Technology helps outside world seep into North Korea

South Korea’s border with the North is a muscular-looking affair – a metallic palisade of fences and hulking watch towers. We approached it rather trepidatiously and I suppose that’s the point of it – keep all undesirable elements (like ourselves) out. For a secretive regime like North Korea, guided by its home-spun “juche” or “self-reliance” philosophy, its borders with South Korea and China have added significance – they mark the end of the world. Everything on the other side is suspect.

Yet after speaking with defectors and activists, I have come to understand this formidable looking frontier as old and creaking technology. The outside world is beginning to seep through it – and as you’ll see in our Channel 4 News report – this process has the potential to change the nation from within.

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Through the auspices of the respected advocacy group Citizens’ Alliance for North Korea, we met a Korean defector called Kim Jin Sun. She fled North Korean several months ago and offered us a frank and contemporary account of life on the inside.

Through necessity, Ms Kim began to work in a market in North Korea; “After I got married we didn’t have enough money – I realised what real poverty was – so I started selling clothes from China. It was illegal, but it’s the only way we could survive.”  Markets are banned Korea but after the collapse of the country’s food distribution system in the 1990’s, people had to hustle, trade – or steal – to survive – few could rely on the patronage of the state. In Ms Kim’s case, Chinese traders gave her a lifeline – jackets and boots to flog in the streets.

It wasn’t much of a life – “My existence had no meaning,” she said. It was only after she was passed a revolutionary new product however, that she began to ask hard questions. That item was a mobile phone, smuggled in by her sister who had fled to China several months earlier. Their conversations had a powerful effect; “I started to envy my sister’s life and I wondered if I could live like that too. I couldn’t talk long – it was too dangerous – but I built up a fantasy about their lives.”

Equipped with Chinese mobiles, users like Ms Kim, can compare their impoverished lives with the experiences of others on outside. It isn’t simple to use them though – another defector told us that people often have to travel up to the border region to get a signal – and if caught, they risk a spell in prison camp or even execution.

There are other sources of information as well. Ms Kim told us that “tons” of DVDs are now flooding into China; “The videos are distributed around the market. I’d buy one, then exchange it for another with a friend. But there’s only one hour of electricity a day – sometimes in the middle of the night – so you we’d leap out of bed to watch the DVDs.” Ms Kim liked South Korean soap operas – her favourites, Glass Shoes and the curiously entitled Scent of Men. But again, she said the penalty if caught was severe; “death in some cases,” she warned.

Still, some people in North Korea are willing to take these sort of risks – like working in markets, watching illegal programming and so on – and they do because their own government is utterly unable to provide a range of goods and services they want. Here’s Ms Kim again on television; “When you watch North Korean television, it’s just movies from the 1950s and 60s. People are so bored of them – ‘why are they still airing that in the 21st century’ they say. North Koreans have a lot of expectations about international movies and they have a lot of fantasies about international world.”

For North Korea’s leaders such fantasies are dangerous and run counter to their own anti-western propaganda – fundamental in maintaining the peoples’ obedience to the regime. Unsurprisingly then, they’ve acted strongly in recent months to stem the flow of seditious information – the number of defectors coming across the border for example has dramatically slowed say activist groups in Seoul. But that hulking great fence on border isn’t big enough to keep the world out entirely and the rumblings of change have begun.

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