The cartoon caricature of the country glosses over recent developments in society. Yes it’s repressive and idiosyncratic, but not uniquely so argues Hazel Smith

Global media remain fascinated with North Korea’s supposed weirdness.



Yet on the face of it, the North Korean government is neither uniquely authoritarian nor the population uniquely economically badly off. From Laos to Turkmenistan in Asia; Equatorial Guinea to Zimbabwe in Africa; and Syria to Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, political dissent is brutally suppressed and freedom still to be won elsewhere, too.

But such is the power of the global media clichés that these simplistic understandings dominate global thinking about the country.

The impression is of a society of 24 million people – more or less the same size of the population of Australia – as frozen in time.

These caricatures need to be jettisoned. North Korea, like every country in the world, is idiosyncratic – but not inexplicable.

‘North Koreans are different from you and me’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest North Koreans watch fireworks during celebrations to mark the 103rd birthday of late president Kim Il-sung. Photograph: KNS/AFP/Getty Images

Perhaps the most pervasive myth is that North Koreans are ignorant of the world outside, and believe everything the government tells them.

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This is extended by the assumption that North Koreans are educationally backward, and lack the sophistication to understand the world beyond their borders.

Images of public behaviour at events – such as the funeral of Kim Jong-il in December 2011 – are presented as evidence that North Koreans are brainwashed, bizarre and inexplicable.

North Koreans are indeed subject to a relentless socialisation campaign that glorifies the exploits of the Kim family and inflicts sanctions on those who criticise the country’s rulers.

Yet despite the best efforts of the North Korean government, the picture of the DPRK as an absolutely closed society is far from the truth today.

The North Korean government works hard to prevent the free flow of information into the country. Students studying in Pyongyang have access to the major state libraries in the capital, which contain foreign books and films, but are only permitted to access these resources if they can demonstrate a “need” to do so, while access to the internet is limited.

However, a small number of students study abroad – about 500 were in Asia and Europe in 2002. The Universities of Warwick and Cambridge in the UK have hosted North Korean students, although Chinese universities provide a more common home: in 2012, 96 North Korean students were studying at China’s Northeastern University alone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest North Korean TV shows mass public mourning at Kim Il-sung’s funeral procession in Pyongyang. Photograph: North Korean TV/AFP/Getty Images

Chinese traders and local trading networks have also provided routes for non-state sanctioned information for nearly a quarter of a century. Many Chinese traders and visitors are of Korean ethnicity, and three of North Korea’s north-eastern provinces – Chagang, Ryanggang and North Hamgyong – border the Chinese prefecture of Yanbian, which is populated by ethnic Koreans of Chinese nationality.



In addition, Pyongyang’s population of three million frequently come into contact with foreigners in the service sector – hotels, shops, bars – and workplaces where foreigners also work.

Outside Pyongyang, the port towns of Nampo, Chongjin and Rajin also host foreigners; so too has the southern tourist development zone of Kumgangsan, and the South Korea-sponsored free-trade zone of Kaesong.

It’s true that short-term visitors to the country are carefully “minded” by accompanying North Korean officials, but long-term residents have more freedom. They are permitted to obtain North Korean driving licences, learn Korean and freely operate without permanent watch.

North Koreans are anything but ignorant. With almost universal literacy, and despite economic deterioration, school enrolment – for girls and boys – remains near universal. About 35% of high school graduates went on to university education in 2002.

The impressions of North Koreans derive partly from the skewing of domestic and foreign broadcasting. The television footage of weeping crowds after Kim Jong-il’s death in 2011 was not balanced by images of the millions more who did not stop all their activities and rush onto the streets to engage in public mourning, for example.

‘North Korea is a dangerous and irrational military power’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Two members of the Korean People’s Army at a firing range in Pyongyang. Photograph: Eric Lafforgue / Barcroft Media

The country is routinely portrayed as a fearsome state that poses a serious threat to its neighbours.

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This is based on the alleged military capacity, aggression and irrationality of the government and the threat of nuclear proliferation.

