In North Korea, a generation gap grows
PYONGYANG, North Korea — She dances beneath 10-foot portraits of two smiling dictators, a modern young woman in a central Pyongyang plaza who twirls to music calling on North Koreans to die for their leader.
When she speaks, a torrent of reverence tumbles out forNorthKorea’s ruling family, as if phrases had been plucked at random from a government newspaper. And as hundreds of students dance behind her in a display of loyalty, she is adamant about one thing: NorthKorea, she insists, has no generation gap.
“The spirit of the youth has remained the same as ever!” RyuHyeGyong says.
But look more closely — look beyond her words, beyond the propaganda posters on every street, and the radios playing hymns to the ruling family — and the unspoken reality is far more complicated.
A 19-year-old university student, Ryu lives in a city that today feels awash in change. There are rich people now in Pyongyang, chauffeured in Mercedes vehicles and Audis even as most citizens of the police state remain mired in poverty.
There’s a supermarket selling imported apples and disposable diapers. On sidewalks where everyone once dressed in drabMaoist conformity, there are young women in not-quite miniskirtsandteenageboyswith baseball caps cocked sideways, K-pop style.
In this profoundly isolated country, a place that can still sometimes appear frozen in a Stalinist netherworld, a generational divide is quietly growing behind the relentless propaganda.
Here, where rulers have long been worshiped as all-powerful providers, young people have grownto adulthood expecting nothing from the regime. Their lives, from professional aspirations to dating habits, are increasingly shaped by a growing market economy and a quietly thriving underground trade in smuggled TV shows and music. Political fervor, genuinely felt by many in earlier generations, is being pushed aside by something else: a fierce belief in the power of money.
It’s a complex divide, where some 20-year-olds remain fierce ideologues and plenty of 50-year-olds have no loyalty to the increasingly worried regime. But conversations with more than two dozenNorth Korean refugees, along with scholars, former government officials and activists, make it clear that young people are increasingly unmoored from the powerful state ideology.
“When Kim Jong Un speaks, young people don’t listen,” saysHanSongYi, 24, who left the North in 2014, dreaming of pop-music stardomin the South. “They just pretend to be listening.”
In her tight jeans and gold-speckled eye shadow, Han revels in Seoul’s frenetic glitz and unembarrassed consumerism. She loves talking about fashion and the K-pop bands she and her friends secretly listened to back home.
Han can deconstruct the sudden emergence of short skirts in her hometown in the autumn of 2012, and how that mirrored not just the ascension of Kim Jong Un, the new leader often photographed with his glamorous wife, but also the political cynicism growing around her.
“North Korea in the past, and North Korea today are so different,” she says.
For generations, propaganda about the Kim family was all that most North Koreans knew, a mythology of powerful but tenderhearted rulers who protect their people against a hostile world. It still suffuses everything from children’s stories to university literature departments, from TV shows to opera.
An economic shift began in the mid-1990s, when the end of Soviet aid and a series of devastating floods caused widespread famine. The food ration system, which had fed nearly everyone for decades, collapsed. The power of the police state weakened amid the hunger, allowing smuggling to flourish across the Chinese border.
While the state tightened its hold again when the famine ended, private enterprise grew, as thegovernment realized it was the onlyway to keep the economy afloat.
To people who came of age after the famine, whenit became clear the regime was neither all-powerful nor all-providing, the propaganda is often just background noise. It isn’t that they hate the regime but simply that their focus has turned to earning a living, or buying the latest smuggled TV show.
“After a while, I stopped paying attention,” says Lee GaYeon, whogrewup amid the mud and poverty of an isolated communal farm and began helping support her family as a teenager during the famine, pedaling her bicycle through nearby villages, selling food door to door. “I didn’t even think about the regime anymore.”
That lack of interest frightens the regime, whose legitimacy depends on its ability to remain at the center ofNorthKorean life.
KimJongUn, whowasn’t even 30 years old when he came to power after his father’s 2011 death, now faces the challenge of his own generation, with a little over one-third of North Koreans believed to be under the age of 25.
On his gentler days, Kim has reached out to young people: “I am one of you, and we are the future,” he said in one speech. There was an increase in youthoriented mass rallies after Kim’s ascension, and public pledges of youth loyalty. There’s also propaganda now clearly aimed at young people.
Kim also has blasted outside movies and music as “poisonous weeds” and in 2015, researchers say, his regime announced that people caught with South Korean videos could face 10 years of imprisonment and hard labor.
Most young people have grown upwith at least some access to smuggledDVDsor flash drives, whether Chinese TV shows (normally OK with the government), American movies (highly suspicious, though Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-emups are said to be in high demand) or a buffet of digitized South Korean entertainment choices (by far the most popular, and by far the most dangerous.)
Some things here barely changed at all.
The power of the police state, with its web of agencies and legions of informers, remains immense.
So while the generational divide has grown, there have been no signs of youthful anger: no university protests, no political graffiti, no anonymous leaflets. Even among themselves, young people say politics is almost always avoided.
Plus, politics is not at the heart of the generation gap.
“It’s not about the regime,” says Lee, whostudies literature in South Korea. “It’s about money.” have