Mobile phones in North Korea

Also available to earthlings

Some North Koreans get better connected

Feb 11th 2012 | SEOUL | from the print edition

Thumbs at work

A NORTH KOREAN professor apparently posted footage on YouTube last year boasting that his country was developing applications for the Android mobile-phone operating system. Ordinary North Koreans are more likely to be pining for a humble mobile phone of any sort, and now their chances of owning one are increasing. Smuggled mobiles have been used on Chinese networks near the border for years, but now business is booming for Koryolink, the North’s only official cellular network, based in the capital, Pyongyang.

The service—75%-owned by Orascom, an Egyptian firm, and 25%-owned by the North Korean state—has gone from 300,000 to 1m subscribers in 18 months. For a hermit kingdom whose rulers resent their subjects keeping closely in touch with each other, this is a remarkable development.

In this section

·         Pragmatic virtues

·         Reverting to type

·         An executioner’s tale

·         Power politics

·         »Also available to earthlings

·         My brothers’ keepers

Reprints

Related topics

·         Kim Jong-il

·         North Korea

·         Pyongyang

Koryolink earns a gross margin of 80%, making North Korea by far the most profitable market in which Orascom operates. The company has worked hard to court the regime, its chairman travelling to Pyongyang last year to meet the late supreme leader, Kim Jong Il.

North Korean mobile-phone users spend an average of $13.90 a month on calls and text messages, and they tend to pay in hard currency. According to a foreign diplomat, many customers turn up at Koryolink shops with bundles of euro notes. There are even incentives for paying in euros, such as free off-peak calls. This provides foreign currency for a government that craves it.

Mobile-phone customers obtain the hard currency from the informal private trading on which many North Koreans depend. Such business is forbidden, but the government has failed to feed its people, forcing it to turn a blind eye to some capitalist practices. Many insiders benefit: Pyongyang’s “golden couples” consist of a government-official husband and an entrepreneur wife.

Mobile usage now appears to be spreading beyond Pyongyang. The gadgets are a common sight in other cities such as Nampo, not far from the capital, and increasingly are owned by non-officials. As yet, though, only a sixth of the country has a mobile signal.

The authorities are not naive. Some outside observers believe that North Korea’s first experiment with mobile telephony came to a sudden end in 2004 because a mobile phone was used to detonate a huge bomb at a train station that nearly killed Kim Jong Il.

Koryolink is a walled garden: users are not able to make or receive international calls, and there is no internet access. It would be hard to imagine that calls and text messages are not monitored. As in China, the network is even becoming a means by which the state disseminates propaganda. Rodong Shinmun, the government mouthpiece, sends out text messages that relay the latest news to phone subscribers.

Orascom’s slogan is “Giving the world a voice”. For Koryolink’s users, that may literally be true, as North Korean mobile-phone users enjoy some of the benefits of modernity that other countries take for granted. Their phones are not yet the tools of revolution, but mark an amazing change for all that.

from the print edition | Asia

·         Recommend

·         7

·         Submit to reddit

·         inShare2

View all comments (1)Add your comment

Also available to earthlings

Feb 13th 2012, 17:29

If talking of North Korea’s past Kim Il-Sum's dynasty, North Korea’s industry was not bad for their highly industrial growth, which was outstanding among the Soviet Union’s Red domain. It is from 1990s that the difference between the Northern and the Sourthern widen in economic and technology concerned.

I feel glad for this neighbor of China because the improvement in telecom. About one year ago, I have contacted with Beijing routinely. At that time, I received a message which let me know that the late North Korean Kim Jeon-Il accepted my suggestion about 2G or even 3G network. Although the ordinary, on average, can't afford to pay the bill, Pyongyang’s administration decided to give many benefits and incentive, also appearing to accept some kinds of capitalism. Another example is the recover of one resort, which recently authorize one American company to plan.

