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America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies

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Joe Biden and Angela Merkel in the Oval Office

Joe Biden and Angela Merkel in the Oval Office

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Ukraine – what you’re not told

America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies

[The article below was first published on the CounterPunch website on 11th February 2022. It is being reproduced here to help explain why the United States is so concerned (and heavily involved) in what is happening in Ukraine at the moment. As with all US involvement in another country there is no concern for the local population but for the greater interests of the US financial, industrial and military complex. The United States is panicking that it will lose its worldwide clout but a frightened beast can be the more dangerous.]

America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies

by Michael Hudson

The U.S. aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia

The Iron Curtain of the 1940s and ‘50s was ostensibly designed to isolate Russia from Western Europe – to keep out Communist ideology and military penetration. Today’s sanctions regime is aimed inward, to prevent America’s NATO and other Western allies from opening up more trade and investment with Russia and China. The aim is not so much to isolate Russia and China as to hold these allies firmly within America’s own economic orbit. Allies are to forego the benefits of importing Russian gas and Chinese products, buying much higher-priced U.S. LNG and other exports, capped by more U.S. arms.

The sanctions that U.S. diplomats are insisting that their allies impose against trade with Russia and China are aimed ostensibly at deterring a military buildup. But such a buildup cannot really be the main Russian and Chinese concern. They have much more to gain by offering mutual economic benefits to the West. So the underlying question is whether Europe will find its advantage in replacing U.S. exports with Russian and Chinese supplies and the associated mutual economic linkages.

What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment. If there is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need for NATO? What is the need for such heavy purchases of U.S. military hardware by America’s affluent allies? And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?

These are the concerns that have prompted French Prime Minister Macron to call forth the ghost of Charles de Gaulle and urge Europe to turn away from what he calls NATO’s “brain-dead” Cold War and beak with the pro-U.S. trade arrangements that are imposing rising costs on Europe while denying it potential gains from trade with Eurasia. Even Germany is balking at demands that it freeze by this coming March by going without Russian gas.

Instead of a real military threat from Russia and China, the problem for American strategists is the absence of such a threat. All countries have come to realize that the world has reached a point at which no industrial economy has the manpower and political ability to mobilize a standing army of the size that would be needed to invade or even wage a major battle with a significant adversary. That political cost makes it uneconomic for Russia to retaliate against NATO adventurism prodding at its western border trying to incite a military response. It’s just not worth taking over Ukraine.

America’s rising pressure on its allies threatens to drive them out of the U.S. orbit. For over 75 years they had little practical alternative to U.S. hegemony. But that is now changing. America no longer has the monetary power and seemingly chronic trade and balance-of-payments surplus that enabled it to draw up the world’s trade and investment rules in 1944-45. The threat to U.S. dominance is that China, Russia and Mackinder’s Eurasian World Island heartland are offering better trade and investment opportunities than are available from the United States with its increasingly desperate demand for sacrifices from its NATO and other allies.

The most glaring example is the U.S. drive to block Germany from authorizing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to obtain Russian gas for the coming cold weather. Angela Merkel agreed with Donald Trump to spend $1 billion building a new LNG port to become more dependent on highly priced U.S. LNG. (The plan was cancelled after the U.S. and German elections changed both leaders.) But Germany has no other way of heating many of its houses and office buildings (or supplying its fertilizer companies) than with Russian gas.

The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27: “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”[1] The problem is to create a suitably offensive incident and depict Russia as the aggressor.

Nuland expressed who was dictating the policies of NATO members succinctly in 2014: “Fuck the EU.” That was said as she told the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine that the State Department was backing the puppet Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Ukrainian prime minister (removed after two years in a corruption scandal), and U.S. political agencies backed the bloody Maidan massacre that ushered in what are now eight years of civil war. The result devastated Ukraine much as U.S. violence had done in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not a policy of world peace or democracy that European voters endorse.

U.S. trade sanctions imposed on its NATO allies extend across the trade spectrum. Austerity-ridden Lithuania gave up its cheese and agricultural market in Russia, and is blocking its state-owned railroad from carrying Belarus potash to the Baltic port of Klaipeda. The port’s majority owner complained that “Lithuania will lose hundreds of millions of dollars from halting Belarus exports through Klaipeda,” and “could face legal claims of $15 billion over broken contracts.”[2] Lithuania has even agreed to U.S. prompting to recognize Taiwan, resulting in China refusing to import German or other products that include Lithuanian-made components.

Europe is to impose sanctions at the cost of rising energy and agricultural prices by giving priority to imports from the United States and foregoing Russian, Belarusian and other linkages outside of the Dollar Area. As Sergey Lavrov put matters: “When the United States thinks that something suits its interests, it can betray those with whom it was friendly, with whom it cooperated and who catered to its positions around the world.”[3]

America’s sanctions on its allies hurt their economies, not those of Russia and China

What seems ironic is that such sanctions against Russia and China have ended up helping rather than hurting them. But the primary aim was not to hurt nor to help the Russian and Chinese economies. After all, it is axiomatic that sanctions force the targeted countries to become more self-reliant. Deprived of Lithuanian cheese, Russian producers have produced their own, and no longer need to import it from the Baltic states. America’s underlying economic rivalry is aimed at keeping European and its allied Asian countries in its own increasingly protected economic orbit. Germany, Lithuania and other allies are told to impose sanctions directed against their own economic welfare by not trading with countries outside the U.S. dollar-area orbit.

Quite apart from the threat of actual war resulting from U.S. bellicosity, the cost to America’s allies of surrendering to U.S. trade and investment demands is becoming so high as to be politically unaffordable. For nearly a century there has been little alternative but to agree to trade and investment rules favoring the U.S. economy as the price of receiving U.S. financial and trade support and even military security. But an alternative is now threatening to emerge – one offering benefits from China’s Belt and Road initiative, and from Russia’s desire for foreign investment to help modernize its industrial organization, as seemed to be promised thirty years ago in 1991.

Ever since the closing years of World War II, U.S. diplomacy has aimed at locking Britain, France, and especially defeated Germany and Japan, into becoming U.S. economic and military dependencies. As I documented in Super Imperialism, American diplomats broke up the British Empire and absorbed its Sterling Area by the onerous terms imposed first by Lend-Lease and then the Anglo-American Loan Agreement of 1946. The latter’s terms obliged Britain to give up its Imperial Preference policy and unblock the sterling balances that India and other colonies had accumulated for their raw-materials exports during the war, thus opening the British Commonwealth to U.S. exports.

Britain committed itself not to recover its prewar markets by devaluing sterling. U.S. diplomats then created the IMF and World Bank on terms that promoted U.S. export markets and deterred competition from Britain and other former rivals. Debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons showed that British politicians recognized that they were being consigned to a subservient economic position, but felt that they had no alternative. And once they gave up, U.S. diplomats had a free hand in confronting the rest of Europe.

