The Utopian

By Michael Goldstein.

“You have not seen many shades of grey until you have seen Pyongyang.”

Our correspondent reports from the Hermit Kingdom.

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We crossed the border by train on a May morning. At 9:05 the train shunts into motion, crawls forward, and rattles on, rail by rail, until we reach the bridge separating China from its southern neighbor. All of Dandong is laid out before us: skyscrapers, billboards, ships, all adverts of China’s impressive growth, but on the other side a dreadful emptiness looms.Shortly we are crossing the water, by 9:10 we have crossed. The train slows and comes to a halt. We are in North Korea.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a land defined by its emptiness: the streets contain no signs; the roads contain no cars; the shops contain no food; the apartments yield no light. Seen from space by night, the country appears as if it were submerged under the seas, a vast ocean of black in between the glittering whiteness of South Korea and Northern China. Of the thousand or so Westerners who, like myself, are granted access to the country each year, I think most only want to shine a light into that darkness, to penetrate the many myths that surround this strange country.

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Grey. You have not seen many shades of grey until you have seen Pyongyang. At first these shades seem undifferentiated, but gradually one begins to distinguish asphalt, concrete, dust, cloud. The grayness extends everywhere, from the clothes people wear, to the noodles they eat, to the dull tone of people’s eyes. Western attire is virtually unknown outside the capital; instead monochrome Maosuits, military uniforms, and workers’ overalls fill the sartorial spectrum. There are isolated posters, hailing Communist slogans in shock red and yellow: the sole islands of color in a sea of same.

Pyongyang is less a city than a geometric experiment. The distances between buildings of interest are immense, yawning. Everywhere people trudge through the interstice, crossing the broad open spaces separating points of departure from points of arrival. Bicycles are a luxury, and those who inhabit this concrete savannah rely on public buses. The queues start in the early morning and stretch like snakes into the evening. Residential apartment blocs, colossal in scale, seem designed to overpower and isolate the individual, to shrink the imagination, and expand in its place the sense of awe and terror of the state that made them be.

The degree of state coordination and control in North Korea was always unparalleled within the communist bloc. Not in Yugoslavia, not in Romania, not in Albania could one find a similar restriction of information. Even Cuba is still too suffused with Catholic piety, Latin rhythm, and the myriad temptations of Caribbean life to make the construction of “socialist man” a feasible project. In the hermit Kingdom, by contrast, such an end is pursued, and pursued relentlessly. But what are the origins of this absolute discipline and control?

In 1957, Karl Wittfogel, a German Marxist, published his masterwork, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Absolute Power. The subtle undercurrent of the book was that Stalin’s Soviet Union was not the inevitable outgrowth of Bolshevism, but rather a specific legacy of Russia’s “oriental” history, from the conquests of the Mongol Khans through the rule of the Tsars. In common with ancient China, Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia, Russia ascribed absolute power to a single monarch, without parliamentary, noble, or religious constraint.

With Wittfogel in mind, the hermit Kingdom seemed more comprehensible to me, a place more akin to ancient Egypt or the Inca Empire than the countries of the former Eastern bloc. One Saturday morning, in the coastal town of Nampo, loudspeakers awake us from the town square. Like the ancient hydraulic civilizations, the DPRK implements a labor corvée: once a week every citizen, young or old, in principle from the highest to the lowest echelons, must gather at dawn to receive their mundane and unproductive work assignments, ranging from hewing grass with their hands, to collecting garbage, to retiling the city’s buildings.

The corvée is just one among many ways that the regime allocates the time of its denizens. Each afternoon, for example, masses of the population gather in public squares across the country practicing for the Arirang, or mass games, a phenomenal display of coordinated dances which is held each year for the benefit of the Pyongyang elite. Those chosen must attend such practices every afternoon for three months beforehand; by my conservative estimate, that would entail that each participant dedicates 300 hours a year to this task alone, equivalent to a fifth of the average annual working year in a country such as France or Germany. And that is merely the Arirang. Other accessory activities demanded by the regime, such as military training, are estimated to consume a quarter or more of national income.