This opening mind surprised me then, inferring that North Korea would be inclined to process peaceful negotiation with outside world. It is sorrowful to say that Kim Jeon-Il passed away too soon to see the probably advanced progress. The network is one of measure that can promote inner economy. Besides, the late Kim visited China’s several special economic zone, which can accompany the upcoming year’s plan. These measures not only ease the tension in Northern-east Asia but also help“normalize” themselves.

    Recommended

    4

    Report

    Permalink

這篇報導平壤的通訊現代化一景，之前一波的通訊進步在2004年就因金正日的一起車站攻擊事件被中斷，直至當時的前一兩年，平壤當局2008年起邀請埃及Orascom通訊商作投資，開放3G的訊號。雖然有很嚴厲的控管機制，自製的平板和中國大陸的白牌平板很暢銷。這有限度的開放包括現在被凍結的金剛山投資樂園乙案，曾經被視為北朝鮮經濟復甦的跡象。可惜當局近來連續幾年的核子試爆破壞了區域政治平衡。

*附金正日先生過世後，經濟學者2011年12月20日所發的亞洲欄第一篇報導，12月20日及31日Leader欄評論：

North Korea

Dear Leader, departed

Dec 20th 2011, 0:20 by D.T. and G.E. | SEOUL and BEIJING

THE tyrant has perished, leaving a failing, nuclear-armed nation in the uncertain young hands of his “Great Successor”. His father, since 1994 the "Dear Leader" of one of the world’s most secretive and repressive states (iconic, to the right in the photo above), died on a train at 8.30am on Saturday morning, of a heart attack. North Korea's 69-year-old supremo had been in poor health: he had heart disease and diabetes, and suffered a stroke in 2008. Nonetheless his demise places sudden and extraordinary pressure on his third son, his designated but untested successor, Kim Jong Un (to the left, in the photo above).

Kim junior—recently dubbed the “Young General”—is now officially in charge of North Korea. His dynastic succession, which had been in preparation since 2009, was reaffirmed swiftly by the state media (as swiftly as the 51 hours it took to announce the elder Kim’s death). The machinery of party and propaganda are organised to support a smooth succession. That does not mean its success is assured. At just 27 or perhaps 28 years of age, the young Un, educated in Switzerland and a great fan of basketball, wants for both experience and proof of loyalty from the armed forces. He was installed as the country’s leader-in-waiting little more than a year ago. By contrast his father had been groomed for leadership for nearly 20 years, with careful attention paid to establishing for him a cult of personality in the image of his own father, the dynasty’s founding dictator, Kim Il Sung.

That Kim Jong Un has no such background may be cause more for anxiety than for relief. His only qualification to lead the country is to be the son of a man who all but destroyed it, and a grandson of the man who built its disastrous brand of totalitarianism. In the 17 years Kim Jong Il ruled since the death of Kim Il Sung, North Korea teetered on the brink of collapse. A devastating famine in the mid-1990s killed as many as a million of his countrymen, while Kim Jong Il indulged his own appetites to excess and diverted massive resources to his dream, now realised, of building a nuclear weapon.

A third Kim may be a step too far. This succession’s viability may well depend on the work of a “regent”: Kim Jong Il’s brother-in-law, Chang Sung Taek. He and his wife, Kim Kyong Hui, appear to have accompanied the Young General’s elevation in lockstep, as those who might stand in his (and their) way have been pushed aside. The ruling elite around the family trinity might appear cohesive from a distance, but they are potentially vulnerable to intrigue. North Korea’s is a government of obscure and competing factions—the army, the Korean Workers’ Party and the cabinet being the greatest—and any uncertainty or crisis in the months ahead could upset the delicate balance behind the dictatorship.

In the very short term though, it seems unlikely that anyone will make a move. Bruce Cumings, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, argues that the cohort of officials who rose during Kim Jong Il’s reign “are now in power and have much privilege to protect”. Even those who privately oppose Kim Jong Un will proclaim loyalty for now. China, fearing instability, will support the succession in so far as it promises to maintain order and prevent a flood of refugees from spilling over its border.

Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman for China’s ministry of foreign affairs, called Kim Jong Il “a great leader of North Korean people and a close and intimate friend of Chinese people”. Zhang Liangui of the Central Party School in Beijing however told Caijing magazine that China’s policy has been developed with regard for “North Korea the country, not Kim Jong Il the man”. For many years Chinese leaders tried in vain to convince Kim Jong Il to embrace Chinese-style economic reforms; they might yet choose to push those reforms with renewed vigour.

The optimists’ argument would be that the time is ripe for such an overture, and that the West should join with its own. The year 2012, the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth, is supposed to be the year that North Korea becomes a “strong and prosperous nation” (kangsong taeguk). The domestic justification for reform could go like so: Kim Jong Il built the nuclear weapons that made his nation “strong”, regardless of whether North Korea might choose to give them up; now it is the time make the country “prosperous”. “Diplomatically, that’s where you want to engage with them,” says John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul who watches China and North Korea. “Okay, you got strength, you’re secure. Now let’s work on prosperity together.”

Sceptics, a group who were proved right under the late Leader time and again, argue that the regime’s elite circles will be loth to abandon the systems of patronage and rent-seeking that have so enriched them. Moreover, any meaningful effort to open up the economy risks exposing the state’s ruling mythology. It has long been shielded from contamination by such inconveniences as facts.

Given a choice, the people might prefer facts to mythology, and real economic well-being over juche (loosely, self-reliance, or autarky). Local television reports are filled with the requisite footage of wailing on the streets of Pyongyang, where the more privileged and well-fed reside, but these images do not offer much insight into the reaction of the impoverished countryside. One NGO worker with extensive contacts around the country states that though they “lived under undeniable fear with Kim Jong Il as the leader of the nation, they are surely even more fearful with him gone.” Without even the barest infrastructure of civil society, lacking most of the tools of modern technology, the rural population of North Korea cannot be fruitfully compared to the victims of repression in the Middle East who are trying to make good on the Arab Spring.

North Korea's fate may depend in some measure, then, on how the rest of the world chooses to grapple with the new leadership, and vice versa. The death of Kim Il Sung in 1994 was quickly followed by the completion of an “agreed framework”, negotiated with the Clinton administration, that had seemed to sideline North Korea’s nuclear programme. Last week, immediately prior to Kim Jong Il’s death, there were whispers of a possible thaw in relations. North Korea is in desperate need of food aid, and the United States had reportedly offered to ship nearly a quarter of a million tonnes of "nutritional aid" on a month-to-month basis—on the condition that it would be allowed to verify that none of it ended up "on some leader's banquet table". There were even murmurs to the effect that Pyongyang might suspend its uranium-enrichment programme. There is something on which to build. Facing an election year of his own however, Barack Obama may find it difficult to pursue a new, softer line on North Korea, even with a new Kim.

Another approach could come from South Korea, but perhaps not until after its parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012. The sitting president, Lee Myung-bak, has defined his term in office with a hawkish stance towards the North. The South’s public reaction to Kim’s death was relatively muted: The KOSPI index of leading Korean stocks fell at first but then stabilised. Ordinary South Koreans have been debating whether or not condolences should be sent (as Pyongyang did when Kim Dae-jung, a former president of South Korea, died in 2009). Some have taken to criticising the country’s intelligence capabilities. The timing of Mr Lee’s visit to Japan on Saturday, December 17th, makes it seem plain that none of South Korea’s spooks were aware of Kim Jong Il’s fate until the official announcement was broadcast. That happened to fall on the president’s birthday; his party was cancelled at the last minute.

A spokesman for Mr Lee, Cho Hyun-jin, says that he is “cautiously optimistic” about North-South relations, and notes that he is in close contact with leaders in Japan, America, and Russia. Mr Lee’s term in office has been marked by severe tensions with North Korea. In November 2010, the North shelled a South Korean island, killing two civilians. Earlier in the same year it was accused of sinking a South Korean naval vessel with a torpedo, killing 46 sailors. Those may prove to have been the last two attacks to have been carried out at the order of Kim Jong Il. But some observers have attributed them to the “Great Successor” as rites of initiation.

