BOOK REVIEW A glimpse into North Korean thinking North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula - A Modern History by Paul
French
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Reviewed by Michael Mackey
Those in search of an easy read would do better than tackle Paul French's
modern history of Korea - aptly titled Paranoid Peninsula . Not that
there is anything substantively wrong with this
book, it's just not a cheerful or even uplifting topic. Misgivings aside, it is
a good book.
The underheralded thesis is North Korea is now effectively an "aid economy"
where foreign assistance is used by the government to ensure its own survival -
quite often at the expense of its people.
French certainly knows his stuff, and there is no shortage of good arguments
and facts as he details this thesis and its worrying implications. This is a
book packed with information without being emotional or rhetorical as the
subject tends to make people.
Consider this excerpt, "Between 1995 and 2002 the US government donated almost
2 million tonnes of food aid and US$1 billion in energy and other aid to North
Korea, making the country the largest single Asian recipient of American state
aid." It's hard
to imagine such a statement in the hands of a propagandist - let alone one from
Pyongyang. But French is a good straight-forward reporter with these startling
facts.
Some of these facts have been in the public domain for some time, but one of
the strengths of this book is that it puts a good number of them into one text.
It's a meaty read - there can be no doubt about that - sometimes too much so.
For example, attempts to make the northwestern city of Sinuiji on the Chinese
border a Special Economic Zone, well reported during the autumn of 2002 as
those curious events unfolded, is repeated at length. That's the too-much side
of the equation; on the neglected side there is only a short discourse on a
similar earlier attempt in Raijin-Sonbong near the China and Russia borders and
nothing at all on North Korea's most recent experiment in free trade at Kaesong
near the South Korean border.
This is a great shame because the approach taken there - close to the
prosperous South and allowing smaller enterprises to use low-cost labor - is a
bit like China's approach to economic reform.
Mirroring this, the section on reunification, a bit predictable to those who
covered Germany in 1989-90 or report on Korea, is limited. China's role and
potential role is not examined in great enough depth and precedents besides
Germany, such as Vietnam, Yemen and Cameroon, are not mentioned - not even in
passing.
Fortunately (or not), French abstains from advocating a bombshell thesis along
the lines of: if China has found that "one country-two systems" works with Hong
Kong and Macau (and quite possibly could work for Taiwan), why not the same
model in Korea? It's an intriguing thought maybe beyond the remit of this book,
but still worth thinking about.
One of the sections where some judicious editing would definitely not have gone
amiss is at the beginning where there is an exposition of North Korea's guiding
philosophy, juche, and following that an overview of its economic
problems.
Juche is basically understood to be self-sufficiency, self-reliance (of
the nation not the individual). It is not a unique political philosophy,
although it's not cross-referenced with other countries that take the same
path, which is a bit of a disappointment.
Some pages are given over to it - its links to Marxism, its inversions of it,
its specificity to Korea. Part of the problem is that juche is, as
French himself refers to it, "A creative application of Marxism-Leninism."
We won't go into how creative or assume that French is being ironic. But is
that rather a contradiction in terms? And isn't it also rather mid-Seventies?
Who else when they hear that kind of phrase thinks seminar rooms and overdue
term papers?
It is perhaps wise not to overstress this annoyance. It is only some pages, but
frankly because it's about a philosophy that is heading for extinction,
probably faster than the great apes, I just felt it a waste.
Similarly, in a discussion of North Korea's basket-case economy, there was a
bit too much on the history, the non-development if you like, of North Korea's
economy. Again, cutting yourself off from the outside world is now generally
assumed to be a bad thing - it's best to accept that the globalized trading
system as a good thing is a given. However, the detail French puts in as to how
this happened, or didn't - impressive and daunting in equal measure - could
have been condensed.
Where there is a freshness to this book is in showing the human side of what
this all means. Luckily, French, who manages to be both friend and sparring
partner of this reviewer, does not descend into mawkishness - even his
treatment of the refugee privations are dry-eyed and factual. And because of
that, they are so much more chilling.
One of the early chapters - "A Normal Day in Pyongyang" - adds so much to the
book. It was interesting to read about what everyday life in the North is like:
grim, with some very minor cracks appearing in the monolith.
Take this detail: a man arriving to collect a female date on a Sea Gull bicycle
- which costs several months wages - is considered "a good prospect". Not that
it works the other way. "In 1999, DPRK TV denounced 'bicycle-riding women in
trousers' as a practice running counter to good morals and manners." In other
less desperate circumstances this would be seen as a society of great
quirkiness, but on top of a famine and widespread brutality this throwback to
Victorian morality has no charm.
It also has seemingly no sources, as only some of the reporting in this chapter
is credited. The example quoted above is not one of the lucky ones; there is an
irritating and recurring problem of no sourcing on intriguing statements.
We learn of Kim Jong-il, North Korea's leader since1994, being hungover at
politburo meetings, malnourishment and disaffection within the army, a
breakdown of military personnel and their hardware, the state turning a blind
eye to a degree of black-market money-changing and attempted coups.
Take the reporting of the first and last of those statements.
If it can be reported that Kim turned up hungover or late and was, at least
whilst his father was alive, publicly berated at these meetings and made to
stand in a corner, then why haven't the agenda and its discussions been
reported?
In one paragraph, French reports four coup attempts, but sources only two of
them and makes no reference to the view that a recent major explosion on the
railway system might have been an assassination attempt slated for Kim. He also
doesn't see what could be a pattern of instability and challenge; it doesn't
undermine this book's basic thesis or value, but it does qualify its
timeliness.
North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula - A Modern History by Paul French.
Palgrave Macmillan (paperback), April 2005. ISBN: 1842774735. Price US$27.50,
256 pages.
Michael Mackey is a Shanghai-based freelance writer.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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this
book, it's just not a cheerful or even uplifting topic. Misgivings aside, it is
a good book.
