Red Carpet, Red Flags: Inside the Secret World of North Korea's Super-Rich

The Party Never Stops — If You Know the Right People

Sometime in late October 2019, a woman I'll call Minju — she's now living in Incheon, works at a convenience store, still jumps when her phone rings — described to me a birthday party she attended in Pyongyang's Ryonmotdong district. The host was the son of a mid-ranking official in the Ministry of State Security. There was imported Japanese whisky. A DJ. A buffet table that, by her account, would not have looked out of place in a Seoul hotel. "I ate shrimp," she told me, laughing a little and then stopping herself. "I hadn't eaten shrimp since I was a child. I didn't even know where it came from." She paused. "I don't think I was supposed to be there."

North Korea Untold

That last line stuck with me. Because in North Korea, that's really the whole story, isn't it? The ultra-wealthy — the donju, the party elite, the generals' families — they exist in a parallel country. Same geography. Completely different planet. And most North Koreans aren't supposed to see it, let alone attend its parties.

Who Actually Has Money in North Korea?

Let's be precise about this, because Western coverage tends to flatten it. "The elite" isn't one monolithic class. There are layers. At the very top you have core party families — people whose surnames appear on the right documents going back to Kim Il-sung's Manchurian guerrilla days. Below them, but still stratospheric by any North Korean measure, are the donju: a merchant class that emerged from the chaos of the 1990s famine. These are people who figured out how to make money when the state stopped feeding everyone and just... looked away for a while. Then there are military officers who've built side businesses, and technocrats who've leveraged access to foreign trade. It's more complicated than a simple pyramid. More like an ecosystem.

A defector named Park Sung-jin — he left through the Tumen River crossing near Hoeryong in March 2017, and I spoke with him extensively at a resettlement center in Gwangju — told me he'd worked briefly as a driver for a donju family in Hamhung. The father had made his initial fortune trading Chinese goods through the Rason special economic zone. By the time Park worked for them, around 2014 to 2016, the family owned three apartments, a car, and had a son studying at Kim Il-sung University. "They had a Samsung TV," Park told me. Not a knock-off. A real one. Bought through a third-party broker who moved electronics through the Chinese border. "The size of a door," he said, spreading his arms wide.

The Ryomyong Street Illusion — and What's Behind It

Kim Jong-un unveiled Ryomyong Street in April 2017 with extraordinary fanfare — a cluster of high-rise residential towers in central Pyongyang that state media called a "monument to the people." And look, the buildings are real. I've seen the satellite imagery, spoken to people who've been inside. But who actually lives there? That's the question the official tours don't answer.

According to one defector who asked not to be named — she left in 2021 and the details of her exit are still sensitive — the apartments in towers like those on Ryomyong are allocated, not earned. You don't buy one. You receive one. And the allocation process runs through party loyalty assessments that are, to put it gently, not transparent. "Scientists got some units," she told me. "Loyal families. People the party wanted to reward or to... keep visible. Keep happy." She made a gesture I've come to recognize in these interviews — a slight tipping of the hand, like weighing something unspoken.

But here's what the state media images don't show: the informal market for these spaces. Sources say that once allocated, apartments in prestige developments like Ryomyong effectively function as tradeable assets. Not legally. Never legally. But a family that receives a unit and then needs cash — or needs to relocate, or falls slightly out of favor — can arrange a private transfer through intermediaries. One researcher I spoke with at Seoul National University, who has interviewed over 200 defectors specifically about property, estimated that informal apartment transactions in Pyongyang generate tens of millions of dollars in economic activity annually. The state has no official mechanism for this. The state also doesn't stop it.

What They Eat, What They Drink, What They Drive

I want to get granular here because the abstractions don't capture it. When I visited the Dandong riverfront in September 2022 — you can see Sinuiju across the water, almost close enough to shout — I spoke with a Chinese trader who had been moving goods across the border for nearly fifteen years. He didn't want his name used. He was cautious even over Korean BBQ and two bottles of Tsingtao. But what he described was a procurement pipeline that would astonish most people who think North Korea is hermetically sealed.

Hennessy XO. Rémy Martin. These aren't rumors — the UN Panel of Experts has documented luxury goods flows for years, and defector testimony consistently corroborates it. But it goes further than cognac. I was told by multiple sources about the trade in cosmetics — specifically South Korean brands like Sulwhasoo and Laneige, smuggled through China and repackaged to remove any indication of their origin. About European suits, tailored in Beijing and moved across as "fabric samples." About Japanese electronics — Sony, Panasonic — that flow through Rason and end up in Pyongyang living rooms. And about cars. The Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedans that appear in footage of Kim Jong-un's motorcade are the famous example. But I've heard from multiple defectors about domestically circulating foreign vehicles — Lexus SUVs, BMW 5-series — owned by donju families in cities like Wonsan and Chongjin. Not just Pyongyang. This is spreading.

Food is maybe the starkest indicator. Minju — the woman from the party in Ryonmotdong — described meals she witnessed at that official's home that included imported fruit. Grapes in November. Mangoes. She said it almost as an afterthought, but I stopped her. Mangoes. In November. In North Korea. Let that sit for a second against the backdrop of a country where, according to UN World Food Programme assessments, over 40 percent of the population is undernourced.

