Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (26 page)

To be sure, Kim added, “the work of construction was only just beginning. As yet, most of the citizens of the capital were still living in shabby dugouts and old-fashioned one-room houses. They had made painful sacrifices and suffered appalling hardships, enduring the crucible of the anti-Japanese and the anti-U.S. wars, trials which no other people in the world had ever experienced. No people in the world had shed so much blood, braved such cold winds and missed so many meals as our people did. For these people we had to build more good houses, make more nice clothes and build more fine schools, holiday homes and hospitals. And we had to bring home more of our compatriots in foreign lands, who yearned for their homeland. This was what I had to do with my life, for the sake of the people. … These thoughts kept me awake at night.”
¹⁰⁸

Kim Il-sung might have gotten even less sleep if he had realized fully the meaning of an event in Seoul three months earlier, on May 16, 1961. Military officers led by Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee took power in a coup d’etat. The coup snuffed out democratic rule, with which South Korea had been experimenting since Rhee’s overthrow the previous year in a student-led revolution. The intensely security-conscious new leaders in Seoul not only cracked down on dissent; they also made it clear very quickly that they would raise higher barriers to inroads by Northern agents and indigenous leftists. That alone would have been bad news for Kim, who counted on subversion to spark the Southern revolution that would pave the way for unification on his terms.

Taking longer to become apparent were some even farther-reaching consequences of Park’s ascension to power. Although the North had gotten the jump on the South economically in the post–Korean War period, the military takeover in the South signaled a new phase in their contest. Within a few years Park’s authoritarian regime had unleashed Western-trained economists—some of them no less than brilliant—and dynamic business leaders. Their mission: build a market economy modeled on that of Japan, employing close bureaucratic guidance and taking full advantage of a low-cost, hardworking, well-trained labor force. The formula was not too different from the “state capitalism” that Kim Il-sung had rejected as inappropriate for the North. It worked for the South, producing a rapidly wealth-expanding, relatively free economy.
¹

There remained severe problems in the South, to be sure. A populace growing more prosperous, literate and sophisticated increasingly found itself in conflict with the repression that the military-backed dictatorship used to preserve its power. The North cheered Southern dissidents and lost no opportunity to attack Park Chung-hee’s legitimacy: the South Korean leader had served during colonial times in the hated Japanese Imperial Army. North Korean propaganda continued to portray the South as a puppet state, where

the U.S. imperialist aggressors have planted themselves in the top-level places of the exploiters and traitors who ride the people, and lord it over them. In shanties and dugouts the people are bemoaning their poverty and hunger, while the plunderers satiate themselves with the blood and sweat of the people, in their palace-like mansions, indulging in orgies. Brandishing their bayonets, the ruling classes, who control the power and the wealth, oppress the people struggling for liberation and unification at will, making the land one of carnage.
²

While the South’s frequent political turmoil did not derail its astonishingly rapid economic growth, the North started to bump up against the limits of what could be achieved with a command economy
³

Mean-while, facing both real and imagined threats, Kim took it upon himself to militarize the economy to an unprecedented degree. “The turning point,” according to Hwang Jang-yop, who was then his ideology secretary, “came in the late 1960s.” Disillusioned by both the revisionists in the Soviet Union and the wild leftists then launching the Cultural Revolution in China, Kim Il-sung “decided that his party had to rely on its own strength to liberate South Korea and achieve reunification.”
⁴
Accordingly Kim began his militarization campaign.

Although militarism would, over time, cripple the civilian economy, North Korea in the ’60s still enjoyed some momentum. As late as 1965 the North’s $292 per capita GNP was more than three times the South’s $88, according to one set of estimates.
⁵
Those were the golden years of North Korean life, to hear former residents reminisce. In the 1950s and ’60s, “even though it was difficult to have an easy and comfortable lifestyle, at least the rations came regularly—never delayed,” Lee Ok-keum, who was born in 1949 and defected to the South with her husband and family in 1994, told me. “There were actually goods made in North Korea that you could buy in the stores— clothing, material, underwear, candy.”

As South Korean economic growth accelerated, growth rates in the North gradually declined. While the multi-year state economic plans of the late 1940s and the mid- to late ’50s were deemed to have achieved their goals
more or less as planned, growth from then on failed to meet planners’ expectations. The first “seven-year plan,” begun in 1961, dragged on for three extra years. Subsequent plans like-wise could not be completed without extensions of two or three years.

Those disappointing results came despite a series of campaigns and mass movements intended to wring greater output from the economy. Kim’s Chol-lima movement had brought serious confusion around 1959, when planners misallocated resources to various sectors of the economy. Quality of production dropped, and eager-to-please economic units turned in inflated claims for their quantitative production. Kim added incentives, short of money bonuses. He combined ideological indoctrination with prizes, including free vacations, and awards of medals and honorific titles for exceeding production quotas. Those incentives proved insufficient.
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Kim’s “Tae-an work system,” named for a power plant he was visiting in 1961 when he gave the instructions, was supposed to reduce bureaucratic inefficiency. In practice, it focused all power in party secretaries who, in turn, represented the will of the Great Leader. Hwang Jang-yop, who held high posts in both the party and the administration before he defected in 1997, explained how it worked:

Say the prime minister has given a certain factory manager some instructions. The factory manager will immediately report to the factory party committee and follow the committee’s instructions. … The prime minister does not have the authority to give instructions to the factory party committee. The factory party committee will deliberate on whether or not the prime minister’s instructions are commensurate with the will of the Great Leader, and if it decides not, then it will not carry out those instructions but report to its supervising party committee and await instructions from there before proceeding any further.

