Pride, Prejudice and Manchurian Heritage: North Korean Migrants and Memories of a Land Left Behind Issue Date: 2020-02-26

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The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/85722 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation.

Author: Green, C.K. Title: Pride, Prejudice and Manchurian Heritage: North Korean Migrants and Memories of a Land Left Behind Issue Date: 2020-02-26

INTRODUCTION: Knowing the Unknowable1

Few low-income states loom larger than North Korea (DPR Korea; DPRK) in political

imaginations, particularly in Europe and North America.2 Seemingly everything the country says or does officially becomes news. Every time a military parade is held in P’yŏngyang, it appears on television news channels around the world, even on those occasions when, as in February and

September 2018, the North Korean authorities appear to be actively downplaying the significance of the event for their own political reasons.3 Goings on amongst the North Korean

leadership, to the extent that they are known outside the country, are commented upon in

foreign ministry briefings from Washington, DC to Brussels and London, Beijing and Tokyo. In

Sŏul, the subject of North Korea is the preserve of an entire government ministry, the Ministry

of Unification, or T'ongilbu.4 The world turns its head at the merest hint that P’yŏngyang might

be considering foregoing its newly won nuclear capability, opening its economy to outside

investment, or when, as in 2018, “there’s a peace on” between North and South Korea.5

1 The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n°338229. Additional financial support was received from the Academy of Korean Studies (grants AKS-2013-R-11 and AKS–2015–R-49) and Leiden University Fund (LUF). 2 At times, the North Korean government actively courts publicity, using it as a plank of the regime’s political strategy. When it is deemed necessary, P’yŏngyang employs information strategies that trade on forms of extreme rhetorical violence that are rare in modern political discourse. It is not in the least bit uncommon to hear threats to turn Sŏul into a pulbada, or “sea of fire”. North Korea has warned (implausibly, but nevertheless repeatedly and with great energy) of impending nuclear war. The country regularly claims to be on the cusp of retaliating aggressively against a laundry list of opponents for any number of putative transgressions. Each of these moments is also meticulously reported by third-country media, even though even the most cursory analysis of North Korea’s threats indicates that they do not map at all well onto its actions. 3 I say “appear” to be trying to downplay the event here because the North Korean government rarely explains its motivations. Regardless, almost irrespective of those motivations, such is the level of interest in North Korean military parades today that an entire cottage industry has sprung up to provide satellite imagery-based analysis of parade preparations taking place at a training facility outside P’yŏngyang. See, e.g.: “Timeline of North Korean Military Parade Preparations,” 38 North, January 24, 2018. https://www.38north.org/2018/01/mirim012418/ (last accessed September 10, 2019); “Update on North Korea’s Foundation Day Military Parade Preparations,” 38 North, September 4, 2018. https://www.38north.org/2018/09/mirim090418/ (last accessed September 10, 2019). 4 The Ministry of Unification website is at: www.unikorea.go.kr/unikorea/. The 50-year old ministry has an interesting history, which I describe briefly in the Literature Review of this thesis. 5 Chicago Daily News reporter Keyes Beech reportedly used the phrase “there’s a peace on” to encourage fellow reporter John Rich to travel from Tokyo to Sŏul at the time of the July 4th, 1972, Joint Communiqué between North and South Korea. Don Oberdorfer and Robert Carlin, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 21.

This is in many ways an inexplicable state of affairs. North Korea is an unremarkable state

demographically, geographically, and economically. It has fewer than 25 million inhabitants.6

Bordered by the northeast corner of China to the north and the Republic of Korea (ROK; South

Korea) to the south, it is only the 99th largest country on earth by land area.7 Gross national

income per capita in 2016 was just USD 1259.8 There are many other states of similar

proportions – in population terms, Côte d'Ivoire and Madagascar are the closest; in terms of land

area, Eritrea and Malawi; in GDP per capita, Guinea and Burkina Faso. And yet, in stark contrast

with those African states, which attract little discernible international attention, DPR Korea is a

live topic of discussion and debate in English-speaking countries, as well as China, Japan, and of

course the Republic of Korea (South Korea).9

This degree of focus on North Korea was a long time in coming. The Korean War of 1950-53

bought brief and deadly infamy to the Korean peninsula, but from the cessation of armed

hostilities on July 27, 1953 through the early 1970s, DPR Korea was largely unremarked upon at

the official level in what was then labelled the First World, meaning that group of capitalist,

industrialised countries that generally aligned with the United States during the Cold War.10

Thereafter, a flurry of (particularly European) attention followed in the wake of the dissolution

6 The population of DPR Korea was 24.89 million in 2016, according to the Bank of Korea, the central bank of the Republic of Korea. Approximately ten percent of the total population of the country reside in the capital city, P’yŏngyang. See: https://www.bok.or.kr/portal/main/contents.do?menuNo=200091. 7 The land area of DPR Korea is 120,540km2. It is mountainous in the east, though not especially so, meaning that most inhabitants live on a plain in the western half of the national territory. 8 According to the Bank of Korea. See: https://www.bok.or.kr/portal/main/contents.do?menuNo=200091. 9 My own life has been repeatedly impacted in unexpected and not always welcome ways by DPR Korea. For instance, news of the death of Kim Chŏngil was broadcast on the morning (in Korea) of December 19, 2011, the day after my wedding. This was the most important and potentially far-reaching news to come out of North Korea in many years, and so naturally I went immediately to the offices of Daily NK, placing all post-wedding entertainment plans on ice for several days. Some of those plans could not be revived. 10 The communist bloc was a different matter, of course. There, a quixotic version of normal diplomatic interactions went on largely uninterrupted from the founding of DPR Korea in 1948. A small but fascinating slice of this diplomatic history is available online at the Washington-based Wilson Center’s “North Korea International Documentation Project” archive: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/north-korea-international- documentation-project (last accessed July 15, 2019).

