The Hidden People of North Korea Read Online Free PDF

aid or allows the people to supplement their income by participating in a parallel economy. When the economy breaks down, as North Korea’s has, survival becomes an individual rather than a collective effort, as is described in chapter 4, which takes a more detailed look at the health, welfare, and work of the people.
    Chapter 5 begins with the self-evident proposition that people need information to make intelligent choices. In order to limit the choices available to its people, the Kim regime has severely restricted information. Predictably, the so-called mosquito net that the regime has drawn over the country to block outside influences has developed holes. By secretly listening to foreign radio and television broadcasts and watching smuggled videotapes and discs, North Koreans are learning about the outside world, and this unauthorized information is beginning to change their beliefs. However, beliefs, the topic of chapter 6, change slowly, and in North Korea any beliefs other than the officially sanctioned thought of the party must be carefully hidden. In fact, it appears that most North Koreans do not even think about politics but instead focus on economic survival.
    Chapter 7 takes up the related topics of the law, political class, and human rights. It is not unusual for dictatorial governments to grant their citizens a long list of constitutional rights, but most of these rights exist only on paper. The more rights the people enjoy, the more constraints are placed on the leader. Since the late 1980s, millions of North Koreans have not even enjoyed the right to an adequate diet. If the Kim regime does eventually reform its political system, which is far from certain, granting its people more individual rights will probably be the last step it takes.
    Chapter 8 recounts how hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have fled across the border into China and how, by 2009, over fifteen thousand of them had then made their way to South Korea. Severe economic hardships, loss of confidence in Kim Jong-il’s leadership, and disillusionment and curiosity due to information about the outside world are the main reasons they leave their homeland. Their flight to China and their struggle to survive or move on to a more hospitable haven in South Korea provide clues about what North Koreans will face if the Kim regime collapses in the near future.
    The material for these chapters has come to us from many sources. Because our writings have been uniformly critical of the Kim regime, we have not been permitted to visit North Korea; instead, we have let North Koreans come to us. Over two hundred defectors have been interviewed by Kongdan Oh in recent years. In addition, Koreans and Chinese who live on the Chinese side of the North Korean border have shared their observations. North Korean officials attending international conferences are usually eager to talk with Oh, whose family originally came from North Korea (although she was born in South Korea). We have also consulted many North Korea specialists in South Korea, China, and Japan and studied thousands of news reports, travelers’ accounts, and direct transcriptions and translations of North Korean media reports and internal documents. We frequently quote from domestic North Korean sources as a means of illustrating the information environment in which the North Korean people live, and it must be admitted that a secondary motive for doing this is to convict the Kim regime with its own words.
    North Korea is constantly changing, and in any case it is impossible to be entirely accurate when describing a population of twenty-three million people. We believe our conclusions about North Korea are substantially correct, although we would be the first to admit that a few of the details may not be entirely accurate or up-to-date. One of the defectors we have interviewed on several occasions has been kind enough to read through the entire manuscript and tells us that, based on his