Kim Jong Il’s funeral, which may provide the first opportunity for assessing the regime’s new pecking order, is to take place on December 28th. (Intriguingly, Mr Chang, the Great Successor’s chief regent, is ranked a lowly 19th on the official list of attendants.) The late Kim’s record, according to Mr Cumings, will be one of “failure at almost every level, except the critical one of maintaining maximum power for his family and the regime”. We will soon see whether or not Kim Jong Un—the youngest leader in the world to command a nuclear arsenal—has such staying power, or such unfortunate consequences for his people. The months ahead will be most telling. Mr Zhang, of the Central Party School in Beijing, makes a wry nod to his own country’s experience. Uttering the ritual platitudes of succession and actually carrying it out are two very different things. “Socialist countries are like this,” he says. “There's a certain distance between legal procedure and actual practice.”

(Picture credit: AFP PHOTO / KCNA VIA KNS)

·         Recommended

41

·          

·          

·         Submit to

North Korea's succession

Goodbye, hello

Dec 20th 2011, 22:00 by H.T., K.N.C., D.T. | TOKYO and SEOUL

IT IS hard to overestimate how much is at stake for the world after the sudden death of Kim Jong Il, the North Korean despot, on December 17th. Officially, at least, it has thrust into the inexperienced hands of his pudgy young son, Kim Jong Un, control of a nuclear-armed nation that has one of the largest standing armies in the world as well as the capacity to wreak havoc on two of America’s strongest Asian allies, South Korea and Japan. The new Kim’s domain abuts China and Russia, both powers that analysts believe would be opposed to any move America might make to try steering the new regime into its orbit.

Almost nothing is known about the man North Korea’s propaganda apparatus has dubbed the “Great Successor”. Apart from evidence he was schooled for a while in Switzerland, it is not even clear whether he is 27 or 28. Since he was unveiled as the heir-apparent in September 2010, he has not spoken in public, and was always accompanied on trips he took with his father by several other veterans of the ruling clique, including his uncle and aunt. These precautions suggest his grooming as dictator-to-be was a race against the clock.

The pressure on him now is likely to be huge. Whereas his father had 20 years of apprenticeship to the regime’s founder, Kim Il Sung, this third-generation Kim has had just two years since rumours of his privileged status first surfaced, shortly after his father had a stroke. After the death of his grandfather, North Korea’s “eternal president”, Kim Jong Un’s father had three years of official mourning to stay out of the public eye. Now the youngster will have only 12 days’ seclusion for official grieving, to end the day after his father’s funeral on December 28th. Less than four months later, the country he inherits is supposed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the eternal president’s birth, by which time it is meant to turn from a land of bellicose misery into a “strong and prosperous” nation. It is a fair bet that an insecure young Mr Kim, surrounded by crusty generals some of whom are triple his age, feels he has a lot to prove.

Yet in the face of such insecurity and unpredictability, analysts say there is little that foreign powers, whether allies such as China, or “mortal enemies”, such as America, can do except wait and see how things turn out. Marcus Noland, a North Korea specialist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, describes North Korea as a country that has remained “remarkably insensitive to punishments and rewards” from abroad; in other words, it shrugs off both sanctions and support, and its behaviour is mostly guided by domestic political considerations. Foreigners have little leverage.

