreographer is a constant performer, although the amazing control and geometry of her own dancing — even now, in her late forties — contrasts markedly with the marvellous gesticulations and ribald commentary of her off-stage persona.

One can’t help but wonder what shaped her strident self-confidence and endearing, high-energy personality. “As a child, we had no TV and no telephone,” Ahn remembers. “All my parents could afford was the house and food, that’s all. So, in the evening, we had to be performers for our parents and grandparents. If you did well, you got one cookie. That was my first job. I don’t remember it, but my mum told me,

`You were a really good dancer.’ She said I did whatever they asked me, and I would be given cookies.”

Which, as an account of creativity born of poverty, is as good an explanation of Eun-Me Ahn’s remarkable choreography, and equally remark-able character, as one could wish for. Not that she cares to dwell too much on the hardships of her up-bringing. No sooner has our inter-view ended than I’m packed off in a cab to her favourite Japanese pub (she travels ahead on her scooter). I, like a tourist, drink Korean beer. She, like any cool Korean, downs a couple of bottles of Tokyo’s finest. Then, after much talk of the Edinburgh Festival, Pina Bausch and the burgeoning culture of South Korea, Ahn is back on her scooter and zipping off into the flashing lights of downtown Seoul.

Princess Bari is at the Edinburgh Playhouse, August 19-21.

Hitting Below the Belt: Pyongyang Spills the Beans on Secret Summit Talks

Posted on 8 July 2011 by admin

By Aidan Foster-Carter
http://38north.org/2011/07/aidanfc070811/

Just when you thought inter-Korean relations couldn’t get any worse, they do. The North has found a fresh weapon, and on June 1, 2011 launched a sneak attack on the South—with a follow-up ambush a week later. Fortunately, we’re not talking ships sunk or islands shelled like last year. But words can do damage too, and this was a low blow.

Despite poor inter-Korean relations in the three years since Lee Myung Bak became South Korea’s president, there have been regular rumors of secret North-South talks behind the scenes. Pyongyang recently confirmed these rumors, revealing the details of these talks and destroying any basis for future trust. The North’s broadsides can be read in full at http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2011/201106/news01/20110601-29ee.html and http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2011/201106/news09/20110609-35ee.html.

It’s embarrassing hot stuff, and of course Pyongyang’s word can hardly be taken as gospel—though they do threaten to publish transcripts of the taped conversations. (Seoul says it didn’t know the meetings were being recorded.) The way the North tells it, the South had “begged” since April to have a secret meeting, which then took place in Beijing from May 9. The idea was two-fold: 1) to finally get past last year’s Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents; and 2) to hold a three-stage summit—first at Panmunjom on the border in June, followed by Pyongyang in August, with the final act in Seoul in March 2012 when the ROK will host the world’s second Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), just one month before parliamentary elections (now there’s a coincidence).

For a leader whose shtick is that he’s a practical no-nonsense business type, Lee Myung Bak’s whole North Korea policy is straight out of fairyland—and this takes the cake. Who in their wildest dreams could ever imagine Kim Jong Il venturing to Seoul, of all places (by train?), when he has steadfastly refused to do so even when friendlier folks like Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun occupied the Blue House, to deliver an abject U-turn on the North’s nuclear policy to a lame-duck ROK president in his final months in office? And all this while the North is busy gearing up for its own fairyland (or emperor’s new clothes) moment: the centenary of its founder Kim Il Sung in April 2012, when the DPRK is due to proclaim itself a “great and prosperous nation”—even while its economy is broken and many of its citizens go hungry.

Small wonder that there are calls in Seoul to sack the security troika—named by the North’s National Defense Commission (NDC) as Kim Chun Sig of the Ministry of Unification’s (MOU) Policy Office; Hong Chang Hwa, a director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS); and Kim Tae Hyo, President Lee’s security advisor—involved in this farrago. Worse yet, the North also claimed that the South offered “enveloped money”: a quaint name for a trait alas not rare in Seoul, nor indeed in inter-Korean relations. Pyongyang is being a rank hypocrite: In the past it had no qualms about trousering such well-stuffed envelopes, but this time the NDC scorned the South’s explanation that it was just offering to pay the North’s expenses.

What rich irony for a regime as secretive as the DPRK to suddenly posture as a champion of openness: a virtue in any case much overrated. As with the Wikileaks, there is both prurient and genuine interest in becoming privy to what we weren’t meant to know. But although the Iraq imbroglio has made many in the US and UK rightly mistrustful of our mendacious leaders, it would be wrong to generalize such revulsion into a blanket call for always-open diplomacy.

On the contrary. Sometimes you do need secrecy, as well as absolute assurance that the other guy—by definition, in these situations, someone you’ve no cause to trust (and vice versa)—won’t betray you. Classic cases-in-point are Henry Kissinger’s first foray to China exactly 40 years ago in July 1971, and the hush-hush Israel-PLO dialogue in Oslo during 1992-93.

But Korea itself has plenty of examples of secret talks over the past four decades. It’s worth taking a minute to recall these—many remain little-known—and how much they achieved. Here, as always, Don Oberdorfer’s book The Two Koreas is a fascinating guide through this labyrinth.

It all started with Kissinger’s visit to China, which alarmed Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung alike. That prompted the two Koreas to start Red Cross talks at Panmunjom in August 1971, but these got bogged down in reiterating entrenched positions. So in March 1972 one ROK Red Cross delegate, Chong Hong Jin—really he worked for the KCIA—quietly slipped out the door on the other side, and was driven to Kaesong and then helicoptered to Pyongyang. Within a month, the KCIA had a direct phone line to the North’s ruling Workers’ Party (WPK).

It was swiftly agreed to upgrade the contact level. In early May, KCIA director Lee Hu Rak secretly popped across at Panmunjom. A man who terrified and terrorized many, Lee confessed to feeling “indescribable anxiety.” He was shown the sights of Pyongyang and then, during his second night, he was woken, bundled into a car, and not told where he was going. He feared the worst, but after midnight, finally came face-to-face with an affable Kim Il Sung.

Lee Hu-rak

What did they talk about? Nationalism, of course. Oberdorfer has fascinating excerpts. Lee assured Kim that Park Chung Hee “detests foreign interference most” and boasted: “In the future the big powers will yield to us [meaning a united Korea].” Kim even apologized for the 1968 commando raid which tried to kill Park—they got within a mile of the Blue House—claiming not to have known about it. Yeah right, but that’s how you get past obstacles and move on. Just as his son Kim Jong Il would assure Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi 30 years later in 2002 that he hadn’t known about DPRK abductions of young Japanese. It may stick in the craw, but diplomacy does need face-saving formulae (i.e. lies) as well as secrecy.

All this led to the first North-South joint statement on July 4 (note the date!) 1972, signed by Lee Hu Rak and Kim Il Sung’s brother Kim Yong Ju, then seen as his successor, as director of the WPK’s organization and guidance department (rather than by the two governments as such). (Incidentally, Kim Yong Ju is still with us, and Lee Hu Rak died only in October 2009.)

In autumn 1972, Red Cross delegations visited each others’ capitals for the first time. Sadly the bonhomie didn’t last, though this is not the place for a full chronicle (read Oberdorfer). The point is, even to get this far required secret talks too—and it was vital that they stayed secret.

Fast forward over a decade. Park Chung Hee is dead, shot by the head of his KCIA (Lee’s successor), and another general has seized power in Seoul. Chun Doo Hwan will forever be rightly excoriated as the butcher of Kwangju in May 1980.Yet his diplomacy showed more subtlety. In September 1984, less than a year after KPA commandos nearly blew him up in Rangoon, killing 17 elite South Koreans and four Burmese, Pyongyang offered aid after floods in the South. Presumably, it expected Seoul to refuse. Chun, imaginatively, said yes.

