Book review: Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-colonial, Marxist and Confucian Perspectives

Book review: Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-colonial, Marxist and Confucian Perspectives

By Michael Rank

During his visit to London earlier this year, President Obama declared, “We believe not simply in the right of nations, but the rights of citizens.” In North Korea, it is the opposite, with citizens having next to no rights that they are able to defend, and the state supreme in its defence of its own rights. Indeed, in North Korea human rights are so limited that it may come as something of a surprise that the government recognises the concept at all, but it does and is prepared to defend its view of them and the way citizens are supposedly protected from exploitation and degradation. Yet knowledge about the North Korean legal system is so hazy that a number of ambassadors in Pyongyang spent much time and effort in the 1970s puzzling out whether the country had any law courts at all, and never came to a definitive conclusion (North Korea Under Communism, by Erik Cornell, 2002).

Almost 40 years later, it is probably true to say no westerner has ever witnessed a trial in North Korea, and North Korean legal theory likewise remains terra incognita, so this book performs a valuable service in putting ideas of human rights in the DPRK in their historical and social context. This includes assessing the influence of Chinese Confucianism and traditional Korean social thinking as well as putting them in a Marxist and post-colonial perspective. “No [previous] attempt has been made to understand and interpret the official discourse of human rights in the DPRK, and I fill in this gap,” the author states in her introduction. The book is based on the author’s doctoral thesis from Cambridge University and relies heavily on Korean-language material, much of it available in digital form, thanks to the engagement policy between the two Koreas after the 2000 Pyongyang summit. That policy has of course since collapsed.

The author suggests that North Korean human rights discourse is based on “Korea’s deeply embedded traditional Confucian values in harmony and unity, the post-colonial right to self-determination, the Marxist antagonism against egoistic individualism, and various collective components of Juche Ideology by Kim Il Sung and ‘our style’ human rights by Kim Jong Il have all constituted collective ideas of human rights in the DPRK.” But Song stresses how human rights discourse in North Korea is by no means static, and criticises some conservative pressure groups, and the current government in Seoul, for “often dismiss[ing] the meaningful signs and important changes that have taken place inside North Korea”. She adds that “It is my belief that the growing number of market-oriented economic activities, and the creation of civil society, although relatively limited in comparison to external standards, can help form a civil society, resistant to the autocratic regime in North Korea.” At the same time, she questions whether western pressure groups are “ready to adopt a culturally sensitive approach approach in order to understand the influences of history, politics, and indigenous cultural traditions on the formation of human rights ideas in North Korea.”

In her discussion of the influence of Confucianism, she suggests that this traditionally incorporated a system of checks and balances but she finds that this no longer obtains in North Korea, and notes that despite the rise of the concept of “virtuous politics” under Kim Jong Il, the country was unable to provide that most basic of human needs, food, in the 1990s when famine stalked the land.

In any case, despite North Korea’s deep debt to Confucianism, it affects to despise this ancient philosophy. According to an official encyclopaedia, “Like other religions, Confucianism was also a heresy, somewhat like opium. Confucianism was used as an ideological tool of the feudal ruling class since it arrived in Korea and had a poisonous impact on the People’s ideology, psychology and ethics as well on economic culture and technological development.”

One of the main factors in North Korean thinking on human rights in the early years of the DPRK was the bitter memory of the Japanese colonial past and the need for nation-building, as well as identifying and suppressing the enemy within. “Distinguishing ‘People’ who are eligible for proper human rights from enemies who are not has been a constant ideational construction process in the DPRK since 1945, depending on changing domestic and international environments,” Song notes. The death of Stalin encouraged critics of Kim Il Sung to stress “the protection of human rights”, which resulted in a backlash, with Kim arguing that his critics were acting “to protect the interests of landlords and capitalists” while the 1956 Hungarian uprising had spread “bourgeois” ideas of human rights into North Korea.

This was the period when Kim was developing his Juche theory, which the author notes replaced Marxism-Leninism as the country’s guiding ideology in the 1992 constitution. For Song, the theory of rights in Juche is closer to Korean Confucianism and to the 19th century Sirhak and Tonghak movements than it is to Marxism, and she also notes how the positive right to subsistence embodied in Juche has been employed negatively to criticise capitalist countries and the poor material conditions of marginalised people in the U.S. and Japan.

Juche has in recent years been complemented by Kim Jong Il’s “‘our style’ of human rights” (urisik in’gweon), which the author, perhaps surprisingly, says “has shown some pragmatic approaches towards international society and left the door open for new departures in this area”. The main characteristics of “our style” human rights “are citizens’ duties and loyalty to the party and the leader in return for the protection of basic subsistence rights and security, and the conception that rights are granted, not entitled inherently when a person is born.” “Not surprisingly,” Song adds, “all [principles] represent the antithesis of individual and liberal concepts of human rights.”

