North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors: Daniel Tudor, James Pearson: 9780804844581: Amazon.com: Books

North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors: Daniel Tudor, James Pearson: 9780804844581: Amazon.com: Books






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North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors Hardcover – April 14, 2015
by Daniel Tudor (Author), James Pearson (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 55 customer reviews

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Dispelling the myth of a brainwashed populace is one of the main goals of the book. Despite horrific prison camps, lack of Internet, and a national fabric called "vinylon," most people still take the risk to watch a foreign film, regularly consume South Korea pop culture, party, and even argue with the police." —The Daily Beast

"North Korea Confidential…uses extensive interviews with recent defectors and people still in the country to build a rich picture of daily life there." —Financial Times

"North Korea Confidential gives us a deeply informed close-up. Tudor, a former correspondent for The Economist, and Pearson, a Reuters reporter, have pieced together their story from North Korean insiders, defectors, diplomats and traders, and from a careful reading of texts in English, Korean and Chinese." —New York Times

"North Korean society is rapidly changing, affecting everything from what people watch on TV to what they sing at karaoke. With the help of a new book charting daily life we see if you've been paying attention." —The Guardian

"North Korea Confidential, by James Pearson and Daniel Tudor, says that nearly all North Koreans lead a 'double economic life', supplementing measly rations and puny state wages of as little as $1 a month with extra work in their spare time." —The Economist

"In a new book that the authors say aims to document 'North Korea, the country' rather than 'North Korea, the state,' two journalists —Daniel Tudor, former correspondent for the Economist in Seoul, and James pearson, currently a Reuters reporter in Seoul—tap a wide range of sources to describe the lives of ordinary North koreans. —Wall Street Journal

"The authors, both journalists in the region, do their best to beat the stereotypes that have been scraped together over the years, 'the ridiculous international media image that suggests that DPRK citizens are robots who simply live to serve their 'Dear Leader.'" —Associated Press

"…it is refreshing to find a book that neither obsesses excessively over the nuclear issue nor treats the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) as simply a bad joke or the world's most irrational place." —Andrei Lankov, Reason
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About the Author


Daniel Tudor is from Manchester, England, and graduated with a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University. He has lived in Seoul, Korea for a number of years, and served as The Economist's Korea Correspondent from 2010-2013. His first book, 'Korea: The Impossible Country' received strong praise and has also been translated into Korean, Chinese, Polish, and Thai. Daniel is a regular columnist for a Korean newspaper, the Joongang Ilbo, and has commented on Korea-related topics many times for the BBC, Al Jazeera, and others. He is also co-founder of The Booth, a small chain of craft beer pubs.

James Pearson is a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Seoul, where he covers politics and general news in North and South Korea. He holds a BA (hons) in Chinese and Korean from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and a Master's of Philosophy (M.Phil) in Oriental Studies from the University of Cambridge.

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Product details Hardcover: 224 pages Publisher: Tuttle Publishing; Hardcover with Jacket edition (April 14, 2015) Language: English

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5.0 out of 5 starsAfter “A Capitalist in North Korea” the next book challenging deep-rooted stereotypes

ByMy Right Eyeon May 29, 2015

Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

It’s certainly one of the very few books that do their best to correct rather than cement the widely held misconceptions about North Korea. It confirms what I had already learned from a rare insider memoir, Felix Abt’s “A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom”, where he explains, from personal experience and with plenty of examples, that North Korea isn’t stuck in the past, but has been undergoing dramatic changes in recent years. Abt not only witnessed this transition, but implemented, or was a party to, many ground breaking reforms himself.
Abt’s lively depiction of life in contemporary North Korea and his ventures and adventures are full of eye-opening surprises, especially to those unused to an informed, impartial portrayal of life in the country. Similarly, North Korea itself may well surprise observers, not as the source of sensationalist headlines loved by Western media, but with tales of moderation, change and advancement.

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4.0 out of 5 starsA sobering look into one of the most isolated country in the world

ByKathyon June 10, 2015

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The author's have done a fantastic job of giving us, the reader glimpse into everyday life in North Korea. If you have any interest in the DPRK, this makes for a fascinating read.

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4.0 out of 5 starsI had no idea that there was a class system ...

Bychrison August 20, 2017

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I had no idea that there was a class system there. The writer really showed a different view of what what described in other books.
Worth reading.

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4.0 out of 5 starstough life

ByThomas Adamson January 23, 2017

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interesting reading, informative.

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4.0 out of 5 starsRemarkably Informative

ByLaughing Bullon January 6, 2016

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This book has more detailed information the Hermit Kingdom than any book I've ever read or even heard of. While it lacks the emotional punch of Barbara Demick's "Nothing To Envy", it does an excellent job of explaining the reality of everyday life -- backed by an extraordinary amount of facts and figures.

Moreover it's one of the few recent books (published April 2015) I've been able to find on the subject. That means it provides ample coverage of the creeping capitalism that is beginning to make the DPRK look a bit like China in the 80's.

A recommended read for anyone interested in this mysterious country.

