Jieun Baek is currently a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She has been studying North Korea for over a decade, during which she has spent time with hundreds of North Korean defectors. Her forthcoming book on information access in North Korea will be published by Yale University Press in Spring, 2016. She keeps a blog at www.jieunbaek.com.

“Son, is that you?”

Recognizing the weak, shaky voice on the other line, Kevin immediately hangs up the phone.


Kevin, the eldest son in his family, defected from North Korea in 1998 when he was 17 years old and is currently a graduate student in South Korea, working odd jobs to save cash to send as remittances to his family, all of whom still reside in North Korea. Several years ago, he sent smart phones to his family so that they could stay in touch.

Kevin hangs up immediately, intending to call his mother back using Skype, which costs only 1.1 cents per minute. His family uses this system of calling, hanging up, then calling back in order to keep Kevin’s phone bill down and to avoid detection by the North Korean authorities. International phone calls are illegal in North Korea.

Kevin calls his mother back via the same Chinese cell phone network and asks how she’s doing, to which she always responds, “We’re alive.” He then listens to the items that his mother will ask him to send, ranging from medicine and clothing to DVD players and Japanese laptops. Despite the North Koreans’ hatred for the Japanese as their former colonizer, North Koreans like Japan-manufactured electronics because the sturdiness of the hardware is undeniable. Kevin scribbles these items down, while carefully eyeing the number of seconds he has been on the phone with his mother. When the phone call reaches around 100 seconds, Kevin starts saying goodbye. She cannot risk getting caught. Detection tools and systems to track down international phone calls made inside North Korea are becoming increasingly accurate and more widespread, so calls must be kept under two minutes. Other friends who escaped North Korea sometimes make calls longer than two minutes when contacting their relatives who remain in North Korea, but Kevin wants to be extra careful.

Kevin has been using a sophisticated and illegal network of foreign organizations, defectors, smugglers, middlemen and North Korean soldiers who turn a blind eye with bribes to pass goods, money and information to his family in North Korea for the past 15 years. He is just one of the thousands like him who do the same. Over 60 percent of the 28,700 defectors in South Korea send money back on a somewhat regular basis—a total of $12 million annually according to some estimates.

This is what links North Koreans to the outside world. And what’s pouring into the country—from cellphones, medication and clothing, to foreign movies, TV shows, and books and encyclopedias—is playing a central role in changing the social consciousness of North Korean individuals, especially the young ones.

***

Kevin looks at the list of items his mother asked for this time—medicine, clothing, women’s cosmetics and an English dictionary for his cousin—and starts to purchase them online. After the goods are delivered to his apartment in Seoul, Kevin wraps each item in several layers of plastic and Ziploc bags to waterproof it before putting them all into single box. The smugglers who are going to swim across the Tumen River to get these to his family will most likely get the package wet.

Kevin calls a friend in China, a Joseonjok (an ethnic Korean with Chinese citizenship), who will partner with a North Korean smuggler to deliver the items to Kevin’s family. He goes through his Joseonjok friend because he no longer wants anything to do with North Korean smugglers directly. “You never know when they’ll snitch or take off with the money,” Kevin tells me. As a former North Korean, Kevin talks about how desperate, entrepreneurial North Koreans cannot always be trusted. Hunger trumps morals.

Kevin also adds a few extra items to this “care package” that he thinks will be good for his family—South Korean books (self-help books are always a favorite), an audio Bible that Kevin personally recorded with a North Korean accent so that his family members would feel more comfortable listening to it, South Korean fashion and current events magazines. He hopes that his family pays some attention to this information from the outside.

Sending this care package via a smuggler (Kevin’s Joseonjok friend refuses to take any commission) costs Kevin a flat fee of one hundred American dollars. The smuggler will strap the items in a waterproof sack, swim across the river and bribe the guards on the North Korean border to let him pass into North Korea. These are guards that the smuggler has carefully built relationships with over time. Smuggling goods is highly punishable, and letting people pass through the North Korean border, rather than shooting them, could get the border guards killed instantly. But North Korea has become a country where money can solve any problem and can save lives. Given the failed Communist public distribution system, people are desperately turning to outside money, connections within the country’s informal black markets and a stroke of good luck to survive.