Some North Korean theorists have some understanding at least of the evolution of human rights in the west, including Magna Carta and the French declaration of human rights, both of which serve the material interests of the “property-driven manipulative bourgeoisie”, and there is even some awareness of contemporary thinkers like Ronald Dworkin and Robert Nozick, who are said to represent the imperialists by emphasising a right to property and abstract norms such as freedom and equity. But “In practice,” Song says, “the ideological education of the DPRK focuses on the growing gap between the rich and the poor and human rights violations in Western countries.”

Song occasionally digresses gently away from human rights, and she has some interesting insights into the religious dimensions to the Juche philosophy and into the personality cult, noting that “Unlike the Stalinist cult, the personality cult of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il clearly belongs to the realm of supernatural shamanistic phenomena.”

This book is absurdly expensive, and it is also dully designed. It includes some unremarkable black and white photographs and reproductions of North Korean propaganda posters that don’t have any great relevance, although I did like the one of a pilot playing an electric guitar, with the slogan, “I’ll show the People’s rock ‘n’ roll to imperialist bastards.”

If I were a prisoner in a North Korean prison camp reading this book (highly unlikely, admittedly) I would probably feel frustrated by its focus on theory rather than on the country’s gruesome practice, but that isn’t really the point. There have been a good number of reports on North Korean human rights practice in recent years, but this is the first study of the thinking behind the practice, and it is so thoughtful and well informed that I can recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in North Korea.

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Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-colonial, Marxist and Confucian Perspectives, Song, Ji-young, Routlege, 9 December, 2010.
ISBN: 978 0 415 59394 6
Order at Amazon here.

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3 Responses to “Book review: Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-colonial, Marxist and Confucian Perspectives”


Book review: Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-colonial, Marxist and Confucian Perspectives North Korea News & Information Resource NK News says:
August 10, 2011 at 6:43 am

[…] http://www.nkeconwatch.com/2011/08/09/book-review-human-rights-discourse-in-north-korea-post-colonia… […]
yozo says:
August 12, 2011 at 12:09 am

Just heard your interview on NPR. Good stuff.
yozo says:
August 12, 2011 at 12:09 am

Just heard your interview on NPR. Good stuff.

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Project MUSE - <i>Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-Colonial, Marxist, and Confucian Perspectives</i> (review)




Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-Colonial, Marxist, and Confucian Perspectives (review)
Suzy Kim
Journal of Korean Studies
Duke University Press
Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2012
pp. 214-218
10.1353/jks.2012.0012
REVIEW
View Citation
Additional Information
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:


Reviewed by:

Suzy Kim
Human Rights Discourse in North Korea: Post-Colonial, Marxist, and Confucian Perspectives by Jiyoung Song. New York: Routledge, 2011. 240 pp. $130.00 (cloth)


Human Rights Discourse in North Korea offers three different perspectives with which to understand North Korean discourses about human rights as explicitly laid out in the subtitle: namely, postcolonial, Marxist, and Confucian. By bringing these three approaches to human rights, the book attempts to provide an alternative conceptualization of human rights, broadening its very definition. Rather than focusing on the traditional emphasis on individual political and civil liberties as the core of human rights, the author challenges liberal notions about human beings as essentially autonomous individuals by incorporating collective duty-bound conceptualizations of human rights. The three perspectives not only show that North Korea has been actively engaged in human rights discourse since its foundation, but also serve to situate North Korea’s discourse within Korea’s historical context, as well as within the international evolution of more communitarian human rights discourses, thereby contesting common characterizations of North Korea as a country without any notion of rights.

After the first chapter lays out a general introduction to the evolution of ideas about human rights and the concomitant theoretical concerns, the book follows a [End Page 214] chronological timeline, moving from premodern Korean ideas relevant to human rights—namely, Confucianism, Sirhak, and Tonghak—to postcolonial Marxist ideas on human rights, the development of chuch’e ideology and its relationship to human rights, and finally turns toward “Our Style” human rights under Kim Jong Il (Kim Chŏngil). Each of the chapters tries to show the combination of postcolonial, Marxist, and Confucian influence on the development of human rights discourse in North Korea to reveal commonalities between North Korean and international human rights discourses.

While the author must be applauded for attempting a historically and culturally informed constructivist approach to analyzing North Korean human rights discourse, serious problems plague the book. Theoretically, the biggest problem is in framing North Korean human rights discourse as a linear evolution, best exemplified by the flow chart at the beginning of the book: “Chosun Confucian state ideology (1392–1910), Sirhak (late seventeenth century), Tonghak (late nineteenth century), Early Korean communism and independence movements (1910–45), Post-colonialism (1945– ), Korean Marxism (1948– ), Juche Ideology (1955– ), ‘Our Style’ human rights (1995– )” (p. 3). The author, thus, traces contemporary North Korean discourses all the way back to the fourteenth-century adoption of Confucianism by the Chosŏn state, the seventeenth-century Sirhak—a form of neo-Confucianism stressing people’s material well-being and philosophical independence from China—and the nineteenth-century Tonghak, a radical peasant movement advocating social equality and land reform.