Thus, we had the amazing sight of hundreds of Northern trucks rolling across the DMZ in peace. The cargo revealed much about the North’s economy: wormy rice, feeble cement, and dodgy drugs (which the South quietly warehoused). But it was the gesture that counted. This ushered in a year of wider contacts, including the first ever family reunions, talks between lawmakers, five economic meetings, and more. It didn’t last, but it was a real breakthrough at the time.

All of that was public, but once again, this was accompanied by secret talks behind the scenes. Remember Park Chul Un? A bright young Blue House aide, only 42 in 1985, Park blazed an extraordinary covert trail not only with Pyongyang, but later in Seoul’s wider Nordpolitik.

His WPK counterpart, Han Si Hae, was an urbane diplomat who would later be the DPRK’s ambassador to the Unite Nations. Here I must quote Oberdorfer directly. Just imagine this, today:

Park and Han established a direct telephone connection between their desks in Seoul and Pyongyang, on which they had frequent conversations. The two met face-to-face a total of forty-two times between May 1985 and November 1991 in a wide variety of places, including Pyongyang, Seoul, Panmunjom, Paektu Mountain in North Korea, Cheju Island in South Korea, Singapore and elsewhere. Some of the meetings lasted as long as five days, but except for a few sightings, most of this diplomacy remained secret. (2001 edn., p. 150)

What followed is especially interesting and very relevant now. Like Lee Myung Bak, Chun Doo Hwan wanted an inter-Korean summit. To that end, former DPRK foreign minister Ho Dam—with Han Si Hae in tow—secretly visited Seoul and met Chun in September 1985. I recall that visit being rumored at the time, so the secrecy wasn’t watertight. But everyone thought it was a hopeful sign, so nobody made political capital of it or spilled the beans. Of course, Chun was a dictator who had the press strictly under control, which made it easier.

Ho Dam

Among much else, Ho Dam insisted that the Rangoon bomb “had nothing to do with us.” If Seoul had demanded an apology there would have be no more talks. Chun seems to have let that go, which was big of him. Lee could learn a lesson from this. The recent NDC revelations do suggest that the South was trying to find a way past the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents.

But back to 1985. A month later in October, Chang Se Dong, head of the Agency for National Security Planning (NSP, the rebranded KCIA) went North with Park Chul Un and met Kim Il Sung. Again, Oberdorfer’s account is fascinating. He quotes a US intelligence source, who saw the transcripts, as saying the two sides got bogged down in detail as well as “linguistic tangles” over how they would describe any summit: “The North was not very interested in making progress, and the South was also bringing up things that would irritate the North.”

A major irritant was the Team Spirit joint US-ROK war games, bigger each year and which Chun refused to cancel. Kim Il Sung once told the East German leader, Erich Honecker, that mobilizing reserve forces to counter these exercises cost the DPRK six weeks of GNP in lost labor time. Whether Kim genuinely feared an invasion or was just spooked and angry, at all events in January 1986 the North denounced this “nuclear war maneuver” and broke off all dialogue.

All public talks, that is. But Park Chul Un and Han Si Hae’s contacts continued, even after Chun Doo Hwan conceded democracy and the people elected his fellow ex-general Roh Tae Woo (because the two leading democrats, Kim Yong Sam and Kim Dae Jung, ran separately). It did Park no harm that he was a nephew of Roh’s wife. Under Roh, Park served as sports minister and was even seen as a potential successor—though he also made enemies: read on.

Widely reviled as mul (water; Margaret Thatcher used “wet” as a similar term of abuse), Roh deserved better. History will respect him as Korea’s Gorbachev, another man much traduced. Such rare leaders—South Africa’s F.W. de Klerk is another—who were both bold and skilled enough to see that the old order had to go, and who successfully and peacefully transformed a failing or noxious political system into a better one, surely deserve our praise, not blame. But Korea, like everywhere, is full of stubborn fools who see constancy, at all costs, as a virtue.

Park Chul Un’s six-year role as a secret conduit to the North eventually helped lead to a third round of inter-Korean dialogue: 1990-92’s eight mutual visits of prime ministers, including the epochal (if unfulfilled) general and nuclear North-South agreements of December 1991.

By then, Park had other fish to fry too. He was also Seoul’s point man on what was to prove the surer bet of Roh’s wider Nordpolitik. North Korea might blow hot and cold to this day, but communist regimes elsewhere—themselves moribund, but who knew?—were by this time, ready to face world and peninsular realities, especially if offered financial inducements. By now, a master of secret diplomacy, Park Chul Un was the obvious man for the job.

July 1988 found Park secretly in Budapest. After 10 days of hard bargaining, plus a fat loan, Hungary became the first communist state to recognize the ROK—just in time for the Seoul Olympics. The same summer saw Park also in Moscow, bearing a letter from Roh Tae Woo which praised perestroika. Gorbachev’s Krasnoyarsk speech followed, and in 1990 came the unthinkable: the USSR recognized the ROK. (Again, be it said, a large loan was involved, on which, Moscow defaulted not long after, somewhat souring the party mood.)

The rest is history. For Park Chul Un things went less well. The flair he showed in diplomacy deserted him on home turf. He made the error of strongly opposing Kim Young Sam, when the latter changed sides in a blatant and successful bid to succeed Roh Tae Woo as president in 1992. Kim was not the forgiving sort; few in Seoul are. Park was indicted for receiving a bribe from a businessman who sold slot machines and spent 16 months in jail.

Park protested his innocence and claimed persecution—which now seems to be the general view—but this finished his political career, even though he was barely 50. (For that matter, Han Si Hae, his erstwhile Northern counterparty, hasn’t been heard of since 1998 either.)

That’s a pity, because Park had skills that Seoul still sorely needs. I could go on, and secret diplomacy did; especially in the sunshine decade (1998-2007), which is a whole other story.

For present purposes, suffice it to have shown that Lee Myung Bak is by no means the first right-wing South Korean president to have had trouble with North Korea. Yet in their different ways, Park Chung Hee, Chun Doo Hwan, and Roh Tae Woo were all ready to take more risks and to be more flexible in pursuing North-South dialogue. Compared to any of them, Lee’s rigid approach to the North appears both fatally flawed in theory—with its totally unrealistic insistence on denuclearization as a first step—and amateurishly bungling in practice.

Even so, shame on North Korea for stooping so low as to spill the beans on secret talks. That was a stupid as well as nasty move. Eighteen months from now, Lee’s successor—whoever that may be—will surely put out fresh feelers to the North. That will involve secret talks; it always does. But after this, how can any leader in Seoul trust a perpetually perfidious Pyongyang?

The answer is: You have to keep trying. And if existing policy fails, try something different. Deplorable though the North’s latest conduct is, it might just jolt the Lee administration into a belated realization that its approach hitherto simply hasn’t worked. Lame duck or not, Lee still has a year and a half left in office. Influential voices in the ruling Grand National Party (GNP), which fears a hammering at parliamentary elections (just 10 months away) if things don’t look up, are already calling for a new approach to North Korea. Lee is not exactly known for listening, but with so much at stake and time running out, he just might give it a try.

Protestants protest: South Korea’s church militant

Posted on 9 March 2011 by admin

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/MC09Dg01.html

Long ago, maybe around 1994, I took a slow train from Pusan – or Busan, if you insist – to Seoul. (No KTX bullet train in those days; though that’s been having its problems lately.) It was October, and I spent much of the journey just watching the colors of autumn roll by.

My seat companion was colorful too. A student recently qualified in Oriental medicine, he was about to go to China, then newly opened to South Koreans. But his real aim, he confided with some excitement, was not strictly medicinal: “Chinese people, they don’t know Jesus!”

This was my first encounter with what is now a global phenomenon. Koreans are tireless rankers. The world’s seventh-largest exporter of goods is also its second-largest exporter of missionaries, after the United States. According to the Korea World Missions Association (KWMA), their number has nearly doubled in five years from 12,159 in 2004 to 22,130 in 2009.

