The Hidden People of North Korea (33 page)

The Kim regime has always viewed telephones with suspicion. It is not known how many telephones there are in the North; a 1997 estimate put the number at five per one hundred people. In the entire country there is only one telephone book, which is a classified document marked “secret,” the better to keep people from learning about the structure of their government and society. A copy of the phone book’s 2002 edition, acquired by a South Korean human rights organization, listed forty thousand numbers of organizations and government-owned businesses but no private numbers. Home phones cost the equivalent of about twenty years of wages for the average North Korean, so when people need to make a call, they line up at public phone booths. In the countryside, they can go to a local government communications office and make a call after presenting personal identification and a small deposit. In Pyongyang and a few other big cities, the telephone exchanges are automated, but in many places in the countryside, people have to go through switchboard operators. In 2005 it was reported that the government had blocked 90 percent of North Korea’s 970 international land lines, leaving only a few for use by foreigners and government offices.

The mobile phone revolution, which swept South Korea in the 1990s, got off to a slow start in North Korea—and then faltered. The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, in a joint venture with a division of Thailand’s Loxley Pacific Company, began cellular phone service in August 2002, employing the GSM standard used in China and the European Union, not the CDMA standard used in South Korea and North America. A year later, news reports out of South Korea said that Loxley was curtailing its expansion due to lack of demand. Cell phone service was extremely expensive by North Korean standards. The handset and initial subscription reportedly cost over $1,000, whereas the average North Korean worker brings home just a few dollars a month.

The government banned all cell phones in May 2004, although its reason for doing so is not entirely clear. There is much speculation that the ban was a response to the Yongchon railway explosion that just missed Kim Jong-il’s private train as it returned from China. If it was an assassination attempt, perhaps the explosion was detonated by a cell phone. The government confiscated all the phones it could find, and the ban continued into 2008.
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In May 2008, Orascom Telecommunications, a subsidiary of a large Egyptian conglomerate that has signed several investment contracts with North Korea, launched another GSM cell phone service, and cell phones began appearing once again in 2009.
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The first people in North Korea to use cell phones, as far back as 1997, were Chinese traders working in North Korea near the border, where they could receive signals from Chinese cell towers. The use of these Chinese cell phones has increased over the years, despite the North Korean cell phone ban. Chinese lend or rent the phones to North Koreans with whom they are doing business, and illegal businesses provide cell phones to North Koreans who want to talk with relatives in China or South Korea. The North Korean security services try to track down these phones by using spies and electronic equipment, and they sometimes succeed, although payment of small bribes usually keeps cell phone users out of jail.

With severe economic and legal restrictions on travel and poor telephone service, North Koreans have few ways to communicate with each other except by word of mouth. Train passengers are said to be an excellent source of information and rumor because their anonymity provides them a measure of safety. Where only two people are gathered, some freedom of communication is possible, because if one person reports to authorities that his interlocutor said something that could be construed as “counterrevolutionary,” the other can always deny it—unless the reporter is an undercover agent. Among three or more people, a measure of paranoia sometimes motivates listeners to report disloyalty to the authorities before they in turn are reported upon by the other parties to the conversation. The security services employ hundreds of thousands of informants (mostly recruited on a temporary basis) to report on their comrades. North Koreans believe that as many as one out of ten or twenty citizens is reporting to the police at any given time. Parents must even be careful about what they say in front of their children, who are sometimes induced by overzealous teachers to report on their home life. Despite these constraints, news, rumors, and even indirect criticism of the Kim regime make the rounds, with a few people paying the price for their loose lips but most escaping any serious consequences.

Media Impact

Gaining access to information is one thing; interpreting it is something else. People screen incoming information to keep from being overwhelmed, especially when the information challenges their current beliefs. The screening process involves selective exposure, selective attention, selective understanding, and selective remembering. The more committed an individual is to current beliefs, the more rigorous the screening process. Consider how this might work for a typical North Korean who encounters information coming from outside the country.

Because the Kim regime is highly selective about what information it allows its people to receive from outside, the information that
does
get in easily makes it through the personal information filter of selective exposure. Nor is selective attention likely to be a significant second-stage barrier in North Korea’s communication-deprived society because outside information is so scarce that people actively seek it out and pay attention to it. Selective interpretation, on the other hand, may prevent information from being correctly understood. North Korean propaganda has consistently taken the line that the United States is doing all it can to subjugate the North Korean people. Even American foreign aid is depicted as a kind of psychological operation. North Koreans who accept this viewpoint will be inclined to interpret any information coming from the United States and other capitalist countries as “imperialistic” propaganda delivered with an ulterior motive.

