International Aid and Sustainable Development in North Korea by Sojin Lim

Author:Sojin Lim
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000919653
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2023-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Cloaked by Economic Elites

Marketisation was established in the shadow economy, and resistance to minimise the regime’s market power remains in the shadows. Those responsible for ‘imposing’ regulations at the street level are willing to take bribes from businesses as they themselves are suffering due to the broken state supply system. The culture of bribery has thus become their own survival system in the government. Meanwhile, for citizens, rather than create a collision between the state and the market, bribery of the street-level bureaucracy provides an exit from the central government’s surveillance system. Thus, forbidden activities are informally acceptable. While the state controls markets, the markets rule over society, and also the state vice versa. The authority is indirectly forced to continue to leverage and balance between market autonomy and state restrictions. In this context, the role of the newly created economically powerful class in the social classification system—for instance, donju—has created another layer within society. Donju keep changes to a minimum by balancing state control and market autonomy at the individual level rather than gathering as a powerful collective force against the state.

This is because people (and thus society) do not know ‘how to’ become an empowered civil society. Having knowledge and acting on that knowledge are two distinct things (Kim-S, 2021). Having information may have successfully helped people realise that the current government system is not adequate for them. However, they do not know how to challenge it. Even though people have developed innovative ways to hide illegal activities and improper expressions from the country’s surveillance system, they have not reached the point of boycotting the authority. Rather, they use doublespeak to share risky information so that such disobedience activities remain a secret within society (see Chapter 3). While we might be able to observe how soft power is slowly ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of North Koreans—to borrow Nye’s (2008) expression here—this has not yet translated into mass activism. Resistance occurs at the individual level rather than collectively, and the failure of other individuals to join in has resulted in each case of resistance losing its bargaining power (Szalontai and Choi, 2014). Thus, the society is not sufficiently empowered to become a ‘civil society’ for a democratic transition to occur through the marketisation process. People would rather defect than collectively rebel.

Also, society itself is segmented into different layers of the class system. In the case of social movements, the elites or the educated are typically the ones who can bravely challenge the system and lead resistance to it. However, in North Korea, the elites fear the regime or want to remain within their comfort zone. They do not understand how people in other segments of society live, they do not even think to cooperate with them for further changes, and they do not want to lose their privileges. There is knowledge and there are potential actions that can be taken, but there is no connection between ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ as yet. The existence of donju and economic disparity blocks potential actions and has even worsened in society.

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