Financial power has enabled America to continue dominating Western diplomacy despite being forced off gold in 1971 as a result of the balance-of-payments costs of its overseas military spending. For the past half-century, foreign countries have kept their international monetary reserves in U.S. dollars – mainly in U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank accounts and other financial investments in the U.S. economy. The Treasury-bill standard obliges foreign central banks to finance America’s military-based balance-of-payments deficit – and in the process, the domestic government budget deficit.

The United States does not need this recycling to create money. The government can simply print money, as MMT has demonstrated. But the United States does need this foreign central bank dollar recycling to balance its international payments and support the dollar’s exchange rate. If the dollar were to decline, foreign countries would find it much easier to pay international dollar-debts in their own currencies. U.S. import prices would rise, and it would be more costly for U.S. investors to buy foreign assets. And foreigners would lose money on U.S. stocks and bonds as denominated in their own currencies, and would drop them. Central banks in particular would take a loss on the Treasury’s dollar bonds that they hold in their monetary reserves – and would find their interest to lie in moving out of the dollar. So the U.S. balance of payments and exchange rate are both threatened by U.S. belligerency and military spending throughout the world – yet its diplomats are trying to stabilize matters by ramping up the military threat to crisis levels.

U.S. drives to keep its European and East Asian protectorates locked into its own sphere of influence is threatened by the emergence of China and Russia independently of the United States while the U.S. economy is de-industrializing as a result of its own deliberate policy choices. The industrial dynamic that made the United States so dominant from the late 19th century up to the 1970s has given way to an evangelistic neoliberal financialization. That is why U.S. diplomats need to arm-twist their allies to block their economic relations with post-Soviet Russia and socialist China, whose growth is outstripping that of the United States and whose trade arrangements offer more opportunities for mutual gain.

At issue is how long the United States can block its allies from taking advantage of China’s economic growth. Will Germany, France and other NATO countries seek prosperity for themselves instead of letting the U.S. dollar standard and trade preferences siphon off their economic surplus?

Oil diplomacy and America’s dream for post-Soviet Russia

The expectation of Gorbachev and other Russian officials in 1991 was that their economy would turn to the West for reorganization along the lines that had made the U.S., German and other economies so prosperous. The mutual expectation in Russia and Western Europe was for German, French and other investors to restructure the post-Soviet economy along more efficient lines.

That was not the U.S. plan. When Senator John McCain called Russia “a gas station with atom bombs,” that was America’s dream for what they wanted Russia to be – with Russia’s gas companies passing into control by U.S. stockholders, starting with the planned buyout of Yukos as arranged with Mikhail Khordokovsky. The last thing that U.S. strategists wanted to see was a thriving revived Russia. U.S. advisors sought to privatize Russia’s natural resources and other non-industrial assets, by turning them over to kleptocrats who could “cash out” on the value of what they had privatized only by selling to U.S. and other foreign investors for hard currency. The result was a neoliberal economic and demographic collapse throughout the post-Soviet states.

In some ways, America has been turning itself into its own version of a gas station with atom bombs (and arms exports). U.S. oil diplomacy aims to control the world’s oil trade so that its enormous profits will accrue to the major U.S. oil companies. It was to keep Iranian oil in the hands of British Petroleum that the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt worked with British Petroleum’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company to overthrow Iran’s elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh in 1954 when he sought to nationalize the company after it refused decade after decade to perform its promised contributions to the economy. After installing the Shah whose democracy was based on a vicious police state, Iran threatened once again to act as the master of its own oil resources. So it was once again confronted with U.S.-sponsored sanctions, which remain in effect today. The aim of such sanctions is to keep the world oil trade firmly under U.S. control, because oil is energy and energy is the key to productivity and real GDP.

In cases where foreign governments such as Saudi Arabia and neighboring Arab petrostates have taken control, the export earnings of their oil are to be deposited in U.S. financial markets to support the dollar’s exchange rate and U.S. financial domination. When they quadrupled their oil prices in 1973-74 (in response to the U.S. quadrupling of its grain-export prices), the U.S. State Department laid down the law and told Saudi Arabia that it could charge as much as it wanted for its oil (thereby raising the price umbrella for U.S. oil producers), but it had to recycle its oil-export earnings to the United States in dollar-denominated securities – mainly in U.S. Treasury securities and U.S. bank accounts, along with some minority holdings of U.S. stocks and bonds (but only as passive investors, not using this financial power to control corporate policy).

The second mode of recycling oil-export earnings was to buy U.S. arms exports, with Saudi Arabia becoming one of the military-industrial complex’s largest customers. U.S. arms production actually is not primarily military in character. As the world is now seeing in the kerfuffle over Ukraine, America does not have a fighting army. What it has is what used to be called an “eating army.” U.S. arms production employs labor and produces weaponry as a kind of prestige good for governments to show off, not for actual fighting. Like most luxury goods, the markup is very high. That is the essence of high fashion and style, after all. The MIC uses its profits to subsidize U.S. civilian production in a way that does not violate the letter of international trade laws against government subsidy.

Sometimes, of course, military force is indeed used. In Iraq, first George W. Bush and then Barack Obama used the military to seize the country’ oil reserves, along with those of Syria and Libya. Control of world oil has been the buttress of America’s balance of payments. Despite the global drive to slow the planet’s warming, U.S. officials continue to view oil as the key to America’s economic supremacy. That is why the U.S. military is still refusing to obey Iraq’s orders to leave their country, keeping its troops in control of Iraqi oil, and why it agreed with the French to destroy Libya and still has troops in the oilfields of Syria. Closer to home, President Biden has approved offshore drilling and supports Canada’s expansion of its Athabasca tar sands, environmentally the dirtiest oil in the world.

Along with oil and food exports, arms exports support the Treasury-bill standard’s financing of America’s overseas military spending on its 750 bases abroad. But without a standing enemy constantly threatening at the gates, NATO’s existence falls apart. What would be the need for countries to buy submarines, aircraft carriers, airplanes, tanks, missiles and other arms?

As the United States has de-industrialized, its trade and balance-of-payments deficit is becoming more problematic. It needs arms export sales to help reduce its widening trade deficit and also to subsidize its commercial aircraft and related civilian sectors. The challenge is how to maintain its prosperity and world dominance as it de-industrializes while economic growth is surging ahead in China and now even Russia.

America has lost its industrial cost advantage by the sharp rise in its cost of living and doing business in its financialized post-industrial rentier economy. Additionally, as Seymour Melman explained in the 1970s, Pentagon capitalism is based on cost-plus contracts: The higher military hardware costs, the more profit its manufacturers receive. So U.S. arms are over-engineered – hence, the $500 toilet seats instead of a $50 model. The main attractiveness of luxury goods after all, including military hardware, is their high price.

