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Informal Life Politics of Marketisation in North Korea Eun Jeong Soh

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Informal Life Politics of Marketisation in North Korea Eun Jeong Soh 9 Informal Life Politics of Marketisation in North Korea Eun Jeong Soh Introduction Observers of today’s North Korea recognise that marketisation is a widespread phenomenon there. While the state-planned economic sector continues to persist, changsa1 (a general term referring to various types of trade and business activities, on a private economic level) has become a necessity for survival. One’s capacity to engage in trade activities has become a determinant of the survival and wealth of the household. Market as a mechanism of exchange is still limited to goods and services, and monetary and financial markets do not yet exist on a significant scale.2 Nevertheless, in the everyday life of North Koreans, trade, both in marketplaces and in the underground economy, has become an absolutely crucial and fundamental means for survival and livelihood. The significance of the market not only holds for ordinary North Koreans but also for state officials at all levels, as well as for the 1 Lankov and Kim (2008) define changsa as ‘dealings in the marketplace’. But in fact, changsa in North Korea also includes long-distance bartering and selling of goods outside of the marketplace: Andrei Lankov and Kim Seok-hyang, ‘North Korean Market Vendors: The Rise of Grassroots Capitalists in a Post-Stalinist Society’, Pacific Affairs 81–1 (2008): 53–72. 2 Lee Suk-ki, ‘Change and Prospect for North Korea’s Market’, Unification Media Group Conference (14 September 2015), www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhVroKIUo88. 227 NEW WORLDS FROM BELOW maintenance of public institutions and enterprises.3 The market has become an essential backbone for the life of individual households as well as the entire North Korean political and economic system and thus has the potential to cause the current long-lasting regime either to fall, to muddle through, to transform, or even to thrive. What is puzzling about the spread of changsa and the resultant marketisation of goods and services in North Korea is that they occurred in the absence of decisive and consistent institutional reforms necessary to facilitate marketisation. Marketisation in North Korea took place under the continued presence of state suppression of basic freedom of movement and association and the absence of property rights.4 How have North Koreans continued to expand their private economic activities despite state authorities’ persistent social controls and the selective punishments of market traders carried out in an effort to inhibit private economic activities? What social mechanisms have enabled such a formation and expansion of marketisation from below without the presence of market- inducing or market-permitting reforms? On the phenomenon of marketisation in North Korea, Haggard and Noland most notably distinguish North Korea’s form of marketisation as a ‘marketisation from below’. Whereas other cases of marketisation occurred, initiated through top-down policy responses resulting from a bargaining process among elites, changes from below dominated the North Korean process and pushed the state to make incremental concessions. Marketisation in North Korea was ‘a by-product of state failure’, actualised by the decline of the state socialist economy in general and a more acute absence of wages and rations, which led to the full-blown famine of the 1990s.5 Despite the central Party’s efforts to crack down on market forces, state officials’ corruption and exploitation of office for private gain facilitated the spiralling growth of markets.6 3 Kim Young-hwan, ‘Change and Prospect for North Korea’s Market’, Unification Media Group Conference (14 September 2015), www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq1SJ5nhTh0. 4 On this, see editor’s remark on Andrei Lankov, ‘The Limits to Marketisation: State and Private in Kimist North Korea’, (14 June 2013), Sino-NK, sinonk.com/2013/06/14/marketization-and-its- limits-state-private-enterprises-in-north-korea/. 5 Haggard and Noland, ‘Reform from Below: Behavioral and Institutional Change in North Korea’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 83 (2010): 133–4. 6 ibid., 133. 228 9 . INFORMAL LIFE POLITICS OF Marketisation IN North KOREA But seeing marketisation in North Korea simply as a phenomenon of state failure devalues the agency of people driven by a desire for survival. Was the private response to state failure indeed ‘unintended’?7 This conceptualisation overlooks the presence of tight state controls on freedom of movement and information and organised social life, despite which marketisation in North Korea occurred. Multiple agencies including the Public Security Bureau, the police, the Army and other ad hoc bodies created by the Centre implemented measures against anti-socialist activities including the market trade of various prohibited items. On top of these social control mechanisms, frequent ideological education and work mobilisation were supposed to divert people from fully engaging in private economic activities. In