Books: “A Capitalist in North Korea” reviewed by Leonid Petrov

[CanKor Brain Trust member Dr. Leonid Petrov is a Russian academic teaching Korean History and Language at the University of Sydney. He is also a Research Associate at the Australian National Uuniversity School of International, Political & Strategic Studies. This review is taken from “Leonid Petrov’s KOREA VISION”, a personal website representing his views and opinions about both North and South Korea. –CanKor]

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A CAPITALIST IN NORTH KOREA: My seven years in the Hermit Kingdom, by Felix Abt. Amazon Digital Services, Inc., 2012. ISBN (ePub Edition): 978-1-937572-92-1. Reviewed by CanKor Brain Trust member Leonid Petrov.

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This new book on North Korea is extraordinary. Since the late 1990s the influx of analytical and documentary literature on North Korea can be broadly divided into two categories: those that exhibit the terrors of life in North Korea, and the rest that speculate on what is wrong with North Korea. Felix Abt, a Swiss entrepreneur who lived and worked in the last communist Hermit Kingdom for seven years, attempts to depict life in North Korea as “normal” despite overwhelming ideological pressure from within and the harsh treatment from foreign powers. To date, only a handful of famed historians, such as Bruce Cumings and Gavan McCormack, have succeeded in showing North Korea from such an unusual angle.

As a business entrepreneur, Felix Abt prefers to remain apolitical and impartial when sharing his thoughts and memories of the seven-year sojourn. His writing exhibits his love for Korea and genuine concern for its people. In his assessments of North Korea’s past and present, the author approaches all issues from a human (and humanistic) perspective, attempting to present life in the country sans political or ideological colouring. But documenting everyday life in the DPRK “as it is” is often inherently counterproductive to the goal of presenting North Korea as “normal” or even on the road to normality. Snapshots of life in North Korea, more often than not, exhibit the miserable lives of the common people alongside the growing wealth of the privileged and trusted groups in the capital, Pyongyang.

DPRK Business Monthly Volume III, No.11

The DPRK Business Monthly, an international business report edited in Beijing, has been made available to CanKor readers by its editor, Paul White. Please check the  current December 2012 edition here: DPRK Business Monthly Vol III, No.11

Titles of articles found in this issue include:

• DPRK-China Trade Up 62%
• German NGO Research Institute of Organic Agriculture
• Kempinski to Manage Ryugyong Hotel
• Mongolia Eyes Rajin Port Access
• Book Review: A Capitalist in North Korea by Felix Abt

…plus a number of other items, including a selection of North Korean tours by various tour operators.

Comment by the Business Monthly Editor:

While blogs and tabloid newspapers had a field day with North Korea’s supposed announcement that it had discovered a “unicorn lair,” more responsible journalists pointed out that “unicorn” is one of many English translations of the word “Kirin.” This is the name of a mythical beast in Asian folklore, along with the dragon and the phoenix. In fact, KCNA itself pointed this out. Calling a cave a “Kirin cave” is no stranger than calling a peak “Dragon Peak” or a valley “Dragon Valley.”

The aim of the report was to offer the inscription “Kiringul” as evidence that King Tongmyong, the founder of the Koguryo kingdom (37 BC-668 AD) set up his capital near Pyongyang. This is understandable given the importance the DPRK and the ROK attach to claiming the allegiance of all Koreans. There are legends associated with the king, including one that he rode a Kirin.

If that was all there was to it, it would be hardly worth mentioning. But it is important to note that much reporting hostile to the DPRK will by accident — or design — pick on a clumsy translation to sneer at the North Koreans and present a misleading picture of the place.

Please feel free to consult the full issue by clicking on this link: DPRK Business Monthly Vol III, No.11

Related articles

• DPRK Business Monthly Volume III, No.10 (CanKor.ca)
• DPRK Business Monthly Volume III, No.9 (CanKor.ca)
• DPRK Business Monthly Volume III, No.8 (CanKor.ca)
• DPRK Business Monthly Volume III, No.7 (CanKor.ca)
• DPRK Business Monthly Volume III, No.6 (CanKor.ca)

Movie: Comrade Kim Goes Flying

Two very different movies about North Korea were featured in September’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The first was a documentary entitled “Camp 14 – Total Control Zone”, by the German filmmaker Marc Wiese. According to the TIFF publicity, this is “An enthralling documentary portrait of twenty-nine-year-old Shin Dong-huyk, who was born and spent the first two decades of his life behind the barb wire of a North Korean labour camp, until his dramatic escape launched him into an outside world he had never known.” The movie is based on the book by journalist Blaine Harden entitled Escape From Camp 14, which has been reviewed for CanKor by editor Jack Kim.

