"Opening up a conversation about the role of political analogy in 1984 with a bunch of North Korean students would not be a good idea"
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as it’s officially known, is famously among the most closed societies on earth. Commonly referred to as “the hermit kingdom”, it’s usually assumed that its 24 million citizens live in a state of near-complete isolation from the outside world. Radios and TVs can only be tuned to domestic channels; that intranet system, while more sophisticated than many outsiders realise, only tells people what their government wants them to hear; and although it’s estimated that more than four million North Koreans now own mobile phones, the network, introduced in 2008, doesn’t allow for connections outside the country.
These numbers are of course tiny, but they’re starting from an even smaller base. “[North Korea] only opened to tourism from “imperialist” countries in the late 80s,” Simon says, “‘88, or something like that. And when I joined, our entire market - not just our company, but our entire market - was no bigger than four or five hundred people a year.” Interest, it seems, is growing."It’s estimated that more than 4 million North Koreans now own mobile phones, but they can't connect outside the country"
From a personal point of view, the Siren song of North Korea became a lot harder to ignore as I watched the landmark events of 2018 unfolding. Not least because I was lucky enough to have a ringside seat when it started, at the South Korean Winter Olympics in February.
As my party of journalists drove back from the DMZ, our South Korean guide pointed out that the enormous speaker stacks - normally used to pump propaganda and K-Pop over to the North at aggressive volumes - had been silenced, at least for the duration of the Olympics."If human nature abhors an information vacuum, filling it with suspicion and fear, we also can’t help but be intrigued"
It’s hard to imagine a more immersive way to spend your first night in North Korea than attending the Mass Games. If arriving in Pyongyang is already liable to cause culture shock, then this is the equivalent of being strapped into a 2,000-volt electric chair, and then thrown in the deep end of a swimming pool.
We lap up the ludicrousness of Kim Il Sung’s infant revolutionary exploits, related to us outside his childhood home. We comment approvingly on the retro feel of the Party Foundation Monument, a structure that looks like it’s stepped straight out of a 70s Soviet architecture manual, but was in fact built in 1995. We marvel at the fact that we’re woken in the morning by patriotic songs, which float eerily over the city like a communist call to prayer, exhorting the workers to greater efforts in the day ahead. And we all line up eagerly to photograph the iconic, 60-foot high bronze statues of The Great Leader and The Dear Leader on Mansu Hill.To anyone who’s interested in the architecture, aesthetics and ideologies of the old Eastern Bloc, North Korea is constantly fascinating. It's like a time capsule, a sort of like a living, breathing totalitarian theme park. Except that people actually have to live here."It's like a time capsule, a sort of living, breathing totalitarian theme park. Except that people actually have to live here"
If you’re not one for organised tours, or mic-wielding guides on busses, then North Korea is not the destination for you. You cannot visit the country as a foreigner without being accompanied at all times. But despite the insinuations of more hysterical media outlets, tour guides in North Korea are just that. (As Simon explained wearily in our pre-trip briefing in Beijing “they don’t work for the interior ministry - they’re not spies…”)
Of course, a lot of the most interesting things you see in North Korea are not sights that you’re bussed to, and a lot of the most interesting insights aren’t things your guides would ever spell out. Look out over Pyongyang from the towering Yanggakdo Hotel for example, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in a communist capital city.
Nowhere is this more obvious than when visiting the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where the bodies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il lie embalmed. It was Lenin, of course, who started the trend for mausoleums when his body was mummified and set to one side of Red Square. Mao has his own, right next to the Forbidden City. But both of these pale into insignificance when compared with the sheer size and scale of the house the Kims built. But again, it’s only the communist aesthetic that’s been borrowed."North Korean ideology, experts suggest, has more in common with fascism than communism"
Ironically, it was one of the few tenets of communism that the regime actually adhered to that arguably lead to the darkest period in the country’s recent history. Our guides refer to it using the official, euphemistic, term “the Arduous March”. But the rest of the world would simply call it “the famine”.
“In the 80s, they had a lot of mechanised agriculture,” explains Simon Cockerell, “but all that fell apart during the Arduous March, when the fuel ran out. Go to certain places and you can see the tractors just rotting in the fields.” Since the 90s, the countryside has gone backwards. The farmers we see are using equipment that is quite literally medieval - single-share ploughs pulled by oxen; sickles to bring in the harvest, and ox-carts to transport it. It’s hard to believe that this third-world level of poverty exists in the same country that’s capable of building ICBMs. At the same time, any threat to "bomb them back to the stone age" would seem futile - agriculturally at least, they're almost there already."In the last decade of the 20th Century, between 800,000 and three million citizens of this once-developed country starved to death"
One of the great pleasures of visiting a quote-unquote “off the beaten track” destination (especially one whose reputation may not match up with reality) is the chance to make a genuine impression on people you meet - and to be genuinely impressed by them in return. I have fond memories of a trip to Iran, for example, shortly after it had been named as part of the original “Axis of Evil”. Obviously we were far from the only westerners in the country. But for a few people we were, I was told, the first representatives of any country allied to “The Great Satan” (ie. the US) that they had ever spoken to. This struck me as an incredible privilege - to be given the opportunity to show, even in a miniscule way, that not everyone on the “other side” was evil. “Our governments may disagree,” I was told at one stage, “but that should never stop people from getting along.” Looking back, I can only hope that my friends and I made as positive an impression on our Iranian hosts as they did on us.
The significance of any of this is, of course, debatable. The experts I speak to are divided as to what, if any, role tourism might play in the opening up of North Korean hearts and minds. B.R. Myers puts his argument succinctly in The Cleanest Race, arguing: “It would be folly to extrapolate from Cold War history. Blue jeans will not bring down this dictatorship.”
As to whether the seemingly-seismic events of 2018 have made a difference? That’s harder to say. Simon takes a fairly cynical view - he’s seen the Koreas share teams at Olympic games before, and worked in the North throughout the expensive, and ultimate fruitless, era of the South’s “sunshine policy” in the early-2000s."When we were at the DMZ, the soldiers on the side of the road were clearing mines. I’ve never seen that before"