terms of policy inconsistencies, the central state swung between reluctant limited liberalisation measures in 2002 and counter-measures in 2005, followed by the disastrous currency reform in 2009. Given the state’s efforts to deter and limit the growth of the market, grassroots marketisation in North Korea can more accurately be understood when the agency of individuals conducting market activities under such circumstances is taken into consideration in conjunction with the phenomenon of state failure. In fact, state failure, in the case of North Korea, did not simply occur from the top. Rather, people have helped to erode the state from below. To highlight the dynamics of the process, this study pays attention to micro-dynamic mechanisms of the formation of collaborative relationships between law-implementing officials of the state apparatus and those who engage in trade. While distinguishing the two for analytical purposes, officials of the state apparatus, in reality, if not directly and openly, are most actively involved in trade. The relationship between the two is a dualistic one, cooperative as well as contentious. This chapter identifies practical strategies, cultural factors and normative justifications that constitute this relationship and facilitate the marketisation process under control. Due to practical limitations on observing everyday life in North Korea, the evidence presented in this chapter comes from narratives of refugee informants in South Korea. I conducted two rounds of interviews—the first round from October to December 2013 and the second round from April to June 2015. Each round consisted of 25 interviews, in which 7 ibid. 229 NEW WORLDS FROM BELOW interviewees spoke about their own experiences and observation of private economic activities in North Korea. The refugee informants came from a diverse range of backgrounds in terms of age, gender, hometown, occupation, and the year of defection. Inevitably, however, the pool of refugee informants who participated in this study may not be representative of the population in North Korea as a whole. The majority of informants were women and come from North Hamkyung and Ryanggang provinces, where marketisation began and spread most extensively. Therefore, allowance must be made for possible regional and gender biases in the material presented here. Figure 12: Hyesan Market, 22 July 2015. Source: Courtesy of Cho Chun-hyun . Background: Conducting Private Economic Activities under Collectivism in North Korea The single most important feature of life in North Korea is the high degree of collectivism. North Koreanists have utilised a range of political science concepts to characterise the North Korean state. The state is often defined as being highly personalistic due to the supreme importance 230 9 . INFORMAL LIFE POLITICS OF Marketisation IN North KOREA of the leader,8 and totalitarian due to the extent of the state control of the society through ideology and organisation. It is also often seen, on the one hand, as a corporatist organic entity and, on the other, as neo- Confucian in its uniquely East Asian features where the family serves as a model of the state. The extent to which each of these characterisations is emphasised depends on the period of North Korea’s history being examined.9 No one model correctly represents North Korea, but rather all emphasise various features that make the North Korean society uniquely collective. The deified leader, layers of bureaucracies and social organisations, extensive surveillance, the system of social stratification, and the unifying ideology of chuch’e (self-reliance) all facilitate, strengthen and reinforce collective ways of life in North Korea. Scholars describe North Korea as one of the most intensely organised societies in the world and in history.10 This collectivism was fostered initially through its efforts to restructure society in the postcolonial period of socialist revolution from 1945, leading up to the founding of the government in 1948.11 Suzy Kim’s recent book, Everyday life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950, describes the experience of the North Korean Revolution (1945–50) as the realisation of a socialist modernity shared with its Chinese and Soviet neighbours, but unique in its exceptionally high level of mobilisation in everyday life spaces.12 It was understood that the well-being of the individual was achieved only through the well-being of the collective. The collectivism of North Korean society strengthened after the Korean War with Kim Il-Sung’s consolidation of his unitary power by eliminating all countervailing factions. Collectivism as envisioned in North Korea was an imaginary wartime solidarity against powerful external enemies that Wada Haruki calls a guerrilla state.13 8 Linz and Stepan briefly mention North Korea as an extreme form of the patrimonialism defined by Max Weber: Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 51–2. 9 Charles K. Armstrong, ‘The Nature, Origins, and Development of the North Korean State’, in Samuel S. Kim ed., The North Korean System in the Post-Kim Il Sung Era (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 39–64.
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