North Korea Untold

Dandong, China — November 2023 The Yalu River looks almost peaceful this time of year. You stand on the Chinese side, in Dandong, and you can see the North Korean city of Sinuiju right there — close enough that on a clear day you can make out figures moving along the riverbank. Guards. Fishermen, maybe. Or people doing exactly what you're not supposed to do in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea: conducting business. North Korea Untold I've been coming to this border for six years now. And every time, I'm struck by the same thing. The gap between what Pyongyang says is happening inside that country and what people are actually doing to stay alive — it's not a gap. It's a canyon. What's happening inside North Korea right now, has been happening for nearly three decades, is one of the most remarkable stories of improvised human survival I've ever encountered in my career. It's the story of the jangmadang — the markets. The gray zones. The bribes,...

The Party That Never Made the News Sometime in the spring of 2019 — a defector I'll call Jisun, a former resident of Pyongyang's Moranbong district, told me this story over instant coffee in a cramped Seoul apartment — there was a birthday party in a villa on the outskirts of the capital. Not a party by any standard we'd recognize. There were bottles of Hennessy Paradis. There was imported sushi, flown in through Dalian. A DJ had been brought up from somewhere, no one quite knew where, and the music went on until four in the morning. The host was the son of a senior official in the Organization and Guidance Department. He was twenty-six. And outside that villa, in the same city, families were rationing corn porridge. North Korea Untold That's North Korea's dirty secret that even most North Korea watchers underplay. Yes, everyone knows the Kim family lives in obscene luxury. But there's a second tier — a floating, semi-hidden class of the genuinely wealthy that e...