Hwang further illustrated his point by noting that as president of Kim Il-sung University he had held cabinet ministerial status. “I was also the Speaker of the Supreme People’s Assembly and member of the party’s central committee, and was therefore one notch above the rest of the cabinet ministers. Thus, in terms of status in the party and the state, the party secretary supervising the university was far below me. And still all power in the university was in the hands of the party secretary, and the university president was under his command.” The Tae-an work system, Hwang said, “only served to paralyze the creativity and spontaneity of administrative and economic officials and legitimize the bureaucracy of party officials.”
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Economic strength translates into political and military power. Park Chung-hee’s reinvigoration of the Southern economy meant that the South now would have a shot at achieving ultimate reunification on its terms. The
contest was becoming clearer. Most Koreans believed that reunification was inevitable sooner or later. One possibility now was that the South, by overtaking and overwhelming the North economically would set the stage for a demoralized North to fall into its lap. The other possibility—that the North would “win the prize by patiently pursuing its tactics of subversion, then intervening in a moment of Southern weakness to help communize the South—depended on dislodging or neutralizing the South’s U.S. backers.

After using the term
juche
in 1955 to describe his self-reliant policy
⁸
Kim had said little about it for a while. By the early 1960s, though, Kim was tilting toward the Beijing side in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Khrushchev in Moscow was promoting the line that communist countries should de-emphasize military preparations. Instead they should focus on peaceful competition with capitalist countries to develop their economies. Moscow assured the smaller communist countries that they need not worry; the nuclear-armed might of the Soviet superpower deterred Western attack.

To Kim such talk had one highly unwelcome meaning: He could expect no help from the Soviet Bloc in a forcible reunification of Korea. The notion of peaceful coexistence—-whether the Soviet Union’s coexistence with the hated imperialist Americans or North Korea’s coexistence with South Korea—-was anathema to him as it had been since the 1950s.
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He still had on his agenda the big-ticket items of pushing the Americans to withdraw their troops, fomenting a Southern revolution and unifying Korea under his rule. (As an official biography put it, he was “leading to victory the revolutionary struggles of the South Korean people, to sweep away U.S. imperialism and its agents, and the struggle of the entire Korean people for national unification.”
¹⁰
)

In 1963, under such circumstances, Kim picked up the theme of
juche
again. Afterward he never tired of talking about it. “In a nutshell,” according to Kim,
juche
means “having the attitude of master toward revolution and construction in one’s own country.” It means “refraining from dependence upon others.” It means “using your own brains, believing your own strength and displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance, and thus solving your own problems for yourself on your own responsibility under all circumstances.” Kim went on to emphasize the importance for any socialist country of “applying the universal principles of Marxism-Leninism and the experience of other countries to suit the historical conditions and national peculiarities of your own country.”
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In other words: Don’t let Moscow or Beijing pull your strings.

In the end, however,
juche,
Kim’s homegrown twist, was to prove just as limiting for the North’s economic growth as the Stalinist-style planned economy. The limitations were to become especially apparent in view of-what Park Chung-hee was starting to do in the South. The Korean peninsula’s own natural resources were concentrated in the North, out of the Southerners’ grasp.
Even if that had not been the case, the peninsula—lacking petroleum and another industrial essential, coking coal—could not be self-sufficient and therefore could never be completely self-reliant. The Southerners turned to international trade, at the opposite pole
from.ju.che
. They would import the basic commodities, then reprocess them using borrowed capital and cheap local labor. Finally, they would export the finished products.

In 1965, South Korea normalized relations with Japan, which provided $300 million in grants and $200 million in loans as compensation for damages inflicted during the colonial period. That money, plus enhanced business ties with Japan, gave South Korea a running start toward the “miracle” that was to make it the leader of Asia’s fast-developing “tiger” economies. According to one analysis, the South’s growth rate outpaced the North’s from 1966—and in 1976 the South’s per capita GNP surpassed that of the North for the first time.
¹²

After somewhat de-emphasizing the military following the Korean War, Kim Il-sung in the 1960s resumed with a vengeance the policy of building up his armed forces.
¹³
While the psychic costs are hard to measure, it is clear enough that Kim’s growing obsession with security-was terribly expensive in economic development terms. His policy of maintaining military superiority over the far more populous South proved to be a crushing burden—and, in the long run, countercompetitive.
¹⁴

Many South Korean and Western analysts argued that the militarization drive represented nothing but Kim’s continuing dream of military conquest of the South. The North, on the other hand, always maintained that it arose from the prospect that South Korea and its American backers would start a new war and Pyongyang would have to defend itself.
¹⁵
My view is that Kim’s policy combined offensive and defensive elements—although his defensive concerns to a large extent represented his fears of the consequences of his offensive policies. Despite military alliances with China and the USSR, and Khrushchev’s assurances of protection, Kim feared he might not be able to count on allies to rescue him in case his contest with the South should lead to renewed war with the Americans. Without an impenetrable defense, he could not feel secure in taking offensive measures.