Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
Maslyukov’s mission three weeks later resulted in an agreement to supply $1.5 billion more in loans to finance Soviet imports of Korean consumer goods and industrial raw materials, and $500 million for the financing of plants and other capital goods. Together with the $1 billion bank loan obtained by Rogachev, the total was $3 billion, all of which was to be repaid at prevailing interest rates after a three-year grace period.
The deal was controversial in Seoul, especially because Korea had to borrow the money to lend to the Soviet Union. Korean officials justified
the arrangement by arguing that the relationship with Moscow was a valuable asset to national security. According to a senior Korean official, Kim Chong Whi told Maslyukov during the negotiations that it would be politically impossible to aid the Soviet Union while Moscow continued to supply arms to North Korea. Maslyukov responded that he had personally rejected a recent North Korean request to Moscow for a new tank factory and would take similar action on future requests. Soviet exports of military equipment to North Korea dropped sharply in 1991, but it is unclear whether this was due to changed political decisions or simply to the economic straits of both Moscow and Pyongyang.
The last official meeting of Gorbachev and Roh, when the Soviet leader stopped at Korea’s Cheju Island after a state visit to Japan in April 1991, included a financial transaction of a different sort. Gorbachev returned to Moscow with an unannounced gift from Roh of $100,000 in US currency. An aide to Roh told me later that the money was at least nominally intended for “victims of Chernobyl,” the Soviet civil nuclear disaster that had taken place five years earlier. Gorbachev’s chief of staff, Valéry Boldin, said the Soviet leader eventually had papers drawn up contributing the money to a children’s hospital.
Slightly less than half ($1.47 billion) of the ROK aid for the Soviet Union was actually paid out before the collapse of the USSR in December 1991. As the successor state, Russia assumed the debts but lacked the money to make more than token repayments. Eventually, Russia began providing tanks, helicopters, missiles, and spare parts to Seoul in partial repayment of the loans. By then Russia had again become an arms exporter to the world, but this time to nations that could pay with hard cash rather than to those with which it shared ideological solidarity. In supplying South Korea with arms, Moscow reversed its historic role as an armorer and ally of the state it had created north of the thirty-eighth parallel.
The Soviet reversal and later the Soviet collapse would have a powerful impact on North Korea. Strategically, it left Pyongyang more vulnerable and more isolated than before. Economically, the loss of North Korea’s most generous and most important trading partner began a steady decline that would increasingly sap the strength of the Kim regime.
__________
*
Two years later, when Kanemaru fell from power and was jailed for tax evasion after $51 million in gold bars, cash, and other assets were found in his home, the scandal helped drive the LDP from power for the first time in thirty-eight years.
I
N MID
-J
UNE
1991, a Chinese civil airliner bringing Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, and his official party from Beijing floated down slowly over a flat green landscape toward a landing on the outskirts of Pyongyang. Making its gradual approach to the capital’s airport, the plane passed over a seemingly deserted country, with ribbons of roadways nearly empty of traffic and hardly any people visible in the neatly divided plots of farmland or around big apartment houses and other buildings. Seated in the tourist section of the plane, behind the foreign minister’s first-class compartment, I peered down for the first time at the territory of North Korea and wrote in my journal that it looked to be a strange land “left deserted by some invisible plague.”
Then as the plane roared down the runway, hundreds of people came into view: a colorful crowd lined up in well-ordered rows on the tarmac, enthusiastically waving pink plastic boughs. As we taxied up and the motors were turned off, we could hear martial music from a khaki-clad military band. From the roof of the terminal building, a giant portrait of Kim Il Sung looked down on the scene.
Waiting near the foot of the steps to welcome the Chinese guest and his party was North Korean foreign minister Kim Yong Nam, the man who was also instrumental in my own invitation to visit. It was pure coincidence that I arrived on the same plane and was in Pyongyang at the same time as the Chinese foreign minister. Although the North Koreans told me nothing of the discussions between the two neighbors, I realized later that I had witnessed the launching of an episode of diplomatic theater that had led to a major readjustment of the relations between Beijing and Pyongyang.
