Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (71 page)

A handmade prototype of a sedan had been displayed at Pyongyang’s Exhibition of the Achievements of Socialist Construction during my 1979 visit. A guide there had said the country hoped to go into mass production. By 1989, the earlier model was gone, replaced by two new handmade prototypes of a car to be called the “Pyongyang”—out-and-out copies of the Mercedes-Benz 190, of-which the country had recently imported a fleet. Production would start soon at a factory then producing military Jeep-type vehicles, said an exhibition guide. I decided not to hold my breath.
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Enough sophisticated foreign goods were getting into the country to let North Koreans glimpse what they were missing. Pyongyang residents were
excited about special shops opened during the festival that sold foreign goods. Even during nonfestival times there was a steady flow of such goods to some North Koreans—particularly to former residents of Japan who had repatriated and whose remaining relatives in Japan kept them supplied. Officials were sensitive about the broadening gap in living standards and tried to persuade foreign journalists to ignore it. “Don’t compare us with the advanced countries,” said one official. “Remember, we had to build everything from the destruction of the war. And we had to do it so that everyone could share the same level. That’s not easy.” But the regime seemed to know it could not sell its economic philosophy forever on the basis of equality only. It would have to offer more of the good life, especially consumer goods.
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Catching up “would require upgrading technology in such fields as electronics. North Korea did have some people capable of working in high-tech fields. Kim ChaekUniversity of Technology boasted computer rooms equipped with personal and mainframe computers imported from Europe (especially Poland), Japan and Singapore, as well as people who knew how to use them and how they were made. The university exhibited robots constructed in campus labs. But factory production of such high-tech machines would be another matter, and there was little evidence the country was making much progress there. As with automobiles, the North Koreans seemed more successful at taking apart foreign-made machines and building handmade prototypes than at starting mass production.

At the Exhibition of the Achievements of Socialist Construction, plenty of North Korean–made high-tech machinery-was on display—but on inquiry it turned out in many cases to be prototype equipment from the labs at Kim Chaek or other universities, not production goods.

Trying to develop at home all the elements of modern technology clearly was out of the question, even for an intelligent, educated population. Obviously it would be hard to meet North Koreans’ rising expectations without importing huge quantities of goods—or, more practically, the foreign technology to produce them. Importing technology would mean a need for joint ventures and other dealings with the capitalist world. A halfhearted and sketchy stab at that, enactment of a joint-ventures law in 1984, had failed to attract much investor interest.

Business dealings with the noncommunist world remained difficult. North Korea had little or no foreign exchange and could not get credit because it still had not repaid its loans from the 1970s.
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Creditors were particularly exasperated that, before even making much of a gesture toward paying its debts, Pyongyang had spent what some Westerners estimated at the equivalent of four to eight billion U.S. dollars importing materials and machinery for the construction campaign to prepare for the youth festival. That history disposed many foreign companies against any dealings with the North, unless they could see cash up front. The one reliable group of overseas
business partners comprised pro-Pyongyang Korean businessmen resident in Japan, who had invested in dozens of joint ventures.

Despite Pyongyang’s determination to stick with the Stalinist status quo, it was possible to detect a few striking, if relatively modest, changes in attitudes and behavior. The authorities wanted to banish North Korea’s image as an Orwellian horror of brain-washed people. Kim Jong-su complained to me that foreigners kept saying North Koreans were “like machines, answering mechanically and smiling mechanically.” That, he insisted, was “not true. Everybody is different.”
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I reflected that the regime’s promoters of the “monolithic” philosophy had worked hard to earn for their country the automaton label. But I did notice that people who were cleared for dealings with foreigners appeared to have been permitted to lighten up just a bit. Overall, North Koreans seemed somewhat easier and more relaxed—among themselves and with Westerners, including Americans—than their counterparts a decade before. Indeed, normal human reactions described the biggest change I found. Although North Koreans still sang the praises of
juche,
for example, they seemed less obsessed than before with giving the impression that everything was Korean-made. At the Taean Heavy Machinery complex near Nampo, when officials conducted a tour of a factory making electrical generators, they identified as foreign-made (Italian, in some cases) many of the machine tools. They offered no excuses.

Spontaneity, which in some quarters had seemed almost to be considered a sin back in 1979, was much more in evidence. North Koreans I saw smiled and laughed more in the presence of foreigners. In some cases they exuded so much warmth and hospitality as to make almost plausible the government’s goal of increasing tourism several-fold in the next few years—to fill up thousands of hotel rooms that were either newly built or still under construction by attracting groups from the West and elsewhere. It was clear, however, that the officials concerned had their work cut out for them projecting an image of their country that would appeal to masses of foreign tourists.

One new tourism facility was the Pyongyang Golf Club, the first and only one in the country, built in 1987 to serve mainly foreigners and overseas Koreans from Japan. Caddies, young Korean women, chirped the Japanese-English compliment “Nice
shotto”
as the golfers teed off. Kang Kyong-chul, thirty-seven, wiry and tanned, had been a tennis coach before going to Japan for two months in 1986 to learn golf in preparation for becoming the course’s pro. He told me his handicap was 10. Golfing had not really caught on—an average of only seven foreigners and overseas Koreans and three North Koreans played each day, according to Kang’s figures, and he said
those did not include any high-ranking Korean officials. “Our country is divided, as you know,” Kang explained. “There are many things to do for our people if our country is unified. At that time we will expand golf and other sports to larger scale.”

