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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • That’s great to hear! 18 years ago would be in 2006, which I recall as during the recovery period for the Arduous March and a time when marketization was widespread. During your time there, were you able to visit any of the markets or understand how markets were affecting people’s lives? As a foreign student I’m guessing you mostly worked with hard currency, but did you get an understanding of peoples’ wages and relative costs of living?









  • Books: A capitalist in North Korea is good one about everyday life in the DPRK, although it mostly covers life during the late Kim Jong-il and early Kim Jong-un period. Felix Abt’s support for the DPRK flucuates a lot throughout the book and he makes some false additions based on later research instead of his own experiences (such as mentioning the Songbun myth). Markets in the DPRK were quite prevalent back then due to official government encouragement of markets in the mid 2000s, but he does cover the start of the demarketization process with Kim Jong-un’s entry. Today, state markets are able to provide most consumer goods and the “free markets” are most limited to farmers’ markets and those too are slowly dying out.

    North Korea: Another Country is also a good read. It’s overall biased against the DPRK but it has some pretty good points in it.

    Documentaries: Boy Boy’s The Haircut is probably the best starter documentary to the DPRK and its myths. Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul is also good, as is my Brothers and Sisters in the North. The most comprehensive series is the SAO Documentary series, which I believe has more than 100 hours of lightly edited footage inside the DPRK. It’s mostly tourist stuff but they ask a lot of questions to the tour guide about daily life and I found it very useful. The documentaries are in Chinese but there are english subtitles in the video. The translations get worse as the series goes on however and sometimes the translations can give very incorrect information. For example one of the video’s subtitles says that rice rations in the DPRK are 2kg a month when in reality it’s 2kg a week.

    This link has good resources too: https://linktr.ee/dprkmyths