Life in North Korea

Ok, barring one isn’t in a labor camp, in the military or buiding the latest missile or nuclear bomb, what is life like for the average North Korean? Besides farming, what other professions are there, except the aforementioned ones? All I get from the media are mass games, labor camps and a police woman directing almost non-existent traffic.

I have nothing specific to add, but am very interested in the answer.

I did however see an online series about an american dude (he looked like a dude) who went to North Korea - but I can’t remember what it was called :frowning:

ETA: Found it! It’s alled the Vice Guide to North Korea

Get your hands on the documentary film North Korea: A Day in the Life. As the title suggests, it depicts a day in the life of an average North Korean family, without any narration or explicit commentary. It was filmed by (IIRC) a German film team with permission of the DPRK, though it’s by no means a puff propaganda piece. Many of the more undesirable aspects of life in the DPRK are depicted, including the frequent electricity outages.

I’ve heard North Koreans are shorter than South Koreans, because they don’t get enough to eat. Not sure if that’s true.

This. There’s nothing like an 800-page history/journalistic account to familiarize one with the cluster of issues posed by North Korea today. I concede that the early chapters (on the history of the Kim dynasty, beginning with Kim Il-Sung’s role in the Korean resistance to the Japanese occupation during WWII) are tedious and less relevant than the rest of the book to the dilemmas posed by NK to South Korea, Japan, China, and the US today, so feel free to skip them, but the latter two-thirds or three-quarters of the book is indispensible to understanding NK.

Economically, you could sum it up roughly like this: the Kims’ ideology of national self-reliance (juche) mandates an insular self-sufficiency in all things, with as little interaction and trade with the rest of the world as possible, generally speaking. Accordingly, they try to grow all the food they need (even though NK’s climate and terrain and high population density render this nearly impossible, and so they suffer frequent famines) as well as manufacture a full range of industrial and consumer products (despite their minimal contacts with the outside world and inadequate energy sources).

On the latter goal, they’re constantly copying and retro-engineering everything they can get their hands on from the West, but this is an increasingly inefficient and doomed economic strategy for competing with a world that’s increasingly information-based, in contrast to NK’s regime, which could be termed anti-information, anti-communication, anti-freedom of movement, and anti-freedom of ideas. (It’s one thing to copy a toaster oven, but how does an increasingly backwards and isolated state go about copying a PC or an iPod – especially when you lack reliable electricity, private telephones, or access to the internet?) One of the fundamental concepts in macroeconomics is that of economies of scale and the mutual benefit that comes from countries’ specialization in particular products and services according to their resources and expertise. NK’s obsession with juche frustrates that natural tendency, so they have people making lousy NK radios (that tune in to the government channel), lousy NK shoes, lousy NK railroad locomotives, growing inadequate quantities of wheat, etc. etc.

That may indeed be true, because real hunger is not wholly unknown there.

Having read a few sources on this, it depends a lot on where you live. If you live in Pyongyang, your life is worlds away from a village in the boonies, even though you might be hardly a stone’s throw away. In the city, you have electricity (sometimes, for part of the day). Your loyalty is bought by the government with some halfway-decent goods. But you are also watched all the time, and must guard everything you say. Productivity is low and entertainment options few.

Out of the cities, unless you are in the military, your world is even smaller and more traditional in scope. You fear the military taking away your food at the next bad harvest. You sneak away any food you can for your family’s hidden stores.

If you work directly in the government, you have a better life than most (and at higher levels, you have something which vaguely approximates a western lifestyle). But you also have to worry about politics more than most. Being on the wrong side of a purge could wreck your whole livelihood. People who want to make the country a better place are probably going to be kneecapped and then purged by people who want things to continue.

More on this. Juche is not just an idiology of self-reliance. It’s a whole philosophical system which, at its core, states that North Koreans are teh bestest and the Kim family is teh bestest of teh bestest, and everyone ought to listen to them, everywhere, on everything.

Yes, it’s mind-bogglingly stupid. They’ve even gone so far as to claim Kim Jong-Il was born on the sacred mountain and lightning cracked down to celebrate his glorious birth, etc (he was actually born in a Pyongyang hospital). Kim Il-Sung was basically an idiot Soviet Puppet. He got his job by kissing Soviet butt and letting other, non-Soviet and non-Chinese and mostly non-Communist leaders do the work of fighting the Japanese. The Soviets came in afterward, claimed Il-Sung was the Big Dog and had done all this wonderful stuff. Il-Sung inadvertently started the Korean War later on in the somewhat unsettled period after WW2 through sheer stupidity.