After rummaging through Pyongyang’s arts-and-crafts and souvenir shops, I had to conclude that Western tourists would find little to inspire shopping sprees. Typical of the offerings was a landscape painting in traditional East Asian style, on sale in a downtown Pyongyang gallery. It depicted the breathtaking gorge, the autumn leaves, the waterfall—but also the highway bridge supporting a gleaming tour bus conveying happy masses of sightseers smack through the middle of the scene. As jarringly, an embroidery picture of a girl in flowing traditional garb swinging on the traditional high swing also showed, in one corner, a modern concrete park bench. I suppose such touches made sense in the North Korean context. After all, Kim Il-
sung’s juche
philosophy celebrated man as the “master” of the earth, so why hide the evidence of man and his creations? (Pictures were done without shading, and I guess that also fit with the ideology.)

A visible change of questionable significance was construction of the first Protestant and Catholic churches permitted to operate in Pyongyang in decades. In the early days of the North Korean communist regime, all the churches had been closed. (The authorities claimed that American bombs destroyed every last one of them during the Korean War.) According to human rights groups, religious people had been persecuted as members of the “disloyal” class. Churches were regarded as symbols of imperialist oppression.
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At the Korea Feature Film Studio lot during that same visit I saw a large gothic church structure, built—obviously for use in propaganda films— in 1980, when the country had no real church buildings. The regime accorded special treatment to Chondoism, an indigenous, patriotic religion founded by a former independence fighter who was said to have “prayed to the mystical wonders of Nature on Mount Paektu to deal out divine punishment to the Japanese and bless the Korean nation.”

At the Protestant Pongsu Church on a Sunday during the youth festival, Korean and foreign cameramen snapped away as worshipers sang “Jesus Loves Me,” in Korean. Many of them appeared to know it by heart. Then a pastor, The Rev. Li Song-bong, prayed “in the name of Jesus Christ” for the success of the festival, under its “banner of anti-imperialist solidarity.” Later, Li preached on the need for removal of nuclear weapons from the peninsula and prayed for Korean reunification—all in all, a heavier political than spiritual agenda.

Although people involved with the church thus he-wed to the official North Korean political line, perhaps the more striking fact in such a tightly
controlled society was that they showed less than full participation in the Kim Il-sung personality cult. The church was in Mangyongdae District, birthplace of the Great Leader himself, but there were no portraits of Kim or his son on the church walls and congregation members during services did not wear the miniature Kim portraits on their breasts. Perhaps this was for the benefit of us foreign visitors. I watched one man walk up the hill toward the church, wearing his Kim badge. Near the gate, he turned his back and made a motion as if he were reaching for a pack of cigarettes. When he turned again, the badge was gone, discreetly pocketed.

No church members or clergy were members of the Kims’ ruling Korean Workers’ (communist) Party, a clergyman explained, because “we Christians believe in God.” People attending church denied human-rights groups’ reports that they suffered discriminatory treatment in economic benefits and legal treatment, but I thought most of those people had a haggard look that suggested their lives had been less than easy. There may have been unconscious irony on that festival Sunday as the congregation opened blue-bound hymnals and sang, in Korean, “We’ve a story to tell to the nations that shall turn their hearts to the right.”

Previously only home church services had been possible for the still-faithful remnants of the old church memberships, I was told; Protestants who did not attend the Pongsu Church services still practiced home worship. Among both the Pongsu Church worshippers and a home-worship group I visited on a different Sunday, participants under forty were rare. Worshippers told me they found it difficult to attract their own children to the faith of their fathers. They did not have to explain the reason. The young ones, after all, had been indoctrinated from shortly after birth, in state nurseries, kindergartens and schools, to worship the Kims. They revered Kim Il-sung as “more than a god,” as a non-Christian student interpreter for one of the foreign visitors to Pongsu Church described the president to me.

In an atmosphere so overwhelmingly hostile to competing religions or other different ideas, it was but a small change to have church buildings— not so much a real shift in domestic policy as a cosmetic ploy to influence public opinion abroad. Several years later, in a similar effort, Kim Il-sung was to receive American evangelist Billy Graham in Pyongyang, after conceding in his memoirs that many Korean Christians of times past “were respectable patriots,” like Kim’s benefactor, Sohn Jong-do.
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This attempt to show a tolerant attitude toward Christianity was intended to improve Pyongyang’s standing in the West. North Korea at the time it built the churches was involved once again in a campaign to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, in hopes of triggering the withdrawal of the some 40,000 U.S. troops that were still in South Korea.

American Christians remained concerned about the persecution of North Korean Christians. Recall that Protestant missionaries from the United
States, especially Presbyterians and Methodists, had led the missionary effort in Korea from the opening of the country in the late nineteenth century. Staying on through the decades until the 1930s, when the Japanese occupation made their work impossible, they had passed the faith to millions of Koreans—ironically, with even more success in the northern half of the country than in the South. Certainly the Pyongyang regime hoped to influence such groups with the highly publicized church openings.

Over time, of course, even such externally targeted measures could inject a note of unaccustomed pluralism into domestic society. For the time being, though, the average North Korean probably felt little effect. Indeed, one American Protestant who visited Pyongyang in the fall of that same year, 1989, found evidence that religious belief still cut very much against the grain of the Kim regime. Virgil Cooper, a Seoul-based Southern Baptist missionary, attended services at Pongsu Church. He told me he had found the associate pastor’s sermon to be suitably “Bible based,” but considered it odd that the congregation did not belt out the hymns with the Korean gusto he was familiar with in Seoul. Later, in his hotel, a Christian woman who had seen him at the church approached him. Pointing to the ceiling, she urged him not to talk loudly. Christians remained subject to considerable discrimination and repression, she told him.

The woman Cooper met, assuming she was a sincere believer, may have been an exception even among the churchgoers. According to a high-level defector, former chief ideologist Hwang Jang-yop, “all the churches in Pyongyang are fake churches built for show. The monks living in the Buddhist temples are of course fake monks. Genuine believers in North Korea cannot profess their faith; only fake believers are allowed to do so.
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