Jangmadang Nation: How North Korea's Black Market Became the Only Thing Keeping People Alive

The Market That Wasn't Supposed to Exist

The first time I spoke to someone who'd actually run a stall in a North Korean jangmadang — that's the informal market, the black market, depending on who you ask and how afraid they are — I was sitting in a cramped apartment in Shenyang, China, in February 2019. The woman across from me, I'll call her Minju, was 41 years old, originally from Chongjin, and she kept glancing at the door even though we were four floors up and nobody knew we were there. Old habits. She'd been selling salt, then dried fish, then eventually Chinese-made electronics for nearly a decade before she got out. She told me the market wasn't just her income. It was her entire life. Her identity. Her survival mechanism. And the state, officially, pretended it barely existed — even as state officials took their cut of every single transaction.

North Korea Untold

That's the paradox at the heart of this story. North Korea's leadership has spent decades insisting it runs a centrally planned socialist paradise where the state provides everything. And for a brief window in the early decades of the DPRK, there was at least an attempt at that — the Public Distribution System, or PDS, theoretically handed out food and goods to citizens based on their songbun class status and work unit. But the famine of the 1990s — the one the government calls the "Arduous March," a phrase so grotesquely euphemistic I can barely type it — killed somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 people depending on whose estimates you trust, and it shattered the PDS almost completely. What grew in its place was something the regime never planned for and has never fully been able to stamp out.

"The State Stopped Feeding Us, So We Fed Ourselves"

Kwon Hyeoksoo — not his real name, he asked me to change it — left North Korea in March 2021 after spending eighteen years working in and around the markets of Hyesan, a border city in Ryanggang Province that sits right across the Yalu River from the Chinese city of Changbai. He's one of maybe a dozen former market participants I've spoken to over the past four years, and he has this way of explaining things that strips away any romanticism you might be tempted to attach to the story of ordinary people improvising their way out of starvation.

"When the food stopped coming from the state," he told me through an interpreter in Seoul last spring, "you had two options. You found a way to trade something, or you died. That's not an exaggeration. People around me died."

The early jangmadang of the mid-1990s were desperate, chaotic things. People selling household possessions — furniture, clothes, tools — anything to get food. Women, mostly. It's a detail that comes up again and again across testimonies: women ran the markets because men were still nominally attached to work units and state enterprises, still required to show up even when those enterprises had nothing to produce and no wages to pay. Women occupied this semi-invisible space in North Korean society and they exploited it — not cynically, just practically — to become the economic engine of a country the state had failed.

By the time the 2000s arrived, the jangmadang had evolved into something far more sophisticated. Fixed stalls. Regular vendors. Recognizable products. And most significantly: a price system governed not by Pyongyang but by supply and demand. Actual market economics, operating inside the world's most closed command economy. I find that almost impossible to get my head around every time I think about it.

The Geography of Getting By

Not all markets are equal in North Korea, and where you live shapes everything about how you participate. Pyongyang's markets — places like the Tongil Market or the Sunan area's trading zones — operate with a kind of relative openness that would be unthinkable in rural provinces. The capital gets more of everything: more products, more money circulating, more tolerance from authorities who understand that keeping Pyongyang's residents fed and moderately content is a political necessity. A source I spoke to in late 2022, a former mid-level Pyongyang resident who defected through the Tumen River crossing, described casually buying South Korean cosmetics and USB drives loaded with South Korean dramas from stalls that operated more or less openly. In Pyongyang. In 2020.

But travel four hours north to somewhere like Musan or Hoeryong — mining towns, poor, far from the capital's calculations — and the picture is harsher. Minju described to me how in Chongjin, which is North Korea's third-largest city and theoretically industrial, the markets in her neighborhood were subject to periodic crackdowns where local police — the inminban supervisors, the Ministry of Social Security officers — would sweep through, confiscate goods, demand bribes, occasionally arrest someone to make an example. And then, she said, two weeks later everything would be back. Because what's the alternative? Starve?