This is the background for U.S. fury at its failure to seize Russia’s oil resources – and at seeing Russia also break free militarily to create its own arms exports, which now are typically better and much less costly than those of the U.S. Today Russia is in the position of Iran in 1954 and again in 1979. Not only do its oil sales rival those of U.S. LNG, but Russia keeps its oil-export earnings at home to finance its re-industrialization, so as to rebuild the economy that was destroyed by the U.S.-sponsored shock “therapy” of the 1990s.

The line of least resistance for U.S. strategy seeking to maintain control of the world’s oil supply while maintaining its luxury-arms export market via NATO is to Cry Wolf and insist that Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine – as if Russia had anything to gain by quagmire warfare over Europe’s poorest and least productive economy. The winter of 2021-22 has seen a long attempt at U.S. prodding of NATO and Russia to fight – without success.

U.S. dreams of a neoliberalized China as a U.S. corporate affiliate

America has de-industrialized as a deliberate policy of slashing production costs as its manufacturing companies have sought low-wage labor abroad, most notably in China. This shift was not a rivalry with China, but was viewed as mutual gain. American banks and investors were expected to secure control and the profits of Chinese industry as it was marketized. The rivalry was between U.S. employers and U.S. labor, and the class-war weapon was offshoring and, in the process, cutting back government social spending.

Similar to the Russian pursuit of oil, arms and agricultural trade independent of U.S. control, China’s offense is keeping the profits of its industrialization at home, retaining state ownership of significant corporations and, most of all, keeping money creation and the Bank of China as a public utility to fund its own capital formation instead of letting U.S. banks and brokerage houses provide its financing and siphon off its surplus in the form of interest, dividends and management fees. The one saving grace to U.S. corporate planners has been China’s role in deterring U.S. wages from rising by providing a source of low-priced labor to enable American manufacturers to offshore and outsource their production.

The Democratic Party’s class war against unionized labor started in the Carter Administration and greatly accelerated when Bill Clinton opened the southern border with NAFTA. A string of maquiladoras were established along the border to supply low-priced handicraft labor. This became so successful a corporate profit center that Clinton pressed to admit China into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, in the closing month of his administration. The dream was for it to become a profit center for U.S. investors, producing for U.S. companies and financing its capital investment (and housing and government spending too, it was hoped) by borrowing U.S. dollars and organizing its industry in a stock market that, like that of Russia in 1994-96, would become a leading provider of finance-capital gains for U.S. and other foreign investors.

Walmart, Apple and many other U.S. companies organized production facilities in China, which necessarily involved technology transfers and creation of an efficient infrastructure for export trade. Goldman Sachs led the financial incursion, and helped China’s stock market soar. All this was what America had been urging.

Where did America’s neoliberal Cold War dream go wrong? For starters, China did not follow the World Bank’s policy of steering governments to borrow in dollars to hire U.S. engineering firms to provide export infrastructure. It industrialized in much the same way that the United States and Germany did in the late 19th century: By heavy public investment in infrastructure to provide basic needs at subsidized prices or freely, from health care and education to transportation and communications, in order to minimize the cost of living that employers and exporters had to pay. Most important, China avoided foreign debt service by creating its own money and keeping the most important production facilities in its own hands.

U.S. demands are driving its allies out of the dollar-NATO trade and monetary orbit

As in a classical Greek tragedy, U.S. foreign policy is bringing about precisely the outcome that it most fears. Overplaying their hand with their own NATO allies, U.S. diplomats are bringing about Kissinger’s nightmare scenario, driving Russia and China together. While America’s allies are told to bear the costs of U.S. sanctions, Russia and China are benefiting by being obliged to diversify and make their own economies independent of reliance on U.S. suppliers of food and other basic needs. Above all, these two countries are creating their own de-dollarized credit and bank-clearing systems, and holding their international monetary reserves in the form of gold, euros and each other’s currencies to conduct their mutual trade and investment.

This de-dollarization provides an alternative to the unipolar U.S. ability to gain free foreign credit via the U.S. Treasury-bill standard for world monetary reserves. As foreign countries and their central banks de-dollarize, what will support the dollar? Without the free line of credit provided by central banks automatically recycling America’s foreign military and other overseas spending back to the U.S. economy (with only a minimal return), how can the United States balance its international payments in the face of its de-industrialization?

The United States cannot simply reverse its de-industrialization and dependence on Chinese and other Asian labor by bringing production back home. It has built too high a rentier overhead into its economy for its labor to be able to compete internationally, given the U.S. wage-earner’s budgetary demands to pay high and rising housing and education costs, debt service and health insurance, and for privatized infrastructure services.

The only way for the United States to sustain its international financial balance is by monopoly pricing of its arms, patented pharmaceutical and information-technology exports, and by buying control of the most lucrative production and potentially rent-extracting sectors abroad – in other words, by spreading neoliberal economic policy throughout the world in a way that obliges other countries to depend on U.S. loans and investment.

That is not a way for national economies to grow. The alternative to neoliberal doctrine is China’s growth policies that follow the same basic industrial logic by which Britain, the United States, Germany and France rose to industrial power during their own industrial takeoffs with strong government support and social spending programs.

The United States has abandoned this traditional industrial policy since the 1980s. It is imposing on its own economy the neoliberal policies that de-industrialized Pinochetista Chile, Thatcherite Britain and the post-industrial former Soviet republics, the Baltics and Ukraine since 1991. Its highly polarized and debt-leveraged prosperity is based on inflating real estate and securities prices and privatizing infrastructure.

This neoliberalism has been a path to becoming a failed economy and indeed, a failed state, obliged to suffer debt deflation, rising housing prices and rents as owner-occupancy rates decline, as well as exorbitant medical and other costs resulting from privatizing what other countries provide freely or at subsidized prices as human rights – health care, education, medical insurance and pensions.

The success of China’s industrial policy with a mixed economy and state control of the monetary and credit system has led U.S. strategists to fear that Western European and Asian economies may find their advantage to lie in integrating more closely with China and Russia. The U.S. seems to have no response to such a global rapprochement with China and Russia except economic sanctions and military belligerence. That New Cold War stance is expensive, and other countries are balking at bearing the cost of a conflict that has no benefit for themselves and indeed, threatens to destabilize their own economic growth and political independence.

Without subsidy from these countries, especially as China, Russia and their neighbors de-dollarize their economies, how can the United States maintain the balance-of-payments costs of its overseas military spending? Cutting back that spending, and indeed recovering industrial self-reliance and competitive economic power, would require a transformation of American politics. Such a change seems unlikely, but without it, how long can America’s post-industrial rentier economy manage to force other countries to provide it with the economic affluence (literally a flowing-in) that it is no longer producing at home?

Notes.