But these threats are often exaggerated and shift focus away from the more real military threats North Korea poses just by its geography.

The proximity of Pyongyang to Seoul (the two capitals are 121 miles apart) means that most types of weaponry could be used to cause mass destruction. The risk of war comes about, not because the DPRK is inherently irrational, but because the underlying conflict between North and South Korea remains unresolved.

In reality, reports suggest the DPRK’s conventional weaponry and hardware is out of date, its military infrastructure decrepit and its armed forces hungry and disaffected.

These weaknesses were the reason for building nuclear weapons in the first place; the intention was to use the country’s limited resources to develop the ultimate deterrent against invasion or coercive regime change.

This nuclear activity has provided the core of its military threat since 2006, when it conducted its first nuclear test; but the CIA, global intelligence agencies and academics have differed over how many nuclear bombs the North Koreans posses – and how successful it really has been in engineering usable nuclear weapons.

In 2011, the International Institute of Strategic Studies estimated that North Korea may have four to eight operational warheads, although it pointed out that “North Korea’s ability to produce a deliverable nuclear weapon remains in doubt”.

Comparatively, North Korea’s military technology and nuclear capacity is insignificant compared to the sophistication of the United States, which in 2011 possessed 2,200 operational nuclear warheads.

In contrast to its adversaries, the DPRK’s scope and scale of military investment is pitifully small. It is nowhere near South Korean defence forces in terms of the quality and quantity of modern armaments.

In 2009, North Korea’s defence expenditures amounted to some $4.38bn. South Korea on its own outspent the DPRK on defence by a factor of nearly four to one.

‘North Korea is a criminal state’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The caricature of an omniscient criminal state misses the point’. Photograph: Rodong Sinmun/EPA

North Korea is, allegedly, a criminal state for three reasons: firstly, because state representatives are alleged to systematically abuse diplomatic immunity to smuggle counterfeit currency, narcotics, counterfeit cigarettes, endangered species and other illicit goods across borders.

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Secondly, because state-owned companies manufacture counterfeit currency, cigarettes and narcotics for sale abroad.

Thirdly, this activity is apparently directed by the North Korean leadership for personal gain.

These criminal acts, it is argued, should be understood as state-sponsored, and are managed by a shadowy party organisation called Bureau 39.

But the caricature of an omniscient state guided by a leader sitting in central Pyongyang planning day-to-day how to manoeuvre 24 million people to commit criminal activity for his sole benefit misses the point.

The US government and international media reports derive from a small number of US government publications that are in turn largely founded on allegations from defectors and unnamed US officials.

The major source in the public arena for alleged DPRK narcotics production and smuggling is an unverified list of incidents from a 1999Intelligence Section report by the United States Drug Enforcement Agency.

Such reports acknowledge the tentative nature of the evidence: “data should be considered a ‘far cry’ from anything that might be remotely considered as evidence in a US court of law”, an official US report said on the DPRK’s alleged drug trafficking.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the vehemence in the west’s belief of North Korean state criminality, there have been only a few international court cases where North Korean nationals have been charged and found guilty of producing counterfeit goods or smuggling.

North Korean officials’ corruption would, however, be far from unique in having abused diplomatic immunity for profit. It’s not uncommon for diplomats from poor and rich countries, including for example South Korea, to exploit postings abroad to enhance income.

It​'s not uncommon for diplomats from poor and rich countries to exploit postings abroad to enhance income

The question as to the level of state involvement in such activity is again more of an open question.

At least since the onset of marketisation in the 1990s, there is evidence of DPRK citizens engaging in licit and illicit activity as a means to survive and prosper, but this is because the central state could not provide or deliver economically – and in spite of the state’s efforts to control such activity.

Thus the cartoon picture of the country obscures important changes in North Korean society, and handicaps our understanding of their political consequences.

This is an edited extract from North Korea: Markets and Military Rule by Hazel Smith, published by Cambridge University Press.

Hazel Smith is a professor of International Relations and Korean Studies, and director of the International Institute of Korean Studies at the University of Central Lancashire.