42%

The lie that hides the truth.

The UN recently reported that 42% of North Koreans are undernourished. One in five North Korean children suffer from malnutrition. This puts the DPRK on par with places like Somalia, the Central African Republic, Haiti and Yemen. What makes the DPRK different from these other nations, however, is that just across the border there is another nation that only seventy years ago began with the exact same people, the exact same history, the exact same geography, the exact same material advantages and disadvantages, and yet today has the tenth largest GDP in the world!

How to make sense of such a tragic anomaly?

First of all, historically, it wasn’t exactly such a level playing field, but not in the way you might expect. For during the Japanese colonial period (1910 – 1945)  the focus was on the industrialization of the north of the peninsula  more than the south. Furthermore, the northern part has more natural resources, such as coal. In other words, from the moment of the establishment of the DPRK and the ROK in 1948, and after the Korean War  (1950 -53) - and despite the devastation wrought by the UN carpet-bombing of the DPRK -   it was the DPRK who was more economically advanced that the ROK until the 1980s.  This, however, was not simply because of innate infrastructural and material advantages. The DPRK also benefited greatly from the patronage of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries. Meanwhile, the ROK got similar benefits from its close alliance with the United States. The crunch came in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, at which point the DPRK the sudden withdrawal of material support threw the DPRK into an economic crisis, exacerbated by adverse weather conditions in the 1990s which led to a famine in which perhaps as many as 3.5 million people died.

This news about the numbers of undernourished in North Korea makes one see the power of ideology  over life. Ideology does not only determine what we think and how we behave, but also directly impacts on our bodies. The average North Korean kid is stunted in growth. The average height of a North Korean adult is between  3. 8 cm (1.2 – 3.1 inches) shorter than their South Korean neighbours! This means that the same  gene pool, the same ethnic group has within a very short period been physically manipulated by the social system under which people live. This is true of both Koreas, because South Koreans are now taller than seventy years ago due to the change in their diet. 

An image of the Pyongyang subway from Oliver Wainwright’s book Inside North Korea. The lucky 58%.

But the situation in North Korea is more complex than the statistics suggest. While 42% are undernourished, these citizens are almost entirely in the countryside, and not in the capital Pyongyang, where the regime ensures that residents have a higher standard of living in return for loyalty. For only those who have proved themselves complaint and obedient are permitted to live in there.. 

In a previous post I mentioned Yeonmi  Park, who escaped from North Korea. As a child living near the Chinese border, she endured the famine of the 1990s, and she graphically conveys the experience of malnourishment, which reduces life to a daily struggle to simply find enough to eat. Hunger effectively crushes any other dimension of human existence.

Park reminds us that pretty much all our thoughts are luxuries, in the sense that they are surpluses to the basic survival instinct. If I think of my own life, one in which I have never felt undernourished, I can see that the society in which I live and the social status I have within it, has permitted me to spend a very indulgent life, one in which I have been able to enjoy freedom of speech, and to explore at leisure the ‘meaning of life’,  love and affection, travel, art-making, writing, mentorship of students. My life, in short, has been one of enormous privileges that I more or less take for granted. 

As Yeonmi Park noted, outside Pyongyang keeping people hungry is a useful weapon, as it also keeps them too weak to protest.  Therefore, the mechanisms of power employed by the ruling Party functions on the level of both the mind and the body.  Brainwashing, on the one hand, and undernourishment on the other. This is not to say that the Party actively encourages food shortages and famines. But they clearly do not see it as an overwhelming obligation to make sure everyone under their control has enough to eat, because what is deemed of paramount importance is not individual citizen’s survival but the survival of the Party system. As a functionary recently announced, they reject aid from the United States because they observe that many countries ‘have undergone bitter tastes as a result of pinning much hope on the American aid and humanitarian assistance.’   This is true, in that, as they say, ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch,’ a sadly apt metaphor in this case.  But as the US State Department observed: ‘the DPRK has created significant barrier to the delivery of assistance by closing its border and rejecting offers of international aid, while also limiting the personnel responsible for implementing and monitoring existing humanitarian projects’. 

The North Korean concept of juche – self-reliance – isn’t intended to mean survival of the fittest. Far from it. The idealization involved in the concept means that the DPRK is said to guarantee succeed by  achieving national autonomy, independent development. But as history shows this is an absolutely fatal error of state policy. China and Japan tried it, as did Korea under the Joseon dynasty, which closed its doors to the rest of the world for centuries, and became known as the Hermit Kingdom. These countries all failed in their efforts to resist the forces of globalization spearheaded by the Western powers, and ended up being forcibly driven to sit at the table of world trade and Westernizing modernization. Japan capitulated first, and even copied the imperialistic agenda of the Western powers by annexing Korea in 1910  and Chinese Manchuria. Seen in this light, the DPRK’s stance can be seen as a throwback to before this fatal moment when East Asian countries encountered the West and eventually found that they had no choice but to succumb to their influence. 

The different decisions of the leadership in the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are instructive. The Chinese Communist Party eventually saw the writing on the wall,  and after the period of Mao, during which  an attempt at Chinese self-reliance proved disastrous, chose once again to engage with the rest of the world. The fact they  have spectacularly succeeded and maintained and even enhanced their control over China is testimony to the fact that today modernization no longer entails what the historian Niall Ferguson in his book Civilization. The West and the Rest (2011)   rather faddishly describes as  ‘downloading’ all the West’s ‘killer apps’, which include individualism and  democracy, and instead can mean only an obsessive focus on others of these ‘killer apps’ –  industrial productivity and consumerism.

Clearly, the DPRK is not ‘downloading’ any of the West’s ‘killer apps.’ By a tragic quirk of history, the Korean peninsula ended up being divided between the Soviet Union and the United States and  its allies in 1945, got partition along the 38th  Parallel (which is just a few miles north of where I write this post) as a pragmatic solution to an immediate problem, but thereafter tragically condemned one half of the people of the peninsula to a system that,  while for a while seemed a viable  rival to the West’s ‘killer apps’, remarkably quickly proved a  total failure. add to this the continuing dominance of the United Staes over global affairs, and we have this result: 42% of North Koreans are condemned to a life spent foraging for grasshoppers on the mountainsides just to stay alive.