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The concept of oriental despotism also helps explain the architecture of Pyongyang, which is in many ways more similar to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, or Astana in Kazakhstan than to Stockholm or Santiago de Cuba. One finds the same long roads, flat surfaces, rows of equally spaced apartment buildings; everywhere the same arid, isolating monumentalism. Amidst this concrete desert, two particular totems stand out: the Kim Il Sung statue, situated in the centre of the city, and the Ryugyong Hotel, to the North. The statue stands twenty metres tall. Embellished in bronze, Kim Il Sung glares over the city from a raised plateau like a modern Ozymandias, an arm outstretched, beckoning the visitor to gaze upon his works with awe and fear. Declared “Eternal President” upon his death in 1994, the elder Kim remains the nominal head of state, and is revered as a deity. Visitors to the country are brought to lay a wreath at his statue’s feet. To take a photo of his incomplete image is prohibited, and if his image appears in print, North Koreans must take care not to fold or crease it.

The Ryugyong Hotel, meanwhile, is a concrete pyramid, now clad in glass, that hovers over the city like an alien mothership, a haunting testimony to the economic collapse of the 1990s. Started in 1987, the structure reaches 330m tall, over three-quarters the height of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Yet after consuming two per cent of North Korean GDP, the project was abandoned in 1992, and has remained an empty shell ever since. In the past year, the Egyptian company Orascom has set to work on cladding the tower in glass, so as to give it the façade of functionality, and at long last renovating the first six floors into the hotel that was originally planned.

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Pyongyang is not a real city, like Amsterdam or New York; it is a political invention. It does not produce anything. Nothing is officially traded there. Its 3.3m inhabitants constitute the political elite and the auxiliary services around them. Residents of other parts of the country must obtain a permit even to visit. By population it is eight times larger than the next city in the country, a giant megalopolis set amidst agrarian wilderness.

In the eastern empires, from the Mongol Empire, to the Mugal Raj, to the Abbasid Caliphate, the capital was not a place of administration, or a commercial hub, but rather the showcase of imperial power: the product of a political system where vast surpluses could be extracted, brought to the imperial capital, and distributed to the court, bureaucracy, and its associated service class. In Europe, by contrast, cities existed largely as centers of trade and commerce, while royal towns were often minor by comparison: witness Madrid, founded in 1562 on the site of a small village, or Berlin, still a middling city of 1.1m people at the height of the German Reich in 1880. By the turn of the 19th century, when Europe’s geopolitical power was paramount, only one of the world’s five largest cities was located in Europe (London), while the other four (Beijing, Guangzhou, Edo and Constantinople) were still to be found in Asia. Many people today see the rise of the Asian megalopolis as a sign of the eclipse of the West. But since the time of Athens and Persepolis, of Rome and Alexandria, such cities have always been exclusive to Asia. Moreover, as political constructions, such Asiatic cities occasionally failed to outlive the empires which begat them: a city such as Vijayanagara in India, capital of the empire of the same name, and with a population of 500,000 in 1500, had entirely ceased to exist two centuries later, while Xanada, the Mongol “summer capital” visited and rhapsodized by Marco Polo, likewise disappeared. The shadow of Ozymandias looms large over the Asiatic city: Look on my works, ye mighty — and despair.

Who can say for certain what will remain of communist Pyongyang, one-hundred years from now? The prospect of total annihilation is never far either from the official propaganda of the regime. In the center of Pyongyang is a simple slogan, emblazed in bold red characters: “A world without North Korea,” it states, “does not deserve to exist.” A world without North Korea: not a world without socialism, or a world without Kim Jong Il. These are intrinsic features of the country, which would cease to be without them.

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How does one justify the fact that North Korea does indeed exist, twenty-one years after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Among the more interesting activities for foreign scholars in the capital is to browse around the Foreign Language Bookstore, which contains the collected works of Kim Il-Sung and his more prolific successor, Kim Jong-Il. These range from the younger Kim’s aesthetic reflections (On the Art of Cinema), to party speeches, and various musings on the challenges facing the regime.

