Curiosity connects North Koreans with the outside world, and Jieun Baek's wonderful book North Korea's Hidden Revolution shows how creative, clever, and ingenious they are in satisfying their curiosity. The games of hide-and-seek under tight control mechanisms help the North Koreans improvise, as the penalty for information access is often very harsh and cruel, including death. Yet they go back to their safe zones and immerse themselves in movies, dramas, and K-pop. Baek describes this underground information revolution in North Korea with balance, warmth, and rigor.
Popular books on North Korea can be categorized into defectors’ stories and autobiographies, visitors’ rare glimpses into the closed society, introductions to the country's society and history, and fiction. Baek's book is path-breaking because it focuses on the uncharted territory of the information revolution while drawing on defectors’ narratives. It thus goes beyond the gut-wrenching horrors of refugee testimonies and cut-and-dried policy analysis. Another merit of North Korea's Hidden Revolution lies in its readability and unpretentious tone; its absence of jargon and the interviewees’ thoughtful observations make this book genuine and sincere.
North Korea's Hidden Revolution starts with a question that prods every observer: why is North Korea such a durable system? By conventional wisdom on sustainable governance, the Kim regime should have ended decades ago through implosion, explosion, mass revolt, or surgical strikes. Baek attempts to answer this question with a humane idealism that permits room for imagination, but the analysis is firmly grounded in evidence. She interviewed more than a dozen North Korean refugees living in the South, of varying ages, genders, and occupations.
In addressing the question of regime survival, chapter 1 contextualizes the totalitarian regime's multifaceted control methods. They include indoctrination in mythologized national beginnings, the Juche ideology of self-reliance, the “sŏngbun” system of social classification, sanctification of the Kim family, militarization of society, and institutionalization of fake information. The regime sustains itself, in short, by instilling false pride, arrested mentality, and fear through surveillance and propaganda.
Baek next moves on to consider the possibility of social change in North Korea. And here she finds the system's cracks in the digital underground. It turns out that the spread of demystifying information on the Kim family's reign represents a breeze of freedom infiltrating the closed society. And the quest for knowledge and information seems to be an irreversible trend. According to Baek, about 70–80 percent of the North Korean population engages in distributing, sharing, and consuming smuggled audio-visual materials. They listen to radio programs, watch DVDs, and plug in USB disks traded in the marketplace. Most of the products originate in China and South Korea, and the contents are Chinese, South Korean, and American. The motivations behind the risk-taking activities are not very different from those in the rest of the world: curiosity, entertainment, knowledge, escapism, and education, among others.
In the next chapter and appendix, Baek undertakes an interesting investigation of the money trail between the defectors now in South Korea and their families left in the North. The absolute majority of the defectors remit hard currency to assist their loved ones living in dire conditions. The system of remittance depends on hard-to-detect international phone calls as well as multinational human networks that involve North Korean and Chinese brokers in addition to the Chinese and South Korean banking systems. It operates on the dexterous usage of modern communication technology and social trust among a small group of people.
Baek also covers recent reports that show the wide spread of an intranet in North Korea, with trading often taking place over the internal computer network linking various corners of the country. The spirit of capitalism, in other words, crisscrosses the economy and cyberspace. The top elites are fully aware of the importance of cutting-edge information technology in making North Korea's military competitive in modern-day warfare. North Korea's information revolution is thus accompanied by the unavoidable dilemma of balancing the externally originating whirlwind of changes and the internal need to keep the gates tightly closed.
In returning to the enticing question with which Baek's book begins, the core of the puzzle going forward will be the correlation between regime sustainability and the underground information revolution that she describes. Baek's prognosis, alas, is that increasing consumption of enlightening information will not get translated into drastic societal change. Her advice is for us to take a long view on the possibility of Korean reunification. Most North Koreans will not leave their homeland simply because they become aware of the outside world, and most will not engage in revolt simply because they learned of the tragic end of other dictators. This assessment is fair enough and well taken. While Baek suggests other variables, such as NGO activism, that can promote a tangible transformation of the autocratic regime, sadly she leaves her discussion largely at that. Laughing at the epistemological absurdity of the Kim regime, for instance, as a cure for the pervasive culture of fear might not work too well. Indeed it takes courage and perspective to find such humor. North Korean defectors testify that they could cry only after their safety and survival were secured. I suspect the act of laughing likewise requires psychological distancing.
All in all, North Korea's Hidden Revolution is a wonderful book and a must-read for students and scholars of Korea as well as for lay readers curious about North Korea. Baek's book is decent, thoughtful, and solid in its analysis and writing, and it elevates the level of discourse.