From its short-lived conquest of ancient Choson before the time of Christ until the twentieth century, China had been the foreign nation with the greatest importance in the Korean world. For more than a thousand years, until Korea’s invention of its
hangul
alphabet in the fifteenth century, Chinese characters formed the basis of the Korean written language, and
they remained important in classical writing into the modern era. Korea adopted not only Buddhism from China but also Confucianism, which remains at the heart of many Korean relationships, public and private. Throughout most of its history, Korea paid tribute to its giant neighbor at the court of the Middle Kingdom. Koreans called China
daeguk
, “big state” or “elder state.”
China’s intimate alliance with North Korea dates back to the Chinese communist sponsorship of Kim Il Sung’s rebel bands against the Japanese in World War II and the participation of Koreans on the side of the communists in Manchuria during the Chinese civil war. A few years later, the newly established People’s Republic of China saved the North Korean regime from defeat—and possibly extinction—in the Korean War by sending its “volunteer” troops across the Yalu River, at the cost of close to a million of its own soldiers killed or wounded.
Even more than the Soviet Union, China maintained a warm official friendship with the North Korean state through most of its existence, relations seriously marred only by the revolutionary tumult of the Cultural Revolution. Even after the 1971–1972 shift in Beijing’s foreign policy, Chinese leaders were careful to maintain close ties with North Korea, which was seen as an important ideological client and ally on China’s border. Despite subsequent ups and downs in relations, both sides knew that the undeniable realities of geography meant they could never afford to drift too far apart.
Until recent years, Beijing had kept aloof from anticommunist South Korea, which was the only Asian nation to continue to recognize the Nationalist regime on Taiwan as the legitimate government of China into the 1990s. Although Sino–South Korean trade had grown steadily after China opened up to market economics, Beijing was more cautious than Moscow in moving toward normalization of political relations with the South.
Nonetheless, by mid-1991 Beijing was following Moscow’s lead in moving toward a much closer relationship with Seoul. The previous year, according to Beijing’s figures, Chinese trade with South Korea had been seven times larger than its trade with the North and was increasing rapidly, bringing with it a greater need for multifaceted relations. Moreover, the termination of the Sino–Soviet dispute and Moscow’s sharply diminished ties with North Korea made Chinese leaders less concerned with the possibility that adjusting their policy toward South Korea could push Kim Il Sung into the arms of the Soviet Union. In addition, China could see a potential domestic political gain in establishing diplomatic relations with South Korea, because it would force Seoul to terminate its long-standing official relationship with Taiwan, thus giving a sharp blow to the island state.
The seriousness of its new situation with China had been brought home dramatically to North Korea during the four-day visit of Chinese premier Li Peng in May, the month before Foreign Minister Qian’s trip to Pyongyang. According to a variety of reports, Li broke the unwelcome news that China did not oppose admission of both North and South Korea to the United Nations and would not veto South Korea’s application, despite the opposition of Pyongyang to dual admission. China’s refusal to veto would ensure Seoul’s entry because the only other obstacle—a possible veto by the Soviet Union—had been eliminated in April when Gorbachev, during his visit to South Korea’s Cheju Island, had promised that Moscow would support Seoul’s application for UN membership.
On May 27, after some in the Pyongyang leadership—apparently including Kim Jong Il—worked for months to overcome Kim Il Sung’s deep aversion to dual entry,
*
North Korea announced it had “no choice” but to apply for UN membership because otherwise the South would join the United Nations alone. This forced reversal at the hands of Moscow and Beijing was a symbol of North Korea’s diminished clout with its former communist sponsors. It also may have been the underlying reason for Foreign Minister Qian’s visit three weeks later, which was long on ceremony and short on substance. For years Qian had blocked efforts within the Chinese leadership to move faster toward normalizing ties with the ROK. Sending him to Pyongyang appeared to be China’s way of mending relations after forcing the North Koreans to swallow the bitter pill of dual North-South admission to the UN.
