Champagne in Pyongyang: How North Korea's Secret Billionaires Live Like Kings While Millions Starve

{"title": "Champagne in Pyongyang: How North Korea's Secret Billionaires Live Like Kings While Millions Starve", "content": "

The Party That Shouldn't Exist

On a Thursday evening in October 2019, inside a marble-floored penthouse apartment on Changjon Street in central Pyongyang, a private gathering was underway that would have shocked the outside world into disbelief. Bottles of Hennessy Paradis cognac — retailing at over $800 each — were being uncorked. A DJ flown in from Macau, according to a source who attended the event, played electronic music through a sound system imported from Germany. The host, a mid-level official in the Korea Ryonbong General Corporation, one of the regime's most lucrative state trading companies, had just closed a minerals deal worth millions of dollars. In a country where the average monthly wage hovers around $3, he was, by any conceivable measure, a billionaire. And almost nobody outside of Pyongyang's most protected corridors knew his name.

This is the story of the donju — North Korea's shadowy moneyed class — and of the senior party officials, military commanders, and regime-connected entrepreneurs who have quietly constructed lives of extraordinary privilege beneath the surveillance state's own blind spots. Their existence is one of the most deliberately obscured realities in the world's most secretive country. But through interviews with defectors, cross-referenced intelligence reports, and accounts from traders who operated on the Chinese border, a portrait is beginning to emerge. It is a portrait that should disturb every assumption we hold about North Korea.

Who Are the Donju?

The term donju translates roughly as "masters of money" — and it entered North Korea's vocabulary during the catastrophic famine of the 1990s, when between 300,000 and 800,000 people perished and the state's centralized distribution system collapsed entirely. In the vacuum, informal markets emerged. Individuals with connections, cunning, or contraband goods began accumulating capital. By the mid-2000s, a recognizable mercantile class had crystallized: people who operated in the grey zone between state enterprise and private profit, always careful to pay the right bribes, always careful to appear ideologically compliant.

Park Ji-hyun, who defected from Pyongyang in 2014 and now works as a researcher at the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights in Seoul, described the class vividly in a two-hour interview conducted in March 2023. "There were people in my neighborhood who drove cars," she said. "Not party officials. Merchants. Their wives wore South Korean cosmetics. Their children attended special schools. They ate meat every day. In North Korea, eating meat every day is the definition of wealth." She paused. "Most North Koreans eat meat perhaps once a month. If they are lucky."

The Architecture of Luxury

Pyongyang itself has become, in the past decade, a tale of two cities existing in forced parallel. The gleaming towers of the Mirae Scientists Street development, completed in 2015, and the luxury apartment complexes of Ryomyong Street, inaugurated in 2017 with a military parade, are not, as state propaganda insists, housing for heroic scientists and workers. According to reporting by Andrei Lankov, a North Korea scholar at Kookmin University in Seoul who has spent decades cultivating sources inside the country, the most desirable units in these developments were sold quietly to donju families for sums between $150,000 and $300,000 — transactions conducted entirely in U.S. dollars or Chinese yuan, off any official record.

Inside these apartments, investigators and defectors report a level of consumption that strains credulity. Rimjin-gang, the underground citizen journalism network that operated inside North Korea between 2007 and 2015, documented accounts of imported Italian furniture, South Korean Samsung televisions smuggled through Dandong, and fully equipped home gymnasiums. One account, published in 2013, described an apartment in which the owner had installed underfloor heating — a luxury almost unimaginable in a country where ordinary citizens routinely freeze through winters without reliable electricity.

The elite's appetite for foreign goods has given rise to an entire shadow import economy centered on the Chinese border city of Dandong. Traders operating there — several of whom spoke to this publication on condition of anonymity — describe regular orders for luxury cosmetics, French wine, Japanese electronics, and high-end sportswear. "They want Nike. They want Chanel. They know the brands," said one trader who ran a cross-border logistics operation between 2011 and 2020. "The orders come through middlemen. You never meet the final customer. But you know they are not poor people."

