Despite gains, North Koreans disillusioned

Mrs. Park is North Korean salt of the earth. Until the 70-year-old was stripped, beaten, and charged with dissent, Park and her family were patriotic, loyal, ordinary. They were true believers in the ruling Kim family's "juche" ideology, which holds that Korea must be separate from all nations and that total obedience is owed to the Kim family. Park's eight kids worshiped Kim Il Sung, the "father of their minds." When Kim died and millions perished in an epic famine, the Parks didn't panic. They wrote a letter to Kim Jong Il, volunteering to farm – something only a pure and loyal family would dare in North Korea.

Yet today Mrs. Park (not her real name) is in South Korea, an escapee. Her family is broken. So are her ideals. She's been captured in China – sent home to the North, made to endure camps, and witness horrific acts. She had gone to China in 2000 only to feed her family. But her world got turned upside down.

The significance of Park's story may be how typical it is. In the past decade many North Korean families have had their state-enforced high ideals shattered, according to refugees and nongovernmental and academic sources working with them. A recent high-level defector from Pyongyang confirms that many elites in the North are now a "skeptical class," according to sources in South Korea's national unification ministry.

The loss of faith among foot-soldiers in Kim's army of believers, say analysts, is a noteworthy change in an unpredictable regime.

North Korea today faces a paradox: While its material standard of living has been improving, moving from awful to less awful – its morale and its collective beliefs continue to fray. Energy, food, cash, and know-how flow faster into the North, from China and South Korea. But the quality of patriotism, military discipline, and ideological purity – elements that have uniquely bound the North – are shaky, say many sources.

Local authority figures of respect have spent a decade foraging for cash and food, like everyone else. The Park family's story emerges from a land where nearly 500,000 a year died between 1995 and 1999, according to Chuck Downs, a US expert on North Korea, currently with the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

A "feeling of positive emotion" is missing in the North, reports a Seoul-based researcher on the Chinese-North Korean border. "People have stopped seeing each other as people; everything is money.... It used to be that everyone looked up to public officials ... to the Army. Now they are on the take," says a Korean reporter for NKnet, a newsletter in Seoul headed by Han Ki-hong, a leftist who is critical of the North's human rights violations.

"The North is being penetrated in terms of thought, information, and in cultural and commercial products from outside," says Scott Snyder, former head of the Asia Foundation in Seoul, now at Stanford University. "The rules have changed."

Mr. Snyder says the novel "Waiting" by Chinese author Ha Jin, set during the brutal Cultural Revolution, contains a psychological parallel with North Korea today. It was a time when the unwritten street codes of survival in China were so at odds with propaganda that even loyalists asked questions, albeit quietly.

The North Korean paradox does not mean Kim Jong Il is any less an absolute ruler, or that his regime is on the brink of collapse, as some in Washington have hoped, and which the October Atlantic Monthly cover article implies. The demise of Kim has been predicted regularly for a decade or more. Kim has regularly turned "the brink" into clever brinkmanship.

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