North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors Hardcover – April 14, 2015

It’s certainly one of the very few books that do their best to correct rather than cement the widely held misconceptions about North Korea. It confirms what I had already learned from a rare insider memoir, Felix Abt’s “A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom”, where he explains, from personal experience and with plenty of examples, that North Korea isn’t stuck in the past, but has been undergoing dramatic changes in recent years. Abt not only witnessed this transition, but implemented, or was a party to, many ground breaking reforms himself.
Abt’s lively depiction of life in contemporary North Korea and his ventures and adventures are full of eye-opening surprises, especially to those unused to an informed, impartial portrayal of life in the country. Similarly, North Korea itself may well surprise observers, not as the source of sensationalist headlines loved by Western media, but with tales of moderation, change and advancement.

The author's have done a fantastic job of giving us, the reader glimpse into everyday life in North Korea. If you have any interest in the DPRK, this makes for a fascinating read.

interesting reading, informative.

This book has more detailed information the Hermit Kingdom than any book I've ever read or even heard of. While it lacks the emotional punch of Barbara Demick's "Nothing To Envy", it does an excellent job of explaining the reality of everyday life -- backed by an extraordinary amount of facts and figures.

Moreover it's one of the few recent books (published April 2015) I've been able to find on the subject. That means it provides ample coverage of the creeping capitalism that is beginning to make the DPRK look a bit like China in the 80's.

A recommended read for anyone interested in this mysterious country.

Practically everything you know about North Korea is wrong. That, at least, is the inescapable conclusion to take from reading Daniel Tudor and James Pearson’s new book, North Korea Confidential.

I exaggerate, of course. North Korea is, without question, one of the poorest countries in the world. It’s ruled by a brutal dictatorship that operates a system of political prisons that would do Josef Stalin proud. It’s a nuclear power and given to saber-rattling. And one family, the Kims, is the country’s ruling dynasty, now in its third generation.

Though all that, and more, is, indeed, true, Tudor and Pearson draw on extensive research to demonstrate that the impression we Westerners get from the news media is still highly misleading. The North Korean people are not slogan-chanting automatons enslaved to adulation for Kim Jong Un (their “Dear Leader,” or “Great Leader,” or whatever else he might be calling himself). Kim Jong Un is not a lunatic; his father or grandfather weren’t, either. Nor is he the sole, undisputed leader of the nation; “he has inherited a system [created by his father] in which one rather shadowy organization may possess more power than he does.” North Korea is not a Communist country, nor has it been for nearly two decades. And there is virtually NO chance that the country will collapse, the victim of its own considerable internal contradictions.

In chapters devoted to the market economy; leisure time; the power struggle at the top; crime and punishment; clothes, fashion, and trends; communications, and the country’s social class structure, Tudor and Pearson paint a picture of a complex society struggling with the conflicts of the mid-twentieth century while the outside world labors to drag it into the twenty-first.

Here’s the gist of the message in North Korea Confidential: ever since the tragic famine that overtook North Korea in the mid-1990s, the desperate urge for survival has led people at all levels of society to build a rudimentary market system that has become the foundation of the country’s economy. The famine was so severe and far-reaching — costing at least hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives –in a country whose population now stands at just twenty-four million — that the government was unable to continue distributing food, as it had ever since Kim Il Sung industrialized the country in the years following the Korean War. Once the distribution of free food was disrupted, the North Korean people found ways to grow their own food, or forage for it, and to sell or exchange food for other necessities in homegrown markets that sprang up in defiance of the Party and the government. And those markets have grown in importance to the point where the gray economy may overshadow the official one.

Equally important, the famine undermined respect for the Kim dynasty’s government. Though vocal criticism of their leadership is still rare (and viciously punished), people demonstrate their independence in a variety of ways: they seek out DVDs and thumb drives containing South Korean and Chinese music, films, and TV shows (and even an occasional American movie); they listen to South Korean, Chinese, and US-sponsored radio for news of the outside world; they dress in ways that defy the Party’s severe guidelines; they travel without permits from town to town and sometimes across the Chinese border; and, increasingly, they are gaining access to the Internet despite the government’s efforts to make that impossible. (More than ten percent of the population now own cell phones.) Whenever they’re caught flouting the rules in these or many other ways, they are almost always able to bribe their way out of the draconian punishment the law dictates.

In truth, there are hints of much of this in the news about North Korea. Yet I’d never before read of the multimillionaires among the Pyongyang elite, or of the estimated $20 billion fortune accumulated by the Kim family. I knew that the country maintains one of the world’s largest armies, but I was unaware that soldiers are more often put to work as free labor on construction and other projects rather than trained for combat. I had surmised that, as in any country, connections to people in power would provide a layer of protection from victimization by the police, but I learned that cash — outright, blatant bribery — is a daily fact of life. I knew that historically “even family members would sometimes inform on each other, either out of fear or the belief that it was the ‘right’ thing to do,” but not that “[t]his is certainly no longer the case.” The regime may still have the power to maintain its hold on the country, but — after the famine — ordinary citizens no longer are inclined to show their respect to authority, even to the Kim family.

All in all, North Korea Confidential provides a useful counterbalance to the one-dimensional pictures we tend to hear from most defectors and occasional dissidents and from the news and analysis that looks at the country from the top down rather than the bottom up.

Daniel Tudor and James Pearson are both British journalists. Tudor formerly worked in Seoul, Korea, as the local correspondent for The Economist. Pearson, also an old Korea hand, currently writes a blog for Thomson Reuters.

I enjoyed reading about the Kim family and the OGD organization and how those two groups sometimes align together and sometimes are opponents. Interesting book !

It was to a degree of what I would expect from the mosyt isolated nation in the world. The fact that it's leader would kill his own relative because he disagreed with him is bizarre.

I was a little surprised to read that if you knew who to bribe, then life could be a little better for your family than a lot of other families living in the DPRK.

It pained a g rim picture of the country and that is not a good t hing to read about int he end. I was curious to r ead in greater detail from people living there actually wha t is taking place today.

A good read if you want to appreciate how all the rest of the world's population is doing compared to the masses that make up PDRK.

as advertised