North Korean Policy Elites - Defense Technical Information Center

as the 1950s. 16 The security organizations classify people according to their presumed loyalty to
the regime, with classification based primarily on family history going back several generations.
These classifications may be reviewed whenever an individual is considered for occupational
promotion.
The trusted “core” of society, comprising about 30 percent of the population, comes from
families who historically were members of the working class. The elite are a select few from this
core class. A few of the historical subgroups in this class are laborers, poor farmers, office clerks,
and soldiers - not by any means members of the intellectual class. The 50 percent of North
Korea’s society belonging to the “wavering” class are considered to have the potential to become
members of the loyal class, given sufficient time and indoctrination. They include those whose
families, in pre-communist times, were middle-class merchants, prosperous farmers, or workers
who immigrated from South Korea. At the bottom of society is the “hostile” class, constituting at
least 20 percent of the population. These are “untrustworthy” people whose ancestors were
wealthy landlords or merchants, committed members of religious organizations, officials or
collaborators of the Japanese occupation government, or anyone who has a family member guilty
of criticizing the Kim regime. Except in highly unusual circumstances, these people never
become party members, let alone join the Pyongyang elite. The dregs of this group are tens of
thousands of political prisoners serving life-time sentences in an animal-like existence.
Beginning in the 1990s, hard times fell on most North Koreans, and party membership no
longer guaranteed a privileged life. Instead, access to foreign currency (primarily dollars or yen)
became the ticket to success, and sometimes, even to survival. Consequently, a major division in
society has emerged between those who have foreign currency (regardless of their political
classification) and those who do not. 17 Foreign currency can be acquired through black market
activities, border trade with China, and travel abroad (in unusual cases). An inferior alternative to
having foreign currency is to have direct access to food, because in the 1990s food became the
basic goal of life for many North Koreans. Country life had always been tougher than city life,
but when the North Korean economy was knocked back to the stone age, farmers survived better
than city dwellers, 18 excepting the higher classes in Pyongyang who could use their political
power to extract food from the countryside or help themselves to foreign aid supplies.
16 See for example, White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea, 2003. Seoul: Korea Institute for National
Unification, 2003, pp. 111-114. On the web, see the National Intelligence Service’s summary of “Social
Elements” in the Society/Controlling People section at http://www.nis.go.kr/eng/north (refresh).
17 Two excellent articles have been published on foreign currency earning in the DPRK. Yi Kyo-Kwan, “North
Korea’s Up-and-Coming Influential People,” Chugan Choson, June 19, 2003, pp. 36-37. FBIS
KPP20030623000066. And “North Korean Regime’s Mobilization of Residents for Garnering Foreign Currency,”
Keys, Vol. 13 (summer 2003), pp. 8-27.
18 Yonhap, December 19, 2003. FBIS KPP20031219000034.
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