2 in 1973 of the UN Commission for the Unification and Rehabilitation of Korea (UNCURK),

which had been established in 1950 to “bring about the establishment of an independent

democratic government for all of Korea.”11 This removed the formal legal obligation of states

not to recognize the DPRK, leading to all Scandinavian countries establishing bilateral ties, also

in 1973.

As its range of bilateral diplomatic interactions grew over the course of the decade, the leadership in P’yŏngyang sought also to make international waves through the Non-Aligned

Movement (NAM), which it joined in August 1975, primarily it would appear as a way to gain support for – and a venue for the articulation of – its opposition to imperialism (in the Leninist formulation; as the highest stage of capitalism) and, in P’yŏngyang’s view worse, sadaejuŭi

(flunkeyism; toadyism; the uncritical serving of Great Power – originally Chinese – interests), as well as to demonstrate North Korea’s ostensible independence contra South Korea, which played host (as it still does) to a large contingent of US military forces.12 But while P’yŏngyang’s

plan met with a degree of success – a conference of NAM members in Colombo in 1976 heavily

criticized “fascist oppression” in the South, a direct result of North Korean lobbying – it was of

little consequence to anyone not a direct participant in the strategic competition for dominance

of the Korean peninsula.13

Following the Panmunjom axe murder incident of 1976 and subsequent crisis and tensions with

the United States, DPR Korea once again retreated somewhat from view.14 Though the country

11 See the UN archive online: https://search.archives.un.org/united-nations-commission-for-unification-and- rehabilitation-of-korea-uncurk-1950-1973 (last accessed July 15, 2019). 12 R. R. Krishnan, “North Korea and the Non-Aligned Movement,” International Studies 20, no. 1-2 (Jan. 1981): 299- 313. 13 Krishnan, “North Korea and the Non-Aligned Movement,” 312. 14 On August 18, 1976, two American service personnel, Arthur Bonifas and Mark Barrett, were killed by North Korean service personnel inside the joint security area (JSA) within the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas. The two had been attempting to cut down a tree that was obscuring the line of sight from a guard post manned by American forces. See: Oberdorfer and Carlin, The Two Koreas, 59-66. In 2006, I visited the JSA from the North Korean side. Arriving at Panmunjom, I was grabbed by an eager North Korean guide and ushered into one

3 remained a source of some interest in leftists academic circles15, it ceased to be a pressing

concern of governments beyond East Asia and the Soviet Union, in whose sphere of influence

North Korea resided and on whose economic and military support it generally depended, or

indeed of nascent multilateral institutions such as the UN, founded in 1945 but which neither

Korean state joined until 1991. (And even then, North Korea only joined the UN under

considerable duress.16)

Given the structure of the international political system since 1945, North Korea’s position in this period was in some senses more readily comprehensible than the one we see today. Back then, North Korea’s relative international irrelevance was in proportion to its limited strength.

Then, what has spurred the dramatic and arguably surprising elevation of North Korea’s public profile in the present? It is a complex story with several moving parts, most of them political. It cannot be done justice without reference to the country’s financial ruin as a result of the collapse

of the Soviet Union17 and competition with South Korea vis-a-vis the 1988 Summer Olympics in

Sŏul and hosting by P’yŏngyang of a pseudo-competitor international event, the 1989 World

Festival of Youth and Students. Also important is the death of DPRK national founder Kim

Ilsŏng (known alternatively as Kim Il-sung or Kim Il Sung) on July 8, 1994. Factors of geography have equally played their part. North Korea’s location in North East Asia, the most economically dynamic region on earth today, serves to elevate North Korea’s status as an outlier.

of the huts where the Korean War armistice was negotiated, and which now serves as a North Korean museum to the history of the inter-Korean border. Heading for the farthest corner of the hut, the North Korean triumphantly showed me the object of his enthusiasm: the axe that was used to kill Barrett. 15 See, e.g., Ellen Brun and Jacques Hersh, Socialist Korea: a case study in the strategy of economic development (London: Monthly Review Press, 1976). 16 North Korea joined the UN with little enthusiasm and only after the USSR said it would no longer use its veto power on the UN Security Council to block South Korea from joining. A North Korean foreign ministry statement at the time explained gruffly, “As the South Korean authorities insist on their unilateral U.N. membership, if we leave this alone important issues related to the interests of the entire Korean nation would be dealt with in a biased manner on the U.N. rostrum […] We cannot let it go that way." David E. Sanger, “North Korea Reluctantly Seeks U.N. Seat,” New York Times, May 29, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/29/world/north-korea-reluctantly- seeks-un-seat.html (last accessed September 10, 2019). 17 The USSR was a provider of credit to the North Korean regime until 1986, and the country’s main political protector until it folded in December 1991.

