Arius

@ariusderr

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By any measure of human well-being, North Korea ranks at the bottom of “places you want to live.” Day-to-day life consists of long, largely compulsory work hours in low-tech, manual labor. All men must serve in the military for 10 years, active duty, where they are treated as free farm and construction laborers. There is very little choice about school, careers, housing, or other aspects of life because the North Korean regime sees individual freedoms as a threat to Kim Jong Un. North Korea truly is a garrison state. I don’t envision significant improvements so long as Kim remains in power.

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Many defectors, like your colleagues, leave behind family and loved ones. They may use the trafficking network they used before to escape, or another broker they hear about through the defector community, to send money back to the North. It works like this: Lee escapes to South Korea thanks to Chen’s help. Lee sends Chen 50% of their resettlement money, plus another 10% they want Chen to get to their family in North Korea. Chen takes another 40% off this 10% for the risk. Chen uses his cut to either/or 1) pay off security guards at the DPRK-China border 2) sneak into North Korea 3) pay someone else to sneak across the border with the cash. If your colleague’s family lives close enough to the Chinese border they may have a Chinese smartphone that connects to Chinese mobile networks. But it’s incredibly risky – North Korea will execute people for having any contact with South Koreans, and imprison them in concentration camps for consuming any sort of foreign media.

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North Korea has multiple theme parks with roller coasters, water slides and other familiar activities. Of course, these parks are off limits to most people in the country and reserved for elites only. Here's Kim Jong Un on a rollercoaster.

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“North Korean culture” is distinct from “Korean culture” because the former has only been around for 75 years or so while the latter is thousands of years old. Like many communist revolutionaries, Kim Il Sung did everything he could to “reset” culture and history when he took over. As a result “North Korean culture” is very much a personality cult built on authoritarianism, illiberalism and oppression and is mostly disconnected from what came before 1948. South Korea is much closer to “Korean culture” but also grapples with their own “resets” – first the 1910-1945 colonization by Japan and then the division of Korea into North and South. In other words, what is and isn’t “Korean culture” is a source of much debate among scholars.

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It is a totalitarian regime held together by a personality cult. This cult promotes socialism and Soviet-style central command but North Korea does not fit neatly into “communist regime” typology.

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It’s impossible to know what’s in the hearts and minds of most in the country because it is so locked down. We do know that defectors who manage to escape almost always do so not because of ideological opposition to the Kim regime but because they are seeking food, medicine or cash and it’s only after they escape — almost always to China — that they make contact with activists, missionaries and others in the border region who explain the stakes and help them decide whether to leave the DPRK for good.

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I disagree. The $3B figure came from the Panel of Experts, a mechanism between the U.S., UK, France, China and Russia that reports and evaluates evidence given to it by UN member states. There isn’t a conspiracy here unless you think the U.S. is working with China and Russia 😂

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The vast majority of North Koreans cannot access the internet. A very select few are allowed web access for either propaganda purposes — lots of North Korean state media available in different languages — and more seriously, cybercrime. The UN estimated last year that the DPRK has stolen at least $3 billion in crypto since 2017. That’s over 10% of the country’s entire GDP!

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We published a good explanation of this back in 2019. The TLDR is that North Korea emulated Stalinist leader worship by building statues of founder Kim Il Sung. By the 1970s there were entire doctrines and procedures about building Kim statues everywhere, and it evolved into a symbolic method of distinguishing Kim from other communist world leaders (Stalin, Map, Lenin etc). https://www.nknews.org/2019/11/bow-to-the-leader-a-history-of-north-koreas-iconic-and-ubiquitous-kim-statues/

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Hot take, capitalism is good and North Korea should let the free market do what it does. The alternative is that millions in the country continue to endure the worst poverty in the world or something close to it.

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“Who’s that and what’s a potcoin”— 50 million South Koreans

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As far as mitigating cybercrime risk, I think this recent advisory from the FBI lays out good ground rules, including having your own 2FA/verification scheme and regularly enforce it, insisting on live video calls and using virtual machines for any sort of proficiency tests. https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2024/PSA240903

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Great questions. It’s cliche and everyone recommends this one, but Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick really is one of the best books about North Korea. I also like Anna Fifield’s The Great Successor, Andrei Lankov’s The Real North Korea, Ankit Panda’s Kim Jong Un and the Bomb and Jihyun Park’s The Hard Road Out: Escaping North Korea. Avoid anything written by Yeonmi Park.

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Not the current leader, Kim Jong Un, but portraits of his father and grandfather — past leaders — are required yes. Earlier this year state media published images of a new military academy that had Kim Jong Un’s photo on the wall, however, so this may be a new rule in the future.

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2) North Korea still clings to Soviet-era ideas about central control over the economy and sees capitalism and market forces as foreign threats.

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1) The regime is hostile to foreign businesses and is so heavily sanctioned it’s very difficult to do any sort of commercial activity there. Nonetheless trade and exchanges with Russia appear to be expanding as North Korea continues to send weapons and ammo to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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North Korea has a large standing army, over a million people and many more in reserves. All resources in the country are mobilized to support the military. The regime experiments with new rocket, missile and even drone capabilities frequently. But the bulk of its assets are old and untested. We have very little idea about tactics and strategy either because it’s been 70+ years since North Korea fought a war. We do know that the DPRK has an anemic Air Force and Navy, absolutely no match for South Korea and the U.S. in a crisis.

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South Korea is constitutionally bound to pursue unification but in practice it’s no longer feasible. Majority of South Koreans say they don’t want to unify, especially those under 30. The Koreas are two seperate countries on complete opposite ends of the political, economic and social spectrum. The Kim regime is quite stable and so is democracy in the South.

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The DMZ is not so secret. It’s one of the most heavily fortified and monitored places on earth! It’s also a haven for rare wildlife, from goats to hawks to reptiles, that are endangered or nearly non-existent elsewhere on the Korean Peninsula.

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