Perhaps it is for that reason that many outsiders have chosen to take a sanguine view that the succession will be smooth—at least in the early months—rather than something like a prelude to regime collapse, a refugee crisis, “loose nukes” or even war. The Obama administration on December 20th called for a “peaceful, stable transition”, a position shared by Japan and echoed in Seoul by Lee Myung-bak, the South Korean president (who nevertheless has kept troops on high alert). Several Washington-based think-tanks believe the regime had prepared for the succession, and that a “gang of four”—the young Mr Kim, his powerful aunt, Kim Kyong Hui, her husband, Jang Song Taek, and the most senior general, Ri Yong Ho—will work together to keep order. Kept in check by his seniors, some believe Mr Kim may initially represent little change from his father, either for good—for example, by allowing greater economic modernisation—or for bad, say by ratcheting up repression or aggression. Others are more pessimistic, however. Mr Noland thinks Mr Kim may be tempted to engage in provocative acts, another nuclear test or a military engagement for example, to burnish his credentials (some believe he was partly responsible for attacks in South Korea in the last two years). Or he may be simply unable to control factions within the regime, allowing the army to create mischief of its own.

Foreign powers have not even been given a chance to gauge the mood by attending the funeral: it is to be an internal-only affair. That has put more emphasis on the messages sent by North Korea’s interlocutors abroad, which range from condolences, in the case of China and Russia (cravenly, China’s authorities said its people would “forever cherish” Kim Jong Il’s memory) to a sort of sympathetic contortionism by America and South Korea, which have both professed support for the North Korean people in their grief without explicitly offering condolences to the regime. In 1994, when Kim Il Sung died, the refusal of South Korea’s then-government to offer condolences cast a pall over the relationship for years. In contrast, the Clinton administration dispatched an envoy to meet with North Korean officials to express condolences.

Coincidentally, almost at the time Mr Kim was suffering a fatal heart attack on a train last Saturday, an American envoy was meeting with the North Koreans to discuss the resumption of food aid to the impoverished country, whose people are stunted by hunger. There are unconfirmed reports that this was in exchange for a halt to North Korea’s uranium-enrichment programme. Whether true or not, the Obama administration and its allies appear to have been moving gingerly back to a resumption of six-party denuclearisation talks with North Korea, involving South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. The food-aid initiative was promptly suspended on news of Mr Kim’s death, replaced by a wait-and-see attitude.

No one is as yet pressing the new leader for a quick resumption of denuclearisation talks. Beyond that, one discussion on North Korea that its five counterparts in the six-party talks have never been able to have—even secretly, according to analysts—is how to react to a potential breakdown if the regime implodes. For China, such a discussion may smack of disloyalty and risk exacerbating what it fears most—chaos in the North. Neither have South Korea and America, who are broadly allied on dealing with North Korea, always seen eye to eye on how to handle regime change. Worryingly, one reason all of them now are urging a smooth and stable transition may be that there is no alternative plan if it all goes wrong.

(Picture credit: AFP)

North Korea after Kim Jong Il

We need to talk about Kim

Regime change in the worst country on earth should be planned for, not just hoped for

Dec 31st 2011 | from the print edition

TO HIS many victims, and to anyone with a sense of justice, it is deeply wrong that Kim Jong Il died at liberty and of natural causes. The despot ran his country as a gulag. He spread more misery and poverty than any dictator in modern times, killing more of his countrymen in the camps or through needless malnutrition and famine than anyone since Pol Pot. North Koreans are on average three inches shorter than their well-fed cousins in the South. One in 20 has passed through the gulags. Once somebody is deemed a political enemy, his whole family can be condemned to forced labour too. Now, Kim Jong Il will never be held to account.

Kimwas pathologically indifferent to the misery of his people. By his own lights, life was sweet. He enjoyed cognac, fine cheeses and sushi. He relished wielding power over his people and his ability, through nuclear provocation, to milk and manipulate the outside world. He bombed an airliner. He indulged his passion for cinema by kidnapping a South Korean director. The whole country was his movie set, where he could play God and have the people revere him (see our obituary). He was often portrayed as a platform-heeled, bouffanted buffoon—a cartoon villain. Yet he was coolly rational and, in the final reckoning, successful. Not only did he himself die at liberty, but he protected an entire generation of the narrow elite who rose with him. And above all, Kim, the family man, ensured that he passed his movie set to a chosen heir, his pudgy third son, Kim Jong Un.