[1] Department [of State] Press Briefing – January 27, 2022. Dismissing reporters’ comments that “what the Germans have said publicly doesn’t match with what you’re saying exactly,” she explained the U.S. tactics to stall Nord Stream 2. Countering a reporter’s point that “all they have to do is turn it on,” she said: “As Senator Cruz likes to say … it is currently a hunk of metal at the bottom of the ocean. It needs to be tested. It needs to be certified. It needs to have regulatory approval.” For a recent review of the increasingly tense geopolitics at work, see John Foster, “Pipeline Politics hits Multipolar Realities: Nord Stream 2 and the Ukraine Crisis,” Counterpunch, February 3, 2022.

[2] Andrew Higgins, “Fueling a Geopolitical Tussle in Eastern Europe: Fertilizer,” The New York Times, January 31, 2022. The owner plans to sue Lithuania’s government for hefty damages.

[3] Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, “Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s answers to questions from Channel One’s Voskresnoye Vremya programme,” Moscow, January 30, 2022. Johnson’s Russia List, January 31, 2022, #9.

Michael Hudson is the author of Killing the Host (published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet). His new book is J is For Junk Economics. He can be reached at mh@michael-hudson.com

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Ukraine – what you’re not told

Pyongyang to Moscow by train – with comments and observations along the way – Part 3

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Train on the east coast of the DPRK

Train on the east coast of the DPRK

More on the DPRK

No longer alone

Although there were people getting on at the various stations not many were coming into the carriage at the end of the train – and I don’t think it was ever full at any time during the journey. It was probably about two to three hours into the journey before a couple of men came along the corridor (some time after the most recent station stop) and joined me in the compartment that housed berths 5 – 8. We soon realised that we had no common language with which we could communicate but that didn’t really become a problem.

Being by myself for the first part of the morning I wasn’t really as much aware of the general protocol of travelling in the sleeper carriage of the train. The majority of the passengers were male (in the whole 33 hours of the journey no more than a couple of female passenger in the carriage – not so in the rest of the train) and as soon as they had settled down, having found their berth and stowed any luggage the first task was to strip off the outdoor clothes.

I learnt on this journey that the majority of men in the DPRK seem to wear one-piece thermal underwear (that used to be called ‘long-johns’ but as they have come into fashion again in the west recently – for all, men, women and children – they are now known as ‘onesies’) and many of them would spend the journey dressed like that, even when it came to getting off the train at some of the longer stops. Others, perhaps with a different attitude to modesty, would take off their street wear and spend the journey in a track suit. Many of the men were dressed in suits and this was to keep these in a good condition but as well it was just mirroring what they would do at home. It might be moving across country but these compartments were effectively our home for the duration of the journey. Street shoes were replaced by some sort of slipper or flip-flops – again just as they would at home. This reluctance on behalf of many in Britain to leave the dirt of the streets on the margins of their homes is one of the reasons the British are considered ‘dirty’ in some countries of Europe, especially the further east you go.

Although they didn’t have a lot of luggage but what they did have was a medium-sized, cardboard box which was placed underneath the table by the window. I was to find out what was in that in a matter of a couple of hours.

How to cater for a long journey

When it comes to food planning it is a necessity on this route from Pyongyang to Moscow, especially if you are going straight through and not planning to stop off en route. I could have done better in my planning but was saved by serendipity. If I were to make the journey again I would plan for the worst case scenario as the greatest disaster in such a situation is that you arrive in Moscow with a lot of food which you didn’t need.

One stand-by (although far from providing a memorable gastronomic experience) are dried noodles, these are especially popular for long distance travellers on Chinese trains. It was for this reason that I had initial concerns about the samovar taking a long time to heat up after departing from Pyongyang. Really the only thing that can be said for instant noodles is that they are light in weight and will keep you alive – and at the end of your journey will swear never to touch them again for the rest of your life.

Due to DPRK restrictions on tourist, as it stands at the moment you won’t be able to make this trip unless it’s tagged on to the end of another pre-booked, organised trip. This means your official tour guides will be able to get you to a supermarket to stock up before you get on the train. I had to shop taking into account the longer stretch on to Moscow but I ended up hitting it lucky on that stretch as well (more in a later post) – so my errors were covered over. Obviously, if you make this trip with a group of people you can turn it into a gastronomic extravaganza if you so wish. Travelling alone means that the responsibility falls on yourself but at the same time opportunities open up to a lone traveller that will denied a group.

The more I think about it the more I don’t understand why the food trolley didn’t come to the last carriage. As far as I could tell the door was locked between the sleeper carriage and the rest of the train – but I might have got things wrong there. Before boarding I thought this trolley would have been a useful fall back option. On the other hand there might have been the problem with currency. Chinese Yuan might have been accepted as on the train from Dandong (on entering the country) but I don’t if that would have been the same with Euros. Presenting US Dollars might well, rightfully, have resulted in you being thrown off the train – before it stopped at a station.

Shopping in the DPRK

It seems appropriate here to make a bit of an aside and talk about shopping in the DPRK. Shopping is something I do only when I have to so won’t be talking about what might or might not be good value in the DPRK. Here I want to concentrate on some of the practicalities that any foreign tourist might find useful on a visit to the country. This is even more important as one of the few English language guide books about the DPRK (Bradt’s ‘North Korea’, 3rd edition, published 2016) is so out of touch with present day reality it is even more than useless. The author is more intent on making negative comments (as he does throughout) that he forgets that a guide book is useful only if it provides a visitor with up to date and accurate information. Virtually all his references to shopping are inaccurate. In fact, if he took out his childish ‘political analysis’ the whole book would be half as long and twice as useful.

What is true, which I’ve stated a number of times in previous posts and which many people are aware, is that you don’t have the same freedom to walk into any shop that is the case in most countries. That aside for shopaholics or just the curious it is possible to get an idea of how this works in the country as well as an indication of what ‘s available to buyers. Whether or not every citizen of the DPRK can actually purchase these items or not is totally irrelevant. Shops are full to bursting with all kinds of items many places throughout the world but that doesn’t mean that all citizens of those countries can take advantage of what’s on sale. I don’t know how much a Rolls Royce car might cost but as the saying goes ‘if you need to ask the price you can’t afford it’.

I suppose for a foreign visitor the number of places where they might be able to shop are limited to a small number of categories.

Those places which are a common part of the itinerary and where there will always be a slot in the timetable. One of these is the Stamp Shop – which is just to the left of the main entrance to the Hotel Koryo on Changgwang Street (not far from the main railway station). As the name implies there are a lot of collectors postage stamps here. These are interesting for people other than stamp collectors as since the very beginning postage stamps have told the story of the political situation internationally, commemorating events that might be taking place nationally or internationally (where there’s a DPRK presence) or celebrating an idea, an achievement or individuals within North Korean culture. (Even, bizarrely, a series of commemorative stamps in 1982 for the birth of William Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.) For those interested in DPRK Socialist Realism some of these are miniature art works of the genre.