After Kevin’s family receives the requested items, his mother calls to go over the inventory to see if the smuggler’s sticky hands got onto any of the contraband.

“An English dictionary.”

“Yes.”

“Chinese DVD player.”

“Yes.”

“Tuberculosis Medicine.”

“Yes. Oh good, that’s still there.”

“Two cell phones.”

“Wait, I sent three. Check again.”

“Kevin, my son, there are only two cell phones.”

“Dammit, I sent three. Those are expensive, too! Ok, that smuggler ran off with a phone. We’ll go with someone else next time. Let’s continue … ”

The next time Kevin talks to his mother, she asks him for $1,000. She gives Kevin a phone number. When he hangs up after about a minute, Kevin then calls that number and tells the stranger on the line that he got a call from someone (he uses a pseudonym to protect his mother’s identity). Every time, the phone number is different.

The stranger on the other line is usually a girl, a Joseonjok girl. The woman gives Kevin a South Korean bank account number, to which Joseph wires $1,000. He then sends the woman a text message using Kakao Talk (a Korean smartphone application that’s similar to Whatsapp), texting that he sent the $1,000. After receiving the message, the Joseonjok lady sends a message to another Joseonjok living in North Korea. This person will then notify Kevin’s family via their legal domestic cell phones that the money has arrived so that Kevin’s mother can go to that individual’s location, or the underground financial house, to pick up her $700 in Chinese RMB. The two middlemen take 30 percent of the requested money and split the commission. The whole transaction, part of the small underground financing system inside the country, can take place in as little as 20 minutes.

Cell phones are essential in allowing for these illicit networks, activities and conversations to exist. The legal cell phone networks inside North Korea, of which the Egyptian telecom company Orascom owns 70 percent, will not allow ordinary North Korea citizens to make international calls. So the estimated 200-2,000 calls made between North and South Korea every day make use of cell phone networks throughout China (especially close to the border, where the cellular connection from the Chinese towers are powerful) and North Korea. The networks themselves are not illegal. It’s the use of them by North Koreans that constitute the illegality. Some people who have been caught making international calls have been publicly executed. The North Korean government has very elaborate machinery and systems to detect cellular usage, which compels people to walk miles from their homes to make a call that lasts a few minutes, then walk a few more miles away from the location of the first call in order to avoid being detected. And yet these networks, and North Koreans’ use of them, are proliferating.

When Kevin calls his family, he often shares information about world politics as it pertains to them. When there are big spikes in international humanitarian aid going into North Korea after diplomatic talks, Kevin tells his mother to wait to buy rice on the black market because prices will decrease for a while. (For decades, much of foreign humanitarian aid, especially sacks of rice, has not been given to people, but rather has been sold on the black market. Defectors talk about buying rice on the black market from rice sacks marked with “USA,” “South Korea” and “United Nations.” The North Korean government detested the fact that its people knew that the rice was coming from outside sources rather than their “self-sufficient” government, so they then required donors to provide rice in unmarked bags or else refused to accept the much needed aid.) When international sanctions stiffen, Kevin advises his mother to buy rice right away because the prices for rice will soon soar. Information that helps Kevin’s family survive is always welcomed.

Information that is critical of the North Korean regime, on the other hand, is too dangerous to listen to, and so Kevin’s mother insists that Kevin does not share any of that. Kevin’s frustration is obvious to me. He wants his family to defect like he did.

But when I ask Kevin about why his family doesn’t follow his footsteps to escape North Korea, Kevin is visibly annoyed at the naiveté of my question. He rambles to describe how dangerous the escape route is, especially for his older mother (his father passed away from what they think was cancer). And even if his family were to make it to South Korea safely, his sister, cousin and aging mother are just too set in their ways. “North Korea is their home. North Korea is still my home, too,” he tells me. Life is simpler in North Korea.

But life in North Korean is changing. For a younger generation, information from outside the country is becoming part of the daily routine.

***

When YeonMi Park watched a pirated copy of the movie Titanic, her understanding of her world shattered. How could a movie contain a love story that was between a man and woman, and not one between a person and her love for her country? How could someone be silly enough to want to die for her lover? These thoughts deepened YeonMi’s questions about her country, and quickly transformed into her decision to defect from North Korea. This 4’11 teenager soon crossed the Gobi desert with her family, and after many months, arrived in South Korea.

