North Korea launched a "150-day struggle," a press-ganged mobilization to increase production of collective farms from April 20 to Sept. 19 on the road to building a "powerful and prosperous nation" by 2012. No sooner had the one struggle ended than a "100-day struggle" ensued. But what exactly is the point? | More juche? |
That alone, since it is quite unrelated to production, suggests that the first campaign failed. Hwang Jang-yop, a former secretary of the North Korean Workers' Party who defected to the South, said, "The activities taking place in the North in recent months are a kind of last gasp, using force to oppress the population and prolong the dictatorship."
The North has undergone major changes. With the ration system suspended in many regions since 2000, the market economy has made rapid inroads into North Korean society. North Korean defectors say the struggles are a means of keeping the market at bay by forcing people to work in the fields or on collective projects. They are also aimed, defectors say, at controlling a society shaken by UN sanctions and for the state to get its hands on individual wealth accumulated through the market.
A senior North Korean official who recently defected to the South said, "Though the 150-day struggle was supposed to raise economic strength to the level of the planned economy in the 1970s and '80s, its actual aim was eliminating the market economy." The North has never officially given up on the planned economy, but it effectively collapsed completely in the latter half of the 1990s. Some 80-90 percent of state-run enterprise staff are engaged in individual commerce, paying a certain amount of money to the businesses and keeping the rest for themselves.
Launching the 150-day struggle in April, the North tried to drive all able-bodied adults to collective farms. Beginning in spring, the security police rounded up anyone they found walking around in major cities and drove them to farms, reported the Daily NK.
The National Defense Committee proclaimed, "We must solve our food problem for ourselves and counter the unprecedented imperialist policy of isolating and smothering the nation" with UN sanctions. But the effort failed.
"Marauding and looting, sometimes even by hungry soldiers, are rampant in the North and giving rise to serious public unrest," one recent North Korean defector said. "It's all caused by the 150-day struggle. If North Koreans are driven further in the 100-day struggle until the end of the year, public unrest could get out of hand, and the results for the regime could be devastating."