Two of the books reviewed here focus on how North Koreans experienced and responded to the famine of the mid-1990s. In the case of Marching through Suffering, Sandra Fahy, an anthropologist, has produced a richly textured, intimate history of the famine in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) from the perspectives of more than thirty North Koreans who left their country and ended up living in Seoul or Tokyo. North Korea: Markets and Military Rule, Hazel Smith's detailed and meticulously sourced work, is a much broader study of North Korea, but the narrative centers on the growth of the market economy over the past two decades. The Capitalist Unconscious, Hyun Ok Park's theoretically sophisticated and dense but highly original book, explores social inequalities in the two Koreas in relation to neoliberalism in South Korea, the growth of market exchange in North Korea, and Korean capital flows and migration across continental Northeast Asia. There are tensions among the interpretations offered by the authors, but, read together, the books highlight the dramatic reconfiguration of Korean societies since the 1990s and recast the way we understand contemporary Korea and Korean diasporic communities.

Smith's North Korea: Markets and Military Rule is different from the other two books in that it is not primarily a research monograph but instead a synthesis of existing academic writings on North Korea. One of the few survey texts on the DPRK, the work avoids alarmist statements while offering a carefully formulated critique of the North Korean regime. A political scientist and Director of Korean Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, Smith is well-known to scholars of North Korea, having published a number of books and articles, including Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance, and Social Change in North Korea (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2005). Her latest work draws on many years of engagement with the DPRK, including her experience living in the country for almost two years in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an aid worker for the World Food Programme and the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund.

North Korea: Markets and Military Rule is intended for a general audience. The book “is not theory-laden,” Smith writes, “nor does it presume any knowledge about North Korea” (Smith, p. 10). In part one, she introduces North Koreans as “complicated subjects of history” and depicts them as “agents of change” (Smith, p. 6). The DPRK can be understood, she astutely argues, not only on its own terms, but also through comparisons with other countries in Asia, through studies of former and existing communist regimes that have experienced transitions to capitalism, and with reference to the global dynamics of poverty.

The second section of the book examines North Korea during the era of Kim Il Sung. Smith argues that Kim's ideology was more nationalist than communist in orientation, a position she shares with Hyun Ok Park, and notes Kim's commonality with Third World neutralist leaders like Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, and the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. This is an important point, and the neutralist dimensions of North Korean policy have often been overlooked, but it underplays the selective borrowing by North Koreans of Soviet and Chinese political, economic, and cultural models, ones that were implemented in the day-to-day context of DPRK state policy regulations. To take one example, Hyun Ok Park refers to the enterprise accounting system in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a partial but important framework for managing North Korea's state-owned firms after 1962 (Park, p. 234).

Smith's discussion of the devastating bombing campaign against North Korea initiated by the United States Air Force during the Korean War is well done, though her emphasis on June 25, 1950, as the war's starting point is conventional and ignores a large body of literature that emphasizes the civil character of the conflict. Two chapters, “Sisyphus as Economic Model” and “Social Stratification in the Workers’ State,” provide insight into the roots of the 1990s famine. Smith points to a number of positive economic and social indicators in the DPRK in the 1960s and 1970s, including growing life expectancy, the eradication of illiteracy, high female participation rates in the economy, robust rates of industrial growth, and the provision of social services. Yet, the regime's failure to invest in light industry, its overemphasis on military production, the dependence on mass mobilization of labor, and chuch'e ideology resulted in poor-quality housing and manufactures, a lack of consumer products, and an economic system that emulated Sisyphus: “Lack of quality control procedures and shoddy materials resulted in badly constructed economic infrastructure, including dams, dykes, irrigation facilities and flood barriers. These literally started to fall apart as soon as construction works ended” (Smith, p. 140). Shortages of food were common before the 1990s, with especially bad years following the Korean War, and from 1970 to 1973. The regime cut rations in 1973 and later that decade initiated a birth control policy, partly to limit pressure on foodstuffs (Smith, p. 152).

Park's analysis in The Capitalist Unconscious echoes Smith's characterization of the northern economy in this era. Park affirms that from the late 1950s to 1970, the economy was “afflicted by continual shortages of labor, technology, and capital, which were compounded by pursuit of economic self-reliance” (Park, p. 229). Unlike Smith, however, Park asserts that the regime applied capitalist principles, especially the law of value, involving production for profit, though under state-regulated prices, in order to resolve structural problems. Emulating the Soviet precedent of merging socialism with some capitalist practices, the state encouraged wage incentives, consumer goods production, and farmers’ markets, especially after the late 1950s. It is against this background, according to Park, that the marketization of the economy after the 1990s should be viewed: “Markets and the production of consumer goods by individuals, neighbourhood organizations, and local firms have all along been characteristics of industrialization in North Korea” (Park, p. 244).

