It has now been almost 30 years since Hwang Jang-yop defected to South Korea, but he remains the highest-ranking defector in history, far above even Thae Yong-ho. Hwang’s memoirs, although published 17 years ago, contain important lessons about the Kim dynasty that are still applicable for the newest Kim leader and especially relevant in the year 2023, the 70th anniversary of the armistice of the Korean War. The reader can see not only the nature of North Korea’s inner political circle as seen from the perspective of the Kims’ right-hand man, but also how the hopeless situation in North Korea, which caused Hwang’s defection and is still causing the defection of an increasing number of high-profile elites, has not improved in the slightest.
Influence of early life
An increasing number of people in South Korea see reunification as becoming less likely as years go by without diplomatic progress, especially given the constantly fluctuating stance of the government elected at that particular moment in time. Many people, therefore, would think Hwang’s perspective on the issue of unification is outdated. By contrast, until a few decades earlier, the memory of a unified Korea resisting Japanese imperialism was fresh in many people’s minds. Like Hwang, they seem to have genuinely believed unification to be a real possibility.
Hwang spent his youth and young adulthood under Japanese colonial rule. His father taught traditional Chinese literature, and he seems to have educated his son in the Korean Confucian tradition in his seodang (village school) before sending him to public school like most of his peers. This Confucian influence manifests in Hwang’s personality that comes across when reading the memoir: an unyielding scholar, committed to learning and bettering his country, confused by the intricate power plays surrounding him, and sacrificing the life of his family for the greater good.
Other early life experiences seem to have contributed to Hwang’s politics. We learn that his older brother received a head injury from a beating by his Japanese school principal for leading independence protests, leaving him with chronic and debilitating headaches, which Hwang believes eventually killed him before he was even 30 years old. Shortly afterwards, Hwang was forced to give up his studies in Japan to be conscripted for the Japanese military near the end of the war and describes feeling the visceral contempt of the Japanese authorities towards the Korean people. His first-hand experience of colonial oppression may have contributed to the anti-imperialistic and nationalistic tendencies of his Juche ideology, as well as his strong conviction that the Korean Peninsula must be united under a single government.
Many South Koreans are becoming tired of the reunification rhetoric, but by starting his memoirs with his upbringing in an occupied Korea, Hwang reminds youth of a past when Korea was united, now almost extinct from living memory. Although most South Koreans may no longer care about reunification, this book can still serve as a reminder that the issue of North Koreans being deprived of fundamental human rights should not cater to the whims of politics or be subject to debate.
“Half a century has passed since our people were divided, but even while we claim that we want to reunify our motherland, we are treating each other as enemies, while the North constantly threatens to turn South Korea into ‘a sea of fire.’ How can these people possibly be seen as being in their right minds? Also, those that advertise that they have built an ‘ideal society’ for workers and farmers, even when those workers and farmers are starving to death, cannot be seen as anything other than insane.” (21)
Undoing progress
Hwang’s comments about the North Korean leadership still ring true today because it seems that, almost two decades after Hwang wrote this book, Kim Jong Un is trying to undo any positive progress that North Korean people have fought for over the years. Many aspects of North Korean life improved over the last few decades, mostly because of the operation of general markets established when the people were left to fend for themselves following the collapse of the state distribution system in the 1990s. The Jangmadang generation that grew up during this difficult period are believed to be the forefront of social change in North Korea. They have very little loyalty for the state that did almost nothing to help them, and they have great interest in the outside world.
The existence of markets is perhaps preventing the emergence of a crisis equal to the “Arduous March” at the moment, but the current post-COVID food shortage is still the worst one since the 1990s, and grain prices are the highest they have ever been under Kim Jong Un’s rule. The government is not helping things when it is punishing young people that try to do business instead of participating in state-sanctioned organizational activities for “ideological laxity.”
The authorities are also trying to squash the social progress that North Korean people made despite great risks by smuggling in cellphones and media content with the implementation of the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act and Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act, both of which explicitly condone the death penalty as a maximum punishment for seemingly minor offenses such as using or spreading South Korean-style language or encouraging or participating in the group viewing of media content from “enemy countries.” Hwang’s memoirs, therefore, seem to depict a time that Kim Jong Un wishes to return his country to.