That is the second reason why there cannot be unalloyed joy at Kim Jong Il’s going. The younger Kim represents the third generation of a dynastic Stalinist dictatorship that has ruled North Korea since 1948. Vicious factional fighting or family squabbles may rage behind the scenes, but the staging of his father’s funeral on December 28th was designed to show that, in public, the regime has fallen into line behind the son, with his uncle and aunt as regents. Continuity is the imperative. Since more of the same means more misery at home and more nuclear blackmail abroad, that is no reason to be cheerful.

The Chosun Un

In 1994, at the death of Kim Jong Il’s father, Kim Il Sung, The Economisthoped, as it does now, for the regime’s swift collapse and the North’s reunification with the South. At the time, Kim Jong Il lacked his father’s authority. The irresistible logic, we claimed, was for economic reform and for the regime to crumble. Today, Kim Jong Un inherits two valuable prizes: nuclear weapons (and the leverage they offer) plus unambiguous support from China. These are not the only reasons to hesitate before predicting the dynasty’s imminent destruction.

Among the North Koreans who have greatest reason to resent the regime are rural dwellers too remote and impoverished to challenge it. And if they did, a countrywide system of repression allows no room for dissent. The elites around the Kim family—almost all revolutionary princelings—know that their own survival is linked to the regime’s. Meanwhile, the capital, Pyongyang, made up only of loyalists, is doing relatively well. Hardest for an outsider to grasp is that the Kim personality cult flows from powerful myths about race and history. Above all is North Koreans’ sense of racial purity. They have been taught to think of the Kims as warm, doting parents, fiercely guarding a vulnerable nation from American and Japanese and even Chinese abuse. Some of the weeping that followed Kim Jong Il’s death may thus have been genuine.

Yet even North Korea cannot avoid change altogether. The famine of the late 1990s engendered unprecedented cynicism towards the regime, as well as survival mechanisms that have proved more durable than the state’s capacity to stamp them out. Black markets have sprung up, along with a thriving petty trade across the border with China. North Koreans watching South Korean soap operas on smuggled DVD players now know that their leaders have lied about the supposedly poor and oppressed people in the South. All this is altering the country in irreversible ways—and one of these days will threaten the regime’s survival (see article).

This presents China with a conundrum. The strategists in Beijing have propped up the regime both because they fear instability on their border and even more because they worry about a unified Korea, perhaps with American troops hard up against the Chinese frontier for the first time in over 60 years. Their dilemma is that whatever they do, North Korea will eventually collapse. On the one hand, the lack of reform is leading North Korea down a dead end. On the other, a more open country would surely spell the end of the Kim dynasty. It is why Kim Jong Il never blessed change, no matter how many times the Chinese showed him their economic miracle.

For fear of something worse

Now surely it is time for China to accept that change is better brought forward—and managed. Even if North Korea collapses chaotically, the potential long-term benefits not just for North Koreans but also for their neighbours, including China, of a peninsula at peace with itself greatly outweigh the potential instability. Some in Beijing claim to see a reformist in the uncle-regent, Jang Song Taek. If so, they should encourage him.

China is much likelier to do this if South Korea and the United States work harder to minimise the dangerous consequences of collapse. The Americans and the South could do much to reassure China (and vice versa)—for instance, by co-operating to prevent the North’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons from falling into the wrong hands. And they could make it far clearer to the Chinese that once the peninsula is at peace there will be no need for American troops to stay.

The regrettable truth is that not just China but also America (fearful of another global crisis), South Korea (fearful of the costs of adopting a country that seems alien to many young Koreans) and Japan (fearful of a united Korea) have propped up a murderous regime. But the Kims cannot survive for ever. The sooner a dialogue begins about how to replace them, the better—not just for the stability of the region, but also for North Korea’s forgotten and downtrodden people.

from the print edition | Leaders