by most accounts, the news came as a shock to Korea watchers. His youngest son, Kim Jong Un, immediately took the throne from his father, who was declared, in the unique North Korean tradition of necrocracy, the “eternal general secretary” of the Korean Workers’ Party.
“Lil’ Kim,” as Time magazine jokingly called him on its cover, set out to reform one of the world’s last five communist countries. Coming off the retrenchment of state-centric conservatism since the mid-2000s, he curbed the power of the military and surrounded himself with a top-level civilian cadre interested in a glasnost for the country. “Officials should work with a creative and enterprising attitude … [and] resolutely do away with the outdated ideological viewpoint and backward method and style of work,” he declared before a crowd. John Delury, a Yale-educated historian of China at South Korea’s Yonsei University, compared that rhetoric to Deng Xiaoping’s famous December 1978 speech that launched China’s reforms, in which he called on party members to be “pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways, and generate new ideas.”
For seven years, I worked in North Korea, hoping that injecting a business culture would help the regime nudge itself toward the world. But my romantic longing only made my life harder. People called me a “useful idiot” for one of the world’s most isolated and militarized governments. They accused me of being an idealist gone blind, or a greedy capitalist trying to fill my pockets at the expense of the suffering North Korean people. Yet during my seven years living and working in the capital of Pyongyang, I was given enormous insight into a country better known for its famine and nuclear bombs than for the stories of its regular people, and all their hopes and dreams that transcend politics.
It is hard for Westerners to imagine this, but I became heavily involved as a point man for investments behind the world’s last Iron Curtain. I didn’t deal in arms and drugs, as many would jokingly assume. Rather, I was involved in a number of everyday projects that don’t quite match the prevailing international image of North Korea. I was involved in the purchasing of domestic goods such as garments, liqueurs, metals, and minerals. I sold items ranging from machines to infrastructure items to dyestuff to foodstuff and pharmaceuticals. I was involved in setting up and running all sorts of representative offices and companies. I advised investors looking into noodle production, mineral water from the country’s “holy mountain” of Paekdu, precious metal extraction, software design, and medicine production. My commercial activities promoted good business practices that included, for example, enhanced safety standards for North Korean miners. The foreign engineers who represented equipment manufacturers from other countries refused to enter unsafe mines to install and repair equipment, so we had to find a solution.
As the cofounder and director of Pyongyang’s first business school, I went on an excursion into the political and business minds of senior cadres. Many of them had given up on the national myth of a pure past and a perfect socialist economy and were looking beyond North Korea’s tight borders for new ideas that would spur growth and innovation. Part of the new mindset was a response to the famine and economic problems of the 1990s, when the Kim regime could no longer rely on Soviet subsidies to prop up its economy. The institute encouraged the world’s most centrally planned economy to dare to take a few steps into the world of free enterprise.
I also helped start and became the first president of the European Business Association in Pyongyang, the country’s first foreign chamber of commerce. The position threw me into the role of lobbyist for investments from Europe and around the world. Part of the job required me to campaign for better investment conditions for foreign businesses, which sought ways to more easily hire employees, reduce their taxes, and gain more direct access to local suppliers and customers without the red tape. In short, we were pushing for the emergence of the rule of law, a system that would legally require the state to protect enterprises and citizens, open the markets, and create a level-playing field for Koreans and non-Koreans. It was both a challenge and an adventure, and the sort of endeavor that could create real change in the North Korean government.
Some readers will be surprised to learn that the North Korean authorities and my business partners were not brainwashed. They acted as normal and rational people would. In our meetings, they behaved fairly and with pleasant etiquette, and I will keep a good memory of them. On the other hand, perhaps I was fortunate to have dealt with people who were not out to rip me off. I have met other businesspeople who were distraught over their experiences, and I will discuss this trickier side of expatriate life later. As I don’t want to hurt, anger, or offend any of my North Korean or foreign colleagues, I will sometimes redact their real names and details of our meetings. Other facts I will not disclose to protect their reputations.
Given the growing political tensions in the mid-2000s, all this business appeared to be the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 2002, George W. Bush placed North Korea on his infamous “axis of evil” list. In 2008, the South Korean government halted all food aid to the regime, distressing relations even more in a way that would lead to tragedy. In response, in 2006 and 2009, the Kim Jong Il regime tested two nuclear weapons. Then, in 2010, North Korea was accused of torpedoing a South Korean naval corvette, the Cheonan, killing forty-six sailors—a claim that it continues to deny.
Both sides have hardened their stances with each confrontation, and the deaths of those sailors would certainly be unforgivable if North Korean forces were indeed behind the attacks. Unfortunately for the hawks, the evidence is still conflicting. In 2012, a prominent Korean seismologist and an Israeli geologist suggested, based on an analysis of seismic and acoustic waves, that the ship probably hit a South Korean mine.
This all plays into a bigger picture of geopolitical bullying. The government, I found in my experience meeting local people, was cornered and needed to protect itself. The regime was reacting to United Nations sanctions and to condemnations from the international press. Legitimate business in North Korea—the sort that could help the country grow out of its impoverished rut—was being harmed in an attempt to go after a tinier and perhaps more extreme contingent of hawkish military commanders.
Those political challenges were among the most difficult of my life, because there’s no other place like North Korea. I say that having lived and worked in nine countries on three continents. That’s in addition to the dozens of other places I’ve visited for business and leisure—a smattering of countries throughout Africa, Asia, and the former Soviet Union and its communist allies. My travels gave me insights into the vastness of the human experience, showing me how people are shaped by their diverse cultural practices and political systems. North Korea is one example of how seclusion has shaped the attitudes of a people, and this book will show how international politics isn’t reassuring for them.
That said, Pyongyang may be isolated from the world, but it’s far from being the begrimed center of poverty that the world makes it out to be. Pretty much every year the human resources consulting company ECA International releases rankings that place Pyongyang among the least hospitable cities for expatriate business people. The North Korean capital falls into a tier that includes Kabul, Afghanistan, and Karachi, Pakistan—a characterization that doesn’t strike me as reasonable. While the capital can hardly match the glamour of London and New York, it’s nevertheless a decent place to live if you’re a foreigner. Expatriates can sit back free from worries about crime, terrorism, and the safety of their children. Pyongyang is clean and secure, even if it sometimes lacks reliable electricity and running water. To be fair, those shortages are to be expected of any metropolis in a poor country—including the rising industrial powerhouses of Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, and Jakarta.
Given the country’s troubled history and estranged political position, it would be fair to look at the isolationism and socialist red tape from the view of North Koreans. North Korea is the most heavily sanctioned nation in the world, and no other people have had to deal with the massive quarantines that Western and Asian powers have enclosed around its economy. These penalties are upsetting from a business standpoint and have only worsened the country’s prospects for developing economically. One time, for instance, I lost a multi-million dollar contract
