Jangmadang Generation: Inside North Korea's Black Market and the Ordinary People Who Risk Everything to Survive

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 smuggled goods, the middle-of-the-night transactions that happen under the nose of a surveillance state that, technically, should make all of it impossible.

It doesn't make it impossible. It never did.

The Famine Changed Everything

To understand the markets, you have to go back to the 1990s. The Arduous March — that's the regime's sanitized name for it. Everyone I've spoken to who lived through it calls it something closer to hell. The Soviet Union had collapsed, aid dried up, the Public Distribution System — the state mechanism through which the government literally fed its citizens — broke down catastrophically. Somewhere between 500,000 and one million people died. Some estimates go higher. Nobody knows for certain, because North Korea doesn't tell you.

A woman I'll call Hyesun — she asked me not to use her real name, she has family still in Hamhung — told me she was twelve years old when her father stopped coming home for dinner. Not because he left. Because there was no dinner. "We ate the bark off trees," she said. We were sitting in a Seoul café in March 2022. She wrapped both hands around her coffee cup like she was still trying to get warm. "My mother would go out before dawn and trade whatever we had left. A pair of shoes. A blanket. She traded almost everything we owned for corn."

Her mother was, without quite meaning to be, becoming a market trader. Millions of North Korean women were doing the same thing. Because the state had failed, and someone had to feed the children.

That's where the jangmadang were born — not out of ideology or rebellion, but out of desperation so acute it overrode fear. And fear, in North Korea, is not a small thing to override.

What a Market Actually Looks Like

People sometimes imagine something furtive. Back alleys, whispered exchanges, goods hidden under coats. And sure, some of that exists — I'll get to it. But the official markets, the ones the government eventually legalized and now taxes, are surprisingly... normal looking. Stalls. Vendors. Noise. The Sunam Market in Chongjin, which sources say is one of the largest in the country, reportedly stretches across several city blocks and operates daily. You can buy Chinese electronics there. Cooking oil. Smuggled South Korean soap operas on USB drives the size of your thumbnail.

A defector named Kwon Cheol-min, who escaped via China in 2019 and now lives in Incheon, described the market in his home city of Hyesan — right on the Chinese border — with an almost nostalgic precision. "You could get anything," he told me. "Chinese instant noodles, medicine, clothes. There was a woman who sold pirated DVDs from a blanket on the ground. Everyone knew what was on them. The police knew. They just wanted their cut."

That last part is the key to understanding how all of this functions. The bribes. The donju — the emerging merchant class that has figured out how to navigate a system where everything is technically illegal but everything has a price.

The Price of Everything

Here's how it works, roughly. A vendor wants to operate a stall in the market. She pays a registration fee to the state. Fine. But she also pays off the market management officials. And the local police officer who patrols her section. And sometimes a People's Unit official from her neighborhood. Multiple layers of informal taxation, paid in cash — often Chinese yuan, which has become the de facto currency of much of North Korean daily commerce because the North Korean won is about as stable as a sandcastle.

I was told by one researcher who has interviewed dozens of defectors specifically about economic behavior — she works at a Seoul-based NGO and asked that neither she nor her organization be named — that the system has essentially created a parallel bureaucracy. "The formal state is there," she said. "But there's an informal state running alongside it, and the informal state is funded by the markets. Officials at every level are dependent on bribe income now. Which means they have a vested interest in the markets continuing to exist."

This is why the regime's periodic crackdowns — and there have been many, especially since Kim Jong-un tightened border controls after COVID-19 in 2020 — never quite kill the markets. You'd be destroying the income stream of your own security apparatus. It's not unlike asking a tollbooth operator to demolish the highway.

Women Run This Economy

I want to be direct about something that sometimes gets lost in the geopolitical coverage of North Korea. The people who built this market system, who take the daily risks to keep it running, who navigate the bribes and the surveillance and the constant threat of detention — they are overwhelmingly women.

Men in North Korea are formally tied to work units. They're required to show up, perform ideological activities, maintain appearances. Skipping that is dangerous in ways that attract attention from higher up the surveillance chain. Women, historically, were given more latitude to engage in small-scale trading because the state considered it beneath serious ideological concern. So women filled the vacuum.

And now, decades later, a significant portion of North Korean households are effectively supported by women's market income, not by whatever the husband brings home from his state work unit salary — which, according to multiple defectors I've spoken to, is often almost worthless in real terms. One man told me his official monthly salary from his state factory job in 2017 was enough to buy maybe two kilograms of rice on the open market. His wife's market stall, selling Chinese-made clothing, kept their family eating.

Hyesun's mother — the woman trading blankets for corn during the famine — eventually built a small trading operation in Hamhung. By the time Hyesun left the country in 2008, her mother was sourcing goods through a network of contacts near the Chinese border, selling them in the local market, and bribing the right officials to stay operational. "She was a businesswoman," Hyesun said, quietly. "She would have been successful anywhere."

