The Great Successor by Fifield Anna;

Author:Fifield, Anna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

While people like Ri flourished at the top of the regime, there were plenty of more independent agents at the grassroots level who were allowed to get rich and help stabilize the system by spreading that wealth around.

“I was selling crabs, shrimp, and mushrooms to China and Russia,” one of these self-made masters of money, Oh Yuna, told me one day after she’d escaped to South Korea. She sent out one-ton containers full of sought-after seafood, sometimes five containers at a time. “So I was rich,” she said.

North Korean crabs can fetch twenty dollars a pound in China, and one container can carry tens of thousands of pounds.

Oh was based in Rason, an area near the borders with China and Russia, where the warm-water ports of Rajin and Sonbong had been combined into a special economic zone. It was one of the most freewheeling parts of North Korea.

The SEZ was started by Kim Jong Un’s father in the 1990s but never took off. It has developed quickly, however, under the Great Successor. This cloistered zone gives local entrepreneurs more creative license and the proximity of the country’s two major trading partners supplying the demand, while its relative isolation within North Korea has enabled the regime to cordon it off and control the spread of capitalism.

Oh became a master of money by bribing the right cadres to let her trade goods in the markets. This way, she became rich the old-fashioned way—by having a good nose for it.

“I was very good at business,” she told me over lunch in an Italian restaurant near her home outside Seoul. “I made sure I put very good quality crabs and shrimp and fish in my boxes. Some people filled their boxes with inferior seafood then put a layer of top-quality seafood on the top. But I never did that.”

She hadn’t been out of North Korea long, but she looked every inch the South Korean high roller, with her stylishly ripped jeans and her expensive-looking fur-collared coat, her suspiciously sharp cheekbones, and her black, bejeweled manicure. After she escaped to South Korea, she’d bought a huge apartment and a Mercedes-Benz and was able to indulge her young daughter’s insistence on French brand clothes.

Oh used money she’d inherited from her mother’s trading business to buy three fishing boats and send them out. She’d take 60 percent of their catch, and they’d keep the rest.

She’d ply the local authorities with beer and top-notch crab. They’d also get bundles of Chinese yuan, as would the border guards and customs agents who allowed her shipments to cross into China. Everyone won.

She knew that the secret to business success in North Korea came by greasing palms—a lot of them. “You have to bribe everyone to be able to do this kind of business,” she told me in between answering calls from various business associates. In the South, Oh runs three factories and constantly has deals to forge or disputes to resolve.

But in the North, she had a different set of

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