There's a rhythm to the repression that defectors describe with a kind of weary familiarity. Crackdown. Bribe your way out. Resume trading. Crackdown. The state extracts money at every stage of this cycle, which is part of why the cycle never truly ends. The jangmadang doesn't just feed ordinary people — it feeds the apparatus that's supposed to suppress it.

The Price of a Kilogram of Rice and What It Tells You

One of the most revealing things about the jangmadang is that you can track what's happening inside North Korea — really happening, not the official version — through market prices. Analysts at places like the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights in Seoul, and researchers like Martyn Williams who runs 38 North, have spent years collecting price data through defector testimonies and border contacts. It's imperfect data. Obviously. But it's real in a way that official North Korean statistics simply aren't.

When Kim Jong-un ordered the borders sealed in January 2020 — officially because of COVID, though many analysts believe the regime saw the pandemic as cover for reasserting control over cross-border smuggling that had gotten out of hand — market prices inside North Korea went haywire. Rice prices reportedly spiked by 50 to 80 percent in some regions within months. The Korean won, already a semi-fictional currency that nobody trusted for serious transactions, tanked further against the Chinese yuan, which is what people actually use when they can get it. One defector I spoke to who maintained contact with family inside told me his sister in Sinuiju was paying the equivalent of nearly a full month's official salary for a single kilogram of rice by mid-2020.

Think about that. A month's salary. For one kilogram of rice. This is not ancient history. This was four years ago.

The border closure didn't kill the jangmadang — nothing has managed that — but it strangled the supply chains that had been quietly integrating North Korea's informal economy with China's. Chinese goods, which had flooded in through the border towns, became scarcer and more expensive. And the regime's simultaneous crackdown on private trading, under what was presented as anti-COVID sanitation measures but was really a reassertion of state control, pushed the markets underground in ways that hadn't been seen since the mid-2000s.

The Donju: North Korea's Accidental Capitalists

Here's something that doesn't fit neatly into the standard narrative about North Korea as a uniformly gray, uniformly poor prison state: there is a merchant class. A real one. They're called donju — "masters of money" — and they've emerged from the jangmadang economy to become something the Kim regime never intended to create and now can't quite figure out what to do with.

I was told, by a researcher who has interviewed dozens of defectors with donju connections, that some of these individuals are worth the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of US dollars. In North Korea. Sitting on capital they've accumulated through years of trading, money-lending — interest rates in informal North Korean lending markets can run 30 percent monthly, which tells you something about both the desperation and the returns — and brokering deals between state enterprises that nominally own resources but need private capital to actually extract or move them.

The state-donju relationship is genuinely strange. The regime needs these people. State enterprises that haven't functioned properly in thirty years use donju financing to actually operate. Military units, party organizations, even some government ministries have arrangements with wealthy private individuals because the state budget simply doesn't cover operational needs. And yet the donju exist in permanent legal jeopardy. They can't officially own what they own. They use frontmen, fake enterprise registrations, bribery networks that extend up through provincial party structures sometimes to Pyongyang itself. They are simultaneously essential to the economy and perpetually one bad political moment away from having everything confiscated.

One defector, a man I'll call Jang Cheolmin, who had worked as a kind of financial middleman for a donju network in South Pyongan Province before getting out in 2018, described this dynamic with a shrug that I found more chilling than any dramatic description could be. "Everyone knows," he said. "The officials know. The police know. The party secretaries know. You pay, and you're protected. Until you're not. Until someone above them decides they want what you have. Then you go to a labor camp and they take everything." He paused. "That's how it works."

Women Who Built an Economy

I keep coming back to the gender dimension of this because it's something that Western coverage consistently underplays, and it matters enormously for understanding what the jangmadang actually is and what it's done to North Korean society.

North Korean women are, on paper, still legally obligated to their husbands' work units and residential assignments in various ways. They face restrictions men don't. And yet — or maybe because of this, because necessity invented the workaround — women became the primary operators of the informal economy almost from the beginning. Estimates from researchers at the Korea Development Institute and from defector testimony databases suggest that somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of jangmadang traders are women. Some are full-time vendors. Some are brokers who move goods between markets. Some are the quiet financiers, lending to other traders and collecting interest.

