In 2010, Wired.co.uk's Ian Steadman spent just over a week in North Korea. After the events of recent weeks -- such as Google's Eric Schmidt visiting the nation, and 3G being switched on -- he reflects on his trip, and how significant the North Korean regime's changes of stance could affect its people and our understanding of them.

You wait years for North Korea to open up a little, and it does so -- twice! -- in one week. You can now follow people Instagramming and Twittering from within the Hermit Kingdom as surely as they do so anywhere else, thanks to foreigners being granted 3G internet access.

That goes alongside the utterly bizarre sight of Kim Jong-Un sitting next to former NBA player (and notorious joker) Dennis Rodman, watching members of the Harlem Globetrotters face up against North Korean players in a game of "basketball diplomacy" for a Vice and HBO documentary.


One of these is a positive thing, the other, not so much.

North Korea elicits an understandable fascination in westerners for being a country apparently frozen in time. Most of the news we receive comes from the country's propaganda machine, or from whispers in neighbouring capitals. It's mysterious because we never know exactly what's going on. Unfiltered information, uploaded straight to the web (albeit perhaps with a sepia filter added for effect) is a sign that it's becoming a place less hard to picture.

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But let's not confuse a push for more tourists, with reported new hotels and attractions on the way, as some kind of concession to international law and better human rights -- visiting North Korea means giving money to a totalitarian regime that starves its children. The US State Department's press conference on Rodman's visit is an unsurprisingly tetchy example of that.

When I visited North Korea, more than anything it reminded me of being taken on a bus tour of the poorer parts of Cape Town. There is no justification for these township tours for wealthy western tourists -- they exist in the same way that wildlife safaris do, for the purpose of letting people gawp at things that are Other.


The groups that run these tours often claim that they use the proceeds to fund charitable work, but if I wanted to have given to charity I could well have done so without sitting in a bus separated from other humans by glass just as surely as I'm separated from gorillas at the zoo. It is dehumanising in a fundamentally wrong way.

The North Korean tourism industry is slick, unexpectedly professional and -- as far as money-generating things go in the DPRK -- relatively large (the photo that accompanies this piece is one I took in a park in central Pyongyang, showing how tourists are tourists wherever you go). It is, exactly as Eric Schmidt's daughter wrote, "just like The Truman Show".

I visited in September 2010 for eight days, a time that was as thrilling as unsettling and which was, occasionally, frightening.

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There were no electricity shortages but the roads were appalling, our bus almost crashed into a house after its brakes failed, and we nearly collided into a truck head-on as our guide tried to overtake a tractor in a mountain tunnel which was filled with exhaust fumes so thick visibility was down to a metre at best. The food was plentiful but pale, and tasteless -- "steaks" were small shredded pieces of beef, cabbage was grey, potatoes were watery and small.


In general each tourist bus takes the same road as every other tourist bus because they can trust tourists to see those roads, because they look the best. Look down a side street and you'll see concrete paving stop and turn into a dirt track, windowless apartment blocks or buildings abandoned half-finished. In Kim-Il Sung University they were very careful to stop us walking down certain corridors. Our guides -- constant companions and barely even pretending not to be secret police -- would tell us not to take photographs, but turn a blind eye until the odd moment when we were told that no, this time, no photographs, we mean it this time. The guides would often lead us down circular non-arguments as we tried to tease out the reality behind the façade: "Are there prisons in the DPRK?"

"No, there is no crime in the DPRK, so there can't be any prisons."

"But where do you put spies?"

"Spies are punished for spying, yes, and put in jail."

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"So where are the jails?"

"There are no jails in the DPRK."

...and so on.

There are hotels in every small town and village, even if most of the rooms are empty, the doors sealed shut and the only regular guests a dozen tourists a week and the occasional Red Cross volunteer. We went swimming in the ocean in Wonsan, diving off rusted iron platforms with holes as big as a fist in the ladder to the top. There's a hut for renting towels just as in any other beach resort, and parasols, and parks with benches and playgrounds.

It's all very normal, but very unsettling, very empty. Much of the North Korea the western tourist sees is as quiet as in movies about the end of the world.

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The country takes in thousands of Chinese tourists every year -- consider it the Chinese equivalent of a day out at Black Country Museum -- and a few thousand western tourists, though exact figures aren't known.

The infrastructure is designed to corral the visitors into the same stock situations, most of which are incredibly dull museums dedicated to farming or industrial production or, sigh, more farming.

A factory for bottling spring water had a small machine in the middle of a huge, otherwise empty room -- the two "workers" turn it on as the tourists enter and hand out bottles of water that the propaganda posters claim can cure syphillis. The bottles are repurposed Chinese beer bottles with new labels. A factory farm in Hamhung had two men in the corner of a yard taking a tyre off a tractor -- they finished changing the tyre, paused, and begin changing it back over again.

Every tourist has a story like this -- "normal" people breaking out into song and dance in the park just as the tourists happen to walk past with their minders. Every few weeks another Reddit AMA -- from tourists, tour operators and more tourists -- floats towards the front page, despite largely containing exactly the same insight each time from visitors.

North Korea presents a fake image of the country to westerners that is not unlike that of the township tours, and it does so to generate money for a despotic regime that enslaves hundreds of thousands of people in gulags. On a scale of useful idiots from one to ten, where George Bernard Shaw scores pretty damn high, a holiday in North Korea surely scores at least a three or a four. Dennis Rodman's trip has been organised by HBO and Vice, clearly designed with lulz in mind. Rodman's about as opposite a character to Kim Jong-Un as you can imagine. That their plan worked, and they even had dinner with Kim at his private villa, is pretty stunning.

But we really, really shouldn't treat North Korea like this, considering the danger it poses to international stability and to the millions living within range of artillery batteries on the 38th parallel. I dare say more people know about Kim Jong-Il's golf record than about the famine that killed millions in the 1990s. That golf record isn't true (nor was it ever something the regime actually claimed), but what does it matter? It's North Korea! The land of "I'm So Ronery"! Lol!

I'm not the first to make this argument, either ( "Kim Jong-un has a beautiful fashionista wife and a box-top haircut to rival The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. LOL. One helluva guy."), and yesterday Gawker posted an extremely pointed response to the Dennis Rodman/Vice/HBO tour. There's a substantial difference between trying to reach out to another culture in friendship, and


tweeting about getting "wasted" with Kim Jong-Il. Bobby Mugabe is probably feeling very left out right now.

The North Koreans that tourists see pretending to do things are not dumb. They know their situation -- they know they live in a repressive state, and that they are instructed to act in a certain way for a reason. An actor knows she is acting. Piracy of South Korean music and TV shows is rampant; iPads and smartphones are common; even skinny jeans are a popular fashion accessory. To reduce these people to stooges is not only to patronise, but to dehumanise.

That makes the move to open up 3G internet to tourists a brave one for the regime. Ordinary people might not get access to the web, but they can see something if you're standing next to them, holding it in your hand. Google Earth renders of Pyongyang saved to a MacBook were a big hit in 2010, as were the lyrics to Pulp's "Common People". Who knows what the they might think of Gangnam Style's tongue-in-cheek satire of nouveau riche South Koreans? The more people engage with North Koreans outside the paradigm of the regime, the more the illusion wavers. Nobody saw the fall of the Berlin Wall coming, but it had been coming, bit by bit by bit.