North Koreans must "sell to live"

‘Everything must go’

It is already a well-established fact that as the Public Distribution Service (PDS) collapsed, the lives of North Koreans underwent a sudden change. The biggest of these changes was a widening of the gap between the rich and poor. Though it should hold that ten years of deterioration in the state economy would deteriorate the lives of all North Koreans, the gap between the rich and poor in North Korea in fact grew larger.

The collapse of the PDS ushered in a new era wherein North Koreans, in order survive, began either selling all of their household goods and bartering them for rice on the jangmadang (‘the marketplace’). Even essential household appliances ‘couldn’t beat hunger’ and had to go.

Residents of Pyongyang were not exempt. It was not an uncommon sight to see those from the capital city of North Korea selling TVs and furniture in order to buy food. For North Koreans, furniture and home appliances work as a sort of insurance. During the worst years of famine, each appliance sold on the jangmadang increased one’s lifespan by weeks and months. The mantra of those times was, “one must sell to live.” Even today, things are not much different; one must still, more or less, sell to live.

An illegal marketplace in Musan, North Hamgyong Province in North Korea.

To buy or to live? Therein lies the difference

This is the case not only for individual North Koreans, but for the North Korean state as well. Instead of producing anything, the state sells  resources to maintain itself. For example, meat, rare herbs or minerals found in the country are sold off at random. Unfortunately, the profits do not ever reach the ordinary people.

In this way, the North Korean state – just like the general population – must “sell to live.” Yet there is one essential difference between the people and the leadership. The state and the North Korean elite “sell to buy”. In other words, they sell off resources in order to maintain a luxurious lifestyle. Meanwhile, the rest of the country “sell to live.” The critical difference between the upper elite and ordinary North Koreans is that between “buying” and “living.”

While ordinary North Koreans were selling their furniture to put food on the table and were plummeting into poverty, the North Korean state extracted what material resources, even human resources, it could in order to exploited the potential and fund their lives. For example, the North Korean state exports manpower to aid potato farming in China and other countries, but the wages do not trickle down to the workers; they end up in the pockets of the elite.

The North Korean elite has looked beyond material resources and have been selling human resources – not to carry on living, but to lead better lives. Just as furniture and household appliances were the last insurance to guarantee food for ordinary North Koreans, the North Korean people have guaranteed better food for the North Korean state. Instead of the people looked after by their state, the people have, effectively, been looking after their state.

The contrast between those who “sell to live” and those who “sell to buy” is only one of many ways in which Korean society’s continuing decline and fall can be observed.