The period of sustained crisis in the northern economy began a decade before the famine, and Smith underscores the economic dislocation of the 1980s, a period when the country bartered 60 percent of its trade with the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc countries (Smith, p. 162). She emphasizes the severe economic disruptions in North Korea caused by the momentous changes during this period in the USSR, stressing that the Soviet Union was North Korea's largest source of international money, accounting for almost 50 percent of foreign loans by the late 1980s. In that decade, however, the Soviet Union and China ended their preferential trade with their common neighbor and North Korean officials stopped their loan payments. A major economic crisis ensued when, in 1990, the Soviet Union suspended all aid to the regime: “The cut off in external aid at the end of the Cold War is a crucial variable in understanding North Korea's economic decline and collapse” (Smith, p. 163n129).

While Smith situates the history of the famine within the frame of the DPRK's international relations and domestic political economy, Fahy explores the inner history of the famine, one of North Korea's worst human disasters, comparable only to the impact on the country of the Korean War. Some of Fahy's interviewees reported that “many died as had in the war” or “more people died than in the war” (Fahy, p. 39). Her book title, Marching through Suffering, is a critique of the official response to the famine, to emulate Kim Il Sung's heroic “March of Suffering” in Manchuria in 1938, surviving hardship and military attacks by imperial Japanese forces. Fahy, like Smith, notes that the regime portrayed the social crisis as a short-term economic matter. Both authors demonstrate that responsibility for the failure of the economy cannot simply be placed on a series of natural disasters, though the 1995 floods produced terrible additional hardships, and both agree that the leadership prioritized regime security over the social welfare of the population. Despite these similarities, Fahy's critique of the regime has a sharper edge than Smith's, reflecting Fahy's interest in what she calls “the natural question” of “why people didn't rise up in the face of such deprivation and difficulty” (Fahy, p. 8). The impact of the famine was widespread, and it affected every part of the north. Instead of revolt, however, Fahy found a complex variety of responses to the crisis, including large numbers of people who remained faithful to the regime, even at the height of the suffering. Many of those who succumbed to the hunger were the most supportive of the political and social system. As one of her interviewees remarked, “the workers were the ones with good hearts and they were diligent, but they died of hunger” (Fahy, p. 44).

In the mid-1990s, North Korean domestic propaganda switched from emphasizing socialism to centering on the Kim family's organic connection to society. Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung recently concluded that “the post-1994 commemorative politics, which focused on further sublimating the late leader's heroic and victorious legacy, contributed to repressing the voices of hunger within the society, thereby aggravating the scale and intensity of the crisis.”Footnote ¹ Fahy's work tends to complement their arguments about the character of North Korea's charismatic theater state after 1994 and the “sŏn'gun” military-first strategy, both designed to ensure stability after the death of Kim Il Sung and the rise to power of Kim Jong-il. She points out, for example, that the use of “correct speech” to describe the crisis of the 1990s was part of the performative and ritual aspects of the regime that contributed to a silencing of existing and potential opposition. Fahy's interviewees were deterred from publicly using words like “starvation” or “famine,” terms that had been used in the past to refer to social conditions in South Korea or other countries in the Global South. References to food shortages were proscribed by censorship, government media, and the implicit threat of informants. North Koreans used politically acceptable words and phrases to describe hunger or death, including “pain,” “illness,” “food ration downturn,” and even “food poisoning,” but also employed humor to convey complex meaning, criticism, and mediated suffering.

The coercion and violence of the famine is an important theme in the fourth chapter, “Life Leaves Death Behind.” The tragedy of the period was punctuated by government decisions to prosecute people who stole food. In some areas, official posters announced that theft of grain would be punishable by execution. In 1996, “as the worst years took hold, the government applied social control at its most extreme level—that of life and death—for famine coping strategies” (Fahy, p. 119). The violence conveyed “the ultimate structure of power, which silences eternally” (Fahy, p. 122). In some cases, state repression motivated people to leave the country and go elsewhere, especially to China.

In the next chapter, “Breaking Points,” Fahy observes that only a small percentage of the population made the agonizing decision to leave the country, that most left with the intention of returning, and that “a majority expressed a longing attachment to home, often because they missed family, friends, and community. Some missed what they called the purity of the North, attributed both to the landscape and the character of the people” (Fahy, p. 127). Another appealed that while there were terrible officials, “there were also good people.… There were people who trusted each other extremely well” (Fahy, p. 40).