Many of the books date from the early to mid-1990s, when Kim Jong-Il was still consolidating his power, and seems to have been prolific in setting down his ideological mark. Over the last decade, there have been relatively few additions to the collection, and those there have been, are paltry and inane – among the latest, at just 13 pages, is the hilariously titled, Improving the Layout of the Fields is a Great Transformation of Nature for the Prosperity of the Country, A Patriotic Work of Lasting Significance. “I have found,” it begins, “that the fields in the Handure Plain in Thaechon County, North Phyongan Province, have been laid out well in regular shapes and in a sweeping manner.” The field layout must indeed have been quite something. The Dear Leader judges that “from the land rezoning of this province, we can see that nothing can break the revolutionary spirit of our people who are determined to build an economic power with the strength of self-reliance,” and — moreover — that “if people from South Korea see the Handure Plain, they will be surprised and envy it very much.” Enough said. It is as if the regime has given up trying to legitimate itself: or at least, to do so through reasoned argument.

The earlier texts, published after the fall of the Berlin Wall, show more of a sense of how to justify an increasingly brittle system. The socialist regimes of the Eastern bloc had failed, Kim writes, due to an insufficient dedication to socialist ideology: The USSR may have had a socialist economy, but not a purely socialist “culture” due to the corrosive influence of western music, literature, and ideas: The more the imperialists scheme to infiltrate reactionary bourgeois ideology into the socialist countries, the harder these countries must struggle to prevent its infiltration and to equip all members of the society with the revolutionary ideology…all manner of machinations by the imperialists and reactionaries to introduce bourgeois ideology into our ranks [must be] completely crushed.

All sources of such “corruption” must therefore be purged, thereby insulating the regime from any foreign information, exchange, or influence. One senses that the top cadres of the regime, up to Kim Jong-Il himself, did learn from the Soviet collapse, but it was not the same lesson drawn by Deng Xiao Ping in China or Nong Duc Manh in Vietnam. The texts state it explicitly: If Korea is to remain true to the path of socialism — in other words, if the regime is to survive — absolutely strict ideological control must be maintained at all costs.

The practical implications of this lesson are easy to see. In an attempt to close off all sources of western corruption, the regime maintains an absolutely strict prohibition on all sources of foreign influence. The internet is banned. Foreign television, even from China, is inaccessible. All books entering the country must be declared. Access to foreign electronics is so restricted that the price of a MacBook in Pyongyang stands in the region of $12,000. There is subtle kernel of truth in the North Korean slogan, “we have nothing to envy in the world.” For envy depends on desire, and without temptation there is nothing: Most North Koreans have no idea what they might want to envy.

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Except that most North Koreans do know: or rather, though they have little awareness of what is going on in the world, or how poor their nation stands, there remains a pervasive sense that, since the death of Kim Il-Sung something has gone terribly, catastrophically wrong. The shortfall of foreign visitors, the stalled construction, and the terrible famine that has claimed as much as 10 per cent of the population are testimony to a failure universally known yet impossible to voice. Instead, opposition can only be expressed in the most feeble of gestures. Among the Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung pin-badges that each North Korean is obliged to carry on their lapel, by tacit consensus the Kim Jong-Il badge has now disappeared: a latent vote for the memory of a better past.

That better past, and the hope of a better future, came suddenly to an end in 1994, with the death of Kim Il Sung. Since then, the country has collapsed into psychic grief as well as economic decay. Like a mourning widow, following the funeral of the Great Leader the land has faithfully nursed his memory through monuments, parades, songs, and tributes, in expectation of their own final hour. In 1994, many thought that moment imminent; now, 5850 days have passed, and they are still there, waiting and hoping, suspended in grief and misery.

How do North Koreans come to terms with a fate in limbo? It is impossible to know, yet the accounts of dissidents suggest that the main priority is simply to survive, until something, at some point, finally changes. Life has been postponed towards an indefinite future: to prospective reunification — the one legitimate cause that the regime’s elites and opponents can share — and the transfer of power to Kim Jong-Il’s third son, Kim Jong-Un, believed to begin as soon as 2012, with the celebrations of his grandfather’s 100^th birthday. This May on the Nampo waterfront locals sit with fishing rods, staring out over the Pacific with the same absent fascination with which Western teenagers might gaze at the stars. One of them turned to our guide as we passed: “When they go, tell them to bring others,” he said. “Let them see what we are really like; and let us hear of the places they are from.”