North Korea has been acting out since the beginning of the year. Starting with firing 400 rounds of artillery shells off its west coast for three days last month, North Korea has mobilized hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles, surface-to-air missiles and anti-ship missiles to conduct eleven hostile demonstrations against South Korea as of Feb. 16.
North Korea’s latest provocations came after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared South Korea as its “number one enemy” late last year. Kim also threatened to use nuclear weapons if necessary to “pacify the entire territory of South Korea.” In the U.S., some commentators are raising the possibility of an imminent war on the Korean Peninsula.
Amid escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula, reports emerged that thousands of North Korean workers in China’s Jilin province went on strike and rioted last month after finding out they would not be paid.
The workers, employed by a trading company associated with North Korea’s Ministry of National Defense, were promised full payment upon their return home. But the trading company had been transferring the withheld wages directly to Pyongyang, sparking outrage. The workers staged large-scale protests, occupying factories and taking North Korean officials hostage. Given that riots by North Koreans are virtually unheard of, recent events speak volumes about the fragile state of affairs within North Korea.
Ko Young-hwan, a former North Korean diplomat and Special Adviser to the Minister of Unification, confirmed the reported riots. The Chosunilbo met Ko at his office in Government Complex Seoul four days ago.
Have the riots stopped?
“They’ve managed to quell the protests, but underlying tensions remain. Unpaid wages amount to 10 million dollars, which North Korea cannot settle immediately. They’re paying the workers little by little, just enough so that they do not explode again. North Korea’s Ministry of External Economic Relations, Ministry of Social Security, Ministry of State Security, and embassy staff received orders to contribute to paying workers their withheld wages. North Korean workers have had their wages withheld before, but this incident stands out because 2,500 to 3,000 workers took collective action. [The North] wants to repatriate these workers, but they can’t - China won’t grant them visas.”
Why is China not granting them visas?
“A North Korean source told me that China is trying to “tame” North Korea. The atmosphere shifted after Kim Jong-un met Vladimir Putin last September and declared, “Our foremost priority is our relationship with Russia.” China used to help North Korea avoid sanctions by granting visas to restaurant workers and students, but they recently reduced the quota. Since the workers in China are unable to return home, North Korea cannot send the next batch of workers to China.”
Why won’t North Korea just arrest these workers?
“That’s exactly what North Korea would have done in the past. [After what happened in Jilin], the workers are considered political prisoners in Pyongyang. But their economic value is significant, and North Korea needs money. These workers are skilled artisans with 10 to 20 years of experience in sewing. While the average laborer earns between $800 and $1,000 per month, these workers receive $2,000, twice as much. Two thousand five hundred workers earning $2,000 monthly adds up to $60 million annually. Chinese companies are also very happy with their work. That’s a lot of money for North Korea.”
How can they leave the ‘reactionaries’ alone like that?
“Occasionally, we obtain videos secretly filmed showing disturbances in North Korea’s markets. You can see ‘grasshopper’ vendors, who sell without a stall, confronting the inspectors. They argue, “Are you going to feed us?” and “If I can’t sell, my family starves,” making aggressive gestures, and the safety agents (police) become flustered and leave the scene. Such a thing would have been unthinkable in the past. Even during the recent riots in Jilin Province, workers smashed equipment and locked up officials to beat them, saying, ‘We won’t work until we get paid.’ Yet, the North Korean authorities seemed at a loss for what to do.”
Are you saying North Korea isn’t what it used to be?
“Violence has been on the rise in North Korea lately. The most frequently assaulted are security and safety agents. It has become commonplace for attackers to wait for the agents to return home or leave, then assault them in alleys and flee. It’s not like the old days when citizens couldn’t make a peep.”
Can control over the residents be maintained like that?
“Day and night are completely different. These days, security agents stop anyone on the street, snatch their cell phones, and if a South Korean song plays, they drag them away. They also ask for IDs if they hear young men and women calling each other ‘oppa,’ [a South Korean word for older brother], or ‘Honey.’ If their surnames differ, they say, ‘He’s not your oppa. You’ve been watching puppet regime dramas, haven’t you?’ and take them away. The control is so tight that people become anxious about using expressions they’ve used without a second thought, worrying if they might sound like they’re speaking in the South Korean style. They can’t even say ‘Nice to meet you’ because it’s considered a South Korean phrase. Life is hard enough, but with such oppression, people vent their frustrations under the cover of night.”