Asia has mostly proved stony ground for Christianity, but Korea is a fascinating exception – for reasons that would make another article. South Korea’s 8.6 million Protestants and 5.1 million Catholics, taken together – not that they always get along – outnumber its 10 million Buddhists. Mind you, the 47% who profess no religion may include many passive Buddhists.

South Korea today is Asia’s most Protestant nation, and evangelical with it. Many want to preach the gospel, as is their right. I’m a firm believer in a free market for faiths; aren’t you?

Well, obviously not if you’re a murderous bigot in Pakistan, or other countries where Islam seems afraid of the competition. In 2004 Iraqi jihadi thugs seized and brutally beheaded a young Korean, Kim Sun-il. They claimed he had conducted “annoying religious activities” under cover of his work as a translator. A harrowing video of him pleading in vain for mercy sharpened the already fierce debate in Seoul about the wisdom of sending troops to Iraq.

As this tragic case shows, evangelists not only put their own lives on the line but can impact on affairs of state. In 2007, 23 Korean missionaries were stupid enough to go to Afghanistan, of all places, defying an official warning from Seoul not to. The Taliban kidnapped them and killed two; a large ransom was paid for the rest. Such behavior is just plain irresponsible.

Yet they’re still at it. In January staff at the South Korean Embassy in Sana’a had to rush out to stop Korean missionaries singing hymns on the street in the Yemeni capital – for the third time in a month. Christian proselytizing is banned in Yemen; you can be jailed – or worse. In 2009 a Yemeni suicide bomb killed four Korean tourists, and a young Korean woman, Eom Young-sun, was among nine foreign religious medical volunteers kidnapped and murdered.

Here I make a distinction. Ms Eom was doing a worthy job, and knew the risks. I respect and mourn her. Similarly, I applaud those brave souls, many Christian, who help North Koreans in China on their long and perilous journeys to Seoul and freedom. Several such have been jailed in China, then deported. They are the lucky ones. At least two South Korean pastors in northeast China have been abducted by Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) agents: Ahn Seung-woon in 1995, and Kim Dong-shik in January 2000. The latter is thought to have died of hunger and torture in 2001.

In my book, Ahn and Kim are – or were, God rest their souls – heroes. Whereas those hymn-singers in Sana’a are idiots. Some, reportedly, were students on vacation getting a cheap thrill – while putting at risks the lives of Korean business people who live and work in Yemen.

Heroes, idiots – and holy fools. Remember Robert Park? The young Korean-American who on Christmas Day 2009 marched into North Korea and a whole lot of trouble, calling on Kim Jong-il to repent. He claims to have been sexually tortured there. In interviews he is clearly not well, and latest reports are that he’s checked back into hospital. May he find healing.

Then there was Park’s copycat, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, who pulled the same stunt a month later. This time it took former US president Jimmy Carter, no less, to fly to Pyongyang to get him out. Gomes appears less unhinged than Park, so he has less excuse. Faith and compassion are all very well, but judgment and prudence are Christian virtues too. (And don’t even start me on Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who as far as I know haven’t yet claimed divine guidance for the irresponsible antics which required Bill Clinton to come rescue them from Kim Jong-il.)

Meanwhile, back in Seoul, Protestants are – well, protesting. Unusually, the target of their wrath is one of their own: none other than President Lee Myung-bak, whose own intense Presbyterian allegiances were well described in these pages by Sunny Lee – no relation, I assume; just kidding, Sunny – even before he took office three years ago. Since then Lee – the president – has managed to offend Buddhists in every way possible, as well as Catholics whose bishops have condemned his flagship US$20 billion plan to “restore” four major rivers as a potential ecological disaster – much as he likes to tout his supposed green credentials.

Undaunted, on March 3 Lee infuriated the Buddhists yet again, and was widely criticized in the Seoul press for insensitivity, when he and his wife were photographed kneeling at an annual Protestant prayer breakfast. As the left-wing Hankyoreh wittily put it, this “marked the first time a sitting South Korean president sat on his knees in a public place”.

Why was he there? Some might say the president is on his knees politically too. His fellow Protestants had been Lee’s loyal supporters – until now. So what prompted an influential religious leader like David Yonggi Cho – founder-leader of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the world’s largest single congregation – to declare war on Lee and threaten to topple him? Dear reader, allow me to me keep you in suspense for a little while, and to take you back in time.

Yoido Full Gospel Church: That rang a bell. But David Cho? I thought he was Paul Cho. And so indeed he used to be. But in 1992. “God showed him that Paul Cho had to die and David Cho was to be resurrected in his place.” In the same year Cho was elected Chairman of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship: the first non-American to head the planet’s largest Pentecostalist denomination, with 50 million members in 60 countries.

So a big fish, if a contentious one. Cho’s view that material wealth shows God’s blessing is not to all tastes, mine included. I once started writing a song, which got no further than this:

I don’t recall seeing Jesus with the winners;
He hung out with publicans and sinners.

Others say Cho runs a cult, and that his theology is heretical. His business practices and reluctance to retire (he is 75) have their critics too. But he is a mighty power in the land.

He was big already back in 1989, when on my fourth visit I decided it was time to seek out some Korean experiences which had so far eluded me. I resolved to do two things: Go to Yoido Full Gospel Church (YFGC), and get tear-gassed. Not both at the same time, you understand.

(While speaking of “typical” Korea, a quick aside: In over 20 trips, I have never eaten dog. Never looked for it, never been offered it; it’s just never crossed my path. Surprise you?)

I duly fulfilled my resolution, but can’t say I’d care to repeat either experience. Each in its own way I found choking. (Admittedly my preferred form of worship is an hour of Quaker silence, so horses for courses.) YFGC is totally over the top. Not just an organ, but a full 50-piece orchestra. The church seats 12,000, and is full up for seven Sunday services – with a further 20,000 following on TV in overflow chapels, according to The Economist in 2007.

People may praise God as they please, of course. And YFGC clearly pleases a lot of people. But the politics stuck in my craw. In that second summer of South Korea’s new democracy, two radicals – Moon Kyu-hyun, a turbulent priest still going strong; and a student, “flower of unification” Im Su-kyong, who has since repented – had illicitly sneaked off to Pyongyang.

This was a big deal at the time, especially to Pastor Cho. You’d think the world had ended. I’ll never forget his astonishing invocation: “Lord, save this nation which is heading for communism!” And the faithful, in their thousands, responding with a heartfelt “Amen!”

So much for Paul aka David Yonggi Cho’s political nous. 22 years later, it’s got no better. Only now, the threat is – had you guessed? – Islam. What’s got him and his ilk hot under the collar with Lee is a proposed bill to give tax relief to sukuk (Islamic bonds) – I don’t have to explain those in Asia Times Online, hopefully – the same as interest-bearing accounts receive.

Islamic finance is a trillion-dollar business. South Korea has heavy commercial involvement in the Muslim world, all the way from Indonesia to Libya. In the latter, even when it was a pariah (first time around), Korean firms won huge construction and other contracts. Yet there too a Korean pastor got himself arrested last year. It took four visits by Lee’s big brother and fixer-in-chief, Lee Sang-deuk, to free him. (There were other issues in play too.)

South Korean banks long to emulate the chaebol (conglomerates) like Samsung and Hyundai and go global. Specifically, they’d like to attract capital from the Middle East – which means having sukuk products in their portfolio. There may also be a link here, though this is denied, to a recent deal to build nuclear power plants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Much touted initially, it now transpires that Seoul is having to lend half the US$20 billion cost.

This is the 21st century, right? It’s the age of globalization – on which South Korea depends more than most, and more than is healthy. Islamic finance may once have seemed strange to non-Muslims, but sukuk bonds are now a normal part of the landscape. In an interdependent world, anyway, we respect one another’s beliefs and practices. This is called civilization.

Not in Seoul, apparently. Another cleric has accused Muslim nations of fighting “economic jihad”, claiming in all seriousness that the planned legislation would enable them to wield oil money to promote the Islamization of Korea. Thus the Reverend Kiel Ja-yeon: no fringe nutcase, but the head of the Christian Council of Korea. It was he who organized the prayer breakfast. In similar vein, Yonggi Cho met finance minister Yoon Jeung-hyun February 24 and later bragged: “I told him this will be a life-or-death fight.”