Although it was a coincidence that I arrived with the Chinese minister, given the limited air traffic into the North, it was hardly surprising that someone of diplomatic importance shared my commercial airline flight. The Chinese civil aviation jet was the only plane to arrive from the outside world that day in the entire country of more than 20 million people. In 1991 only eight scheduled airplane flights and seven trains a week entered North Korea, making it one of the most reclusive—and mysterious—nations on earth.
My traveling companion,
Washington Post
Tokyo correspondent T. R. Reid, and I were greeted in the airport terminal by our official hosts and transported to our hotel in two chauffeured red Mercedes sedans. So few other vehicles were visible in either direction on the twelve-mile road into town that I could easily count them: twenty-three cars, six buses, three minivans, three trucks, and two jeeps. Hundreds of people could be seen walking along the roadside or waiting patiently for the few overcrowded buses. More than just transportation, the energy shortage seemed to have idled much of North Korea’s industry as well. I saw a number of overhead construction cranes during my week of travels, but not one that was in operation.
For North Korea, 1991 was a terrible year economically. Beginning in January, the Soviet Union demanded hard currency for its exports to Pyongyang rather than continue the traditional concessional arrangements of the past. As a result, North Korean imports from its most important trading partner declined precipitously. The drop was particularly sharp in energy imports, which fell by an astonishing 75 percent from the 1990 level, suddenly making the North dependent on China for more than two-thirds of its imported energy. China, however, was unwilling or unable to make up for the Soviet losses, and in May notified Pyongyang that it would soon discontinue its concessional sales. The dire result was that in 1991–1992, North Korea was forced to abruptly reduce its total petroleum consumption by between one-fourth and one-third, resulting in the deserted roadways and idle construction projects that I observed.
One might expect from all this to find a regime in a deep funk, fearful of the future and uncertain about which way to go. The greatest surprise to me was that Pyongyang’s officialdom was, outwardly at least, undaunted by the revolutionary reversals in their alliances. In the North Korean worldview, the faltering of communism in the Soviet Union and its collapse in Eastern Europe proved the correctness of Kim Il Sung’s independent policy of
juche
and his consistent refusal to formally join the Soviet bloc. Foreign Minister Kim Yong Nam spoke optimistically to me of “our people advancing along the road of the socialism they have chosen—socialism of their own style.” This phrase, reminiscent of China’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which justified Beijing’s swing toward market economics, had first appeared the previous December in a Workers Party organ. In this case, “our own style” justified the absence of change rather than a deviation from the previous well-worn path.
To the evidence before my eyes in 1991, North Korea was unique, a land unlike any other I had seen in my extensive travels as a correspondent. The capital, Pyongyang, had been so leveled by American bombing in the Korean War that the head of the US bomber command had halted further air strikes, saying that “there is nothing standing worthy of the name.” Kim Il Sung had rebuilt it from the ashes to a meticulously
planned urban center of broad boulevards, monumental structures, and square-cut apartment buildings that resembled a stage set more than a working capital. Indeed, it was a synthetic city in many respects: according to foreign diplomats, the population was periodically screened, and the sick, elderly, or disabled, along with anyone deemed politically unreliable, were evicted from the capital.
Pyongyang was dominated by homage to Kim Il Sung. Among its most imposing features was the Tower of the
Juche
Idea, an obelisk almost as high as the Washington Monument, which was erected for the Great Leader’s seventieth birthday to celebrate his self-reliance dogma; an Arch of Triumph larger than the one in Paris, celebrating Kim’s return from victory over Japan in 1945; and Kim Il Sung Stadium, seating one hundred thousand people for mass demonstrations of loyalty to the ruler and the regime. Less celebrated but equally prominent was a mammoth 105-story hotel, built to be the tallest in Asia, but now standing unfinished and abandoned. Rumor had it that the structure had fatal architectural flaws and could never be finished.
*
Pyongyang struck me as well suited for gigantic displays but not very convenient for people, who had few cars and buses and, unlike Beijing, no bicycles to help them traverse the capital’s massive spaces.