The Market That Feeds a Nation the State Would Rather Let Starve
I first heard the word jangmadang in a cramped apartment in Yanji, a Chinese border city where the Korean language drifts through the streets like smoke. It was March 2019, and a woman named Choi Hyeon-suk — late thirties, missing a back molar, hands that couldn't stop moving — was describing how she'd kept her two sons alive through the worst years. She didn't talk about the government. She barely mentioned Kim Jong-un. What she talked about, for three hours straight, was the market. The unofficial one. The illegal one. The one that, by the time she fled in 2017, had become so embedded in daily North Korean life that it was almost impossible to remember a time before it existed.
This is the story of how ordinary North Koreans built an economic system from nothing — from hunger, from desperation, from the particular human genius that emerges when the state fails you completely and you either adapt or you die.
How It Began: The Famine That Changed Everything
The official economy in North Korea was always a fiction. But it was a functional fiction for a long time — the state distributed food through the Public Distribution System, the PDS, and in exchange people showed up to their assigned work units and performed the theater of socialist productivity. It was a transaction. A grim one, but a transaction.
Then came the 1990s. The Soviet Union collapsed, aid dried up, and the harvests failed. What followed — North Koreans call it the Arduous March, the government's own preferred euphemism — killed somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 people. Maybe more. The numbers are still disputed and probably always will be. What isn't disputed is what happened to the PDS: it stopped working. In many provinces, it stopped entirely. The state, quite simply, stopped feeding people.
And so people fed themselves.
At first it was barter. A neighbor with a small garden plot trading radishes for a pair of shoes. Factory workers stealing materials and selling them quietly. Women — and it was overwhelmingly women, because men were still technically obligated to show up at their useless work units — setting up small stalls selling whatever they could find. Rice. Cigarettes. Corn. A used jacket.
By the late 1990s these informal gatherings had become semi-permanent markets. The authorities cracked down periodically, confiscated goods, arrested vendors. But here's the thing about a crackdown when officials are also hungry: it tends to dissolve into negotiation. You pay a bribe, you get your goods back, you open again tomorrow. According to one defector I interviewed in Seoul in late 2022 — a former mid-level party official from South Hamgyong Province who asked not to be named — local authorities were actively taking cuts of market profits by at least 2001. "They had no choice," he told me. "Neither did we."
The Geography of Survival
The jangmadang today are not back-alley operations. That's what surprises most people when they first hear detailed descriptions from defectors. In cities like Chongjin, Hamhung, even Pyongyang itself, the markets occupy large permanent structures — sometimes purpose-built, sometimes old state facilities quietly repurposed. Hundreds of stalls. Thousands of vendors. Tens of thousands of transactions every single day.
Choi Hyeon-suk described the main market in her home city of Hoeryong, in North Hamgyong Province, as roughly the size of two soccer fields. "You could buy anything," she said, and then she listed things: Chinese instant noodles, USB drives loaded with South Korean dramas, bootleg American movies, medicine from China that you couldn't get at the (essentially non-functional) state pharmacy, mobile phones, cooking oil, salt, sugar, and — she paused here, almost laughing — sometimes actual state-issued goods that someone had stolen from a warehouse and was reselling at markup.
The geographic distribution matters. Markets in the northern border provinces — North Hamgyong, Ryanggang — tend to be more developed, more deeply connected to Chinese supply chains, and more brazen. The closer you are to the Tumen River, the more porous the trade. Chinese goods flood south. Occasionally, North Korean goods — anthracite coal, seafood, certain metals — move north, though international sanctions have complicated the larger flows significantly since 2017.
Pyongyang is its own complicated case. The capital has markets too, but they operate under more scrutiny. The city is, in theory, reserved for the most politically loyal citizens, and the regime is more sensitive about what happens there. But even in Pyongyang, I was told by multiple sources, the underground economy is pervasive. One woman who left the country in 2020 — she'd lived in the Moranbong District, which is about as central as it gets — described a network of home-based traders who sold goods through trusted contacts rather than open stalls. Effectively: a delivery economy, years before most North Koreans had heard of anything like it.
The Women Who Run Everything
Here is something the regime never fully reckoned with: by liberating women from their official economic obligations — men were still required to attend work units, women less consistently so — the state accidentally created a class of female entrepreneurs who became the backbone of the informal economy.
Park Jihyun, a defector and activist I've spoken with several times over the years, first in London and later at a conference in Washington in September 2023, describes it with a kind of dark humor. "The men had to sit in a factory doing nothing. The women went out and made money." She pauses. "Who do you think the family depended on?"
By the 2000s, the so-called donju — the "masters of money," North Korea's emergent capitalist class — included a significant number of women who had started with a single market stall and, through reinvestment, bribery-management, and ruthless commercial intelligence, built small commercial empires. They hired other vendors. They lent money at interest. They connected supply chains across provincial borders. Some of them, according to sources who've described the situation in Pyongyang's trading environment, were doing deals worth tens of thousands of dollars.
In a country where the state officially controls everything and private wealth is ideologically impermissible, these women existed in a state of constant legal jeopardy — and constant negotiation. The bribes they paid were not incidental. They were structural. Budgeted for. A cost of doing business, distributed carefully among local police, market supervisors, party officials, and anyone else whose silence was worth purchasing. One defector, a woman who'd run a small textile trading operation in Sinuiju before leaving in 2018, told me she kept a mental ledger of every official she paid and how much. "You had to remember," she said. "If you forgot someone, that was the one who reported you."
