Nothing to Envy: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

North Koreans, Demick writes, have multiple words for prison, the same way the Inuit do for snow. There are detention centers, police units, “enlightenment centers” for the rehabilitation of those charged with smuggling, labor camps, and the most notorious prisons of all—kwanliso, or “control and management places” located in the northernmost reaches of the country. An estimated 200,000 prisoners are housed in these gulags today—politicians, descendants of landlords or Japanese collaborators, Christian clergymen, and those who have been charged with insulting the authority of the leadership. Sentences in these camps are life sentences, so few ever emerge to tell their stories.

When Kim Hyuck was arrested just after his 16th birthday, a fleet of undercover police from the Bowibu, the national security agency that investigates political crimes, brought him to a holding center where they beat him incessantly and questioned him unendingly about having drawn a map of the easiest border crossings for a Chinese citizen. After a few months, he was transferred to a county jail; there, without a trial, he was charged with an illegal border crossing and sentenced to three years in a labor camp.

At the camp, Hyuck and about 1,500 other prisoners worked from sunrise to sunset, laboring in lumberyards, farmlands, a brick factory, and a mine. The labor camp produced furniture, bicycles, and more. The men were fed one small rice ball padded with corn husks each day. At night, they slept on concrete. The prisoners were mostly “economic criminals,” or those who’d been caught working the black market. Many mornings, Hyuck and his fellow prisoners would wake up to find a man had died in the night. Beatings, the withholding of food, and executions were commonplace. Hyuck was released at last in July of 2002 after just 20 months—he was told that his early pardon was in celebration of the upcoming anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party, but Hyuck believed the camp simply had more “important enemies” than him scheduled to arrive soon.  

As the food shortage stabilized, Kim Jong-il decided that he needed to be less “tolerant” of those who had resorted to buying and selling goods on the black market during the crisis. The regime ramped up its arrests, bringing anyone who worked as a vendor, trader, or smuggler to a camp. Kim Jong-il sent reinforcements to heighten security along the Chinese border; he also encouraged Chinese undercover police to start patrolling markets and towns on the other side, hunting for defectors and smugglers. He created prisons for the homeless, hoping to keep hidden away the drifters whose presence on the streets revealed just how bad things were. 

Kim Jong-il also purged the 6th Army, a division of the military stationed in Chongjin, and replaced them with new troops from the 9th Army. Rumors of an attempted military coup spread throughout Chongjin—many people waited for something terrible to happen. Demick writes that the more plausible explanation for the purge was that Kim Jong-il wanted control over the infantry’s financial activities—the military ran trading companies that exported rare delicacies alongside illicit drugs, which the regime condoned as it made a profit. But when the military was suspected of skimming off the top themselves, Kim Jong-il had had enough. 

After the purge, even harder crackdowns began. Special prosecutors traveled to the region to investigate factory managers who had organized employees to start an illegal scrap metal trade across the border; the managers were executed by firing squad in a public area near the market. More and more executions began taking place—prostitutes, hoarders, and petty thieves whose only crimes were stealing and selling copper wires from now-defuncted telephone poles were accused of “antistate activities” and gunned down in the streets. Life in North Korea became increasingly chaotic and dangerous, and the rules that had governed life there for so long were changing fast.