Hwang describes Kim Jong Il as stubbornly adhering to self-reliance and refusing to follow China’s example of “reform and opening up.” To Hwang’s great frustration, Kim even rejected all of Hwang’s ideas to improve the bureaucratic process and develop tourism at Mount Kumgang to alleviate the famine. Kim failed to recognize the flaws of a communist economy from the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the German reunification, and this is why Hwang attributes Kim Jong Il’s lack of economic expertise and obsession with falsifying results for the sake of political propaganda as the reasons behind the almost complete breakdown of the North Korean economy following his ascent to power. Kim Jong Il forced the construction of stadiums, roads, gates, and dams despite the loss of life and resources, just as Kim Jong Un now insists on wasting money on launching missiles and faulty satellites instead of alleviating the current food crisis. To add insult to injury, even as North Koreans were dying from starvation, Kim Jong Il arranged an international Juche debate conference to celebrate his birthday. This callous decision, Hwang writes, was the moment he gave up on persuading Kim Jong Il to come to his senses. Today, Kim Jong Un, like his father, is apparently willing to let the people starve to death instead of giving up his obstinacy about unwise foreign and economic policy.
Hwang also writes about his firsthand observations of Kims’ ridiculous propaganda tactics as they built up their cult of personality. Curiously, Hwang blames Kim Jong Il for roping Kim Il Sung into developing their cult, which is perhaps in line with Hwang’s intense hatred for Kim Jong Il, whom he calls “an enemy of democracy and a traitor to our people.” Hwang remembers Kim Il Sung keeping personal propaganda in moderation before handing over power to his son, saying “blatant propaganda cannot reap results,” which his son clearly refused to listen to.
After Kim Jong Il came into power and began to “deify” his father, however, Hwang writes that Kim Il Sung started to contribute to his son’s heavy-handed propaganda methods. Kim Il Sung decorated the graves of his parents and grandparents, required party executives to worship the graves of his ancestors, and exaggerated his battle experience during the Korean War. Hwang recalls a particular incident in which Kim Il Sung wrote an ode to celebrate his son’s 50th birthday, carved it on a memorial stone, and put it next to a house he built on Paektu Mountain which he claimed was where Kim Jong Il was born. Hwang writes that he truly could not, and still cannot, comprehend the need for such obvious falsification, as it is common knowledge that Kim Jong Il was born and raised in Russia. For Hwang, the extent Kim Il Sung would go to flatter his own son would have been a shocking assault to his traditional values of filial piety and obvious proof of the moral corruption of the regime. It is perhaps reassuring to see how even the high-ranking North Korean officials and the Kims’ most devout believers were just as bewildered as the rest of the world about the turn of events.
Hwang also writes about how the regime’s insidious system of fear and surveillance left no one untouched, not even elites like himself. Anyone could be reported to the Supreme Leader as being anti-revolutionary for the slightest, often imagined, infractions, and everyone reported on each other to curry favor with the Kims. Hwang remembers feeling extremely uneasy when Kim Jong Il expressed his knowledge of Hwang’s habit of eating uncooked rice because it meant that people were reporting on his every move to the Kims. This reign of terror means even the most powerful officials could be exiled overnight or worse on the Supreme Leader’s whim, making dissent impossible. Kim Jong Un demonstrated the continuation of this family legacy of terror shortly after taking power with the execution of his uncle, Jang Song Taek and with the implementation of draconian laws such as the Social Security Regulation Act.
One episode best highlights the hypocrisy of the Kims’ regime and Hwang’s hatred for Kim Jong Il. During the famine, Hwang recounts, many people used bicycles to travel around and look for food, and it was commonplace for women to ride on the backs of those bicycles. When Kim Jong Il saw this while out on the streets, however, he forbid letting women sit on the backs of bicycles, saying the sight displeased him and that it was an offense against the public morals of North Korea. Hwang wonders whether someone who regularly enjoyed luxurious private parties had the right to complain about the corruption of morality, and he expresses his exasperation at the incompetence of a leader that interfered with people’s livelihoods with frivolous excuses instead of alleviating a famine that he caused.
Hwang’s memoirs are not a primarily political or philosophical text. He includes some general references to Juche, although the book mostly describes Hwang’s motivations and process in developing the ideology, not so much its contents. There is a greater emphasis on his underlying philosophy of humanism (a version which excludes the belief in individual autonomy) and his belief in the transcendence of the individual self to contribute to the human race, which seem to have formed the foundations of his philosophy. The lyrics of a song he wrote himself (189-193) summarizes his version of humanism best.
Humanity!
You are the master of the universe
possessing omnipotent power
…
To live a life worth living
is to cast off the smaller ‘me’
and follow the will of you, the greater ‘me’
To live a life of happiness
is to cast off the smaller ‘me’
and live in the love of you, the greater ‘me’”
Through Hwang’s work, we are invited to see the author and the people he encounters in his life as flawed, struggling in an impossible situation, and see the Kims as petty, small-minded people unfit to be leaders instead of larger-than-life monsters. While Hwang’s accounts of North Korea’s political circle is perhaps no longer a great revelation as it was when this book was first published, it is interesting but somewhat depressing to witness the history of suffering repeating itself as power is handed from father to son.
Views expressed in this guest column do not necessarily reflect those of Daily NK.