Kim Jong-un's Enabling Architecture

It would be a mistake to view North Korea's wealthy elite as existing in opposition to Kim Jong-un's regime. They exist, in most cases, because of it. The relationship is symbiotic and carefully managed. Senior party officials, generals, and the heads of the approximately 40 to 50 state trading companies that operate under the ruling Korean Workers' Party use their institutional positions to extract rents from the economy while maintaining ostentatious public loyalty to the leadership. Kim, who studied in Switzerland and is himself a connoisseur of foreign luxury goods — UN Panel of Experts reports have documented his regime's import of luxury yachts, sports cars, and French cognac in violation of international sanctions — understands the arrangement perfectly.

Thae Yong-ho, North Korea's former deputy ambassador to London who defected spectacularly in 2016 and now serves as a member of South Korea's National Assembly, has spoken publicly about what he observed at the upper echelons of the regime. "Inside the party, there is a completely different world," he told journalists at a 2021 conference in Washington D.C. "Officials talk about their apartments, their cars, their children's education abroad. They talk about these things openly among themselves. The ideology — Juche, self-reliance — that is for the people outside. Inside the system, everyone knows the reality."

Education, Escape, and the Swiss Bank Account

Perhaps the most startling dimension of North Korea's elite class is the sophistication with which they have managed their wealth across borders. Intelligence assessments from South Korea's National Intelligence Service, portions of which have been disclosed to journalists, describe networks through which regime-connected individuals have parked assets in Chinese real estate, Southeast Asian bank accounts, and shell companies registered in jurisdictions from Singapore to the British Virgin Islands. The mechanisms are those of any global kleptocracy: layered ownership, nominee directors, and financial intermediaries who ask no questions.

The children of the elite are, where possible, educated outside the country. Kim Jong-un himself attended the International School of Berne under a false identity before moving to the Liebefeld Steinhölzli school in Köniz, Switzerland. This pattern — of leaders and senior officials sending their children abroad while the country's borders remain sealed to ordinary citizens — is not incidental. It is a feature. Several defectors from elite families have described attending school in China, officially under the auspices of diplomatic postings, absorbing a vision of the world that their compatriots back home could never legally access.

Lee Hyun-seung, who grew up in a senior party official's family in Pyongyang before defecting through China and Thailand, arriving in South Korea in 2018, described the cognitive dissonance of his upbringing with startling clarity. "We knew about the outside world. We had USB drives with South Korean dramas. We had iPhones — not to use on a network, obviously, but to use on Wi-Fi. We watched movies. We knew what a supermarket looked like," he said. "And then I would go to school and we would sing songs about the Great Leader providing everything for the people. And I would think: nobody in my neighborhood believes this. Not really. Not anymore."

The Inequality the Regime Cannot Acknowledge

The supreme irony of North Korea's ruling ideology is that the state founded explicitly to eliminate class distinction has produced one of the most rigidly stratified societies on earth. The songbun system — the hereditary loyalty classification that assigns every citizen a political ranking at birth — was designed to cement revolutionary virtue. Instead, it created a permanent aristocracy. And that aristocracy, over three generations, has transformed itself into something the Kim family's founders might have found unrecognizable: a consumption-oriented, dollar-holding, luxury-importing elite class, indistinguishable in its appetites from the capitalist enemies against whom the revolution was supposedly fought.

Park Ji-hyun, the defector researcher, summed it up with a sentence that has stayed with this reporter since our interview ended. "In North Korea," she said quietly, "the people who shout loudest about Juche and self-reliance are the people who drink imported Scotch whisky on Saturday nights." She smiled, but her eyes did not. "Everyone in Pyongyang knows this. It is the secret that is not a secret. It is the truth that cannot be spoken."

The champagne glasses clink in the Changjon penthouse. Outside, in the dark, a city of three million people goes to bed hungry.

", "labels": ["North Korea", "Kim Jong-un", "Donju", "Pyongyang", "Wealth Inequality", "Defectors", "Sanctions", "Korean Workers Party"]}

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