Specifically, Cho threatened to mobilize the Protestant vote against candidates supporting the sukuk bill in by-elections on April 27. These aren’t crucial. Whatever happens, Lee’s ruling conservative Grand National Party (GNP) will keep control of the National Assembly. But with barely a year to go till the next general election in April 2012, they’ll be seen as a straw in the wind. A separate presidential election follows in December 2012; Lee can’t run again.

Hang on, though. In theory the GNP controls the assembly, but in practice they’ve already caved in to the backwoodsmen. Or backwoodswomen. Another implacable opponent of the bill is Lee Hye-hoon, a Christian GNP lawmaker and a rare woman in Korean politics. She has been quoted as saying that the 2.5% of returns from sukuk bonds which go to charity (zakat) that may be used to support terrorism.

Faced with this, on February 22 the GNP decided not to bring the bill forward for debate, at least until after the April by-elections. It remains to be seen how it fares then. The liberal opposition Democrats (DP) are no less craven: citing the alleged UAE nuclear link as an excuse, when everyone knows they too are scared of losing the bigot vote. The DP leader, Sohn Hak-kyu, was down on his knees with Lee at the same Protestant prayer breakfast.

All credit then to former premier Lee Hoi-chang, head of the small Liberty Forward Party (LFP). A Catholic, Lee is even more right-wing than his namesake the president. Yet his is a rare voice of sanity: “The constitution states that religion and politics are strictly separate. Churches should stay away from politics.” That brought instant criticism from the Council of Presbyterian Churches in Korea, who challenged the LFP leader to a public debate.

I’ll leave the last word – well, almost – to a columnist in the Hankyoreh. According to Jung E-gil, writing on March 3, both David Yonggi Cho and Kiel Ja-yeon have in the past marked Easter by carrying big wooden crosses, as if to re-enact the passion of Christ. But there was a difference. They bore no burden: these crosses were on wheels. No nails pierced their flesh; instead, padding protected their delicate skin and expensive suits. Jung quotes a Protestant online newspaper News and Joy: “Death waited at the end of Jesus’s march with the cross … whereas beautiful luxury cars were waiting after these men’s performance.”

Pharisees is the word, if I recall. Also: Render unto Caesar. Strange Christians, these.

Korea’s pulpit bullies take aim at Islam

Posted on 9 March 2011 by admin

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/MC09Dg01.html

This was my first encounter with what is now a global phenomenon. Koreans are tireless rankers. The world’s seventh-largest exporter of goods is also its second-largest exporter of

missionaries, after the United States. According to the Korea World Missions Association (KWMA), their number has nearly doubled in five years from 12,159 in 2004 to 22,130 in 2009.

South Korea today is Asia’s most Protestant nation, and evangelical with it. Many want to preach the gospel, as is their right. I’m a firm believer in a free market for faiths; aren’t you?

So a big fish, if a contentious one. Cho’s view that material wealth shows God’s blessing is not to all tastes, mine included. I once started writing a song, which got no further than this:

I don’t recall seeing Jesus with the winners;
He hung out with publicans and sinners.

Others say Cho runs a cult, and that his theology is heretical. His business practices and reluctance to retire (he is 75) have their critics too. But he is a mighty power in the land.

(While speaking of “typical” Korea, a quick aside: In over 20 trips, I have never eaten dog. Never looked for it, never been offered it; it’s just never crossed my path. Surprise you?)

Pharisees is the word, if I recall. Also: Render unto Caesar. Strange Christians, these.

Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University, and a freelance consultant, writer and broadcaster on Korean affairs. A regular visitor to the peninsula, he has followed North Korea for over 40 years.

The secrets of my brilliant Korea

Posted on 8 January 2011 by admin

Please respect FT.com’s ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ca8b7760-19e0-11e0-b921-00144feab49a.html

Seoul greeted me in the usual fashion early on Thursday morning: a ridiculously long drive into the city (I had too much luggage to try out the new high-ish speed train to Seoul Station), a warm welcome and my favourite room at the Park Hyatt, and a schedule that left little time for coffee, let alone pee breaks.

As we wove through the streets of the South Korean capital trying to avoid the chronic gridlock, my colleague Ariel and I chatted about the lack of holiday hangover compared with the west: everyone is back at work, nobody’s making idle chit-chat about the presents their children didn’t like and there’s just the vaguest nod to the start of a new year. By the close of business on Thursday, I felt quite happy that the holidays had come to a firm stop and that I didn’t have to relive them repeatedly for clients or colleagues.

It was so nice to cut out the chit-chat and get on with business that I thought this could be a new Korean cultural export – let’s dispense with niceties and pre-amble and get down to business. If we get on famously, then we can drink nice wine and gorge ourselves on bibimbap and bindaetteok later. Korea Inc. might also consider exporting the following:

1. A uniform mentality: Japan might have the best-dressed workers on its building sites but the Koreans come first when it comes to kitting-out staff at department stores and airlines. It’s hard to top the outfits for the girls and boys at Shinsegae or the women in taupe working the aisles on Asiana.

2. The warm sounds of Winterplay and W & Whale: if you add anything to your playlist this year, track down the melodic, dreamy and gently poppy tunes of these two Korean acts.

3. K is for cruising: given South Korea’s knack for hospitality and shipbuilding, I continue to wonder why one of the major chaebol business conglomerates haven’t combined the two and launched a cruise line to take on the Americans and Italians and own the Asian cruise market.

4. K is also for culture: given the innovation taking place in the pages of Korean magazines, I wonder how long it will be until the country’s more innovative media show dithering western publishers how to produce healthy, lively magazines.

5. Oksusu cha: Korean corn tea is just what the doctor ordered: like many a warm beverage, it’s supposed to cure myriad ailments. With the right marketing, could evolve into a holistic movement of its own.

6. Sulwhasoo: for consumers seeking a skin miracle in a bottle or simply some great-looking packaging for the bathroom shelf, this premium range of skincare products has a distinctly fragrant Korean top-note (warm and earthy) and just might give you the complexion of a K-Pop star.

7. Girls Generation: speaking of K-Pop, it’s worth losing a few minutes on YouTube watching this ensemble of leggy girls belting out their hit single “Run Devil Run”.

8. Incheon airport’s management: this is a team that could do European air travellers a favour and take over some airports – Brussels would be a good place to start, followed by Vienna, Malpensa and Geneva.

9. Bindaetteok (savoury pancakes): these have all the elements needed to become a global fast-food favourite.

10. Korea’s major department stores: Shinsegae, Lotte, Hyundai could all do with taking their acts on the road to show consumers what it means to be a real store full of departments with all the service and trimmings. Lotte’s so far made a half-hearted attempt but there’s plenty of scope for it and its competitors to go global.

Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle

China Help with North Korea? Fuggedaboutit!

Posted on 26 November 2010 by admin

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/11/26/china_help_with_north_korea_fuggedaboutit?page=full

Some years ago, much to my surprise, I persuaded FP’s then editor Moises Naim to drop the expression “Fuggedaboutit!” from these august columns. Chirpy is one thing, vulgar another.

It was kind of Venezuela’s former trade minister to heed the sensitivities of a Brit subscriber. But now I repent me. For nothing less emphatic will do to express my profound dissent from one dominant trope in the endless, circular discourse on North Korea, lately amplified by commentators and policymakers who should know better.
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You know the tune, so sing along. It goes like this: Call Beijing! Only the Chinese have influence in and on Pyongyang. (They deny it, but we know they’re kidding.) Call yourself a responsible global leader, Comrade Hu? Then rally round, and do your bit. Kim Jong Il and his nukes are as much a threat to you as to the rest of us. And now he’s shelling South Korean civilians! So join us in condemning him, and for God’s sake rein the rogue in. Or words to that effect.