Such skepticism about U.S. intentions brings into relief two important and related issues in communication and persuasion: latitude of acceptance and communicator credibility. A communication is most readily believed when it is neither too different from nor too similar to the audience’s current attitudes and experience.
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If it is too similar, the new information is received with little thought and has little impact, falling well within the latitude of acceptance. If it is too different, the new information is rejected as implausible or incomprehensible, falling within the latitude of rejection. The width of these latitudes varies for each audience segment and even for each individual at different times and on different issues. A plausible hypothesis is that, having been for so long isolated and subjected to hostile anti-American propaganda, the North Korean people have developed a wide latitude of rejection for foreign (especially American) communications. Consider the case of a North Korean who escaped to China, where he came across an article in a Russian journal telling about how Kim Il-sung had actually started the Korean War. “If the journal had not been from Russia, I would have believed the article was fabricated by South Korea. So I decided to go to South Korea to learn more.”
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The Kim regime has taken extreme measures to prevent its people from receiving and believing foreign communications, especially those coming from the United States. As the country opens itself slightly to foreigners, it has erected a mosquito net of censorship to let some information in while preventing unwanted influences from turning people’s heads. Another measure to combat outside communications is the use of “inoculation,” whereby North Korean propagandists contrast the ideal American life with its somewhat harsher realities in order to prevent the North Korean people from believing everything they hear and see about the United States. In a particularly graphic, and sometimes comical, example of inoculation,
Nodong Sinmun
published an article describing the experiences of an unnamed Russian tourist who visited the United States. According to the paper, the Russian’s experiences were reported “some time ago” in a
Pravda
article titled “A Russian Citizen’s Account of the Disgusting United States.” The Russian reports on housing:

Only a very small minority of people live in skyscrapers. These skyscrapers are few in number. They converge in the “commercial center,” a small district that comprises a few streets in the heart of the city. The entire remainder of the city is a world of asbestos-board houses.… Most people live in pressboard or asbestos board houses that are singularly disorderly and swarming with roaches. The walls of these houses are such that just pressing on them with a finger leaves a mark, and one can push a nail into them with the bare hand. . . .
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One time I went into a house where eight households lived, with one kitchen and one bathroom. There were old people living in that house. Their lives were all but done. They sat and wept. The lighting was barely enough to see in front of one’s nose. I sat down and considered how I might console them.
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Eventually, I returned to my home in the fatherland. When I set my trunk on the floor, U.S. cockroaches came crawling out of it. We threw the trunk out on the veranda. In the cold of the Russian February, the cockroaches crawled barely half a meter and froze to death.
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On the U.S. health-care system, the Russian says,

If one is not insured, then he cannot get an operation. Yet the cost of insurance is 300 to 400 dollars each month, and no one can pay that much. They go on living somehow, without dying. There is a “free treatment system” for pensioners called the “old-age health system.” In fact, they call the old folks in every month to confirm whether they have died or not, then they insult them by asking why they live so long when they live poorly, and threatening to get rid of the “old-age health system.”
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In North Korea, as in all countries with heavy censorship, inquiring minds learn to read between the lines of the official media. Even though the media are designed to be a propaganda tool of the Kim regime, they are not without some informational value because the propagandist needs the raw material of news content in order to tell a story. For example, in a
Nodong Sinmun
article arguing that U.S. forces fell into a “trap” set by resistance forces after invading Iraq in 2003, readers were informed that “it took only some 40 days for the U.S.-led coalition forces to occupy Iraq.”
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The astute reader could therefore infer that U.S. military power must be formidable if it vanquished the large Iraqi army in a matter of weeks. To take another example, a
Nodong Sinmun
article in 2003 reported that due to recent events, South Koreans no longer liked the United States. It is true that anti-American sentiment had increased at that time; however, the information in the article conflicts with the usual propaganda line that the South Koreans have
always
disliked the Americans.
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Sometimes so many facts are left out of a foreign news story that the audience can probably make neither head nor tail of it. For example, presumably referring to speculation in the international media that a nuclear transparency policy recently adopted by Libya might prove to be a model for North Korea, KCTV quoted a foreign ministry official as cryptically saying, “Recently, the United States has been extensively advertising the incidents they orchestrated in some Middle East countries and is having a hallucination that the effects from these incidents will be reproduced on the Korean peninsula.… To expect a change in our position is the same as expecting a shower from a clear sky.”
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Although it is easy to characterize North Korea’s information environment as impoverished and dysfunctional, the fact to keep in mind is that this environment has served its purpose as one of the most important means of keeping the Kim family in power for over half a century. On the other hand, the regime’s restrictive information policy has prevented North Korea from modernizing and becoming internationally competitive. Information needed to make optimal choices, especially economic choices, is in short supply. More importantly (from our point of view), the lack of information about alternative political systems keeps the people, dissatisfied though they may be, from finding a way out of their political prison.

It is difficult to predict what would happen if North Koreans gained unfettered access to information about their regime and the outside world. Such information might empower them to restructure their society to their own benefit, but they would need more than information to free them from the grip of thousands of years of autocratic rule.

CHAPTER SIX