4 This would likely not be the case if DPR Korea were located in a region of mostly low-income states such as those listed earlier in this introduction.18

In terms of external perceptions of North Korea, however, the elevation of the country’s public

profile is primarily a result of two very specific and interconnected processes. The first of these

is the now-25-year old conflict between North Korea and the United States over the fate of

North Korean nuclear and missile programs. The second is the development of an activist

mandate regarding the state of North Korean human rights. Both phenomena rose to

prominence in the 1990s, but that prominence has grown exponentially in the 21st century.

P’yŏngyang’s decision to speed up its pursuit of nuclear weapons in and after the 1990s – to both secure itself against external intervention in its affairs and reorient the regional order in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR and wider socialist world post-1991 – begat a rapid increase in interest in North Korea in academia, media, and government. Today, continuing to develop a nuclear capacity in the face of international opposition ensures that DPR Korea attracts ongoing attention from an international coalition led by the United States but including the EU (most notably member states (and, in two cases, nuclear powers) France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) and Scandinavian states, as well as Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and of course Japan. At the official level, international interest is driven by concern not only at the development of North Korea’s weapons programs per se and related questions of nuclear safety on the Korean peninsula and in contiguous areas of China and Russia, but also by the risk that the United States and others say that even mere de facto acceptance of North Korea’s nuclear

18 Those defector-migrants from North Korea with whom I speak tend to bristle at any comparison between North Korea and African states. In their assessments, location is what causes African states to fail, whereas North Korea has ample geographical advantages, and fails only due to politics. Whilst understandable, this is not a tenable position, and permitting it to stand would eliminate a useful set of comparative political tools. I have previously written fruitfully about North Korea’s November 30, 2009 currency redenomination in comparative perspective with a similar redenomination in then-Zaire in 1979, for instance. See: Christopher Green, “Marketization and Yuanization: Economic Changes in the DPRK,” Yonsei Journal of International Studies 5, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 111-118.

5 status would pose to existing nuclear non-proliferation agreements such as the NPT (Nuclear

Non-proliferation Treaty).

Meanwhile, public attention regarding North Korea’s human rights situation emerged from a

ruinous famine known in North Korea as the konanŭi haenggun, or “Arduous March”, which

occurred alongside the emergence of the North Korean nuclear threat in northern provinces of

the country in the 1990s, peaking in 1995-1998.19 There had been brief international interest in

North Korean human rights issues earlier than this. The best-known instance of a human rights issue rising in public consciousnesses concerns the case of Ali Lameda, a Venezuelan poet and communist who was sentenced to 20 years in a North Korean prison camp back in 1967, ostensibly for espionage and sabotaging the North Korean revolution. Lameda was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International in 1974, a step that appears to have led to his release the same year.20 However, the Lameda case is in no way comparable to the situation

North Korea has faced since the 1990s, a period during which interest in North Korea prompted

by both famine and an evolving awareness of the normatively outrageous nature of the country’s

penal system, specifically its network of political prison camps, has been unprecedented.21

19 I look at the historical evolution of the North Korean human rights movement and its impact on academic research later in this thesis. 20 In due course, Lameda returned to Venezuela. Lameda’s older French colleague Jacques Sedillot, also arrested, was dealt a worse hand, dying in P’yŏngyang in 1976 before he could return home. As far as it is possible to discern, Lameda and Sedillot were victims of the rise to power of Kim Chŏngil and simultaneous failure of North Korean economic policy in the 1960s, the latter a distinct embarrassment to the DPR Korean government. Ali Lameda, “Ali Lameda: A Personal Account of the Experience of a Prisoner of Conscience in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” report, Amnesty International, January 1, 1979. https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/204000/asa240021979en.pdf (last accessed September 10, 2019); Joseph S. Chung, “North Korea’s ‘Seven Year Plan’ (1961-70): Economic Performance and Reforms,” Asian Survey 12, no. 6 (June 1972): 527-545. 21 Interest in North Korean human rights acquired heightened speed and energy in the 2000s, particularly in the English-speaking world. This is in no small part because there was (and still is) a rapidly rising degree of interest in human rights worldwide. The high-water mark for North Korea human rights activism so far has been the creation of a UN Commission of Inquiry into the country’s human rights abuses, whose findings were published in February 2014, bringing the breadth of those abuses to the attention of publics worldwide.

6 These two key subject areas – nuclear weapons and human rights – interact to give North Korea

a serious and entirely justified image problem.22 However, of concern to us here is an

accompanying unwelcome, presumably unintended consequence; namely, that research into

other areas of North Korea – society, economy, etc. – gets pushed into the background. This is a

structural crowding out effect, whereby the twin drivers of interest dis-incentivize other areas of

investigation.23 Countering such powerful dynamics is no simple task.

