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www.groovekorea.com / August 2014 30 Edited by Matthew Lamers (mattlamers@groovekorea.com) INSIghT ThE NORTh KOREA COLumN AbOuT ThE AuThOR Christopher Green is the manager of international affairs for Daily NK, an online periodical reporting on North Korean affairs from Seoul. The opinions expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily represent those of Groove Korea. For more information, visit dailynk.com. Column by Christopher Green / Illustration by Michael Roy FOR NORtH KOReA’S eLIte, eVeRY mOVe IS HIgH StAKeS I f you were an ordinary, upper-class North Korean, how would you navigate your way through life? Imagine you owned a digital camera, a rice cooker (made by South Ko- rean firm Cuckoo), a television (a gift from a benevolent Kim), and, to put the icing on the cake, you were posted abroad in China. You would be doing the state’s bidding, in a financial sense at least, and therefore would have a mea- sure of power and authority. On the other hand, your power and authority wouldn’t really add up to much, since con- trol over your life, death and liberty would reside elsewhere. What type of relation- ship would you form with the North Korean state under such cir- cumstances? For a tiny but increas- ing number of today’s North Koreans, this is more than just an amus- ing parlor game. It is a high-stakes question. For five years or so, the gov- ernment in Pyongyang has been working harder than ever on the issue of how to guarantee flows of hard curren- cy. I do not mean to suggest that the state has seen the light and is embracing “economic reform” at last. Rather, the Kim regime needs to ensure that it can afford the fuel that the “theater state” demands to function, so that the co- ercive flame of Kimist dominance burns on in the minds of domestic audiences, irre- spective and in spite of the country’s end- lessly inefficient, anacronistic social and eco- nomic structure. This is being done in part through business interests based in China, and, whether the jittery regime likes it or not, these kinds of business activities suck up manpower. Needless to say, living in China as an en- voy of the Kimist capital is not an endless whirl of cocktail parties and days spent at the mall. Whereas illegal border-crossers from the North find themselves at risk of forced repatriation and imprison- ment (on those occasions when bribery doesn’t cut the mustard, or the transgressor is deemed unworthy of a self-flagellatory televised apology for fool- ishly opting to leave in the first place), legal visitors “merely” live under state surveillance, report and are reported upon, and, for all but the most elite- of-elite, are obliged to bow before the Kim dynasty at various meetings of one sort or another. First among these meetings is the birthday of Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s long deceased founding father. The day, April 15, is known as the Day of the Sun, and the sanctioned means of celebrat- ing it is to gather early in the morning at Yuwen Middle School in Jilin, where Kim spent a number of years studying in the 1920s before he was jailed for his subversive militancy. The event at Yuwen is not particularly grand: there are a few balloons, a brass band, and some beautiful Korean hanbok. As those digital cameras flick and click beneath a bronze statue of a youthful revolutionary Kim,