Few things are as controversial as foreign tourism to North Korea. No sane person would doubt the highly repressive and brutal nature of the current regime in Pyongyang, even though the exact level of repressiveness might be argued about. It is also clear that in order to survive, the North Korean government heavily relies on many kinds of subsidies and easy income from overseas.
That being the case, many believe it to be unethical to go to North Korea as tourist. It is argued that the money spent by visiting Westerners on their own short and overpriced tours will go straight into the pockets of the North Korean regime, which will then use it to maintain its control over its downtrodden people.
Some supporters of tourism (some of whom have a stake in the business) respond to this argument by saying that all countries have their prisoners and their prisons, after all. They may also claim that many a tourist dollar goes toward meeting the basic economic needs of the long-suffering North Korean population.
Unfortunately, these arguments are seriously flawed. Firstly, all states are to a certain extent necessarily violent and repressive, but equating the Guantanamo Bay with the North Korean gulags is the height of intellectual dishonesty. Second, while we should not deny the fact that the North Korean government spends some of its hard currency income on food and medical supplies for its people, we must not forget that such things are not high on its list of priorities. The North Korean leaders prioritize just one thing above all else: their own survival.
Another important critique of Western tourism (recently highlighted by Brian Myers in an opinion piece for the NK News website) is that visitors are often used as propaganda props – albeit usually unwittingly – by the regime. Pyongyang often presents tourists as proof of North Korea’s high international standing and the widespread respect that the North Korean regime allegedly enjoys across the world.
“While this tourism has its dark side, on balance it helps to change the country by influencing the minds and hearts of North Koreans”
Such arguments against tourism are valid, but the present author remains a supporter of tourists to North Korea. While this tourism has its dark side, on balance it helps to change the country by influencing the minds and hearts of North Koreans. In this regard, the Cold War experiences of Western tourism to the Soviet Union (of which I was a rather passive observer) is illustrative.
The Soviet Union played host to many Western visitors during its history. According to official statistics, 700,000 foreigners visited the USSR in 1960, but by 1970 the number had risen to 2 million, and in 1980 there were as many as 3 million. We should remember, though, that only about a quarter of this number were people from the countries of the developed West.
The Soviet authorities, like their North Korean peers, believed that tourism was a relatively safe way of earning precious hard currency, thus increasing government revenues without running considerable political risks (unlike meaningful economic and social reform). In essence, North Korea’s way of handling foreign visitors follows Soviet patterns.
Back in the USSR, the state-run Intourist Company, the staff of which included a large number of security police personnel and informers, handled the overwhelming majority of foreign tourists. As a matter of fact, for a few years in the late 1930s, Intourist was officially subordinated to a security agency – though this connection was not public knowledge at the time.
With few exceptions, tourists were put into small and closely managed tour groups, each with their own guide. In most cases, tourists were segregated from the Soviet public: they lived in exclusive, foreigner-only hotels, ate in foreigner-only restaurants, and shopped in places where purchases had to made in hard currency (it was a grave crime for any Soviet citizen to be in possession of hard currency). Even when they visited ‘normal’ restaurants, or walked the streets for that matter, guides did their best to ensure that the interactions between tourists and Soviet citizens would be short or non-existent.
This system appears to be very similar to what foreign visitors can now see in North Korea. This is not surprising, of course, since, as we have already mentioned, the North Korean government has deliberately imitated the Soviet prototype – driven by the same fear of ideological contamination and the same desire for easy income.
“Like the vast majority of Soviet citizens, I could see foreign tourists only from afar. Yet this did not prevent them from exercising much impact from their sheer presence”
The question remains though, did the system work as intended in the Soviet Union? It seems that the answer to this question is clearly in the negative. As a former citizen of the USSR, coming from a rather humble social background, I can testify that Western tourists were one of the most powerful conveyers of the truth of the Soviet Union’s relative social and economic backwardness.
Like the vast majority of Soviet citizens, I could see foreign tourists only from afar. Yet this did not prevent them from exercising much impact from their sheer presence.
I spent my childhood and youth in the city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), the Soviet Union’s second largest city and former capital of the Russian Empire. It played host to a large number of foreign visitors, a surprisingly large number of which were from neighboring Scandinavia (attracted not to the cultural wonders of Russia’s imperial capital, but rather by the cheap liquor to be found in Intourist hotels and bars). Seriously inebriated Finish tourists were a remarkably common sight in the downtown Leningrad of my youth.
Everyone could see that foreign tourists were very well dressed, and they also possessed high-tech gadgets that the Soviet citizen had never seen before and could not be found or heard of in the USSR. They had tiny transistor radios, cassette tape recorders and digital watches. They were also well groomed. Everyone could see this when they encountered tourist groups in large museums and at local monuments.