Shifting the Lens

Today’s DPR Korea is a complex and rapidly changing society that would reward a wider range

of analytical frames transcending (but of course not occluding) questions of military strength and

human rights. There is much to investigate. Changyong Cho cites a recently (at the time) escaped

defector-migrant, who argues:

“…that North Korean society has transformed from a state, controlled by force, coercion, and state ideology, to a living space in which an individual can trust only him or herself. In this process, North Korean society is witnessing increasing disparity between those who have political power and those who do not, and a deepening conflict between the generations who experienced the Korean War (1950-53) and extreme collectivism first hand, and the younger generation, which has learned consumerism through expansion of the market.”24

The anonymous defector-migrant quoted is correct in his or her assessment of how much North

Korea has changed since the mid-1980s. The national economy of North Korea has transformed

out of all recognition since Soviet patronage and centralized political control of economic power

22 See, e.g., “South Korean Attitudes toward North Korea and Reunification,” report, Asan Institute for Policy Studies, February 2015: 13. http://en.asaninst.org/contents/south-korean-attitudes-toward-north-korea-and- reunification/ (last accessed July 15, 2019). 23 It is worth noting that human rights concerns also get crowded out along with everything else at those times when there is active diplomacy between North Korea and the United States, as that is when the pre-eminent concerns of the United States – nuclear non-proliferation and the constitution of regional security architecture – tend to acquire overwhelming importance. 24 Changyong Choi, “’Everyday Politics’ in North Korea,” The Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 3 (August 2013): 655.

7 began to yield incrementally to a disorganized and freewheeling form of free-market capitalism

and then corrupt state capitalism somewhat along Chinese or Vietnamese lines. Routes to money

and power have shifted, and the power of institutionalised discrimination against some groups in

society has weakened.25 Economic entrepreneurs have emerged as new nodes in nationwide

socio-economic and political networks, operating both with and against the interests of the state

in different contexts, frequently both at the same time.26 On the one hand, entrepreneurs

generate economic surpluses, a portion of which the predatory state can and does extract.27 But

on the other hand, entrepreneurs implicitly pull individuals away from the authoritarian orbit of

the state, providing employment and networks, routes to transactions and income streams that

are not mediated directly by the state through its ownership of the means of production (in the

form of state-owned enterprise, or SOEs). Accordingly, entrepreneurs contribute greatly to the

centrifugal forces acting against the state’s capacity to manage and control society.28

The roles of women have changed dramatically with the economic transformation.29 Locked out

of the labour market for decades in a patriarchal social structure, women have come to dominate

the realm of small-scale commercial exchange.30 The opening of South Korea to incoming North

Korean migrants, 70 percent of whom are now female, has created an incentive structure for

would-be migrants that, coupled with push factors, brings between one and three thousand

25 Christopher Green, “The Sino-North Korean Border Economy: Money and Power Relations in North Korea,” Asian Perspective 40, no. 3 (July-September 2016): 415-434. 26 The simplest overview of practical changes in the North Korean economy since the 1990s is in Daniel Tudor and James Pearson, North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors (Hong Kong: Tuttle, 2015). 27 Boaz Moselle and Benjamin Polak, “A Model of a Predatory State,” The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 17, no. 1 (2001): 4. 28 These changes may well be more readily evident to the casual observer were it not for the dizzying pace of change in two of the three states with which DPR Korea has land borders: China and South Korea. 29 For more on the economic history of North Korean marketization, see Peter Ward and Christopher Green, “From Periphery to Center: Synthesizing a History of North Korean Marketization.” In Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands, ed. Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green and Steven Denney (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). 30 Kyungja Jung, Bronwen Dalton and Jacqueline Willis, “From patriarchal socialism to grassroots capitalism: The role of female entrepreneurs in the transition of North Korea,” Women’s Studies International Forum 68 (May-June 2018): 19-27.

8 North Koreans to the South each year. Nowadays, these predominantly female border-crossers

are some of the most talented and younger members of DPR Korean society. This impacts upon

both North and South Korean social structures, not least in border towns of North Korea where

the loss of population is felt most keenly, and where the reproductive (and latterly intellectual)

potential of the society has been draining away for two decades.31

The results of these processes are in need of investigation. For instance, it is well understood

that rapid economic and social changes lead to a whole host of other changes, including in terms

of identities and identity-formation processes. It is no surprise that North Koreans would be

changing in these same regards. But these questions have gone largely unaddressed. This is partly

because of the aforementioned preoccupations of North Korean studies and its funders, but it is

also partly down to problems of data and access that are addressed in later sections of this thesis.