Thus Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, to CNN this week: “I believe that it’s really important that Beijing lead here…. I’ve believed for some time that probably the country that can influence North Korea the most is clearly China … [North Korea] destabilizes the region, and China has as much to lose as anybody in that region with the continuation of this kind of behavior and what the potential might be.”

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley echoed this sentiment: “China is pivotal to moving North Korea in a fundamentally different direction …We would hope and expect that China would use that influence, first, to reduce tensions that have arisen from North Korean provocations and then, secondly, [to] continue to encourage North Korea to take affirmative steps to denuclearize.”

Hope all you want, P.J. It ain’t gonna happen, at least not the way you put it. Sure, Beijing makes vague noises. “We are ready to make joint efforts,” the Foreign Ministry said recently.

But China barely talks the talk, and no way does it walk the walk. Has Washington missed the new lovefest between Pyongyang and Beijing? A friendship forged in blood, as close as lips and teeth. The old slogans and warmth are back. And it’s for real. Better believe it.

We saw it first this summer. Not only did China’s skepticism on the sinking of the Cheonan, the South Korean corvette, let North Korea off the hook, but its hostility to U.S.-South Korean naval exercises in the Yellow Sea — Chinese coastal waters, apparently — sent the allies scurrying ignominiously to hold their maneuvers on the other side of the peninsula.

(Not this time. As I write the aircraft carrier USS George Washington and its battle group are steaming toward the Yellow Sea, after North Korea’s latest provocation: Tuesday’s fatal and unprovoked thermobaric shelling of civilians on Yeonpyeong Island, in the same waters. Thus far Beijing has not reacted so fiercely again, recognizing perhaps that the United States and South Korea have got to make some show of force — and a show is better than the real thing.)

China’s support of the North on the Cheonan came despite a contretemps between lips and teeth just weeks before. In early May Kim Jong Il flounced home from Beijing a day before he was due to go; leaving the Phibada Opera troupe — Pyongyang’s finest — to perform the gala opening of their version of the Chinese classic “Dream of Red Mansions” for — well, nobody much. No doubt as usual the Dear Mendicant had demanded summat fe nowt, as we say in Yorkshire. And for once, China’s checkbook stayed closed. Lessons have to be taught.

But beggars can’t be choosers, or not when no one else is willing to cough up any more. By August, Kim had seen the light and headed for China again; this time to the northeast. Hu Jintao came to meet him — and his son Kim Jong Un, soon to be unveiled to his country and the world (although the younger Kim wasn’t publicly announced as being on the trip) as the heir apparent.

A deal was struck. China swallowed this dynastic succession, and probably bankrolled the festivities. Every family in North Korea got liquor, pork, and soap; all are luxuries for many.

Barely a month later, as the reptile press — some North Korean barbs are too good not to use — oohed and aahed at the pudgy young general, most missed the one man on the podium not wearing a Kim Il Sung badge. That was China. Specifically Zhou Yongkang: a top Politburo figure with a public security background, and Beijing’s new point man on Pyongyang.

Back in Beijing a week later, Zhou welcomed an unprecedented North Korean delegation: the party bosses from all 11 provinces and cities, led by rising star Mun Kyong Dok, an economist who runs Pyongyang and at 53 is by far the youngest of the new Politburo (he’s an alternate member). This team went on to tour China’s northeast, which featured prominently in a new economic accord signed in early October. In a comparison no one local will be making, any fresh business ties will be the first big boost since Manchukuo days. For a start Heilongjiang, Liaoning, and Jilin provinces will be happy if Pyongyang starts paying for the coal et al that they supply — or at least stops stealing the railway wagons they send it in. There’s quite a ways to go.

October also saw the 60th anniversary of the Chinese People’s Volunteers’ (CPV; old British army joke: I want three volunteers, you, you, and you) entry into the Korean War. That turned the tide, saving Kim Il Sung’s bacon and his infant state from being wiped off the map. It normally rates a few lines in the Pyongyang press, but this year both sides celebrated this fulsomely: “with splendor,” gushed the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the North’s official organ.

Seoul, its nose already well out of joint over the Cheonan, seethed when Xi Jinping — tipped as China’s next leader — called the Korean War “a great and just war for safeguarding peace and resisting aggression.” Whose aggression, exactly? North Korea invaded the South, and then the CPV helped the Korean People’s Army (KPA) capture Seoul a second time in 1950.

In the North, the most striking event was on Oct. 26. After their Chinese guests had gone home, the Kims father and son plus the KPA top brass made an unprecedented pilgrimage to Hoechang, a valley east of Pyongyang where the CPV had its headquarters — and where its dead lie buried, most notably Mao Zedong’s son. The Kims laid a solemn wreath on Mao Anying’s grave. North Korea doesn’t tend to do grateful, so this was quite an extraordinary gesture.

What does it mean? The Kims are snuggling up to Beijing because there’s no one else left to snuggle up to. They’d rather have rival suitors as well, whom they could play off in time-honored fashion — as Kim Il Sung did in the Sino-Soviet dispute, or more recently between China and South Korea during the latter’s “sunshine” decade of an engagement policy (1998-2007).

But now China is the last man standing. For various reasons, everyone else has taken their bat home and quit the field. Beijing probably can’t believe its luck, if such it be. This could all have been far fiercer, as it fatefully was a century ago when the region’s three whales — China, Russia, and Japan — battled over the shrimp of the dying, introverted Chosun dynasty: the original Hermit Kingdom. (The parallels are striking, but the DPRK is more a scorpion.)

The cast of characters doesn’t change much. For Japan, then-premier Junichiro Koizumi’s bold visit to Pyongyang in 2002, eliciting an amazing admission and apology — North Korea doesn’t say sorry, either — by Kim Jong Il in person for past kidnappings of Japanese, was meant to resolve this issue and lay the ground for diplomatic normalization. But it backfired, since Pyongyang patently wasn’t telling the full story. Bilateral ties have been in free fall ever since, to the point where Japan — once a major trading partner — now bans all commerce with North Korea.

And where did Moscow go? The Soviet Union founded the DPRK — Kim Il Sung came home in 1945 in a Red Army uniform — and funded it unstintingly for almost half a century, even under Mikhail Gorbachev, before abruptly pulling the plug in its own final months in 1991. Enter Russia. President Boris Yeltsin leaned toward Seoul but his successor Vladimir Putin tried to mend fences, meeting Kim JongI Il thrice in successive years. But since then nothing, and minimal trade or investment. Pyongyang owes unpaid billions, so maybe Moscow just gave up. Just one of many puzzles about Russian foreign policy nowadays.

Finally, South Korea. Sunshine was one-sided, but at least it gave Seoul a foot in the door. In 2008 a newly elected right-wing president, Lee Myung-bak, threw it all away by refusing to honor new projects — mostly win-win, like joint shipbuilding — signed by his predecessor Roh Moo-hyun at the second Pyongyang summit in 2007. That wasn’t smart. It doesn’t remotely excuse sinking the Cheonan or shelling Yeonpyeong, but it partly explains them.

But back to China. Even if this trio of potential rivals hadn’t each for their own reasons left the scene, arguably Beijing alone has both the means and motivation to really take North Korea in hand, as I reckon it is now starting to do. This goes beyond the familiar mantra, that China fears above all a North Korean collapse, chaos on its borders, massive refugee flows and so on. (South Korea too has reason to be no keener on that scenario, but it’s hard to know what Lee Myung-bak is trying to achieve.)

I used to think the logic of juche, North Korea’s supposed doctrine of self-reliance — which in practice meant defying everyone while taking their money — was such that in the end Kim Jong Il would irrevocably annoy Beijing as much as all the others. China plays a long game. In less than two decades since it opened formal relations with South Korea — which brusquely ditched Taiwan to do so — trade and other ties have soared. China is now South Korea’s top trade partner and main destination for outward foreign direct investment. More flights out of Incheon head for China than anywhere else.