Also on sale in the Stamp Shop are small, poster reproductions of some of the stamps. My group was told that the ones that depict the US being destroyed by soldiers of the DPRK are especially popular. A paper version of these would cost about the equivalent of £3.00 and one printed on cloth about £10.00. Here both Yuan and Euros are happily accepted.

The other place that is on the itinerary of virtually all tours is a visit to the Foreign Languages Bookshop on Sungri Street, just a block away north from Kim Il Sung Square. This is only a small, one room bookshop but it has a reasonable selection of books that cover the spectrum from the political to the cultural. The most common languages will be Russian, English, French and German, many books (especially picture books and albums) being in two or three languages in the same edition. These will be of various prices and probably more expensive than was normally the case in such bookshops in Socialist countries in the past. Here, again, Yuan and Euros are accepted without any problem.

Sanctions mean that it’s not easy for the country to export its publications and it’s even difficult for foreigners to subscribe to magazines from the DPRK. This probably has had an impact on the prices requested. However, technology has become a sanctions buster here with much historical and contemporary political material (including the monthly magazines ‘Korea Today’ and ‘DPRK Pictorial’ – in various languages) available as a download – in pdf – from Korean Books.

Visitors might want to buy drinks in their hotels at the end of the (what is normally a very long) day. I have no interest in other country’s beers when I’m travelling and stick to whatever is the local brew. In the Koryo Hotel a local made beer, 660ml, cost the equivalent of about £1.20. Stay local with the spirits and the prices are still very low (taking into account these are hotel prices and much more expensive than they would be in a local supermarket). Go pretentious and international and the prices will probably start to get to what you’d pay in any international hotel. Why anyone would do that is beyond me but there’s no accounting for taste.

All the international tourist hotels will also have a small supermarket somewhere in the building. These are rarely very busy and have a selection of both local produce as well as international products – almost certainly from China. Here it is the case that you have to pay via the system of getting a chit of you purchases, paying for them and then returning to the first counter. This, for people who are used to going to a supermarket and then paying for their goods via the self check-out, does seem (and in fact it is) somewhat archaic. But why do people who go to other countries demand that everything is the same there as in their home country? It’s different but once you know the system it’s no more complicated than queuing in any major department store in Europe. Even there things have changed – remember when cash tills were everywhere but now there’s a common queue? Anyhow, my limited experience at the hotel shop was easy enough the staff, knowing that their system might be strange for foreigners, making the process as easy as possible. Why this constant search for tiny inconveniences to make a negative point about a society?

The other shopping opportunity – that might only be normally available to those tourists on some of the longer tours – is a visit to a ‘normal’ department store in the centre of Pyongyang where foreign currency could be exchanged for DPRK won and used to buy whatever was available to the local population. This was a three storey store along one of the main streets of the capital – unfortunately I didn’t get the name or the address, but I’m sure it would be the same one used for tourists each time.

The idea here is that the visitor is allowed to wander around and see what is there and after a pre-arranged time meet up with the guides and then the process of currency exchange and purchase would go from there.

This store was similar to many in any other reasonably well-developed city. On the ground floor food and household goods. The range of food was extensive and prices by European standards were cheap – but then the cost of living in general is much less than in Europe. Most of the goods on sale in this store appeared to be local, DPRK produce. The food hall took up most of the ground floor and the household goods section was relatively small – specialised stores for such goods holding a bigger selection.

The first floor was mainly clothing and other items of personal use. Here there was a requirement to deposit any bags at a counter before going through a turn-stile to enter the sales area at the top of the stairs. I would have no idea of the incidence of shop lifting in the DPRK but I suppose there will always be someone who wants something for nothing. I’m the worst one to ask about what might be on sale but all the (very few) items I inspected looked of reasonable quality. There was nothing I needed but I’m sure that many tourists taken to this shop would buy a small something just to say they handled DPRK currency and that they had something authentically North Korean.

The top floor was dominated by a huge canteen. I was there at lunch time and the place was full and very busy. There seemed to be a wide selection of dishes, some similar to what we had been served in various restaurants at previous meal times and other more esoteric dishes which would be the norm for Koreans but which I really only came across when I was on the train journey from Pyongyang to Rajin – on my way to Moscow. This included a wide selection of sweets and desserts, that section full with children. I would have preferred to have eaten here rather than the fancy restaurant somewhere in the depths of the same building but that was not possible.

I suppose I should have decided to buy something, just to experience the actual process of currency exchange, but there’s nothing to be gained by knowing the process as it would only take place with the involvement of the official guides so the role of the visitor would be to merely pull out the foreign notes. When I met with my two female guides and I said there was nothing I wanted they neither expressed surprise nor suggested that surely there must be something I would want – i.e., there was no pressure to spend foreign currency. This was the case in all the places that we did any shopping, you could spend as much or as little as you wanted and all the guides would do would be to make the transaction as trouble-free and quick as possible – there nearly always being time constraints.

A whistle salute as the train departed

There was an interesting ritual when the train left one of the stations after about 3 hours into the journey (possibly Sudok or Sinsongchon) which didn’t occur anywhere else. As the train started to move out of the station a number of female station staff, all immaculately dressed in dark blue uniforms, blew their whistles as the train moved away. There were quite a few of them as if they were at each of the carriages along the whole length of the train. As my carriage was the last the whistling stopped after we passed and can only surmise it was to make people aware that a train was moving away from the station. I can’t recall this happening anywhere else which makes it all the stranger as I would have thought these procedures would have been standardised throughout the network.

My concerns about food came to nothing and Korean hospitality

Before getting on the train in Pyongyang I had been given a take-away, packed Korean lunch as the meal was considered to be part of my tour package. This sort of multi compartment, plastic container is common in many countries of South-east Asia. They have a time scale of a couple of days outside of refrigeration, there are and six or seven sections in the base with a number of local dishes, a mixture of meat/fish and vegetables, as well as the ubiquitous rice. When I had been handed this I decided that if other food options didn’t present themselves I could have survived on this for the length of the journey, it being easy for me (a relatively small eater) to spread the contents over a couple of meals. However, that didn’t become necessary.

From my experience North Koreans (reinforced by the almost 12 days I spent on trains with citizens of the DPRK) tend to have quite regular habits when it comes to eating, when they have the opportunity to choose when to eat. That’s basically 06.00 for breakfast, 12.00 for lunch and then 18.00 for the evening meal. Obviously it could, and did, slip from time to time but unless something major interfered (such as a longer stop at a station occurring at one of these times if travelling) it would rarely slip more than 30 minutes or so.

Around about 12.30 the question I had asked myself about what was in the cardboard box that my two compartment companions had brought with them was answered. It was their picnic for the duration of the journey. This was not home-made food but different dishes that had been prepared on a commercial basis and which local people would have bought in the stalls, stores or supermarkets before getting on the train.

