Read Online Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin - Free Book Online

process, North Korea itself was moving to an even more authoritarian system than before. The regime stepped up surveillance to make sure Western ideas would not contaminate the citizenry as the country brought in foreign capital and technology. 4
    However, the technology-import strategy backfired, partly because of a downturn in the world economy but also because of lack of ability and experience in the most advantageous use of the new technology. Failing to repay its debts, the regime became known in international financial circles as a deadbeat. The country’s reputation suffered further injury when some of its diplomats in Scandinavian countries were accused of smuggling drugs, in what seems to have been a systematic attempt to raise hard currency. Pyongyang had botched the first of many attempts to take money and technology—but not ideas and values—from the West.
    In 1972 North Korea adopted a new constitution, which mandated a switch to a presidential system. Kim Il-sung gave up the premiership to take the presidency. Thenceforth, the premiership would be a useful lightning rod for the regime. The incumbent premier could be dismissed to take responsibility for any recognized policy failure—even though President Kim continued to dictate the policies. At the end of 1977 Kim reorganized the government, implicitly acknowledging the North’s failure to regain the economic lead over the South. While men of military background previously had served as premier, this time he put an economist, Li Jong-ok, into the job. The question was how much lee-way Li and his technocrat cohorts would have. After all, real power continued to be held by President Kim, who had established a politics-first ideology and who kept around him men who had served with him as anti-Japanese guerillas. 5
    Despite the problems, Kim stuck stubbornly to—and even intensified— his policy of Stalinist centralism. 6 Micromanagement from the top had become less and less effective with the economy’s expansion, but still it seemed that no detail was too small to concern Kim Il-sung. At a meeting of financial and banking workers in December 1978, he gave an hour-long address thatdelved deeply into the minutiae of the country’s economic administration. He complained, among other things, about the way people were misusing a synthetic textile, vinalon. “During my survey on waste of cloth, I found that vinalon strings in Yanggang Province were used for hop-vine supports, which could easily be replaced with something made from hemp or barks of lime trees,” Kim said, advising that “vinalon strings should be used for webs only” 7
    Why didn’t Kim do more to change his system and ideology in response to the Southern challenge, once it became apparent in the 1970s? My 1979 visit to the country gave me considerable food for subsequent thought about this question.
    When I met Kim Yong-nam near the end of that visit, the party foreign affairs secretary noted that I had been touring his country. “As you have seen,” he said, “we have built and constructed a lot in a peaceful atmosphere. Why should we destroy all these successes and fight with our own people?” I thought he had a point. It was not that my visit had turned me into a true believer. Indeed, I was deeply troubled to learn in my stops at North Korean schools, cultural agencies and even health-care facilities of the extent to which Kim Il-sung’s attempts to remake the minds of his subjects were still going strong—and apparently succeeding. Overall, however, it would have been difficult for me, or any other newcomer, to avoid being favorably impressed by the achievements that North Koreans showed off to visitors. Even though South Korea probably had pulled ahead of the North in per capita GNP by 1979, 8 the overriding impression was of Northern success up to a point—not failure.
    Both building anew and restoring the mighty infrastructure that the Japanese had bequeathed to them, the