So the smart thing for China, surely, would be to let the irredeemable North rot to the point of collapse; have the South absorb it German-style, which would keep it busy for quite some time; and lure this unified Korea out of Uncle Sam’s embrace into the neutrality that most Koreans in their heart of hearts have always craved. Shouldn’t be too hard, really.

It might have gone that way, if the balance of various forces — in Beijing, Pyongyang, Seoul and elsewhere — had been even a little different. But they weren’t, and now it won’t. Instead, as the Korea expert Victor Cha — of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and lately of the George W. Bush administration — wrote recently, China has made the strategic decision that a unified Korea which is South Korea writ large, and as such a U.S. ally, goes fundamentally against its interests.

Hence Beijing’s support, or as good as, over the Cheonan and the shelling. China is pursuing its own agenda on North Korea, and no one can stop it. It will tolerate some provocations, to show the Kims they can trust it not to let them down. But there is a limit, and a price or two.

First, Beijing will not pour money into a broken system. North Korea must fix itself first. That means finally embracing markets, as Deng Xiaoping first urged a much younger Kim Jong Il 30 years ago. (Imagine if the Dear Leader had heeded him then.)

Second, the roguery has to stop, if not all right away. That means no more nuclear tests, and in the long run denuclearization — perhaps in exchange for a Chinese security guarantee.

What if the Kims won’t play ball? Then China has its own Kim who will. No. 1 son Kim Jong Nam went strikingly off message last month, raining on little brother’s parade by saying he was against a third generation succession. Who did he say this to? Japan’s Asahi newspaper. Where did he say it? In Beijing, where evidently he still lives — and is protected.

True, a regime so introverted, vicious, and world-historically stupid as North Korea’s could yet foul up. The Kims may chafe and rattle their new cage. It could all go wrong, for China and them.

But if they have an ounce of sense, they must know the old game is up. Militant mendicancy won’t cut it any more; no one will buy that old horse again. There is only China. Meanwhile their hungry subjects watch pirated South Korean DVDs, and grow restive.

Bottom line: North Korea’s nomenklatura needs a sugar daddy. If you were they, on whose tender mercies would you throw yourself: Lee Myung-bak, or Xi Jinping? That’s surely a no-brainer. They know how it went in Germany. Becoming China’s satellite is humiliating — but better than ceasing to exist, in whatever sense.

Finally, should the rest of us mind? We can do precious little anyway. Let the Chinese have the burden of dragging the DPRK into the 21st century; that will keep them busy. It’s galling for South Korea, which claims the whole peninsula. But even in Seoul, if honest, they may breathe a sigh of relief for the poisoned chalice to fall to someone else.

And who knows? A decade or two down the line, a by-then-more-normal and half-rich North Korea may slough off the Chinese yoke and seek unification with the South. For the latter, that’s a more feasible project than right now, which is a case of “one country, two planets.”

So frankly, sending the USS George Washington, and all the U.N. resolutions and sanctions, and the Six Party Talks, in fact all the paraphernalia of the past decade and more, are by the by. None of it has worked, and none of it now counts. China has a plan: its own plan. Beijing may go through the motions and play along with our old game a bit, for form’s sake. But the truth is, they have a new game. We shall all have to get used to it, and stop pretending.

For the Kims, the weakest link is family

Posted on 22 October 2010 by admin

By Aidan Foster-Carter
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/LJ22Dg01.html

I’m a sociologist, by discipline. Or indiscipline, do I hear you sneer? True, my subject has its share of what one eminent sociologist, Garry Runciman, has called ”attitude and platitude”. Plenty of obfuscating jargon, too. Nor is it half as trendy as when I first got hooked, back in 1968 – when I mixed it up with Marxism. These days, subjects like psychology, history and even economics (despite our present discontents) are more highly regarded than sociology.

But my trade has its uses too, as I shall now try to demonstrate. Take Kim Jong-eun, newly crowned dauphin of North Korea. A communist monarchy: that’s a strange beast indeed, and a contradiction in terms. But sociology, I contend, may shed some light here. What is going on? How on earth did it come to this? And can such a peculiar system survive?

Trotsky saw it coming
Let’s start with Trotsky. Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940), who took the name Trotsky, was by profession a revolutionary, not a sociologist. Before they joined forces to lead the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, he had criticized Lenin’s methods and in particular his elitism.

Despite starting out as democrats, intellectuals who believe they have history on their side tend to get the idea that they know best. The people’s will becomes whatever they say it is. We are progress, we must prevail. You, conversely, who beg to differ, are an enemy of the people, on the wrong side of history – so shut up, or else. (A word for this is ”vanguardism.”)

The young Trotsky’s critique of such arrogance – before he sold the pass and joined the club, seduced by the smell of power – was sociologically sharp, prescient, and indeed fateful:

”In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the central committee.”

Which is exactly what came to pass. Having seized power, the Bolsheviks betrayed hopes of democracy by quashing all who disagreed with them: not just counter-revolutionaries, but fellow socialists. Before long, the suppression spread to within their own ranks. The logical conclusion was the monster Stalin – whose agents murdered Trotsky in his Mexican exile.

Had Trotsky lived to see the further perversion of communism that is North Korea, he might have taken this further. Soviet Stalinism spawned mini-Stalins elsewhere. Even as the USSR repudiated Stalin, his Korean epigone Kim Il-sung moved in the other direction: to cement control. Moreover the Great Leader resolved that his system should not perish with him.

And it hasn’t. Kim Il-sung was no sociologist, but he understood what it took to grab power and build a tyranny that lasts. Trotsky’s three stages – three substitutions, in his word – take us from democracy to dictator. But history doesn’t end there. The tyrant must secure his power: both in his lifetime and especially after he has gone. Succession is the Achilles’ heel here.

Looking at how North Korea has managed to endure, three factors appear essential. One is force, pure and simple. With all pretence of democracy gone, Mao’s dictum becomes the bottom line: Power grows out of the barrel of a gun. North Korea’s relentless militarization is thus no surprise, nor is its formalization by Kim Jong-il as Songun (military-first policy): even twisting Marxist theory to make soldiers, not workers, the revolution’s driving force.

Unlikely generals
How far Songun has come was clear from the rare conference on September 28 of the nominally ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK). At least the WPK now has a Poliburo and a Central Committee (CC) again; both had atrophied since Kim Il-sung died in 1994. And of course the main point was to hail the new princeling. But first things first. On the eve of the meeting Kim Jong-eun – aged 27, with no known military experience – was made a four-star general.

So was his equally civilian aunt Kim Kyong-hui, Kim Jong-il’s younger sister, whose field is light industry. Only then did Kim Jong-eun acquire Party rank: as a CC member and (crucially) as joint vice-chairman of the WPK’s Central Military Committee (CMC). (Connoisseurs of comparative communism may care to note that China’s vice-president Xi Jinping, widely seen as President Hu Jintao’s successor, acquired exactly the same position on October 18.)

But back to North Korea. Nephew and aunt look an unconvincing pair of generals – what do real soldiers make of this? – but the symbolism and pecking order are clear. What counts in Pyongyang these days is the Korean People’s Army (KPA). And while Kim Il-sung as an ex-guerilla had the kudos to control the KPA, his pampered son lacked that clout. Indeed, when the Dear Leader dies an actual military takeover looks a distinct possibility. That isn’t the Kims’ plan, however, so two additional strategies have been devised to try to prevent this.

One is family rule. Kim Il-sung took that step as early as 1966. The last time the WPK held a delegates’ meeting like the one we have just seen in Pyongyang – 44 years ago: due process is not North Korea’s forte – it was to be told the startling news that their leader had picked his younger brother Kim Yong-ju – later out-maneuvered by Kim Jong-il, but thought to be still alive at age 90 – as successor. That stuck in some throats, even of those who had seen how ruthlessly Kim purged his foes a decade earlier – they used Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin to try to get rid of him, but failed. The lucky ones managed to flee to the USSR and China. Thereafter Kim’s cult of personality grew apace, but extending this to his brother was a step too far for some. Those rash enough to voice objections were duly purged.