What this has done, quietly and without anyone planning it, is create a generation of North Korean women who have independent economic identities that didn't exist before. They earn money that isn't mediated by a work unit or a husband. They make decisions about inventory, pricing, risk. They have social networks built on economic relationships rather than state-assigned neighborhood watches. According to one defector who asked not to be named, who left Wonsan in 2016, the women in her jangmadang network knew more about the real state of the North Korean economy than any party official she'd ever encountered. Because they were living in it. Every day.

This doesn't mean the markets have made North Korean women free — the regime's patriarchal structures are deeply embedded and market participation hasn't dismantled them — but it's something. A crack in the wall. And I think the regime knows this, which is part of why crackdowns on market activity so often seem specifically targeted at female traders.

What the State Can See, and What It Can't

Kim Jong-un's government has tried three distinct approaches to the jangmadang since he took power in late 2011. First, a period of relative tolerance — letting the markets expand because suppressing them visibly would be admitting the state couldn't feed people. Second, periodic crackdowns that were really revenue extraction disguised as ideological enforcement. And third, since around 2019, a more sustained push to bring market activity back under state supervision, creating official market spaces while trying to criminalize the informal networks that actually do the work.

None of it has worked. Not in any fundamental sense. The networks are too diffuse, too embedded in everyday life, too intertwined with the very officials who are supposed to suppress them. A source who monitors North Korean state media and internal documents — I can't say more about this person's access without endangering them — told me last year that internal party reports from 2022 acknowledged that market activity had not been successfully controlled and that local officials were systematically underreporting the scale of private trading in their districts. They were underreporting it because they were profiting from it.

The jangmadang has, in some ways, corrupted the very apparatus of the North Korean state from the inside. Not dramatically, not in ways that are about to produce a revolution — I want to be careful here, because journalists have been predicting the imminent collapse of North Korea since about 1994 and it hasn't happened — but structurally. The officials who take bribes from market traders are not purely ideological agents of the party anymore. They're economic actors with interests of their own. That's a change. Whether it's a change that ultimately matters for the people living through it, I genuinely don't know.

The Human Cost of Survival

I want to end somewhere close to where I started, which is with Minju in that apartment in Shenyang. Before we finished talking, I asked her what she missed about her life in Chongjin, which felt like a strange question to ask someone who'd risked her life to leave. She thought about it for a while.

She missed the market, she said. Not what it represented or what it meant for the political economy of North Korea — she had no interest in that framing. She missed the actual physical experience of it. The noise. The smell of dried fish and machine oil and something frying. The women she'd worked alongside for years, some of whom she still didn't know by real name because you learned quickly not to ask. The feeling, she said — and I'm translating loosely here from what her interpreter conveyed — of being in a place that was real. Where real things were happening. Where money changed hands and goods moved and people actually needed what you had to offer.

Everything else in North Korea, she said, felt like performance. The mass rallies. The political study sessions. The official slogans painted on walls. The news broadcasts. Performance. But the market was real.

I've thought about that a lot since. The black market — the jangmadang, this thing that was never supposed to exist and that the state officially can't fully acknowledge — might be the most honest institution in North Korea. The only place where reality isn't mediated by ideology. Where the actual conditions of life are reflected, in the price of a kilogram of rice or a smuggled USB stick or a bribe paid to a policeman looking the other way.

It won't bring down the regime. Markets didn't bring down the Soviet Union by themselves, and North Korea is a far more controlled environment than the late Soviet Union ever was. But the jangmadang has already changed North Korea in ways that are probably irreversible. Millions of people have spent decades learning to operate outside the state's framework. To trust informal networks over official ones. To use Chinese yuan instead of North Korean won. To understand that value comes from exchange, not from party decree.

The Kim family built a country where information was supposed to flow in one direction only — downward, from the leadership to the people — and where economic life was supposed to be entirely state-mediated. The jangmadang broke both of those things. Quietly, gradually, undramatically, one transaction at a time. And the people running it weren't dissidents or activists. They were just people trying to eat.