North Korea, starting with the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act in 2020, which included clauses for extreme punishment, successively enacted laws such as the Youth Education Guarantee Act and the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act, collectively known as the ‘anti-South Korea three acts,’ all during the administration of former President Moon Jae-in. Ko analyzed that Kim Jong-un’s actions, including the directive to demolish facilities at Mount Kumgang in October 2019, blowing up the inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong in June 2020, and even going as far as to enact extreme laws, were due to the judgment that the side effects of South Korean cultural infiltration, such as ideological and systemic relaxation, far outweigh the benefits gained from inter-Korean exchanges.
What’s the economic situation in North Korea?
“Kim Jong-un recently lamented that ‘we can’t even provide necessities to the local people.’ Simply put, in the provinces these days, people have to dip food in salt since there’s no soy sauce or bean paste. In the past, they used to light lamps with petroleum or pine resin at night, but even that isn’t easy now. After 7 p.m., only a few people walk around, and people sleep right after the early evening. It’s like a zombie city, a ghost town. The only place that’s lit is the statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.”
It wouldn’t be a recent development that the situation has become difficult.
“When I was in the North, there was already a huge gap between Pyongyang and the provinces. Food distribution in the provinces was cut off during the North Korean famine, also known as the March of Suffering, and things got even harder in the mid-2010s as UN sanctions intensified. Still, people managed to get by with items found in the markets, but with the pandemic, the market hours have been shortened, and the items available for trade have been restricted.”
Is it any better in Pyongyang?
“Pyongyang has electricity only four hours a day, two hours each during rush hour. In high-rise apartments, 300 to 400 people line up to use the elevators at rush hour. Apartments in the Hwasong district, which Kim Jong-un boasts about, are 70 to 80 stories high. The residents are frustrated. They go out in search of firewood because houses are not heated. Many homeowners move to the outskirts because they can’t get wood.”
But N. Korea builds 10,000 apartments a year.
“The Pyongyang sewer system was built in 1958-1959 before the People’s Army of China withdrew. They’re building skyscrapers on top of it. When you flush the toilet, it clogs and backs up on the first floor. A North Korean defector from Pyongyang called it “an apartment without a butthole.” They’re just building apartments in a rush without maintaining sewer pipes or expanding sewage disposal facilities.”
Disposal of feces must be troublesome.
“Luckily, excrements have to be collected in the winter months. People fight over compost in cities and rural areas alike. Pyongyang is no exception. While the higher-ups pay the People’s leader to take care of it, the majority of the population composts their collected wastes by mixing them with briquette ashes. The collecting process is in full swing at this time of year.
Kim Jong-un has acknowledged the poor conditions in Pyongyang on several occasions. At a Politburo meeting Kim chaired in June 2020 amid the rampant spread of COVID-19, he openly addressed the urgent issue of sustaining the livelihood of Pyongyang’s residents. During his speech at the National Mothers’ Congress last December, he said, “We will first solve the problems of insufficient water and firewood, public transportation, elevators, and heating system for the capital’s citizens.” This means nothing has improved in three and a half years.”
Ko compared North Korea’s current aggressive stance to when it threatened “a sea of fire” upon Seoul in 2013. “In early 2013, North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a ‘sea of fire’ daily, and Kim went to Jangjae Island and Mudo Island on the West Sea frontline and urged to ‘mow down the enemy lines,’ raising the risks of a possible war,” Ko said. “Jang Sung-taek’s power was great at the time, and Kim bluffed his way out because his power was vulnerable.”
He said North Korea is most likely ratcheting up hostile demonstrations against South Korea to cover up domestic turmoil. “A country that wants to go to war does not sell 5,000 containers of shells,” he added. “Kim’s biggest concern is passing on power to the fourth generation and continuing the ‘Kim Dynasty.’ How could he possibly go to war?”
☞Who is Ko Young-hwan?
Ko Young-hwan is a North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea. Born in Pyongyang in 1953, he studied at the Pyongyang Foreign Language Revolutionary Institute and the Pyongyang University of Foreign Languages before joining the diplomatic service in 1979. He was Kim Il-sung’s French interpreter for three years and eight months. He served at the North Korean Embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo before returning home in 1991. He is the first North Korean diplomat to defect. He worked for 26 years at the National Security Strategy Institute, a National Intelligence Service think tank. Last September, he was named to the newly created position of special advisor to Seoul’s Unification Minister. He is the first figure elite North Koreans seek out when settling in South Korea.