What Flows Through the Markets
Food, obviously. Rice has become the de facto hard currency of the informal economy — prices for it are tracked as a kind of shadow inflation indicator by analysts outside the country. When rice prices spike, it typically signals either a harvest failure, a border crackdown reducing Chinese imports, or some combination of both. The spike in late 2020 and into 2021, following Kim Jong-un's decision to seal the border against COVID-19, was severe. Defectors who maintained contact with family inside described desperate price increases — the cost of a kilogram of rice reportedly doubling in some regions between early and late 2020.
But food is just the beginning. The more interesting — and politically significant — flows are the information goods. USB drives and SD cards loaded with South Korean entertainment: dramas, K-pop, movies. Chinese smartphone content. Occasionally, South Korean or American news. This is the thing that keeps regime analysts up at night, and honestly it should. Because a population that has spent twenty years illegally watching South Korean television knows, at some level, that the world outside looks nothing like what they've been told.
The regime has responded with increasing harshness. The 2020 Anti-Reactionary Thought Law introduced the death penalty — in some cases — for distributing South Korean content. Reports from sources inside and from defectors who left after the law passed suggest public executions have been carried out as deterrence. And yet — and this is the thing — the trade continues. The USB drives still move. Because the demand is there, the profit is there, and the population has twenty years of practice at risk calculation.
Medicines are another critical flow. The state healthcare system, which was genuinely functional in the 1970s and early 1980s, has largely collapsed outside Pyongyang. Hospitals lack basic supplies. Surgery is sometimes performed without anesthesia. The medicines that actually work — mostly Chinese generics, sometimes brands that have been smuggled across in larger quantities — come through the markets. Choi Hyeon-suk told me that when her younger son developed a serious respiratory infection in 2015, she didn't go to the local clinic. She went to the market and asked which vendor she trusted most. The vendor connected her to a trader who sourced antibiotics from China. It worked. "The hospital would have given him nothing," she said.
The Regime's Impossible Contradiction
Here's the central paradox that the Kim regime has never resolved and probably can't: the markets keep the population alive, and the regime knows it. Multiple rounds of attempted crackdown — most significantly the disastrous 2009 currency redenomination, which wiped out people's savings and temporarily devastated market activity — have demonstrated that suppressing the informal economy too aggressively risks destabilizing the social order entirely. The 2009 redenomination was so damaging that the official responsible, a senior party official named Pak Nam-gi, was reportedly executed in 2010. Whether that's precisely true is unverifiable, but the story — which circulates widely among defectors and Korea-watchers — captures something real about the consequences of getting this wrong.
So the regime has settled into a kind of grudging coexistence. Markets are tolerated, partially legalized in structure if not always in content, taxed indirectly through a system of fees and bribes that function as a shadow revenue stream for local officials. The state pretends it's in control. The traders pretend they're operating within the rules. Everyone involved knows it's performance.
What the regime cannot tolerate — and here is where the crackdowns become genuinely brutal — is when market activity threatens political control directly. The information economy. The money flows that make people economically independent of the state. The donju whose wealth gives them the means, theoretically, to imagine alternatives. Kim Jong-un's consolidation of power since 2012 has involved periodic campaigns to bring the wealthiest informal traders back under state control, forcing them into official partnerships, extracting their capital through "loyalty donations," reminding them that wealth without political protection is just an asset waiting to be seized.
What It Costs to Simply Survive
I want to be careful not to make this sound heroic in a way that sanitizes the reality. The market economy in North Korea has also generated severe inequality — something that barely existed under the old socialist system. The donju and their families live in relative comfort. The people at the bottom of the market hierarchy — the old woman selling a few vegetables, the man doing day labor at a market stall for a few hundred North Korean won — are surviving, but barely. The gap between them and the people at the top is wide and growing.
And the system runs on corruption, which means it runs on fear. You bribe officials to operate. If you stop being able to bribe, or if the political winds shift and your protector loses influence, everything can collapse overnight. A woman I'll call Lee — she didn't give me her name — described watching a neighbor in Hyesan get arrested in 2016 after a new local police commander decided to make an example. The woman had been trading for years. She had a family. She was taken away and, as far as Lee knew when she herself left North Korea in early 2017, hadn't come back.
"You never feel safe," Lee said. We were sitting in a small café in Incheon, South Korea, and she was stirring her coffee in circles without drinking it. "Even when it's going well, you never feel safe."
That's the reality of survival in North Korea that doesn't make it into the satellite imagery analyses or the UN sanction reports. It's not a system. It's millions of individual acts of improvisation, each one carrying real risk, each one performed by people who had no alternative and built something extraordinary out of the worst possible circumstances.
The jangmadang didn't save North Korea — not in any political sense. The Kim regime is still there. People are still suffering. But the markets kept people alive who should have died in the 1990s, and they've kept people alive every year since. That's not nothing. It might, in some ways, be everything.
", "labels": ["North Korea", "Kim Jong-un", "Black Market", "Defectors", "Human Rights", "Jangmadang", "Famine"]}
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