The second film featured at the TIFF was a romantic comedy, a joint Belgium, UK & North Korea production. According to TIFF, the movie is about “A young female coal miner (who) struggles to realize her dream of becoming a circus acrobat in this winning, life-affirming fable that is the first Western-financed fiction feature ever made in North Korea.”

In reviewing the TIFF, the New York Times had this to say about the film: 

Books: Escape From Camp 14

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ESCAPE FROM CAMP 14, by Blaine Harden. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012. X 224 pp. hardcover. ISBN 978-0670023325. Reviewed by CanKor “Human Factor” editor Jack Kim.

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For those who disbelieved, and continue to disbelieve, North Korean refugees when they first started trickling in, Shin Dong Hyuk’s story is the mother of them all. Born in a concentration camp, witness to unspeakable horrors, the protagonist of an amazing escape from a country that condemned him even before he was born. The story is, well, far too fantastic. It is unbelievable.

His story has been well documented in the media. After all, the book hit double digits on the amazon.com best seller list. According to Shin, he was born in Camp 14 to inmates of the camp, grew up there, watched his mother and brother executed, and serendipitously managed to escape not only the camp, but the DPRK itself. According to the author, Shin describes nonchalantly every day features of the camp that to those of us fortunate enough to live outside its fences, stir up Holocaust imagery: starvation, public executions, camp guards savagely beating inmates. He describes how snitching became a method of survival, to the point that he reverses previous accounts of his life in the book by admitting that this very snitching led to the execution of his mother and brother.

Books: Inspector O and the case of Jon Yong Chol

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THE MAN WITH THE BALTIC STARE: an Inspector O Novel, by James Church. New York: Minotaur Books, 2010. 279 pp. Can$29.99, hardcover. ISBN 978-0-312-37292-7. Reviewed by CanKor editor-in-chief Erich Weingartner.

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A most unusual document reached us at CanKor early in August. It isn’t unusual for us to receive messages from the Pyongyang-based Korean Committee for Solidarity with the World People. We are obviously on the KCSWP mailing list, and have published a number of their documents right here on the CanKor website. Usually these concern anniversaries or special pronouncements by the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Not this time. Attached to the partially garbled email message was a file with an attention-grabbing title: “INTERVIEW WITH THE ARRESTED TERRORIST.” The email explains that Jon Yong Chol had been caught trying to perpetrate the “hideous crime of undermining the supreme dignity of the DPRK at the instructions of the U.S. and south Korean intelligence agencies.” He was subsequently interviewed by domestic and international reporters in Pyongyang on 19 July 2012.

I found it interesting that the DPRK scribes referred to this document throughout as an “interview” although – as you can see from the transcript – the hapless Jon Yong Chol clearly calls it a “confession”. Have DPRK translators become aware that the word “confession” elicits an emotionally negative response and wanted to give this document an air of objectivity? The email underlines repeatedly that the important thing to pay attention to is the identity of the ROK and US puppet masters, not the gullible individual who was close to committing the crime.

Jon’s confession is excruciatingly detailed, naming names, organizations and places. The goal behind a conspiracy to blow up monuments to Kim Il Sung (the “statue demolition society”, purportedly) in order to sow confusion and undermine confidence in the central government’s authority also makes political sense. In other words, if this confession is a fiction, it has been very well researched and made to seem perfectly plausible, at least to the casual reader.

David Hawk on the second edition of Hidden Gulag

[In 2003, CanKor Brain Trust member David Hawk, Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, authored “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps” for the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. The book contained numerous former prisoners’ testimonies and satellite photographs of the locations identified by them. Earlier this year a second, revised and augmented edition of this book was published. We asked David to explain why a new edition seemed necessary and some of the differences between the two. –CanKor]

David R. Hawk

CanKor: Why a second edition of Hidden Gulag?

Hawk: The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea wanted a second edition because the 2003 edition was long out of print. So rather than reprint additional hard copies of a then eight year old report, the Committee asked me to do an update.