Finally, it is partly because there is a willingness to unquestioningly assume that North Koreans

really are what they are told to be.32

Writing in 2005 about Soviet society, Fitzpatrick writes, “Fifteen years ago [in 1990] there was still a lingering sense that ‘Soviet ideology’ was something that the regime force-fed to a population whose atomized members were merely passive consumers. It is a great step forward to have the Stalinist subject emerge as ‘an ideological agent in its own right.’” North Korean studies is, if not exactly in the same position as Fitzpatrick’s 1990 USSR, then certainly not out of the 1990s altogether. Only rarely are North Korean people treated in written works as

31 Kim Sŏk'yang, Hoeryŏngsaramdŭl kiŏk sok iyagirŭl tŭllyŏjuda 회령사람들 기억 속 이야기를 들려주다 [Listening to the memories of the people of Hoeryŏng] (Sŏul: Kookmin University Press, 2013). 32 Evidence to the contrary is actually relatively easy to come by, if one is willing to venture off the beaten track. See for instance the story referenced in this tweet, carried by Daily NK: Green, C. [Dest_Pyongyang]. (2019, Oct 8) This story of political vandalism on @The_Daily_NK shows (again) that North Korean political rhetoric is divorced from daily life in the country, and that there is no such thing as a brainwashed, totally compliant population. https://www.dailynk.com/english/the-quiet-shadow-part-1/?fbclid=IwAR0AHC0T7qfmA6YjhQcFL_z43xv5dte- wN0yQoQMJuKEh3mHfAUJAVL3b7I [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/Dest_Pyongyang/status/1181521203028267008.

9 psychologically complex, and capable of holding in their heads multiple, possibly even

contradictory ideas, arguments, and identity markers at the same time. Seldom are they presumed

to be able, for instance, to retain a strong cultural affinity with North Korea whilst also – as in

the case of more than 30,000 “defector-migrants33” who have moved from North to South since

the late 1990s – resettling in South Korea and feeling patriotism and affection for the state that

granted them citizenship unconditionally. There seems to be little will to interrogate what it

actually means to be North Korean, either historically or in the 21st century

This thesis seeks to make a contribution in this area. It interrogates the cultural identities – or

self-understandings (see next paragraph) – of resettled North Koreans in South Korea, asking as

we approach the third decade of the 21st century: What does it mean to be North Korean? What

constitutes North Korean cultural self-understandings? And finally, what are the cleavages in

North Korean society that structure observable differences among types of self-understanding in the second decade of the 21st century?

As a general principle, I do not use the terms “identity” or “identities” in this thesis hereafter. I

adopt instead “self-understanding(s)”. “Self-understanding(s)” rejects the implication of

homogeneity and sameness that is implicit in the term “identity/ies”.34 It strips away the implicit

assumption that one’s putative identity or identities are what drives one to action, irrespective of

material interests.35 It also re-emphasize the notion of identity as being “a process – identification –

not a thing” (emphasis in the original).36

33 I have selected to give preference to this term in this thesis, as it comes closest to conveying both the political and economic meanings of migration or escape from North Korea in the post-famine era, and combines different motivations for departure from North Korea into one. I go into more detail in other areas of the thesis. 34 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (Feb. 2000): 7. 35 Richard Jenkins, Social Identity (3rd ed.) (London: Routledge, 2008), 5. 36 Jenkins, Social Identity, 5.

10 There is no such thing as a homogeneous North Korean identity. North Korean identities in

1950 were not the same as North Korean identities in 1970, or 1990, or indeed today. The

principle of historical specificity holds here; that “any given society is to be understood in terms of the specific period in which it exists,” and thus so are the forms of self-understanding that emerge from those societies.37 Nor are concepts related to identity -- “North Korean

ethnonationalism” or “North Korean anti-Americanism” – enough to explain what drives

individual North Koreans to action at any level, from the elite down. It is one claim of this thesis

that North Korean individuals have variegated conceptions of what it means to be North

Korean, and of what North Korean self-understandings are constituted. Pluralizing “identity” to

“identities” could perhaps help reinforce this point to the satisfaction of some, but in line with

Brubaker and Cooper, I deem it useful to go further. 38

Whilst eschewing the term “identity”, I nevertheless note the critique that my chosen term “self-

understanding(s)” may not adequately reflect factors in identity formation processes that are

outside the control of the individual. The term “self-understanding(s)” ascribes a high degree of

agency over identity formation to the individual, and the corollary is that a lesser degree is

ascribed to social and structural factors. My response to this critique, germane though it

unquestionably is, is the same as that of Brubaker and Cooper: that “identity” has been so

drastically over-used and has acquired multiple definitions over time that point in “sharply

differing directions” – a situation that is only getting more problematic with the rise of “identity

politics” in the 21st century – that it would be methodological folly for me to use it.39 That my

chosen alternative terminology is also (inevitably) flawed does not change that in any meaningful

way.40

37 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (40th Anniv. Edition) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 149. 38 Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” 1-47. 39 Identity politics are well beyond the purview of this thesis. For more, see, e.g., Francis Fukuyama, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Profile Books, 2018) 40 Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” 1.

What, then, does this thesis claim? It advances three inter-connected hypotheses. First, that

North Koreans harbour nuanced, diverse, and discerning self-understandings. Those self-

understandings do draw on the founding myths of the Kim family, including the national origin

story set in Manchuria – the so-called “Manchurian heritage” of the title to this thesis – but they

only do so selectively. Second, that diverse forms of self-understandings draw on recognizable

attributes of societies that are similar to those attributes we find in other societies around the

world. And third, that the structuring of difference within North Korean society – which is

reflected in resettled defector-migrant North Korean self-understandings – happens in practice

primarily along the vectors of generation and geography (although the subjective views of

defector-migrants in this regard may not be empirically justifiable, a point I return to in the

Results chapter).