I picked this up a couple of years ago. It’s a great look at North Korea from an outside perspective. Guy Delisle went there to do some freelance animation for the government. He also has one on Burma. Maybe he’s hitting all the dictatorships and will bring them to us in Graphic novel form!
I spent three years in Seoul, and saw North Korean propaganda flyers all over the place. Unfortunately it was illegal to have any, so I turned them in to one of the hundreds of “Amnesty Boxes” before I left. Too bad, because it was a great example of people trying to woo you with no real idea of what your daily life entailed. Fascinating stuff.

I even got to sit in with an interview of a North Korean refugee. the life they live up there should not exist in the 21st century.

I mentioned this elsewhere on the Board, but one of my wife’s colleagues, another Thai lady, was there last year as part of a UN team taking a census. She was told ahead of time to take a flashlight, due to power outages. I believe she was there maybe three weeks, often out in rural areas, and after returning she told the wife that the people she saw seemed fairly healthy, all things considered.

A couple of very interesting reads:

-tears of my soul by Hyun Hee Kim. This is a story of the life of a North Korean spy responsible for the bombing of a Korean Passenger plane. The book is an autobiography. She covers stuff like daily life in North Korea and her spy training program.

-the Reluctant Communist by Charles Jenkins. The story of a US soldier who defected to the north during the Korean war. He thought that he’d be handed over to the Soviet’s and sent back to the US. Boy was he wrong. He spent 40+ years there and shares his life story in this book.

There is also a documentary called Crossing the Line which revolves around another US soldier defector called Dresnok. He and Jenkins spent a lot of time together in the North and both seem to have very different takes on the country (probably not very surprisingly as Jenkins is now free and in Japan while Dresnok is still in N. Korea. Anyway, all very interesting.

The famines were somewhat loocalized because the distribution system broke down. The NK state basicall had a policy of taking everything and then handing it out again. As corruption and bad governance worsened, people started not wanting to turn their food over. So rural people simply hid it away, while th military tried to steal anything they could. It was the relatively urban populations who suffered most.

I just watched part 1 of that and can’t wait to get home tonight at watch the rest. How interesting!

here’s a diary -from 1986- by a British guy who lived in Pyongyang for a year teaching English, and describes daily life as he saw it: 15 pages of very interesting observations
He seems pretty objective, and gives a lot of detail about what he sees, but also knows that he isn’t seeing the whole story

Very! But it doesn’t give you much insight into normal life though. It’s mainly “the Dude” doing his tourist trip.

I’m hoping to go to North Korea this summer, and have heard it described as a “Communist Disneyland” in a morbid sort of way.

Actually, he was probably born in the far eastern Soviet Union.

I just finished watching all 14 episodes the Vice Guide to NK. It was pretty good considering the restrictions they were working under.
Makes me want to know more…

North Korea and Cuba are the two most prominent examples of government that claim to aspire to the “Communist Ideal”. In fact, neither of those countries are Communist, they are dictatorships. Both are failures in respect to the quality of life that they have provided their people. The failure of the North Korean government has gotten them to the point where, in order to provide basic sustenance, their major industry is shaking down other countries by threats and therefore getting outside aid.

Contrast Cuba and North Korea to Vietnam. Vietnam claims to be a communist government but they followed the Chinese model of economic development. While the situation in Vietnam is not perfect there is no shortage or food or goods. The people are working, moving and getting ahead (yes, some get left behind). In Cuba and North Korea the average person that isn’t being subsidized by someone outside the country has a daily struggle to get the basics of survival. The black market is more effective and efficient than the established government market. What does that say?

I just saw the Vice Guide series and it came off that way. Everything was for show and instead of Walt Disney, we get Kim Il-sung as Lord Farquaad.( I will have order! I will have perfection! )

If I may ask another question. I heard that during the reunion of the families who were separated between North and South that when asked how life was in the North, the North Koreans would, if seated, stand up and spouted how the “Great Leader” took care of them almost Pavlov-like. Any truth to this?

I’ve not read this, but it comes highly recommended: Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, a graphic novel based on the personal experiences of a Western visitor, the Canadian Quebecois Guy Delisle.