The Market Mothers: How North Korean Women Built a Secret Economy That Defies Kim Jong-un

On a freezing morning in February 2019, a woman named Choi Hye-jin rose before dawn in the city of Chongjin, wrapped dried fish in cloth, tucked a wad of North Korean won beneath her undergarments, and walked three kilometres to a concrete-floored marketplace before the state security agents began their morning patrols. She was not a revolutionary. She was not a dissident. She was simply trying to feed her children. And in doing so, she had become something the Kim dynasty never anticipated: the invisible backbone of an entire underground economy that now keeps North Korea alive.

North Korea Untold

The Collapse That Created the Merchant Women

The story begins not with courage, but with catastrophe. Between 1994 and 1998, the Great Famine — known inside North Korea as the "Arduous March" — killed an estimated 600,000 to one million people, according to South Korean government estimates. The state's Public Distribution System, which had supplied every citizen with food rations since the nation's founding, collapsed entirely in rural and industrial areas. Factories shuttered. Men, bound by rigid work-unit obligations and political surveillance, were ordered to continue reporting to dormant state enterprises even as their families starved. Women, subject to comparatively fewer institutional controls, stepped into the void.

"The men had to attend the work unit every day or face punishment," recalled Lee Sun-hyang, who escaped North Korea in 2011 after years of trading goods in the markets of Hamhung. "But we women — we could move. Nobody watched us the same way. So we started selling. First our furniture, then our clothes, then whatever we could find." Her testimony, collected by researchers at the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights in Seoul, mirrors hundreds of others gathered from the more than 33,000 defectors now living in South Korea.

Jangmadang: The Black Markets That Became the Economy

What began as desperate survival evolved, over three decades, into a sophisticated and sprawling commercial ecosystem. The jangmadang — literally "field markets" — now operate in virtually every city, town, and village across the country. A 2020 survey conducted by the Seoul-based Korea Development Institute estimated that between 70 and 80 percent of household income in North Korea now derives from market activity rather than state salaries, which often go unpaid for months or years at a time.

Women dominate this system at every level. Defector testimonies consistently describe markets where between 70 and 90 percent of visible traders are female. They sell everything: Chinese-manufactured electronics smuggled across the Tumen River, grain purchased cheaply in the countryside and resold at urban price differentials, bootleg South Korean dramas burned onto USB drives, medicine, cosmetics, and foreign currency. In Pyongyang's Tongil Market — one of the capital's largest official trading spaces — female vendors occupy the majority of registered stalls. In the hundreds of unofficial jangmadang that operate in grey zones beyond full state sanction, the dominance of women is even more pronounced.

"I had seven people working for me by 2007," said Park Minju, who operated a trading network between Hyesan and the Chinese border before defecting in 2014. "All women. We moved medicine across the border, sold it, bought grain, moved the grain. I knew every bribe to pay, every officer's schedule." Park now lives in Incheon, South Korea, where she spoke to North Korea Untold in October 2023.

The Bribe Economy: Paying Men to Look Away

The underground economy does not operate in spite of the state apparatus — it operates through it, via a meticulously calibrated system of bribery that has corrupted North Korea's security infrastructure from bottom to top. Female traders are the primary financiers of this arrangement. Local police officers, agents of the Ministry of State Security known as bowibu, and market management officials all receive regular payments — called «ppalgaji» in informal usage — to permit illegal trading activity, overlook unlicensed goods, and warn traders of impending inspection raids.

According to a detailed 2022 report published by the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, monthly bribe payments in mid-sized cities like Wonsan or Sariwon ranged between 50,000 and 200,000 North Korean won per stall — equivalent to between five and twenty US dollars at black-market exchange rates, but representing significant sums in a country where official monthly wages average less than two dollars. These payments are almost universally negotiated and delivered by women.

"The men took the money," said Kim Jungsook, a former market trader from Wonsan who now lives in Gwangju. "But we earned it. We knew the system. We knew which officer drank too much and needed cash on the fifth of every month. We knew which one had a mistress he needed to hide. That knowledge was power." Kim defected via China in 2016 and was interviewed by this reporter in March 2024.

Kim Jong-un's War on the Women Who Feed His Country

The regime has not accepted this transformation passively. Since consolidating power following his father's death in December 2011, Kim Jong-un has repeatedly attempted to reassert state control over the markets his country cannot survive without. In January 2020, authorities in Pyongyang issued directives ordering markets to reduce operating hours and increase state oversight of goods. In 2021 and 2022, citing COVID-19 border closures that had already devastated supply chains, security forces in multiple cities conducted raids specifically targeting female traders dealing in foreign currency and Chinese goods.

The crackdowns have been brutal but ultimately self-defeating. Internal reports obtained by Daily NK — a Seoul-based outlet with an extensive network of sources inside North Korea — documented that a market raid in Chongjin in August 2021 resulted in 47 women being detained, their goods confiscated. Within three weeks, the market had reconvened two kilometres away. The women had simply moved.

"They can't shut us down," said one woman, identified only as "Mrs. Han" to protect relatives still inside North Korea, who traded in Sinuiju before escaping in late 2022. "If they shut us down, nobody eats. Not even the soldiers. They know it. We know it. That's why we always come back."

The Social Revolution No One Planned

The economic transformation has carried profound — and entirely unintended — social consequences. In a society built on Confucian patriarchal hierarchy and Juche ideology that explicitly centres male industrial labour as the engine of the revolutionary state, women who earn more than their husbands, who command networks of employees and informants, and who negotiate directly with state officials have quietly dismantled traditional gender hierarchies in the most practical terms imaginable.

Researchers at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, led by Professor Cho Young-hee, published findings in 2023 documenting that in surveyed defector families, women who had engaged in market activity for more than five years reported significantly higher rates of household decision-making authority, including decisions about children's education, housing, and family finances. Several reported leaving abusive husbands after achieving economic independence — a phenomenon virtually unthinkable in North Korea a generation earlier.

"I used to ask my husband for permission to buy rice," said Lee Sun-hyang. "By 2008, he was asking me for money to buy cigarettes. That is not a small thing in our country. That is everything."

What Washington and Seoul Are Missing

Western policy toward North Korea remains overwhelmingly focused on nuclear weapons, missile tests, and the political calculations of Kim Jong-un and his inner circle. But analysts who study daily life inside the country argue that the female-led market economy represents a transformation in North Korean society as significant as any weapons programme — one with potentially far greater long-term consequences for the regime's stability and legitimacy.

"The state no longer provides. The state no longer feeds people. The state is no longer the centre of daily life," said Dr. Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul and one of the foremost experts on North Korean society, speaking in November 2023. "Women built an alternative system. That is an extraordinary historical development, and it is almost entirely invisible in the international conversation about North Korea."

On a freezing morning in Chongjin, or Hamhung, or Hyesan, thousands of women like Choi Hye-jin, Park Minju, and Kim Jungsook continue to rise before dawn. They carry their goods through cold streets. They pay their bribes. They feed their families, and in doing so, they feed a nation — all while a government built on absolute control struggles to reckon with the fact that it is no longer, in any meaningful sense, in charge.