However, the connections between these large intellectual currents are made without sufficient argumentation as they are understood rather superficially. For example, Song maintains that Confucian emphasis on benevolent leadership results in the cult of personality in contemporary North Korea while the emphasis on family unity leads North Korea to shun foreign relations (p. 61). Religious overtones in chuch’e ideology are the result of Kim Il Sung’s exposure to Christianity as a child and the importation of the concept of divine rights from Western Christianity to produce “a divine concept of rights” (pp. 126–27). However, the author’s own quotations of primary sources on chuch’e ideology lack any reference to divinity, emphasizing instead how the people are masters of the state (p. 128).

Likewise, North Korea’s emphasis on collective interests, socioeconomic rights, and citizenship duties not only make up the major tenets of its Marxist perspective, but, according to the author, these elements “pre-existed in Korean traditional thinking, which focused on the role of the benevolent ruler to protect people’s subsistence rights and security, the collective and harmonious unity, and citizens’ loyalty in return for the guarantee of food and security from their rulers” (p. 2). Thus, rather than specifying what makes certain aspects of North Korean human rights discourse specifically and particularly Confucian or Marxist, collective interests, socioeconomic rights, [End Page 215] and citizenship duties are framed so generally...

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How communist is North Korea? From the birth to the death of Marxist ideas of human rights
Article in Cambridge Review of International Affairs 23(4):561-587 · December 2010 with 3 Reads
DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2010.523821
Cite this publication

Jiyoung Song

Abstract
This article focuses on the Marxist characteristics of North Korea in its interpretation of human rights. The author's main argument is that many Marxist features pre-existed in Korea. Complying with Marxist orthodoxy, North Korea is fundamentally hostile to the notion of human rights in capitalist society, which existed in the pre-modern Donghak (Eastern Learning) ideology. Rights are strictly contingent upon one's class status in North Korea. However, the peasants' rebellion in pre-modern Korea was based on class consciousness against the ruling class. The supremacy of collective interests sees individual claims for human rights as selfish egoism, which was prevalent in Confucian ethics. The prioritization of subsistence rights and material welfare over civil and political rights was also the foremost important duty of the benevolent Confucian king. Finally, unlike Marx's reluctant use of the language of ‘duties’, rights are the offspring of citizens' duties in North Korean human rights discourse.




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The Right to Survival in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Article in European Journal of East Asian Studies 9(1):87-117 · July 2010 with 17 Reads
DOI: 10.1163/156805810X517689
Cite this publication

Jiyoung Song

Abstract
For the past decade, the author has examined North Korean primary public documents and concludes that there have been changes of identities and ideas in the public discourse of human rights in the DPRK: from strong post-colonialism to Marxism-Leninism, from there to the creation of Juche as the state ideology and finally 'our style' socialism. This paper explains the background to Kim Jong Il's 'our style' human rights in North Korea: his broader framework, 'our style' socialism, with its two supporting ideational mechanisms, named 'virtuous politics' and 'military-first politics'. It analyses how some of these characteristics have disappeared while others have been reinforced over time. Marxism has significantly withered away since the end of the Cold War, and communism was finally deleted from the latest 2009 amended Socialist Constitution, whereas the concept of sovereignty has been strengthened and the language of duties has been actively employed by the authority almost as a relapse to the feudal Confucian tradition. The paper also includes some first-hand accounts from North Korean defectors interviewed in South Korea in October-December 2008. They show the perception of ordinary North Koreans on the ideas of human rights.



=========

The Right to Survival in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Article in European Journal of East Asian Studies 9(1):87-117 · July 2010 with 17 Reads
DOI: 10.1163/156805810X517689
Cite this publication

Jiyoung Song

Abstract
For the past decade, the author has examined North Korean primary public documents and concludes that there have been changes of identities and ideas in the public discourse of human rights in the DPRK: from strong post-colonialism to Marxism-Leninism, from there to the creation of Juche as the state ideology and finally 'our style' socialism. This paper explains the background to Kim Jong Il's 'our style' human rights in North Korea: his broader framework, 'our style' socialism, with its two supporting ideational mechanisms, named 'virtuous politics' and 'military-first politics'. It analyses how some of these characteristics have disappeared while others have been reinforced over time. Marxism has significantly withered away since the end of the Cold War, and communism was finally deleted from the latest 2009 amended Socialist Constitution, whereas the concept of sovereignty has been strengthened and the language of duties has been actively employed by the authority almost as a relapse to the feudal Confucian tradition. The paper also includes some first-hand accounts from North Korean defectors interviewed in South Korea in October-December 2008. They show the perception of ordinary North Koreans on the ideas of human rights.