The three above hypotheses are built upon three relatively uncontroversial assumptions about

North Korea in the present. First, that sources and types of North Korean self-understandings are more complex than those asserted by the state and imposed from the top-down. The state frames a set of notional identities around loyalty to the Paektu hyŏlt'ong, or “Mt. Paektu

bloodline”, the term by which Kim family rule is collectively described and which is frequently

invoked in official propaganda, along with the amorphous ideological constructs chuch'e and

sŏn'gun, and then claimed to apply more or less universally to all DPR Korean citizens.

Conversely, this research assumes that the picture in reality is far more complicated, not least

because the intersectionality of class, geography, gender and generation with the notion of a

collective “Manchurian heritage” makes that outcome all-but inevitable.

Second, the work assumes that North Koreans, primarily those under 45, do not harbour such

strong emotions toward the founding leader of the state, Kim Ilsŏng, as was the case for

12 previous generations. This is thought to be so for both resettled defector-migrants in South

Korea and also those inside North Korea. I present evidence for both, but with an empirical

focus on the former. My claim is that for those born after the death of Kim Ilsŏng or who

cannot remember the daily reality of his rule, and/or who were born after the famine that swept

the country’s northern provinces in the 1990s, Kim’s legacy is an abstraction. As an abstraction,

the way Kim family rule is experienced and assimilated into self-understandings is not the same

as it is for those whose lived experiences were during the formative and relatively formidable nation-building years of Kim’s practical rule.

Finally, the work assumes that if the previous two assumptions are verified then other attributes must be doing some of the sociological work of explaining social cohesion in modern North

Korean society. I assert here that much of the passion that had been attached to being North

Korean, such as it ever existed (a topic for another day), bled away with the repressive control and deconstruction of the role of the state in society during the Kim Chŏngil (known as Kim

Jong-il or Kim Jong Il) era, which began officially in July 1994 and ended in December 2011.41

Where I differ from much established scholarship is in my proposition that what remains is nevertheless powerful: feelings of passion for cultural productions – art, literature, sports and suchlike – where there is some, little or even no passion for the ideological components of those works. The passion is for the products, and the labours of those who produce them.

In seeking to answer the research questions, the work falsifies two dominant tendencies that have infused North Korean studies for decades. First, that ordinary North Koreans are simply coerced into acquiescence to the rule of the Kim family (see Conclusion) and that this ostensible

41 As noted elsewhere, the Kim Chŏngil era began earlier than 1994, since Kim took over many key state functions from his father in the 1980s, having begun his ascent to power in the 1970s, and arguably ended some years after 2011, given that Kim’s former university comrades did much to control the state after Kim’s death, at a time when Kim Jŏngŭn was relatively weak. Officially, however, this era spanned 1994-2011.

13 fact is enough by itself to explain the longevity of the political system and state. And second, the obviously contradictory position that ordinary North Koreans harbour an undying loyalty to the

Kim family that underpins every aspect of senses of self.

The truth, as is often the case, is somewhere in between.

Telling the Story

The important matter at this stage is to explain how the story is to be told. It is both easy and popular to dismiss North Korean society as occluded and unknowable. In 1993, the year before the death of Kim Ilsŏng, Hagen Koo wrote that “North Korea, of course, is a supreme case of a monolithic, totalitarian state, resembling the Orwellian state of 1984; the civil society that exists is neither heard or seen, except in its ritualistic echoes of state power.”42

The phrase “of course” does a lot of work here, highlighting how Koo’s claim was just about defensible at the time. North Korea prior to the death of Kim Ilsŏng really was another country.

However, today such sentiments are not much more than a useful pretext; a shortcut that justifies exclusive focus on the top-down grip of the country’s leaders over their society and the narratives that emerge and flow downward and outward from the peaks of state power. These legitimize analysis of artefacts, cultural productions and government documents, which is no bad thing, all whilst obviating the need to consider how such artefacts are perceived and processed, which is.

42 Hagen Koo (ed.), State and Society in Contemporary Korea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Unviersity Press, 1993), 1.

14 North Korea is not the first closed state to be approached in this way in scholarship.43 It was

largely speaking true for academic works on the USSR and remains common in the case of

Russia. It was true of Nazi Germany, and to a certain extent China under Mao.44 But it is not appropriate, and is now rather less tolerated than it once was. As books such as that by Frank

Dikötter on the Cultural Revolution have demonstrated, the societies and constituent peoples of

representative 20th century autocracies – the USSR, Nazi Germany and China under Mao – were engaged in lively, by no means cordial, two-way state-society dialogues that give the lie to prior

assumptions about how those societies functioned.45

In the case of North Korea, too, recent scholarship has begun to break the illusion of

unknowability. As I explore in the Literature Review chapter, it has done so in large part through

the telling of bottom-up histories utilizing information and testimony from resettled North

Korean defector-migrants. As can be seen in the figure below – and as is discussed in greater

detail later on -- the number of North Koreans migrating to resettle in South Korea has grown

enormously in the 21st century, peaking (to date) at 2,914 arriving in South Korea per year in

2009 and declining to 1,137 in 2018. At time of writing, more than 32,000 North Korean citizens have made the decision to migrate/escape to the South.46