Obviously there are no take-away places that have become like a virus in most countries, culturally homogenised but dominated by the fast-food that has spawned around the world from the United States. One of the great joys of being in the DPRK was that it was a Coca Cola/McDonalds/KFC/etc., free zone. Not only was the country not poisoned by the food itself, neither was the eye continually assaulted by their garish advertising and promotion. Also the country was free from the pollution of the streets which always comes with these businesses and the attitude of those who eat there of the throw away nature of what they had paid for.

Back to the compartment at lunch time. Slowly, out of the cardboard box came a number of these small, clear, plastic containers. They were talking amongst themselves about what to bring out, deciding how to spread the different dishes over the meals when they were on the train. The small semi-circular table that was fitted beneath the window was soon full of different containers. Also making an appearance was a bottle of a reddish coloured liquid in a bottle that was first used to store iced tea. The bottle was followed by a small stack of shot sized, clear, plastic cups.

Next to appear was a plastic bag which held a number of packs of use once and throw away chopsticks. These are, again, common throughout this part of the world. The chopsticks are made from flimsy wood and are shaped to about a centimetre or two from the end you hold in your hands. When released from their plastic wrapping (plastic is dominating so many aspects of life in the DPRK as well as other parts of the world) you just pull them apart and after the meal throw them away. (For anyone making a long journey by rail it would be useful to have some of these little packs as washing facilities are basic and the disposable sticks are a better option – although that might horrify many environmentalists.)

There had been little communication between us since they had joined the train apart from the nod of the head and a smile at the beginning and I just sat and watched this all play out. I was thinking that I, too, would start on my lunch – such an early start had meant I hadn’t had any breakfast.

The next thing to happen was that one of them handed me a pair of the chopsticks and indicated with his hand that I should help myself to what was on the table. Thinking that I should at least attempt to bring something to the feast I brought out and opened my commercially prepared lunch pack and found space for it on the edge of the table, indicating that – if they wished – that was available for the table.

Food for foreign tourists

This food was unlike any that had been presented at the something like 20 meals in the different restaurants during the first ten days or so of my visit. This was ‘Korean’ food but very different from the ‘Korean’ food that’s presented in the places where tourists go to eat. These restaurants are a mix of KITC (the official Korean Tourist company) owned restaurants or those attached to hotels. In many respects these are the up-market type of restaurants that aren’t in normal use. Those attached to hotels are the sort of places that would be used for large, family celebrations, such as weddings, so are close to a normal restaurant as they would be in any country.

I also feel that, although there’s no total pandering to foreign tastes, many of these places have a ‘westernised’ menu. It takes the fundamental of local cuisine but then twists it slightly to take in influences from the capitalist west. This is yet another impact, which affects virtually all countries – a sign of ‘wealth and prosperity’ is defined by the consumption habits of those in the richer countries of the world. A consequence of this is that meat, of all varieties, appears in quantities that aren’t the norm in the local cuisine. This is done not taking into consideration the negative effects that this change in diet might have on both the economy, ecology and health of a country.

On the other hand to have provided typical North Korean cuisine to foreign visitors on all occasions would have caused riots. I have been in circumstances (especially in Spain) where tourist hotels, catering for those from northern Europe, have tried to introduce local dishes in all meals but have soon changed back to a more homogenised menu (perhaps having a ‘local’ menu on one night of the week) as what people say and how they react when presented with a different menu is very often not the same – especially if this goes on for a number of consecutive days.

At the same time reject all the rubbish you’ll read on other sites where people claim that eating in these restaurants is all to do with a separation of foreigners from the rest of the population. If these people had travelled anywhere in any other part of the world they would have experienced a situation where the places to eat are not chosen for the benefit of the tourist themselves but of another self-interest – whether that be of a guide (who will get some commission) or a place that has an agreed relationship with a tour company. So on virtually all organised tours, in all countries of the world, the choice is no choice whatsoever. The only way you could do that is when you travel independently – but those who the most vocal in their criticism of the DPRK are the very ones who would be like fish out of water if they had to depend upon their own wits.

I agree it’s unfortunate that independent travel is not possible in the DPRK but that has historic reasons – which anyone with a modicum of political analytical ability will understand. The biased and prejudiced attitude of some travellers being a prime example of what this has produced. If you want to find fault when visiting another country then no country would be omitted – including the country from where these complainers come. It’s a case of people in glass houses. But hypocrisy is not confined to political so-called ‘leaders’.

It’s also not true that no Korean can enter the restaurants where groups of foreign tourists are eating. It would be difficult to place a percentage upon it (I wasn’t thinking in that strangely constrained manner when I was eating) but I would say that about a third of the places I ate in during the 11 days I was in the country there were a few local people also having a meal. This was especially so in the restaurants attached to any of the hotels in the centre of Pyongyang. If there was a limiting factor it was probably down to cost, making the realistic assumption that the hotel restaurants would have been more expensive than those regular eating places along all the streets.

I personally would have preferred to have eaten on those more ‘local’ sorts of places as well as at some of the street stalls that existed on occasions. There seemed to be some semi-permanent places in the centre of Pyongyang that only seemed to be open at weekends – which seemed to be attracting a regular stream of customers whenever I passed them.

But back to what the locals had for their lunch – which I was now sharing.

There must have been a half a dozen different dishes, with a mixture of meat, fish and vegetables. The fish, in such circumstances, is almost invariably the small, dried fish (which I learnt more about when on the next stage of my journey from Tumangang to Moscow). The meat was pork and this was in a spicy thick sauce. (Knowing that many foreigners are used to bland and flavourless food probably the most frequent questions about food preferences was whether you liked spicy food or not.) And, of course, there was always plenty of rice together with a container of kimchi. (There seems to be as many recipes for kimchi as the number of people who make it and I probably never ate the same version twice.) The fresh veg was provided by a small cucumber that was handed to me and which was eaten by biting off a chunk – having the effect of refreshing the mouth from the spicy cooked vegetable and meat dishes.

Soon after we had started eating the little plastic cups began to be passed around. This was their version of the local, home-made alcohol, possibly soju (rice wine) but this version had a slight reddish tint so was almost certainly flavoured by some fruit – perhaps to soften the impact (although I didn’t think it too harsh). Again the awful Bradt guidebook ‘warns’ visitors off this tasting these home-made versions for some reason.

As I was eating I was aware that the train staff were passing past the door taking food they had prepared and cooked to other passengers who weren’t as organised as my companions. This is useful to know for anyone who might like to try what could be produced on a tiny stove in an equally tiny kitchen. I stored this idea away for possible back-up when I was on the Tumangang-Moscow train – but that was before I knew the actual logistics of that part of the journey. There would still be the problem of communication but I’m sure that, if necessary, the problem could have been overcome with body language and a few selected words of Korean. As always, if I had known then what I know now.

