and the lights went out across much of the country. Most of the time, they are still out.
Satellite photographs of the Korean Peninsula at night show a black hole between China and South Korea. There is not enough power in the country even to keep the lights on in Pyongyang, where the government tries to pamper the elite. In February 2008, when I travelled for three days and two nights to Pyongyang as part of a large delegation of foreign journalists to cover a performance by the New York Philharmonic, the government managed to turn on the lights in much of the city. When the orchestra and the press left town, the lights went out again.
It makes sense, then, that the construction of small- and medium-sized hydroelectric plants, capable of serving local industry and built mostly by hand, using basic technology, has been a priority since the 1990s. In a frenzy of hard labour, thousands have been built.
Besides staving off economic collapse, the dams are ideologically beguiling to the family that runs the country. As his hagiographers tell the story, Kim Il Sung’s most important intellectual achievement — his brilliant
As the Great Leader explained it:
‘Establishing
None of this, of course, is even remotely possible in a country as ill-governed as North Korea. It has always depended on handouts from foreign governments, and if these end, the Kim dynasty would probably collapse. Even in the best of years, it cannot feed itself. North Korea has no oil, and its economy has never been able to generate enough cash to buy sufficient fuel or food on the world market.
North Korea would have lost the Korean War and disappeared as a state without the help of the Chinese, who fought the United States and other Western forces to a stalemate. Until the 1990s, North Korea’s economy was largely held together by subsidies from the Soviet Union. From 2000 to 2008, South Korea propped up the North — and bought itself a measure of peaceful coexistence — with huge unconditional gifts of fertilizer and food, along with generous investment.
Since then, Pyongyang has become increasingly dependent on China for concessional trade, food aid and fuel. A telling measure of China’s growing influence is that in the months prior to Kim Jong Eun’s official emergence in 2010 as the chosen successor to Kim Jong Il, the ailing elder Kim travelled twice to Beijing, where diplomats say he asked for China to bless his succession plan.
Reality notwithstanding, North Korea champions self-reliance as the
To that fantastical end, the government regularly enlists the masses in miserable tasks dressed up in noble slogans. The propaganda can be quite creative: the famine was repackaged as the ‘Arduous March’, a patriotic struggle that North Koreans were encouraged to win with the inspiring slogan: ‘Let’s Eat Two Meals Per Day’.
In the spring of 2010, as food shortages again became severe, the government launched a massive back- to-the-farm campaign to persuade city dwellers to move to the countryside and raise crops. These urbanites were to be permanent reinforcements for ‘rice-planting combat’, the annual campaign that sends office workers, students and soldiers to the country-side for two months in the spring and two weeks in the fall. In the winter, city people are charged with collecting their faeces — and that of their neighbours — for spring planting.
Other urgent and patriotic tasks that North Koreans have been urged to shoulder include ‘Let’s Breed More High-Yielding Fish!’ ‘Let’s Expand Goat Rearing and Create More Grassland in Accordance with the Party!’ and ‘Let’s Grow More Sunflowers!’ The success of these hortatory campaigns has been mixed, at best, especially when it comes to the government’s highly unpopular efforts to lure city-bred people into back-breaking farm labour.
For the dam project inside Camp 14 there were no such problems with motivation.
As Shin witnessed it, soon after the guards announced a new ‘rally of endeavour’ to build a hydroelectric dam, thousands of adult prisoners marched from factories to makeshift dormitories erected near the north bank of the Taedong. Shin and his classmates moved out of their school dormitory. They all worked, ate and slept at the dam site, which was located about six miles southeast of the centre of the camp.
Labour on the dam, which satellite photographs show to be a substantial concrete structure spanning a wide river, with turbines and spillways hugging the northern bank, continued round the clock. Trucks hauled in cement, sand and rock. Shin saw only one diesel-powered excavator. Most of the digging and construction was done by workers using shovels, buckets and bare hands.
Shin had seen prisoners die in the camp before — of hunger, illness, beatings and at public executions — but not as a routine part of work.
The greatest loss of life at the dam occurred soon after fullscale construction began. A rainy season flash flood rolled down the Taedong in July 1998, sweeping away hundreds of dam workers and students. Shin watched them disappear from a perch on the riverbank where he was hauling sand. He was quickly put to work confirming the identities of dead students and burying their bodies.
On the third day after the flood, he remembers carrying the bloated body of a girl on his back. At first it was slack, but it soon became stiff, with rigid arms and legs splayed outward. To squeeze the body into a narrow, hand-dug grave, he had to push the limbs together.
Floodwaters stripped some drowned students of their clothes. When Hong Joo Hyun discovered a naked classmate amid the post-flood debris, he removed his own clothes and covered the body.
As the clean-up continued, Shin competed with many other students to find bodies. For each corpse they buried, guards rewarded them with one or two servings of rice.
The Taedong, as it flowed past Camp 14, was too wide and swift to freeze in the North Korean winter, allowing dam construction to continue year round. In December 1998, Shin was ordered to wade into the river’s shallows to pick up boulders. Unable to bear the cold and without the approval of his guard, he joined several other students who tried to wade out.
‘You come out of the water and I’ll starve you all, understand!’ their guard shouted.
Shivering uncontrollably, Shin kept working.
Students worked primarily as bottom-rung labourers. They often carried steel reinforcing rods to older workmen who tied them together with twine or wire as the dam rose from the riverbed in a chequerboard pattern of concrete blocks. None of the students had gloves, and in winter their hands often stuck to the cold rods. Handing over a ‘rebar’ sometimes meant ripping skin from one’s palms and fingers.
Shin remembers that when one of his classmates, Byun Soon Ho, complained about a fever and feeling unwell, a guard gave him a lesson in the benefits of stoicism.
‘Soon Ho, stick out your tongue,’ the guard said.
He ordered the boy to press his tongue to a freezing rebar. Nearly an hour later, Soon Ho, tears in his eyes, his mouth oozing blood, managed to detach his tongue.
Working at the dam was dangerous, but Shin also found it exhilarating.
The primary reason was food. It was not particularly tasty, but month in, month out there was lots of it. Shin remembers mealtimes at the dam site as the happiest moments of his teen years. He regained all the weight and stamina he had lost in the underground prison, he could keep up at work and he became confident in his ability to survive.
Living near the dam also gave Shin a small measure of independence. In the summer, hundreds of students slept outdoors under a canopy. When they were not working, they could walk — during daylight hours — anywhere inside the sprawl of Camp 14. For his hard work, Shin earned a recommendation from his grade leader that allowed him to leave the dam site for four overnight visits to his father. Since they were not reconciled, Shin spent just one night with him.
He had worked at the dam for about a year when his time at secondary school came to an end in May 1999. The school had been little more than slave quarters from which he was sent out as a rock picker, weed puller and dam labourer, but graduation meant that, at the age of sixteen, he had become an adult worker. He