The Dollar Economy and the Illusion of the Won

Here's something that doesn't get reported enough: North Korea's elite essentially doesn't use North Korean won. Not for anything that matters. The currency for serious transactions — real estate, vehicles, imported goods, bribes significant enough to matter — is US dollars or Chinese yuan. Sometimes both. I've seen this confirmed so many times across so many independent testimonies that I've stopped being surprised by it.

Park Sung-jin, the driver from Hamhung, told me his employer paid him partly in yuan. Not won. Yuan. For a domestic job, inside North Korea. "Won is for the market," he explained. "For buying vegetables. For small things." The real economy, at least in its upper registers, runs on foreign currency that the state officially forbids ordinary citizens from holding. And yet — according to a 2020 report by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights that drew on testimony from over 13,000 defectors — foreign currency possession is now effectively normalized among the middle and upper classes in major cities. The law exists. Enforcement is selective. Selectively applied to people without the right connections, predictably enough.

The mechanism by which the donju accumulate foreign currency is worth understanding. Many of them are essentially fronting state-affiliated enterprises — import businesses, trading companies — that conduct transactions in yuan or dollars and then funnel a portion back to the officials who provide their legal cover. It's a protection racket dressed up as commerce. The official gets his cut in hard currency. The donju keeps a percentage. The state gets a share through the enterprise structure. And ordinary North Koreans, who have no access to this system, watch the gap between their lives and the lives above them grow wider every year.

Education, Travel, and the Reproduction of Privilege

One thing that genuinely surprised me early in this reporting — and I've been working this beat since 2011 — was how consciously the elite reproduces itself through education. Kim Il-sung University and Kim Chaek University of Technology are the obvious prestige institutions. But there's a whole shadow system underneath: specialized schools in Pyongyang that are technically open to meritocratic competition but in practice dominated by the children of party families and successful donju. I spoke with a former teacher — she asked me to describe her only as a woman in her fifties from South Pyongan Province — who taught at one of these schools in the mid-2010s. "The parents would come," she said. "Not just for meetings. To bring things. Gifts. You understand." I understood.

And then there's the foreign education pipeline. This is still relatively small in scale but it's growing. Sources in the South Korean intelligence community — I'm being deliberately vague here — have indicated that the children of senior officials are increasingly being sent abroad, primarily to China and occasionally to European countries, through official exchange programs or via the overseas business operations that many elite families maintain. They go, they learn, they come back. And they come back with knowledge, contacts, and perspectives that further entrench the gap between them and everyone else.

Travel within North Korea is also a stratified privilege. Moving between provinces requires a travel permit — a yeohaengjeung — that ordinary citizens find difficult and expensive to obtain. For the elite? I was told by multiple defectors that prominent donju and party families move with far greater ease, often because they simply have the right relationships with the security services that issue permits. Or they pay. Or both. Minju told me she once accompanied her employer's wife on a trip from Pyongyang to a coastal resort area near Wonsan. "She didn't show any documents," Minju said. "At the checkpoint, the soldier recognized the car. That was enough."

What Happens When the Music Stops

None of this is stable. That's the thing I keep coming back to, sitting here with my notes and my recordings and my memories of these interviews conducted in resettlement centers and coffee shops and, once, a parking garage in Shenyang because someone was too frightened to be seen with me indoors.

The donju class exists at the pleasure of the state — specifically, at the pleasure of Kim Jong-un and the apparatus around him. There have been periodic crackdowns: waves of inspections, asset seizures, arrests. The currency reform of 2009, which wiped out savings held in won, devastated the nascent merchant class of that era. More recently, the COVID-19 border closure that began in January 2020 and persisted far longer than almost any analyst predicted — cutting off the China trade that forms the lifeblood of donju wealth — reportedly drove many mid-level merchants to near-ruin. One source, a man who left in late 2022, described the atmosphere in Chongjin during the border closure as "frightening." Not because of the disease. Because of what happened to people who'd built their lives on cross-border commerce and suddenly had nothing to sell.

And then there are the purges. Kim Jong-un's execution of his uncle Jang Song-thaek in December 2013 sent shockwaves through the elite precisely because Jang had been one of the architects of the donju system — the man who'd helped manage the Rason zone and the network of patronage relationships around it. When he fell, people who'd built fortunes under his protection scrambled. Some managed the transition. Some didn't. A defector who'd worked in Rason during that period told me about businesses that effectively vanished overnight — not burned down, not seized in any formal sense, just... suddenly it was unwise to be associated with them. Phones stopped being answered. Names stopped being spoken.

That's the fundamental condition of wealth in North Korea. You can have the shrimp and the whisky and the Samsung TV the size of a door. You can have the apartment in Ryomyong and the son at Kim Il-sung University and the Lexus in the courtyard. But you hold all of it at the discretion of a system that can take it back without explanation, without process, without anything resembling the rule of law. The ultra-wealthy in North Korea are, in the end, just better-dressed hostages.

Minju understood this. When I asked her, near the end of our last conversation, whether she missed anything about her life before she left, she was quiet for a long time. "I miss my mother," she said finally. "I don't miss being afraid." And then she picked up her coffee and looked out the window at Incheon — the traffic, the neon, the ordinary chaos of a city where nobody checks your car at a checkpoint — and she didn't say anything else.