Fahy regularly uses the word “defector” to describe the people who left North Korea, imparting a meaning that goes beyond the evidence of the motivation of the interviewees, who did not express their decision to leave in political terms or as a form of resistance. There is a tension in the analysis on this point, however, since Fahy notes, at the start of her book, a preference for the term “North Korean” or “former North Korean” over “defector,” in order “to avoid overt dissident associations” (Fahy, p. ix). The word “refugee,” rarely used in the book, better describes those North Koreans who fled in search of food.

Park's transnational framework distinguishes her work from the other two books, though it has some affinity with Smith's internationalist approach. Like Fahy, Park very effectively incorporates interviews into her book, and she supports the analysis with a large body of work published in Korean and English. Some of the interviews from the early 2000s, used in The Capitalist Unconscious, were likely recorded for her first publication, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), which examined the social history of capitalism in pre-1945 Manchuria in conjunction with the expansion of Japanese colonialism and Chinese and Korean communism. One of her conclusions, relevant for the analysis here, was that the nationalist orientation of the Korean and Chinese communists in Manchuria blinded them to the diverse social needs of their constituencies and resulted in dividing the regional communist movement along ethnic and territorial-nationalist lines. She argued that the problematic legacies of this project were reproduced in North Korea: “excised from the [North Korean] memory of Manchurian struggle is the irreducible gap between the masses’ social life and socialist national politics” (Park, p. 239). The implication, not elaborated in the narrative, is that the contemporary political and social failures of the northern regime are rooted in the Korean communist movement's inability to provide an appropriate critique of the capitalist system that accompanied the expansion of the Japanese empire into Manchuria. For Park, this shortcoming has an epistemological meaning, one embedded in recurring crises that have displaced Koreans from northern and North Korea at key historical junctures, especially the 1930s, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and the famine of the 1990s. Territorial nationalism is key to Park's problématique, insofar as she argues that it obscures the social question.

Themes from Park's first book provide a foundation for The Capitalist Unconscious, where she argues that the recent restructuring of social relations in the two Koreas and northeastern China is tied to the global dynamics of capital and neoliberalism. In the Republic of Korea (ROK), democratization has fused with neoliberal policies that have undermined welfare programs and have resulted in legalized violence against union workers who protest their vulnerability to layoffs or plant closure. Capital is concerned only with profit, rather than the rights of workers, and “invented and actual crises in the rate or size of profit are invoked to justify firing unionized workers, replacing them with low-paid, nonunionized, and precarious labor and intensifying the productivity of remaining workers” (Park, p. 58).

For Park, changes in the region since the 1990s are encapsulated by the movement of migrant labor from North Korea to Manchuria and by the flow of Chinese Korean laborers to South Korean companies in China and to South Korea. In the aftermath of the ROK's normalization of relations with China in 1992, South Korean capital began to stream into China, and by the mid-2000s China accounted for one-third of all overseas Korean direct investment. This change significantly affected the Chinese Korean population in Manchuria: just over 20 percent of the workforce in Korean manufacturing enterprises in China is made up of Chinese Koreans. In coastal Shandong, with access to the Yellow Sea (the West Sea in Korea), about 70,000 Chinese Koreans worked for Korean businesses in the mid-2000s (p. 108). These developments have contributed to overturning earlier notions of Korean unification as a marriage of ethnicity and territory and replaced them with flows of capital and labor between South Korea, China's northeast, and the DPRK. “Capital,” Park asserts, “has already unified Korea in a transnational form” (Park, p. ix).

Park discusses the history of the Korean Overseas Act to demonstrate that the South Korean government sought to keep Chinese Koreans in relatively low-paying jobs and prohibit these same workers from taking advantage of an amendment in the Act stipulating that Koreans who had left the country prior to the establishment of the republic in 1948 could apply for naturalization. She refers to these debates as the politics of reparation, as they are theoretically designed to address the legacies of injustice and displacement during the colonial era. Instead, she argues, they are the basis of new social inequalities. Programs designed ostensibly to allow overseas Chinese Koreans to visit family provided a pretext for increased numbers of Chinese Korean workers entering the ROK as “illegal” laborers. In the context of neoliberal reforms in the south, “Korean Chinese workers ease deficiencies in welfare programs, thereby reducing the political liability of democratically elected governments” (Park, p. 80). Park identifies the intentionality of such policies as “capitalist unconscious,” by which she means a false consciousness or Sartrean bad faith that suppresses or replaces the material meaning of the underlying process with the liberal politics of reparation or human rights.