Hidden Gulag had become something of a textbook on political imprisonment in North Korea. So I wanted to do an update that would have a “long shelf live” in the sad event that things in the DPRK remain largely the same. The Committee agreed that I should do an almost entirely new report as there is now much more information available about the practices of arbitrary detention. (When in 2002-2003 I did thirty in-depth interviews for the first edition there were some 3,000 former North Koreans who fled to China and South Korea, among whom were two score persons who had been imprisoned in the DPRK. By 2010-11 when I did an additional thirty interviews for the 2nd edition there were some 23,000 former North Koreans now recently resident in South Korea, among whom literally hundreds were previously incarcerated in the DPRK’s variety of forced labor facilities for persons deemed to have committed political offenses.)

North Korea as a Nuclear Power and the Prospects of Its Control, by Hans-Joachim Schmidt

[This is a paper for German readers of CanKor. The author, Dr. Hans-Joachim Schmidt, is Senior Research Fellow at the Hessische Stiftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (HSFK) – also known in English as Peace Research Institute Frankfurt/M (PRIF) – and an expert on the Six-Party Talks. Dr. Schmidt is a good friend of CanKor and has previously submitted his work for our benefit. We thank the author for making the full German version of this paper available to CanKor. A brief summary of his latest paper follows here in both English and German. For the full version of the German paper, please follow this link: Nordkorea als Nuklearmacht – Chancen der Kontrolle, or by clicking on the image of the title page below. – CanKor]

North Korea as a Nuclear Power and the Prospects of Its Control

In the latest HSFK-Report, Hans-Joachim Schmidt evaluates the prospects of both cooperative and confrontational approaches against the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

Since its first nuclear test in 2006, a nuclear North Korea cannot be prevented anymore. Therefore, one major aim of international politics must be to delay, constrain and control the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

In HSFK-Report 1/2012, Nordkorea als Nuklearmacht – Chancen der Kontrolle (North Korea as a Nuclear Power and the Prospects of Its Control), Hans-Joachim Schmidt presents the multifaceted regional and global threats of both conventional and nuclear armament of North Korea and analyzes how the North Korean leadership can be urged to follow its international commitments.

He examines problems and prospects of cooperative and confrontational approaches by South Korea, the US, Japan, China and Russia who seek a political arrangement with North Korea regarding nuclear technology. Against the background of their different interests, the author develops specific propositions for a relaunch of the six-party talks following the presidential elections in the USA and South Korea.

An Insider’s Account of Obama’s North Korea Strategy, by Jeffrey A. Bader

[On 8 March 2012 the Brookings Institution held a launch for Jeffrey Bader’s latest book, “Obama and China’s Rise: an Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy”. Bader is currently John C. Whitehead Senior Fellow in International Diplomacy, Foreign Policy at the John L. Thornton China Center in Washington DC. Previously, he was President Obama’s Senior Director for Asia on the National Security Council for the first 3 years. The following is a selection of what the author had to say about US North Korea policy, which figures prominently in the book. This selection is taken from the 9 Mach 2012 edition of The Nelson Report. To hear the entire speech, please click March 8, 2012 book launch at Brookings. –CanKor]

Jeffrey A. Bader

(…) Instead of describing how seamlessly we executed plans drawn up in the first days, let me lay out what we did in reaction to events. As one of my colleagues said to me after a frustrating day dealing with demands for elaboration of a strategy, “there’s no such thing as strategy; there’s only tactics.” An exaggeration, to be sure, sort of like the observation that history is just one damned thing after another. But it frequently feels like the complete truth when you’re in the middle of the fray.

First, North Korea, since that was the issue that posed the most immediate dangers and consumed so much time, effort, and energy.

We came into office on something like automatic pilot, prepared to pick up implementation of Assistant Secretary Chris Hill’s plan for dismantling the Yongbyon plutonium reactor. But North Korea quickly eliminated that option. Intelligence in February 2009 showed North Korean plans to launch an ICBM, later announced to be a satellite launch. We could not proceed with implementation of dismantlement, and further international shipments of heavy fuel oil, under the shadow of an ICBM launch. So it’s fair to say that North Korea’s plan produced a very significant hardening of attitudes in the Obama national security team.

