The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [56]
The transcript of the confidential discussions with Honecker on December 10, preserved in the GDR archives, provides a rare snapshot of Kim's private views in the late 1970s. While acknowledging that his country faced problems, many of which he attributed to "American imperialism," Kim was supremely confident of his position and the ascendency of his self-reliant juche ideology. Wearing horn-rimmed glasses and an elegantly tailored cadre suit of the sort worn by Chinese leaders, Kim at 65 was still in the prime of his life. Only a few flecks of gray could be seen in his full head of hair.
Kim, according to the transcript, declared that his number one priority was unification of the country, and he outlined three strategic directions that he had set forth in the early 1960s and adhered to for the rest of his life: "first, to successfully carry out the organization of socialism in the northern part of the country; second, to support the revolutionary struggle in South Korea; third, to develop solidarity and unity with the international revolutionary forces." He discussed the status of each in turn.
Kim first described the extraordinary mobilization of the population that distinguished North Korea from nearly every other country, and that he justified as necessary to create a powerful revolutionary base for the Korean peninsula and beyond. He told Honecker without overstatement that "everyone, apart from infants, is included in the organizational life" of the nation. Of North Korea's 17 million people, at that time 2.2 million were in the Workers Party, and all the others, except for infants, belonged to various organizations of children, youths, women, farmers, or workers.
Education was compulsory through the eleventh grade. However, ideological instruction took up more than half the day in North Korean elementary schools in the 1970s, and Kim had decreed that this emphasis should be even greater in the upper grades. A U.S. Central Intelligence Agency analysis of the economic competition on the peninsula, issued a month after the Kim-Honecker meeting, cited the priority on teaching ideology over useful skills in the education system as a key reason why North Korea had fallen behind in labor productivity and a well-educated South Korea had surged ahead.
In his talk with Honecker, Kim described in general terms the social engineering that was so much a part of North Korea. To "revolutionize and reform women, according to the example of the working class," according to Kim, they were being "freed from heavy domestic work" and placed in jobs outside the home. About 80 percent of farmworkers were women, he said, and over 90 percent of workers in light industry. Without giving numbers, he explained that this was necessary because "many young people in our country are in the army." To compensate for the absence of mothers and to start inculcating its ideology early, North Korea had built nurseries and kindergartens for 3.5 million children so they could be "taken care of and educated by society."
Kim made no mention of this to Honecker, but the fact was that despite North Korea's strenuous efforts, by 1977 the balance of economic power on the peninsula was shifting decisively in favor of the South. In the first years after the Korean War, the centrally directed economy of North Korea had grown more rapidly than the more loosely controlled economy of South Korea. But in the early 1960s, the two economies took decisive turns: the North opted for an inner-directed economy, centered on building its heavy industry at home and shying away from commitments abroad; the South, guided by American-trained Korean economists and the promise