Much information filtered through the large number of people who were allowed, indeed required, to deal with foreign visitors. Guides, bus drivers, waiters, and even hotel cleaners had to be somewhat careful when they were talking to strangers, but amongst family and friends, they were quite frank about their many exotic encounters – and their stories filtered away from the family circle easily. Indeed, working for Intourist was considered to be one of the best career options for practically minded people in my generation, since some foreign riches trickled down to the people who came into contact with visitors. These people told their friends that the foreigners they met often came from very humble backgrounds, but still live better than mid-ranking officials in the Soviet Union. Indeed, few could doubt that it was fisherman and loggers (not CEOs of big companies) who got drunk in the Leningrad bars of the 1970s. Catching mackerel and cutting pines was considerably more lucrative in Western Europe than in the USSR though.
“Much information filtered through the large number of people who were allowed, indeed required, to deal with foreign visitors”
Of course, the official media tended to tell the Soviet people that foreign visitors were attracted to the Soviet Union because of their sympathies for the socialist experiment or Russian culture, though it was often admitted that some bad sheep might have infiltrated the ranks of the ‘friends of the USSR’. However, such propaganda was not taken all that seriously by most. Intourist guides often relayed the highly sarcastic and humorous remarks made by their charges regarding the state of the Soviet economy, ideology, and above all, the service industry. In fact, a foreign tourist a staple in Soviet jokes in the country’s latter years.
One of the author’s favorites is about a foreign trade unionist on a visit to Moscow who, when he visits a factory and sees that the workers are playing chess, smoking, knitting and exchanging jokes tells them that he wishes them well in their strike.
By the late 1970s, the average Soviet citizens had a very clear understanding of just how much freer and richer the Western world was compared to their own country. The Soviet media did all it could to paint the West as benighted by poverty, with an epidemic of homelessness. Such stories however, were almost universally rejected. In fact, when I first went to the West in 1989 (for a very brief stopover returning from Seoul) I was genuinely surprised to actually some unfortunate homeless people on the streets of Paris.
The image of the West as a paradise of prosperity and liberty was produced not so much by Cold War era Western propaganda as by the presence of normal Western people in the Soviet Union, as well as by some exposure to Western life through cinema and literature. Tourism was one of the most important windows onto the outside world for Soviet citizens – it provided us with a reliable antidote to official propaganda, and it made many in the Soviet Union conscious of a need to change the country.
“Tourism was one of the most important windows onto the outside world for Soviet citizens – it provided us with a reliable antidote to official propaganda”
Some may argue that this logic is not necessarily applicable to North Korea because North Korea is far more repressive and restricted a place than the post-Stalin Soviet Union ever was. This is may be the case, but we should not forget that the once unprecedented system of repression has substantially eroded in the last 15 years. North Koreans are now far more willing to talk politics (as the experience of the present author and his colleagues testifies) and they are much less sheepish when dealing with the government – as many riots, as well as smuggled videos that show quarrels with police testify. North Koreans of today, like the Soviets of the 1960s and 1970s, are quite likely to take seriously stories about foreign tourists – such stories will make them far more suspicious about the officially approved picture of the world.
As a matter of fact, the Soviet, and to a lesser extent, the Eastern European experience is applicable to North Korea. Regime survival is to a large extent predicated on officially endorsed beliefs that the current system is capable of providing not only economic equality and justice, but also high living standards. In the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, North Korea, and pretty much everywhere else it was tried, the state planned economic system has met with spectacular failure, bringing with it stagnation and eventually crisis, not the prosperity that was hoped for. However, the government could not afford to accept this bitter truth, and this is what makes information from the outside world so deeply corrosive for such states.
This is also the difference between North Korea and Myanmar. The latter, when it was itself a brutal dictatorship, and faced an international tourist embargo. The embargo was significant because Myanmar had significant tourist potential. The lifting of the embargo and the arrival of foreign tourists, and the resultant spread of information about the outside world would have little impact on the average Myanmarese mind. The regime’s ideology was predicated on nationalism and social stability, not on its ability to deliver recording breaking economic growth. Thus even if the Myanmarese learnt that their neighbors enjoyed dramatically better material lifestyles, this would not necessarily have much impact on their views and perceptions of the outside world.
So, in Myanmar, the tourist embargo may have contributed to the regime’s decline, but North Korea being an post-Leninist ideocratic state. As such, it is quite vulnerable to news from abroad; tourism is one such channel by which such news can flow – and not an insignificant one at that. Hence, while tourism certainly brings revenues to the North Korean state, it also changes minds inside the country, thus speeding up changes that have been underway in the country for quite some time.
Picture: Eric Lafforgue