43 This is not always true outside of academia. For instance, Russians may be complicated, but a rich literary history means that they are not inscrutable. The works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Bulgakov are examples of literature with enormous psychological depth. 44 Cass R. Sunstein, “It Can Happen Here,” New York Review of Books, June 28, 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/hitlers-rise-it-can-happen-here/ (last accessed February 8, 2019). 45 Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 46 For the most up-to-date statistics, see the Ministry of Unification’s online statistics portal: https://www.unikorea.go.kr/unikorea/business/NKDefectorsPolicy/status/lately/

15 3500

3000

2500

2000

1500

1000

500

Male Female Total

Number of defector-migrants admitted into South Korea annually, 1998-2018. | Source: Ministry of Unification In spite of the rising number of former North Korean citizens now living in the South,

investigating the state-society relationship on the ground in North Korea remains difficult; much more so than working out what a few individuals in power say or do, or how top-down propaganda is delivered through cultural productions. But thanks to defector-migrants as a

source of information, it is no longer dismissed as impossible. In this thesis, then, I follow this

approach.47

In attempting such a project, one rightly runs into challenging methodological questions not just

about how North Korea can be analyzed, but how it should be analyzed. As noted previously, the

approach used in this thesis centers on the views of a cross-section of the resettled migrant

population based in Sŏul. As a methodology, this is not without its critics.

Critiques come in two main forms.48 The first concerns bias: that defector-migrants are a self-

selecting sample of those who choose to leave North Korea, and that they are therefore pre-

destined to be unreliable witnesses to the society they left behind. The voices of North Korean

47 This is of importance in its own right, but even more so given that social dynamics inside North Korea are of enormous long-run salience for predicting the future of the state. What happens inside North Korea, matters outside it. 48 There is a third critique, that of representativeness. Being essentially a matter of methodology, this critique is dealt with in the Methodology chapter.

16 escapees are therefore treated as biased and inadmissible, and get marginalized or dismissed.

Research then soon gets bogged down in the question of what constitutes “reliable” and

“unreliable” testimony, two terms that point clearly, and none-too-subtly, toward the distinction

between truth and lies. “Reliable testimony” claims to portend the revelation of hitherto

unknown facts, whilst “unreliable testimony” foreshadows nothing of the sort. Reliable

testimony is presumed to be unbiased, or at least not biased in ways that are meaningfully

problematic for the research question(s) being asked; unreliable testimony is seen as biased, and

thus inadmissible in courts of law or public opinion. Defector-migrant testimony is all-too

frequently dumped in the “unreliable” category and left to languish there.

Were we to accept the proposition underpinning this critique – that escapees from coercive

dictatorial regimes are biased and impossible to trust – we would then not be able to accept as

credible the words of the thousands of Jewish interviewees who did not, once travel to Israel had

been legalized, wish to remain in the Soviet Union and subsequently participated in the Soviet

Interview Project (SIP) in the 1970s and early 1980s. Nor would we place any value on the words

of any number of other émigré groups, such as those who fled the Khmer Rouge in

Cambodia/Kampuchea, also in the 1970s, or indeed the Japanese colonial system in Korea to

foreign lands at the turn of the 20th century.49 These are just a handful of examples of

migrant/refugee groups whose words societies do, broadly speaking, accept as credible. Perhaps

one feels we should not accept those words, but the fact remains that we generally do so, and

that is enough to demonstrate the inherent unreasonableness of the existing discourse on

defector-migrant testimony.

49 At the turn of the 20th Century, the same question of the relationship of those living beyond national borders to the nation itself also fostered divisions over the status of what Andre Schmid calls “deterritorialized compatriots” in the Korean case. Whether or not leaving national boundaries – 70 years after the physical division of the Korean peninsula, this is an appropriate description for those from North Korea who resettle in South Korea – renders one an invalid respondent to questions about that society lay at the heart of the debate then – namely, what or where is the “true Korea” in a time of colonial domination? – and continues to do so now. Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires: 1895-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 225.

17 Evidently, it is my contention that much can be discovered about life in North Korea by

surveying and interviewing people who have left. This is particularly so now that the defector-

migrant community has become more broad-based and diverse than it was at the turn of the century. My own prior research contributes to demonstrating the point.50 Moreover, the method used is defensible, representing as it does an attempt to look at North Korean culture “at a distance”, where members of North Korean society are “inaccessible to direct observation.”51

As Mead and Metraux note, the approach adopted here is appropriate when “it is essential [for

exigent political reasons] to know something about a period or a culture that is not accessible but from which there are still living representatives who can be interviewed.”52 Few cases fit that

definition better than North Korea.

