Rice, Bribes and Survival: The Secret Economy Keeping North Koreans Alive

{"title": "Rice, Bribes and Survival: The Secret Economy Keeping North Koreans Alive", "content": "

On a grey November morning in 2019, Choi Hye-jin watched a state security agent pocket a folded banknote and walk away from her market stall in Hyesan, a border city in North Korea's Ryanggang Province. She had just paid a bribe of 5,000 North Korean won — roughly the equivalent of a day's official wages — to avoid having her unlicensed goods confiscated. It was a transaction she repeated several times a week. Without it, she told this reporter after her defection to South Korea in 2021, she and her two children would have starved.

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North Korea's Secret Rich Class: How the Donju Merchants Are Reshaping the Hermit Kingdom From Within

The Man With the Mercedes In the spring of 2016, a black Mercedes-Benz S-Class edged through the potholed streets of Pyongyang's Moranbong district, past the grey concrete apartment blocks and the billboards praising the Supreme Leader. Behind the wheel sat a man in his fifties wearing a tailored suit — not a party uniform, not a military jacket, but the kind of Italian cut that would not look out of place in Seoul or Shanghai. His name, according to two defectors who separately described the same figure to this reporter, was Choe Yong-nam. He was not a general. He was not a senior party official. He was a coal trader. And he was, by any measure, extraordinarily wealthy. Choe Yong-nam represents a phenomenon that has quietly redefined the social and economic fabric of North Korea over the past two decades: the donju . The word translates roughly as "masters of money," and it refers to a class of private merchants and entrepreneurs who have accumulated significant capital...
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Signal in the Dark: How North Koreans Risk Everything to Hold a Smuggled Phone

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{"title": "Signal in the Dark: How North Koreans Risk Everything to Hold a Smuggled Phone", "content": " On a freezing night in January 2019, a 24-year-old factory worker in Hyesan — a border city hugging the Yalu River that separates North Korea from China — pressed a smuggled Chinese smartphone against her chest and held her breath. She had climbed to the rooftop of her dormitory building, wrapped in a military-surplus coat, waiting for a single bar of Chinese mobile signal to bleed across the frozen river. Her name was Park Soonja. She was not calling a lover. She was not ordering food. She was, in the eyes of the North Korean state, committing an act of treason. She was trying to call her mother, who had escaped to Seoul three years earlier and whom she had not heard from since. What happened next — and what is happening across the northern border regions of the most hermetically sealed nation on earth — constitutes one of the most remarkable and ...
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Jangmadang Nation: How North Korea's Black Market Became the Only Thing Keeping People Alive

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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 de...
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