Books: “Witness To Transformation” by Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland

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WITNESS TO TRANSFORMATION: Refugee Insights into North Korea, by Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland. Washington DC: Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2011. 182 pp. US$23.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-88132-438-9. This book review was written by CanKor Human Factor Editor Jack Kim.

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In a former life as a management consultant, there was one lesson my superiors drilled into me: good decisions were all about data, data, and data. The more data you collected that was of superior quality, the more likely you were going to make a recommendation that would benefit the client.

Of course, that seems like common sense to most of us. But sometimes this simple lesson is lost upon those who make the “above-my-paygrade” decisions in life. Notwithstanding the limits of evidence-based decision-making, there are plenty of instances we can point out in the geopolitical sphere where catastrophic decisions were made with little regard to the data available. For example, Iraq comes to mind. The Rwandan massacre is another example of the world ignoring the evidence available.

But in many cases it is not only the qualitative analysis of data that is the issue – it is a lack of data in itself that prevents us from making decisions we should have otherwise made. When it comes to human rights, the world’s experience with the Cambodian genocide comes to mind. One of the reasons, especially early on, that the world stood idly by as at least two million Cambodians were murdered by Pol Pot and his cronies, was the Khmer Rouge’s ability to manage the information that came out of the country. In short, the atrocities themselves were hidden behind the curtain of control, sparking doubts of credulity in the outside world.

Of course, if there’s any a regime that has been as successful as the Khmer Rouge in controlling information flows, it is Pyongyang.

Books: “The Orphan Master’s Son”, reviewed by James Church

[James Church is the pseudonym of a former Western intelligence officer with intimate knowledge of the DPRK, who has authored four “Inspector O” mystery novels set in North Korea. There seems to be much excitement about a new novel by Adam Johnson that purports to be a “window into North Korea”. Adam Johnson is a creative writing teacher at Stanford University known mostly for short stories published by a wide range of magazines from Paris Review to Esquire. He has no North Korean experience whatsoever, except for one visit to Pyongyang as a tourist, but has reportedly spent the past six years working on what would become “The Orphan Master’s Son”. His second novel, this book follows a fictional young man’s journey through fictional tunnels and torture chambers of a fictional North Korea. The main character is the son of a kidnapped singer and an influential master of a work camp for orphans. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do (John Doe?) comes to the attention of superiors in the state and rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper and … well, there’s violence, romance, and eventually heroism, as well as reconfirmation of all the cliches about the horrors of life in the DPRK. –CanKor]

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THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON, by Adam Johnson. Random House Publishing Group, 2012. 464 pp. US$30.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-0-8129-9279-3 (0-8129-9279-2). This review by James Church was first published by our partner-site 38North under the title “The Orphan Master’s Son”: No Window.

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The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson (Random House)

The range of topics for authors is endless, the techniques of story telling as diverse as the stars in the sky, limited only by what eyes can see—with or without reading glasses—and the public’s brain can comprehend.

All of this applies in spades to Adam Johnson’s new book, The Orphan Master’s Son. Many readers are blown away by its pyrotechnic, shape-shifting, picaresque (choose one or all) approach. It may, indeed, be the best book of the year. The reviews are stellar. All the same, there is a little-noted fly in this ointment, and it is this: For some reason someone decided somewhere along the line to sell the book as a window into North Korea.

That, decidedly, it is not.

If readers like the writing, like the plot twists, like the characters, then good on them. But the book is packaged, touted, and sold as “insight” into North Korea. Someone ought to stand up and gently point out that it isn’t. It might as well be me. I’ve written a few stories set in North Korea, and I’m happy for some company. Let me be clear. What I’m mainly concerned about here is the sales pitch, not the book itself.

We might begin with a simple fact. The author of the book admits he knows next to nothing about North Korea. That would be the end of the problem, except he doesn’t follow through and simply clam up on the subject in his public remarks. How could he set a book in North Korea and say nothing about the country in all the interviews and book tour appearances? That’s a dilemma, but solving it by letting North Korea be the sizzle for the book isn’t the answer. That may be the publicists’ idea. It may simply have been a decision that came out of thin air. No doubt, it wasn’t such a difficult decision to make. If no one knows anything about North Korea, if everyone is equally ignorant, then there is no danger, and certainly no harm, in taking everyone for a nice ride, is there?