The second critique is that in the process of defection and resettlement in South Korea,

defector-migrant self-understandings are altered to such an extent that sampling North Korean

defector-migrants for their views of North Korea once they have arrived in South Korea results

in erroneous conclusions. The argument here is that, as Stuart Hall notes, self-understandings are

produced “never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside,

representation.”53 Then, self-understandings must depend in part on contingent external factors

including location. Removing a native-born North Korean from North Korea whilst still

50 Steven Denney and Christopher Green, “Unification in Action? The National Identity of North Korean Defector-Migrants: Insights and Implications,” KEIA Academic Paper Series, October 1, 2018. http://keia.org/publication/unification-action-national-identity-north-korean-defector-migrants-insights-and-implica (last accessed March 15, 2019). 51 Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux, The Study of Culture at a Distance (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 3; Hyang Jin Jung, “Do they mean what they act? Surveillance, theatricality, and mind-heart among North Koreans,” Acta Koreana 16, no. 1 (June 2013): 90. A majority of the data used in the second of these publications is derived from encounters between the author and defector-migrants in South Korea. 52 Mead and Metraux, Culture at a Distance, 3. 53 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader, ed. Patrick Wheatsheaf and Laura Chrisman (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 222-237.

18 expecting that individual to produce – and articulate – themselves in an identically “North

Korean” way would presumably then be a mistake.

However, while not false per se, this critique appears also to be overblown. Length of time spent in South Korea seems not to have a statistically significant impact on self-understandings among defector-migrants. If we average the structured survey results in this thesis across three groups:

(1) new arrivals (those having spent 1 year or less in South Korea); (2) newly resettled (2-5 years in South Korea); and (3) fully resettled (6+ years in South Korea), the data suggest that opinions remain more or less similar across groups. 54 The takeaway, shared by South Korean scholar

Kim Byung-yeon, is that attitudes towards certain qualities of life and experiences in North

Korea are not significantly impacted by the length of time one has spent in South Korea.55 By extension, then, we can hypothesize that self-understandings also survive the defection and resettlement process mostly intact.

Of course, this is assuredly not always the case, and so caution is merited. Data show that political attitudes towards democratic participation changes over length of resettlement, for instance.56 Moreover, I cannot ever guarantee that the act of migrating out of North Korea itself does not have a decisive impact on self-understandings. No natural experiment exists to help resolve this conundrum. All I can say is that in the case of items explored in this thesis, neither resettlement nor exposure to South Korea per se seem to have a significant impact on responses.

This supports the claim that the attitudes shown in this thesis are resilient opinions of people

54 See Steven Denney and Christopher Green, “Chuch’e and the Everyday: Does Ideology Matter for Ordinary People in North Korea? Insights from Interviews and Surveys with North Korean Defector-Migrants,” presented at the Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference in Denver, March 2019. This analysis only assesses changes post-resettlement. It does not guarantee that the act of migrating out of North Korea itself is not having a key impact on the formation of self-understandings. 55 See, e.g., Kim et al., “Do Institutions Affect Social Preferences? Evidence from Divided Korea,” Journal of Comparative Economics 45 (2017): 865-888. 56 Aram Hur, “Adapting to Democracy: Identity and the Political Development of North Korean Defectors,” Journal of East Asian Studies 18 (March 2018): 97-115.

19 who grew up in North Korea. It can be very tentatively claimed that in this case, survey

responses represent North Korean perspectives and not merely opinions of a defector class, and

the critique is therefore rejected, at least in part.

Naturally, none of the above frees the researcher from the requirement to take great care. In part because the bar for acceptability is high, the utmost attention must be brought to bear on research of this type. The decision to listen with humility – rather than indifference or

dismissiveness – to what North Korean defector-migrants choose to say to us about North

Korea does not mean one should abandon all that may have been learned by other means, such

as, per C. Wright Mills, “Every well-considered social study requires […] full use of historical

materials.”57 It does not benefit anyone for the attentive listener to be a naïve or ignorant one;

the need for cross-checking and verification is ever-present. But rather than downplaying the views of defector-migrants, we ought instead to be obliged to weigh the evidence coming from conversations with members of this group, and to draw conclusions based on that evidence plus as much other information as we are reasonably able to obtain. It is in this spirit that I approach this thesis.

Note on Romanization

In this thesis, I use the McCune-Reischauer romanization system for the names of people and

places. However, I provide alternative spellings of figures and locations in parentheses upon first

use where these alternative spellings seem to be better known. This category includes conflicting

spellings of places such as Yanji, the capital of the Yŏnbyŏn Korean Autonomous Prefecture of

China, as it is known in local Chinese Korean dialect, but as Yenbyen in the dominant South

Korean dialect.

57 Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 145.

For readers hungering for a lengthy disquisition of the merits and critiques of one system of

Korean romanization over another, I recommend James Grayson’s history and background of

McCune-Reischauer vs. Revised Romanization.58 In it, Grayson asserts that Revised

Romanization is “not only unsatisfactory, but inferior to the [McCune Reischauer] system which it has supplanted.” He may be right, but Revised Romanization works better with e-readers, so we’ll see whether the McCune-Reischauer used herein survives the transition to a book, if/when it comes.

58 James Grayson, “The New Government Romanization System: Why Was It Necessary?” Journal of East Asian Libraries 140 (October 2006): 49-59. See also: James Grayson, “Korean Romanisation: A Response to Chris Doll” Journal of East Asian Libraries 166 (February 2018): no pagination. This second piece appeared in response to Chris Doll, “Korean Rŏmaniz’atiŏn: Is it finally time for the Library of Congress to Stop Promoting Mccune-Reischauer and Adopt the Revised Romanization Scheme?” Journal of East Asian Libraries 165 (October 2017): 1- 28.