After the meal the unfinished dishes were put away in their cardboard box and any debris from the meal thrown into the rubbish. Then my two companions went to sleep. In fact, virtually everyone in the carriage, passengers and staff, disappeared for at least an hour or so for the afternoon siesta.

Apart from me. The corridor was quiet as I watched the world go by.

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Pyongyang to Moscow by train – with comments and observations along the way – Part 2

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Commemoration of the Supreme Leaders

Commemoration of the Supreme Leaders

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What’s the train like?

To describe my ‘home’ (I thought) for all but one night of the next 10 days.

The ‘soft seat’ coach was the very last of about 18 carriages which comprised the Pyongyang –Rajin train. As I’ve written in the post on train travel in China the name ‘soft seat’ is a bit of misnomer. It might have had relevance when the ‘hard seat’ was actually a wooden board (and not a six-berth compartment as it is now) but I can assure anyone that after spending a considerable amount of time travelling on trains in China, the DPRK and Russia the last adjective to describe those seats is ‘soft’.

The carriage had 9 compartments (4 berths in each) with a corridor running down one side – the sort of carriages that were the norm on British railways until they were phased out from the 1970s. This one was Russian made – quite a long time ago – and all the original signage was in Cyrillic. Everything was clean and the berths in all the compartments were laid with sheets and blankets ready for the passengers most (if not all) of whom, in this coach, would be travelling well into the night. Unlike the Chinese trains there was no hot water flask in the compartment.

There was a toilet at either end, the WC kind – some of these carriages often have a squat toilet as one of the options but not this particular one. There was a smaller two berth compartment (which was for the staff) next to which was a small galley – not very well equipped but adequate for the task it was to perform. Next to the galley, accessible to the public, was a large hot water boiler – an indispensable piece of kit for any train operating in the east Asian and Russian area – instant, dried noodles being a staple for many travellers.

The carriage had seen better days but as I got to ‘know’ it over the next few hours I thought that I would be able to accept what it had to offer for the time of my journey. Until I arrived in Rason (and more particularly after I had arrived in Tumangang) I thought it would be this very carriage that would see me all the way through to Moscow – I was wrong (but, again, that will come later). It could have done with a bit of tender loving care and a small investment would make it as acceptable as anything new and more up to date. It didn’t have a power point in the compartment – which I would have liked for my computer – but there were a couple of points in the corridor and with a little bit of planning and forethought the power issue could be overcome.

I knew there were no catering facilities available but a short time after the train left Pyongyang, when I went exploring, I realised that the connection between this final carriage and the rest of the train was locked and that a trolley that would serve the rest of the train couldn’t come anywhere close to me. That was something I wasn’t expecting, having thought that the trolley would be able to supplement whatever I had brought with me. Here was another of those ‘unknowns’ that didn’t work out as I had hoped. This had not been the case on the Dandong-Pyongyang train as the two young women who operated the trolley on that journey seemed quite fascinated that two Caucasians were on board – and who were wound up by some of the men in the carriage about our reasons for travelling.

Another point worthwhile making here, before going any further, is that even though the people in the north of the Korean peninsula are demonised by so many of the governments (and its sycophantic media) in the capitalist world (including the erstwhile Socialist countries of China and Russia) I never encountered any animosity in the limited amount of contact I had with the people during my time in the DPRK. In fact, it was quite the opposite when they realised that I was there to try to learn and understand a bit more about their country and not to continually find fault with all that I saw. I’m not saying that the country doesn’t have its issues but critics would do well to look at the problems in their own countries before loading their opprobrium on to the DPRK.

When I had arrived at the station there was a lot of activity in and around the carriage as those travelling stowed their luggage (many people who travel on these long train journeys often travel with huge amounts of luggage and there’s a rush to find space before others get there first) but once we moved away from the station the whole carriage got very quiet, everyone, including the staff but apart from me, retreating to their compartments, doors closed, probably resting after an early start. Even the samovar took some time to warm up and it was three hours or so before hot water was available.

It’s always possible to see much more from a train than in a mini-bus so it was useful to get my bearings as we passed through the outskirts of Pyongyang, picking out the landmarks helped as there are some very tall and distinctive buildings in the city, and was able to put together a mental image of the locations I had been to, and had passed, in the previous days. Pyongyang main railway station is in the west of the city (the newer part expanding towards the east and the south) so the route out is initially to the north-west and then curving around to the north and the city is left behind after less than 10 kilometres into the just a smidgen under 800 kilometre journey.

The importance of rice

Being predominantly an agricultural society it wasn’t long after leaving the capital behind that the route took us between rice paddies, as far as the eye could see. This had been the same on the journey from Dandong, all the fields on both sides of the train filled with the golden colour of just about to be harvested rice. And this went on for miles, only being broken up by occasional orchards, fields growing cabbage (for the ubiquitous kimchi) and other smaller concentrations of other vegetables.

Not being an expert on rice everything looked well to me. The crop looked ripe, it wasn’t blown down or damaged (except in a very small number of paddies – indicating that the weather hadn’t been unfavourable at the wrong time) and some of the early rice was already being harvested – an increasing number of paddies had cut sheaves of rice standing on end in order to dry out before being taken away for threshing. Although the area covered by rice was huge the paddies were of varying sizes, as is the case with paddies in order to make the flooding manageable, but there was no indication of any individual ownership. When people were working in the fields they were almost always in groups much larger than you would get with private ownership so these must have been collective or State farms.

This should mean that the autumn 2017 rice crop was a good one for the DPRK. There have been a few bad years in the recent past, an issue which is affecting many countries due to the consequences of climate change, so a good year offers the country the opportunity to fill up grain stores for possible collapses in the crop in the future.

The country’s dependence upon one crop is something I would have thought should have been studied. If so much importance is placed on one crop then there are any number of possible problems that could arise from climate being wrong at the wrong time to the threat to a whole crop that could arise from pests and disease. Although I was only travelling along a very narrow corridor rice dominated the horizon and the only change in the dominant crop occurred when passing through areas where rice was impossible to grow – where maize became ubiquitous.

One thing that was very obvious, from both the train journeys and passing so many rice paddies, was the lack of any significant mechanisation in the process, of either the harvesting or the transporting of the rice crop. Although land ownership looked collective I only saw one small tractor being used during all the time I was looking out the window. There are economic reasons why mechanisation is not appropriate for farmers with small areas of cultivation but when it comes to a whole village working the land surrounding it there should be more than an economic reason to employ machinery. Rice planting and cutting is a particularly back-breaking form of agricultural labour – constant bending being necessary – so anything that can reduce that will have an immediate benefit to the workers in the countryside.

The collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1930s – and 20 years later in China – was only possible with the revolutionary transformation of industry in the cities and the bringing of the industrial revolution to the countryside. Tractor stations which provided, and maintained, all the machinery needed for an efficient and productive countryside were an integral part of collectivisation. Without one you wouldn’t have had the other. Not only is it economically more efficient it also transforms the peasant in the countryside into a worker in the countryside, raising him/her to the same status as the worker in the city. Breaking down the divide between the town and country being an important aim of the revolution in what were predominantly peasant countries.

Reducing the time spent in the fields doing hard manual work allows the agricultural workers to diversify and also to improve their skills through education for themselves and their children. There’s nothing wrong with children working, at times, in the countryside, especially at times of harvest, as it educates them into the world of labour. But to depend upon that labour has the potential of keeping the countryside in the past and prevents developments for the future.

Economic sanctions under which the DPRK has had to live for a number of years now (assisted by the pusillanimous and sycophantic attitude of both Russia and China – whose own self-interests are more with the DPRK than the US imperialists and their hangers-on) don’t help. Fuel oils being in short supply mean that priorities have to be decided and perhaps fuel for farm machinery is one area that suffers. However, after so many years after Liberation I would have liked to have seen more evidence of machinery in the countryside.

I don’t think that people who haven’t spent a significant amount of time living in an Asian country can quite understand the importance of the rice crop and how much of a staple it is. Rice is served at EVERY meal and people eat rice in quantities which have never ceased to amaze me. Rice has an importance in Asia which is not reflected in the same way with the staples in the west, which is spread across a number of crops. Maize does play a small role in diversification – and in those areas of the country where rice growing is impossible maize is much more in evidence – but it can only be a small percentage of the whole. I don’t know how much effort is being made to wean the population off such total dependence on one crop but with the uncertainties with which agriculture is having to deal with the man-made effects on the climate it would seem to be a priority.

I also don’t know how productive these paddies might be. It’s quite possible to fill the land with low yield strains that look good but have low productivity. I would like to think that this issue has been addressed in the DPRK as they have had many years where they have been developing their own science institutes. As an example of this I was shown a small area in Pyongyang where experiments are being carried out to grow rice directly on slow flowing rivers. In a country where levels of pollution of the rivers is low this makes more use of valuable resources, both of water and land.

Obviously, a good crop in itself doesn’t mean that the food gets to all who need it. This is an issue everywhere and is evident in all capitalist countries. The supermarkets in Europe and America are bulging with all kinds of foodstuffs but the same countries have an increasing rate of poverty and food shortages are a serious problem for many. If that’s wasn’t the case why is there the abomination of the proliferation of food banks in some of the richest countries in the world. Yes, many people depend upon them, but what does that say about these societies? It’s not what you produce, or how much, it’s all a matter of distribution and control of the means of production. As long as profit dominates people will go hungry.

In my limited time in the DPRK I wasn’t aware of these problems. People in all the places I visited seemed healthy enough, the people on the streets of Pyongyang, the people in the two trains I travelled on, the cultural places I visited as well as the people in the countryside. Those in the cities were well dressed and seemed, more or less, content with their lot. If you are up to your shins in mud cutting rice stalks all day you are unlikely to be wearing your best party frock so judging people in the countryside by what they are wearing is fraught with danger. But the bicycles and motorbikes that were standing close to the railway, whilst their owners worked in the fields, looked quite modern and functioning well.

Yes, often there were children working in the fields. That’s not unusual in agricultural communities, especially at harvest time, throughout the world. However, I would suggest that children in the fields in the DPRK is a long way from the children who are forced to work in sweatshops in the likes of the so-called ‘world’s biggest democracy’ of India, so a little bit of perspective might well be useful here. As children do in all parts of the world they would look up from their work, or from playing at the sides of the fields as their parents worked, and wave at the passengers going by. (Perhaps not in all countries. In Albania and Vietnam – for reasons I just don’t understand – they throw rocks.)

A short anecdote about child poverty

When I went around the National Art Gallery in Pyongyang I was asked how I read a painting of a poor, young, peasant boy ignoring a large dragonfly which was hovering around his head. This introduced one of the many cultural differences between Britain and Korea. For Koreans this had an immediate significance as it seems that all young Koreans (and here I assume both north and south of the false border at the 38th parallel) love to chase the big dragon flies that can be found throughout the countryside. The fact that he was ignoring the insect was proof that he was too tired or concerned with more important things, i.e., his empty stomach, than the almost innate wish of Korean children to chase these large insects.

As well as the people the buildings in the countless small villages the train passed through looked in a good condition and gave the impression of a thriving community. Yes, many of the roads weren’t paved but when you have an embargo on the import of petroleum products that doesn’t leave a lot of slack for the ‘luxury’ of a paved road.

Iconography

Over the entrance into the railway station buildings there was always the dual portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. In many of the villages you can also see columns commemorating these two previous leaders of the country. Also large mosaics would be erected in the main squares, sometimes with images from the revolutionary past, a visit from one of the Kim’s to the area or depicting life in the countryside – I saw one on the way from Dandong to Pyongyang of a couple of white cranes flying over the ripe rice paddies.

Village showing revolutionary mosaic

Village showing revolutionary mosaic

Restrictions on foreigners?

Although, in the main, I understand the restrictions that foreign travellers have whilst travelling in the DPRK, they can, at times, be frustrating. After a little over an hour into the journey the train stopped at the town of Pyongsong. Here there were quite a few stalls selling whatever. Other passengers from the carriage had got off so I knew we would be there for at least a few minutes but when I tried to get off – just to see what was going on, after all I didn’t have any local currency even if I did want to buy something (although Chinese Yuan might have been accepted if you got that far) – it was politely indicated to me that it was not permitted.

Now it’s possible that the train staff knew that the stop was only for a matter of a few minutes and they didn’t want me to get myself stranded. This is not as far-fetched as it might sound, as in many Asian countries foreigners are not considered to be really adults and are treated like children – probably based on the inability of generations of Europeans being able to understand the people and the customs in the countries they have invaded, normally due to their lack of desire to do so. In all these situations I encountered until I got into Moscow ten days later I could only use supposition to try to understand what was happening as the lack of any meaningful, verbal interaction was virtually nil – there’s only so much that can be conveyed by body language.

This restriction was not repeated at any of the other stops where the ongoing passengers got off to buy something or to just smoke or stretch their legs so I’ll have to remain mystified why it occurred at the first station stop which was longer than just one allowing passengers to alight or jump on board. Needless to say that when I did go on to the platform, or beside the track when in the middle of nowhere, I never strayed too far and always kept a watch on what everyone else was doing, which was to include a few false alarms for all us.

I think it was when we had just left Pyongsong that I received a salute from a young soldier who was manning one of the rail/road crossings. The train was still moving very slowly and I was just looking out of the window and he saluted as soon as he saw me. I smiled and nodded in return. I think that was the first time I’ve had such a response in my travels – often authority figures, whilst not necessarily being hostile (although I’ve met enough of them) are certainly more distant to foreign visitors.

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