Communist monarchy
Communist monarchy: what a grotesque paradox. Yet there is a double logic to this. First, at the end of the day who can you trust? Especially in a culture that prizes filial piety, your own family looks the best bet. Kim Jong-il certainly thinks so, promoting not only his son but his sister – Kim Kyong-hui also becomes a full Politburo member – and of course her husband Jang Song-taek, now an alternate Politburo member as well as a vice-chair of the National Defense Commission (NDC), the highest executive body of state outranking the Cabinet.

Second: In a state barely 60 years old, but preceded by centuries of Confucian monarchy and (more immediately) four decades of emperor-worship under Japanese occupation (1905-45), keeping it in the Kim family presses powerful buttons. Or to put it more sociologically, this mode of essentially patriarchal legitimation of rulers is familiar, indeed deeply ingrained.

On October 8 Yang Hyong-sop, a veteran Politburo member aged 85, told Associated Press Television News (APTN): ”Our people take pride in the fact that they are blessed with great leaders from generation to generation… Our people are honored to serve the great president Kim Il-sung and the great general Kim Jong-il. Now we also have the honor of serving young general Kim Jong-eun.”

He sounded deeply traditional: a loyal courtier to his kings. But North Korea’s communist origins mean it can’t admit it has become a monarchy, so this isn’t quite enough. Both the ruler, and even more his successor, have to justify their rule in some other way. This is the third factor, and it takes two forms – or more precisely, stages.

The first is a cult of personality: originated by Stalin, extended by Mao, and pushed to its extremes by Kim Il-sung. Hey, if a guy claims absolute right to rule, he’d better be special. This is what the German sociologist Max Weber called charisma: a term which has entered the language in a looser sense. Or if he’s not so special, you make up stories to pretend he is. These may be ludicrous, but woe betide anyone rash enough to giggle or cast aspersions.

Yet as Weber saw, as a mode of rule charisma has problems. Unlike traditional authority – a monarchy proper, for instance – charisma is vested in just one exceptional individual. What happens when they die? The challenge, in Weber’s rather ugly term, is to routinize charisma.

Immortal presidents
Well, North Korea has done that. One way is to make the hero immortal. Kim Il-sung is still ”eternal president”, despite being dead for 16 years. The final step, logical enough, is to turn adoration into veneration and in effect create a religion. Again the recent WPK meeting is a case in point. Pouring into Pyongyang from every corner of the land, what was the first thing the delegates did? Before the conference came an act of worship. As a group, they all visited the ”sacred temple of Juche”. That’s how the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) refers to Kumsusan Memorial Palace: where Kim Il-sung lived and worked, and where even now his embalmed corpse keeps a glass eye on things. KCNA noted that the delegates ”paid high tribute” even to Kim’s statue, and ”made deep bows to the president” in person.

Weird, yet it makes a kind of sense. To sum up so far. Trotsky’s grimly accurate forecast of what happens when an elite thinks it knows better than the people it purports to represent – first the party, then a clique, and finally a dictator – is only half the story. For the dictator to hold onto power, even after his death, entails three further steps: militarization, family rule, and a quasi-religious cult. Or at least that’s what North Korea’s peculiar evolution suggests.

Two caveats. This isn’t a complete sociology of power in North Korea, obviously. A fuller account would look more at the role of ideology. This too has mutated far from communism into what Brian Myers bluntly calls ”race-based nationalism”. His book The Cleanest Race examines North Korea’s internal propaganda. The story the regime tells its people about the world and their place in it is even nastier, narrower and more noxious than you’d imagine. Read it, especially if tempted to believe that this regime genuinely wants to make peace.

Can it last?
Second, I dare to hope for a happy ending. Kim Il-sung’s sociological nous has kept the state he created alive longer than many (me included) had expected. But can it go on for ever?

That I doubt. A full answer would loose more hares than there’s room for here. In the 21st century, refusing market reforms is a recipe for self-destruction. Abroad, North Korea’s old game of militant mendicancy, despite some success from the Sino-Soviet dispute right up to the six-party talks, is past its sell-by date; other powers are fed up and won’t play any more.

But just to stick to the processes already mentioned, these too are far from foolproof. The weakest link is familism. Past history, in Korea or anywhere – think of the Borgias in Italy – suggests that monarchies or other forms of family rule can be riddled by strife. Some crown princes just aren’t up to the job. People plot, and before you know it the knives are out.

Specifically, promoting a third son over his elder siblings is asking for trouble. What does number one son think? On October 12 he told us. Interviewed in Beijing by Japan’s Asahi TV, Kim Jong-nam broke ranks, saying: ”Personally, I am against third-generation dynastic succession”. Adding that he didn’t care, and would help little brother ”while I stay abroad”, doesn’t make this any less of a bombshell. Kim Jong-nam has gone off-message, big time.

Nor is he the only one. Even in Pyongyang the mask is slipping. The WPK conference and subsequent military parade seem to have passed off smoothly, but dissent is growing. One recent visiting group (which included a Korean-speaker) heard a full-scale row between their guides – it was evening, and drink had been taken – as to what right Kim Jong-eun had to be foisted on them as leader. That is still dangerous talk; but many more will be thinking it. The young general has much to prove, and may not have long to do so. Interesting times.

The cultural life of North Korea

Posted on 15 October 2010 by admin

North Korea’s 65th anniversary of the Workers’ Party offered a rare insight of every day life in the capital Pyongyang.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/15/north-korea-pyongyang-secret-culture
Tania Branigan

A street scene in Pyongyang. Photograph: Dan Chung/Guardian

Old men playing cards in a park; a woman shopping for vegetables; tired workers jostling for space on a rusting trolley bus. These tiny glimpses of daily life would be unremarkable anywhere else. But this is Pyongyang, capital of one of the world’s most insular countries, and even the mundane is an extraordinary sight – more fascinating to a journalist than the pomp of North Korea’s largest military parade, the real reason we have been allowed in.

We expect to see the portraits of Eternal President Kim Il-sung and his son, the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, gazing down at us from roadsides. We have been well briefed on socialist haircuts and vinalon, the miracle fabric made from limestone and better known for durability than comfort. We have read the propaganda, combining revolutionary fervour, the vocabulary of 30s potboilers and accounts of Kim’s visits to potato-starch factories.

But who knew that The Da Vinci Code was a hit in this strictly controlled city? That Céline Dion is a karaoke favourite? Or that the mass performances are not only a tribute to the leadership and motherland, but the way that many young people find partners?

Few foreigners see this city at all. Around 2,000 western tourists visited last year, plus perhaps 10 times as many Chinese visitors. The expatriate population, excluding Chinese and Russian diplomats, and including children, stands at 150. Mobile phones are confiscated at entry; visitors are accompanied by official escorts at all times; tourists’ photos are inspected and frequently deleted, even when their subject matter is – to outside eyes – entirely innocuous.

A family passes before the Party Foundation Monunment in Pyongyang. A family passes before the Party Foundation Monument. Photograph: Dan Chung/Guardian

Information is so sparse that interpreting North Korea is not so much like reading tea leaves in a saucer as examining them while they float in a milky brew. People devote their careers to the country yet acknowledge they know little about it – one Seoul-based expert, Park Hyeong-jung, is reportedly writing a paper on “just how terrible our research and predictions are”, though others say information about daily life – such as market prices – is much better than two decades ago.

Our rare media trip has been organised by the government at little notice to show the world that Kim Jong-un, the leader’s youngest son, is now heir apparent. We arrive in Pyongyang less than 24 hours after flinging scribbled applications at the Beijing embassy and officials admit they hadn’t expected so many journalists. With minders in short supply we have more freedom than usual, visiting the railway station, department store, vegetable shops and kiosks and a local restaurant. This is by far the wealthiest section of the wealthiest part of the country.

