North Korea through Chinese eyes

Eyevine



North Korea through Chinese eyes
May 24th 2007 | PYONGYANG
From The Economist print edition


All the misery of Maoism with none of the redeeming features


THE place often seems like a black box from which the occasional horror (like a nuclear bomb) emerges without warning or welcome. North Korea certainly deserves its nickname, the hermit kingdom. Visitors are tightly controlled and only a trickle of Westerners admitted. Yet even North Korea needs dollars, and tries to get them by attracting Chinese tourists, who go for the gambling, and the bizarre allure of a bygone era of fanaticism and privation that China itself once endured. Joining a group of 60 visitors, this is what you find.
The North Koreans can put on a good show. In April and May, no fewer than 100,000 performers went through a series of synchronised gymnastic displays at the May 1st Stadium in Pyongyang, the capital. Even a few hundred Western tourists got a peek (many from the arch-enemy, America, whose tourists are normally kept at bay). To Chinese visitors, the show, known as Arirang, was reminiscent of similar extravaganzas in Beijing during the days of Mao Zedong. “Nowadays I doubt whether we could do it,” says one, wistfully. Next year's Olympic Games in Beijing, he suggests, might prove an exception.
In the late 1990s, the North Koreans allowed investors from Hong Kong and Macau to set up casinos in their closed world. One was in Rajin-Sonbong, a failed investment zone close to the Chinese border; another lurked in the basement of an isolated hotel for foreigners in Pyongyang. North Korea correctly reckoned that, since gambling is banned in China, these would be a big attraction (gambling is also banned in North Korea for ordinary citizens, but the government allowed Chinese to staff the casinos).
As China saw it, the casinos proved rather too popular, drawing huge numbers of corrupt officials. Two years ago, China cracked down on cross-border gambling—appealing to neighbouring countries to close down casinos, banning travel agents from offering gambling tours, restricting foreign visits by officials—after one official allegedly embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars of government funds and gambled the money away at the casino in Rajin-Sonbong. This has now been closed. The one in Pyongyang is still open, but is beyond the range of weekend holiday-makers. These days you find few gamblers there, mostly Chinese tourists betting a few tens of dollars to help relieve the tedium of endless mind-numbing tours of political monuments.
Neither China nor North Korea publishes regular figures for tourism in each other's country but the crackdown seems to have taken its toll. One Chinese newspaper said there had been 20,000 job losses in Dandong, a border town through which Chinese tourists usually pass on their way to North Korea by train. The number of Chinese visitors to Dandong has fallen to a quarter of what it was in the peak years. Last August many travel agencies said North Korea had stopped accepting Chinese visitors. It is not clear why. Some cited floods. One official newspaper said it was because North Korea had reduced its annual quota for Chinese tourists. It is likely that it was also piqued by China's unusually tart response to its supposed ally's missile and nuclear tests. Early this year, restrictions appeared to ease again.
What remains is a niche market for the curious and sated. For all their professed ideological similarities, North Korea and China are worlds apart. Affluent urban Chinese who have travelled to other parts of Asia now visit North Korea for its rarity value, and for a taste of what they themselves have escaped from. One member of your correspondent's group was the son of a Korean war veteran. He and other Chinese visitors were disappointed to find little public acknowledgement of China's role in the Korean war of 1950-53, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese died fighting the Americans.
Older Chinese visitors find striking comparisons with their own country, 30 or more years ago. The public worship of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, and of his late father, Kim Il Sung, is similar to the cult of Mao. The state ideology of juche (self-reliance) has much in common with Mao's isolationism. Chinese tourists are given warning, before leaving, to avoid commenting on North Korean politics and to be careful where they point their cameras. China was once as prickly.
North Korea is almost as wary of Chinese visitors as it is of Westerners. Like Westerners, Chinese are assigned guides whose job is to prevent spontaneous contact with locals. Some guides express disdain for Chinese socialism. “China is so dirty now and so expensive, and takes no stance whatsoever against the American imperialists”, says one (with its industry barely operating, North Korea's air does seem refreshingly unpolluted to Chinese visitors).
The kind of tourism North Korea prefers is the carefully controlled tours by South Koreans to Mount Kumgang, a scenic resort on the northern side of their common border. There, they have virtually no contact with locals (South Korean tourists are rarely welcome in Pyongyang). On May 17th, North and South Korea opened the first rail links across the border since the Korean war. It was largely a symbolic act. Maybe one day such links will make it easier to travel to Mount Kumgang and to Kaesong, a South Korean investment zone in the north. But there is no sign North Korea plans to let South Koreans travel freely. Regular train services are still a distant prospect.
As mobile-phone-loving Chinese tourists frequently complain, North Korea does not allow visitors to bring their phones into the country—so fearful is it of unmonitored information conduits to the outside world. There is no internet access even in expensive hotels. North Koreans authorised to speak to visitors appear to be oblivious of their guests' annoyance at such privations. They boast that North Korea's economy once outperformed China's, particularly in the 1960s when China was gripped by famine. One Chinese visitor says her brother fled to North Korea then. The North Koreans do not allow her to try to contact him.
A Chinese travel agent says North Korea's poverty is part of its off-beat appeal. If North Korea were to become richer, she says, it would lose its competitive tourism advantage. Not that it is a huge draw, even when it does welcome tourists. The Arirang performance, originally due to last for a month, ended several days early because of insufficient paying visitors.

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.