YeonMi, a North Korean millennial, is a part of what some North Korean watchers call the “Jang Ma-Dang Generation.” The Street Market Generation—named for the North Koreans who were born during or after the “Arduous March” (a euphemism for the famine in the mid-1990s that killed an estimated 1-2 million people) and have been exposed to widespread illegal street markets that sprung up to replace the broken Communist Public Distribution System. So, although young North Koreans continue to follow state laws and pay respect to their leader, their minds may not be fully aligned with their outward behavior. Young people are savvy, and know how to survive in their oppressive system while sating their curiosities. Young defectors share anecdotes about how many of their friends back at home in North Korea make jokes about the leader (a highly punishable crime). Most households, they say, are involved in black market activity to survive, and their generation has grown up accepting this. Defectors I have spoken with—ranging from college professors, to teenagers, to married women—have had experience selling, buying and trading all sorts of goods in this country that continues to demonize and criminalize capitalism.

Young people wear clothes with Western cartoons on them, sport shorter skirts than previous generations of women, quietly whistle South Korean pop songs and use South Korean slang that they picked up from secretly watching movies. Perhaps someone might add a flourish to her hairstyle that does not exactly fit into any of the 18 state-approved hairstyles for women (or 10 state-approved hair styles for men).

South Korea and the Western world, particularly the United States, are no longer seen as purely evil among this generation. Changing fashion preferences or secretly singing South Korean pop songs are small signs that one is unintentionally turning away from the state’s strict policies around permitted behavior.

Small social and cultural changes inside parts of North Korea are undeniable. Illicit flows of foreign media and information that’s inextricably tied with unofficial trade networks with China is changing the psyche of North Koreans in different parts of the country, especially the border regions between North Korea and China. But these social and cultural changes are not necessarily linked with current or near-future political changes. There’s still a long way to go.

Some question whether sending information into North Korea is strengthening self-determination and self-consciousness among North Koreans, or if it is merely another form of Western propaganda. Of course no one should live under a dictatorship, but is the answer sending in American movies, books and South Korean dramas full of ideals cherished in developed democracies?

Yes, some governments and international NGOs often strategize about sending information into North Korea through the expansive networks that already exist or new ones—satellite, blue tooth, short wave radios. But the most ardent proponents of sending information into North Korea are people like Kevin: North Korean defectors, who have seen movies and political shows, and want their families and friends to watch media other than regime-sanctioned monotonous propaganda. Some defectors film footage of the most mundane activities—shopping in a super market, hanging out in a dog park, the notorious Seoul traffic—to convey to their former countrymen that even the most ordinary activities outside North Korea are filled with options, diversity and bustling life.

When I ask defectors how they select materials to send in, they often tell me that they try to recall the content that they yearned to watch and read when they were inside North Korea, and then find similar materials to send. Mr. Jeong, who escaped 10 years ago, showed me Kakao text messages he receives from brokers with requests for specific dramas from their clients inside. Strong demand for outside information unquestionably exists. People continue to risks their lives inside North Korea to quench their thirst of knowing the outside world in the form of film, articles, books and stories spread by word of mouth.

Some lessons could be drawn from loosely parallel situations in other totalitarian regimes where outside information changed an oppressed people’s behavior dramatically. People living inside the Soviet Union were sealed off from the outside world and were punished for seeking exposure to information outside their territorial borders. However, once some people started learning about how people on “the other side” were living, they started to seek more information about the reality outside their regime. Internal dissidents and defectors worked to help fellow countrymen access more information through radio programs and stealthy literature circulation. While information access inside these sealed countries may not have been the primary reason for regime collapse, access to information certainly had a large role in hollowing out believers of these regimes.

A “North Korean Spring” or “Pyongyang Square” demonstrations are unlikely to take place anytime soon. But human nature is such that people’s perception of their reality fundamentally transforms when compared to alternate realities that exist. By gaining access to information about a world outside North Korea and quietly turning away from the government’s propaganda machine, North Koreans will have a much wider set of realities from which to choose.

Names of North Korean defectors have been changed upon request.