“Nobody who lives in Pyongyang is an ordinary person. This is the top five to 10% of the population,” points out Barbara Demick, whose book Nothing To Envy offers a vivid account of ordinary life in North Korea.

On top of that, we have arrived amid unusual celebrations. The party has promised special supplies to households in the capital, including a bottle of alcohol, cooking oil and sweets. Most passersby are drab, in grey, khaki or navy outfits; their only colour the red Kim Il-sung badge pinned to each lapel. But women attending the military parade have brought out their bright traditional gowns for the holiday and others show a thirst for colour, with vivid bags or jackets. Hot pink is a surprisingly popular shade in Pyongyang. Most are immaculately made-up and all are neatly coiffed. Hair is a serious matter in North Korea, which licences a limited range of haircuts – in 2005, state television launched a series titled Let’s Trim our Hair in Accordance with the Socialist Lifestyle.

On the streets, a handful of residents lick ice lollies; one tiny girl holds a candy floss stick in each hand. Across from our hotel, people jostle at food stalls for savoury pancakes, fritters and pizza (reportedly a favourite of Kim Jong-il’s). An enormous white frosted cake with pink icing roses is priced at 9,000 won (£6.25), while a dish of shaved ice with syrup costs just 5 won. Young men take aim at shooting stalls, and around town crowds gather to watch open-air concerts, the bands lined up in neat rows like Merseybeat-era Beatles.

But some who know the city suggest that attractions such as the street lighting will vanish once we have gone. Even during our visit, most roads away from our hotel are dark. The sleek restaurants surrounding it are almost empty. The central department store is gloomy, illuminated only by late-afternoon light and a string of fairy lights. As at a rainy English fete, the effect of the bunting above the counters is more plaintive than festive. Stock lies untroubled in glass counters or on the shelves behind them: lengths of plaid fabric, clocks, footballs, pastel towels, TVs and even a cafetiere set. There are perhaps 20 visitors sprinkled across four sizeable floors and the only actual customer appears to be a small child buying a cheap plastic toy.

Old men play Korean Chess near the Party Foundation Monunment in Pyongyang. Old men play Korean Chess in Pyongyang. Photograph: Dan Chung/Guardian

There are certainly signs of change here: Air Koryo has new planes and three gleaming airport buses to ferry passengers from runway to terminal. Last week a vast new theatre opened, as did an apartment complex, although it may be destined for officials. The 105-storey Ryugyong hotel – more than two decades in construction – is finally glass-sheathed and due to open in 2012. That year will mark the 100th birthday of the country’s founder, Kim Il-sung. But it is hard to see how it can achieve its pledge to become “a great, powerful and prosperous nation” by then – even given the Stakhanovite industrial efforts lauded in its newspapers.

Life must be good for some in Pyongyang. A journalist spots a North Korean handing over $2,000 to buy two Longines watches. Orascom, the Egyptian mobile phone company that opened a network here last year, already has 200,000 subscribers, although the handsets cost anywhere between £65 and £190 and their use is strictly limited: Koreans can only call other Koreans, while foreigners can only call each other or abroad.

But away from the handful of show projects there is little sign of improvement in ordinary lives. Overloaded trolley buses wheeze along, more rust than steel. One reporter sees a woman and child apparently digging for roots in a park. The country has been heavily reliant on food handouts since the 90s, when hundreds of thousands died. Those who have visited the countryside recently say residents are visibly gaunt, even in farming areas.

Pyongyang is lucky: no one is plump, but nor is there noticeable emaciation. Dr Andrei Lankov, associate professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, says the official income in Pyongyang is around 3,000 won a month, but many have ways of making money on the side and – unlike other North Koreans – its residents receive subsistence food rations. Most top those up at markets that are legal though never formally acknowledged (officials insist that “everything is public”). At the turn of the year, the government embarked on currency reforms to eradicate an increasingly independent group of “kiosk capitalists”. But wiping out hard-won savings caused highly unusual public discontent and even, reportedly, unrest.

“It was a near complete disaster; the first time in my memory that high-level North Korean officials openly complained to their counterparts about government policy,” says Lankov.

The government swiftly reversed the changes and reportedly executed a senior official for the blunder. Now, says one frequent visitor, the economy is exactly as it was – except that prices have risen sharply and people are unhappier. The government would like foreign investors to help revive the economy, but the country’s unpredictability and the international sanctions imposed over its missile and nuclear tests make that unlikely, despite its rock-bottom wages.

Armaments are its big earner and those aside, its existing production base seems unlikely to save it. The current issue of Foreign Trade, designed to woo international business, advertises a curious selection of goods – homemade wigs, rabbit fur, steel cutlery and Kaesong Koryo Ginseng Extract, recommended “for treating radiation diseases, cancer and Aids”. Amid these problems, culture becomes more important than ever as a tool to bind support for the regime. Often, it makes little attempt to disguise its pedagogic intent – songs include Vinalon is a Textile Made from Stone and My Youngest Daughter, Pok Sun, Became an AA-Machine Gunner.

But music is a genuine passion as well as a political tool for North Koreans, and other tunes combine political themes with romance. Our foreign ministry escorts grow misty- eyed when The Night of Pyongyang City starts playing at the mass dance. Young lovers walk hand-in-hand at night murmuring the romantic melody, they say. Many of those couples have met through the months of drilling for such performances.

“Lots of people also find love in the Grand People’s Study Hall. I found my love there,” says one minder. “People usually keep loving relationships for a long time and try to help each other in study or work . . . You can’t achieve CNC technology [technological production] if people don’t have that aspiration,” he adds.

Tired commuters cross Pyongyang on an old bus. Photograph: Dan Chung/Guardian

More surprisingly, The Da Vinci Code was a big hit here, though it seems unlikely that Dan Brown’s publishers are aware of the fact – or are benefiting much. So, too, was Harry Potter. Young women love Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables – a translation of the third volume in the series is due out shortly. Though banned, foreign films are also increasingly – albeit surreptitiously – popular. The government hoped people would watch films such as the sprawling patriotic series Nation and Destiny when it authorised DVD players. But smuggled movies from China have provided residents with a glimpse of life outside. One NGO worker recalls a teenager requesting shyly whether she could ask her a question: Who did she think was better – Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves? Though they might sound trivial, such anecdotes show that the information seal is not airtight.

Koreans in border areas are also using smuggled handsets and sim cards to make calls via Chinese networks. Many have slipped across the border, too, or have relatives living covertly in China. The country is becoming increasingly porous.

“People are beginning to suspect that the world lives better than they do,” says Lankov. But he adds that very few realise how much better, and that North Korean propaganda has adapted. “It doesn’t insist any more that it is a prosperous and rich nation and everything else is hell. They say, ‘Well, there are other places, but we have our leader and our pure national blood . . .’,” he notes.

It is impossible to know whether North Koreans find such statements convincing. Tears stain the faces of some performers at the mass dance when they glimpse Kim Jong-il watching them – but the cheering is piped through speakers and apparently pre-recorded.

“North Koreans do criticise the leaders and politics, just not in public – especially to foreign visitors. That is the quickest way to be arrested, tortured and sent to prison. It’s a society where pretty much all freedoms are restricted,” says Kay Seok, the Seoul-based researcher for Human Rights Watch.

State news agency KCNA describes such reports as lies, insisting: “The independent and creative life the Korean people enjoy is a dignified, worthwhile and happy life unimaginable in the capitalist society.”

In the absence of open conversation, analysts seize on the tiniest signs to read the mood of the country. If rising hemlines indicate optimism in western economies, so too can trousers show defiance in North Korea, one observer suggests. Women are banned from wearing them in Pyongyang in the summer, apparently because Kim Jong-il considers them alien to Korean culture. Neighbourhood committees monitor compliance and send offenders home to change. Yet as the temperatures rose this year, several women defiantly clung to their slacks. Is that, asks the Korea watcher in all seriousness, a sign of increasing disaffection and feistiness following the disastrous currency reforms?

Only North Koreans know for sure. And they are not telling.

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