The USB Revolution

Walk through any discussion of North Korea's black market with a serious researcher and eventually you hit the same thing: information. The trade in outside media — South Korean dramas, American movies, K-pop, news — has become as significant, in some ways, as the trade in physical goods. Maybe more significant. Because it's changing what North Koreans think.

The vehicles are small. USB drives, called "flash drives" or locally referred to as notel — small portable media players that run on batteries and became popular precisely because electricity supply is so unreliable. According to a 2022 report by InterMedia, a significant percentage of North Koreans under 35 have been exposed to foreign media. The regime knows this. They've been trying to stop it for years.

In December 2020, Kim Jong-un pushed through the Reactionary Thought and Culture Rejection Act — the penalties are severe. Distributing South Korean content can theoretically carry the death penalty now. And yet the USB trade continues, according to defectors who left after 2021. Because the demand is overwhelming, the profits are significant, and the people selling this stuff have, once again, figured out which officials need to be paid.

Kwon Cheol-min told me he watched the entire run of a popular South Korean drama series — I won't name it, he asked me not to — on a notel device in his apartment in Hyesan, passing it around among friends afterward. This was 2018. "We all knew it was dangerous," he said. "But after you watch it — after you see how people in South Korea actually live — it changes you. You can't un-see it."

He paused for a long moment. "That's probably why they're so scared of it."

COVID Shut the Border. The Hunger Came Back.

Whatever fragile, improvised equilibrium the markets had reached by 2019 was severely disrupted starting in early 2020. Kim Jong-un closed the border with China with a speed and totality that genuinely surprised analysts. No trade. No movement. For a country that had become deeply dependent on Chinese goods flowing through smuggling networks along the Yalu and Tumen rivers, this was catastrophic.

Prices spiked. Reports from sources inside the country — filtered through networks of traders and contacts in China that organizations like Daily NK and Radio Free Asia maintain — described the cost of basic foodstuffs roughly doubling in some areas during 2020 and 2021. The UN's World Food Programme flagged North Korea as one of the countries with the most serious food security situations on earth.

And yet the regime didn't open the border. COVID, yes — but also, I think, something else. The border had become porous in ways that scared Pyongyang. Information was flowing in too freely. Defections, though difficult, were still happening. COVID gave them a reason to shut everything down and reset the terms of control.

The people who paid for that decision were the people who always pay. Not the officials with their bribe income and their access to regime supply chains. The vendors. The families in Hamhung and Hyesan and Chongjin who had rebuilt their lives around market income. I spoke to one woman — through an intermediary, she is still inside North Korea — in late 2022. She described selling furniture to buy food. Piece by piece. A chair. A table. A wardrobe. "After the wardrobe," the intermediary relayed her words, "I don't know what we sell next."

The Donju: North Korea's New Rich

It would be wrong to paint this as purely a story of suffering, though. Because alongside the desperation, something else has grown: a class of people who have genuinely prospered from the markets. The donju — literally "masters of money" — are North Korea's de facto capitalist class, and they're an open secret.

They operate through a system of front arrangements with state enterprises. You want to open a restaurant, a small factory, a transport business? You nominally attach it to a state entity, which provides legal cover. The state entity takes a cut. You keep the rest. It's not freedom. But it's closer to a functional market economy than anything the Korean Workers' Party ever intended to create.

Some donju have become genuinely wealthy by North Korean standards — owning multiple properties in Pyongyang, driving Chinese cars, sending their children to the right schools with the right connections. There are apartment buildings in Pyongyang, I've been told, that were effectively privately financed and built, dressed up in state project clothing.

Does this create any pressure for political change? That's the question analysts argue about endlessly. My honest read, after years of talking to people who've lived it — not really. Not yet. The donju are not dissidents. They're survivors who've made peace with the system because the system is profitable for them specifically. They bribe. They comply. They wave the flag when required. They're not going to lead a revolution.

What Survives

The last time I stood on the Dandong riverbank was November 14th, 2023. Cold. The kind of cold that gets into your shoulders and stays there. A Chinese tour boat was doing slow circles in the Yalu — there's a small tourism industry built around looking at North Korea from a safe distance, which has always struck me as one of the stranger things human beings have commercialized.

I was thinking about Hyesun's mother. Still in Hamhung, as far as anyone knows. In her sixties now. Probably still trading, if her health allows it. Probably still paying off whoever needs to be paid. Probably still getting up before most people are awake to figure out where the next meal comes from.

She never chose to be an entrepreneur. She chose to feed her children, and the markets were the only mechanism available for doing that. And in doing so — along with hundreds of thousands of other women making the same desperate calculation in the 1990s — she helped build something that the North Korean state has tried to suppress, regulate, co-opt, and exploit, but has never been able to destroy.

Because you can't destroy something that people need more than they fear you.

That's the actual story of the North Korean black market. Not smugglers and spies — though there are plenty of both. Ordinary people, making extraordinary decisions to survive. And a state that knows, on some level, that its survival now depends on theirs.

The river doesn't look peaceful to me anymore. Hasn't for years.