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5.0 out of 5 starsSurprises galore!

ByMal WarwickTOP 1000 REVIEWERon August 10, 2015

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Practically everything you know about North Korea is wrong. That, at least, is the inescapable conclusion to take from reading Daniel Tudor and James Pearson’s new book, North Korea Confidential.

I exaggerate, of course. North Korea is, without question, one of the poorest countries in the world. It’s ruled by a brutal dictatorship that operates a system of political prisons that would do Josef Stalin proud. It’s a nuclear power and given to saber-rattling. And one family, the Kims, is the country’s ruling dynasty, now in its third generation.

Though all that, and more, is, indeed, true, Tudor and Pearson draw on extensive research to demonstrate that the impression we Westerners get from the news media is still highly misleading. 

The North Korean people are not slogan-chanting automatons enslaved to adulation for Kim Jong Un (their “Dear Leader,” or “Great Leader,” or whatever else he might be calling himself). 

Kim Jong Un is not a lunatic; his father or grandfather weren’t, either. Nor is he the sole, undisputed leader of the nation; “he has inherited a system [created by his father] in which one rather shadowy organization may possess more power than he does.” 

North Korea is not a Communist country, nor has it been for nearly two decades. And there is virtually NO chance that the country will collapse, the victim of its own considerable internal contradictions.

In chapters devoted to the market economy; leisure time; the power struggle at the top; crime and punishment; clothes, fashion, and trends; communications, and the country’s social class structure, Tudor and Pearson paint a picture of a complex society struggling with the conflicts of the mid-twentieth century while the outside world labors to drag it into the twenty-first.

Here’s the gist of the message in North Korea Confidential: ever since the tragic famine that overtook North Korea in the mid-1990s, the desperate urge for survival has led people at all levels of society to build a rudimentary market system that has become the foundation of the country’s economy. The famine was so severe and far-reaching — costing at least hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives –in a country whose population now stands at just twenty-four million — that the government was unable to continue distributing food, as it had ever since Kim Il Sung industrialized the country in the years following the Korean War. Once the distribution of free food was disrupted, the North Korean people found ways to grow their own food, or forage for it, and to sell or exchange food for other necessities in homegrown markets that sprang up in defiance of the Party and the government. And those markets have grown in importance to the point where the gray economy may overshadow the official one.

Equally important, the famine undermined respect for the Kim dynasty’s government. Though vocal criticism of their leadership is still rare (and viciously punished), people demonstrate their independence in a variety of ways: they seek out DVDs and thumb drives containing South Korean and Chinese music, films, and TV shows (and even an occasional American movie); they listen to South Korean, Chinese, and US-sponsored radio for news of the outside world; they dress in ways that defy the Party’s severe guidelines; they travel without permits from town to town and sometimes across the Chinese border; and, increasingly, they are gaining access to the Internet despite the government’s efforts to make that impossible. (More than ten percent of the population now own cell phones.) Whenever they’re caught flouting the rules in these or many other ways, they are almost always able to bribe their way out of the draconian punishment the law dictates.

In truth, there are hints of much of this in the news about North Korea. Yet I’d never before read of the multimillionaires among the Pyongyang elite, or of the estimated $20 billion fortune accumulated by the Kim family. I knew that the country maintains one of the world’s largest armies, but I was unaware that soldiers are more often put to work as free labor on construction and other projects rather than trained for combat. I had surmised that, as in any country, connections to people in power would provide a layer of protection from victimization by the police, but I learned that cash — outright, blatant bribery — is a daily fact of life. I knew that historically “even family members would sometimes inform on each other, either out of fear or the belief that it was the ‘right’ thing to do,” but not that “[t]his is certainly no longer the case.” The regime may still have the power to maintain its hold on the country, but — after the famine — ordinary citizens no longer are inclined to show their respect to authority, even to the Kim family.

All in all, North Korea Confidential provides a useful counterbalance to the one-dimensional pictures we tend to hear from most defectors and occasional dissidents and from the news and analysis that looks at the country from the top down rather than the bottom up.

Daniel Tudor and James Pearson are both British journalists. Tudor formerly worked in Seoul, Korea, as the local correspondent for The Economist. Pearson, also an old Korea hand, currently writes a blog for Thomson Reuters.

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4.0 out of 5 starsGood story to read,but it could have been a little better.

ByAmazon Customeron September 12, 2015

Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase

It was to a degree of what I would expect from the mosyt isolated nation in the world. The fact that it's leader would kill his own relative because he disagreed with him is bizarre.

I was a little surprised to read that if you knew who to bribe, then life could be a little better for your family than a lot of other families living in the DPRK.

It pained a g rim picture of the country and that is not a good t hing to read about int he end. I was curious to r ead in greater detail from people living there actually wha t is taking place today.

A good read if you want to appreciate how all the rest of the world's population is doing compared to the masses that make up PDRK.

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5.0 out of 5 starsThe real North Korea

Bydinguson June 28, 2016

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Very informative. Provides an entirely different picture of North Korea than the one that is typically presented in the news.

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