Park attributes a range of motivations to the North Koreans who left for China and South Korea. Like Fahy, she points out that very few intended to go to South Korea when they left the North, and that “the actual reasons for their migration are diverse, ranging from the search for food and freedom, to boredom, flight from criminal prosecution, search for family members who previously went to China or were separated during the Korean War, search for work, and small bag trading.” Paralleling Fahy's discussion of violence, Park cites a former North Korean, living in Seoul, who argued that there was “no such country where the army holds guns against its own starving people struggling to survive” (Park, p. 264). Unlike North Koreans living in South Korea, however, those in Manchuria often “visit home two or three times during stays in China of five to seven years, maintaining contact with their family in North Korea” (Park, p. 255). Park emphasizes the porous character of the Sino-Korean border and points out that DPRK train security officials would let people travel if they stated they were searching for food, and that border guards were complicit with travelers who offered bribes. In contrast with Fahy, who argues that the North Korean state's efforts to limit market access has made things more difficult for North Koreans to access foodstuffs, Park describes the desires of those who look to the market for their needs as embodying a “market utopia,” as social inequalities, corruption, and alienation increase in North Korea. She cites one woman who had formerly engaged in market trading in the DPRK: “I came to realize that the reality of market trading was more horrendous [than the threat of starvation]. People are vicious and driven only by self interest. It was a totally different world” (Park, p. 266).

Neither Fahy nor Park address the scale of the dramatic transformations that occurred in the aftermath of the North Korean famine, but Smith provides such an assessment, highlighting major changes in the DPRK's social structure, but also the limited improvements in the welfare of the population. Part three of her book, “Marketisation and Military Rule,” is rich with descriptions about the reconfiguration of North Korean society since the 1990s. Several important trends include the growing importance of the family as the state withdrew as a provider for society's basic needs; the significant presence of women in trade; an increase in the number of Communist Party and military business enterprises, such as the armed forces’ operation of the west coast container port at Namp'o; officials acting as brokers, facilitating linkages between market traders and businesses; and a decline in the effectiveness of state surveillance (Smith, chapter 9). Important changes occurred in 2002, as the government legalized profit and abolished food subsidies. Yet, the economy improved only marginally in the 2000s, with a growth rate just above 1 percent. In 2012, acute malnutrition affected about 5 percent of the population, which was still high, though lower than the crisis years and less than the wasting rates in India and Indonesia. The United Nations estimated that per capita annual income dropped from about $700 in 1990 to less than $600 in 2011 (Smith, p. 245). The overall result is that the Kim Il Sung–era society has been devastated. Those with the least support and assistance include the elderly, orphans, the industrial working class,Footnote ² and former soldiers who were often employed in dangerous, low-paid jobs involving hard labor.

Agency is an important theme in the three books, but the agency of the Koreans that Fahy and Smith describe is different, in that it involves, on the one hand, North Koreans who left the DPRK and, on the other, those who continued to live in the country. Within Park's conceptual frame, however, these two groups are tied together by their transnational histories, since many North Koreans in the DPRK have become involved, directly or indirectly, in border-crossing market activities. Park's agents are products of transnational capital and crisis, and she would like readers to take these shared histories into account in conceiving a “new politics of the commons” (Park, p. 294). Though Park might refer here to politics in South Korea, in a broader sense the challenge contends with other regional actors and sources of capital that shape the histories of the transnational Koreans she writes about. Indeed, it will be difficult to reconceptualize politics solely in relation to transnational Koreans, even if this is done locally, as she suggests. Chinese Koreans, for example, have multiple, complex social and class identities also related to a transcultural and moneyed China. South Korean capital has played an important role in shaping the political economy of the region, but the recent past and present described by Park may be increasingly shaped by “Chinese” capital and agency. The interplay of multiple sites of transnational capital will likely perform a significant role in the ongoing reconfiguration of the region's social and political structures. The role of the state also remains important. Concern over the objectives and source of capital, along with chuch ’e ideology, may be one reason why North Korean officials have behaved cautiously on issues associated with the integration of the economies of the DPRK and China.

Social scientists have just begun to study and comprehend the scale of the societal upheavals that have impacted North Korea in recent decades. The stories, histories, and voices presented in the books by Fahy, Park, and Smith provide powerful and vivid glimpses into that tumultuous time while also contributing substantially to our conceptual, analytical, and empirical understanding of contemporary continental Northeast Asia.

This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (MEST) (AKS-2010-DZZ-3104).