By Steven Borowiec

Even drab dictatorships get the occasional dash of glamor. The summer of 2012 offered a break from the monotony of observing North Korea, which might be the least sexy country on Earth, one whose public face is an overweight, homely man clad in an all-black jumpsuit.

Suddenly on the scene was a young, glowing woman, stylishly dressed in colorful western attire. Ri Sol Ju, who we now know is leader Kim Jong Un’s wife, appeared in images carried by the country’s state media accompanying Kim on his field trips. Beyond her western-style garb, the mere fact of her public appearances was noteworthy, as previous leader Kim Jong Il almost never went out in public with a female companion.

Some suggested that that summer would be a watershed moment in the country’s history. A young, western educated leader was in power, and an uncommon display of western culture was going on in the capital, Pyongyang, as Kim Jong Un permitted, and attended, performances by Disney characters.

Some observers of North Korea took such moves as indicating that the country, one of the world’s few surviving totalitarian states, was finally opening to the outside world. North Korea expert Andrei Lankov wrote in a column that the changes on display were “by no means trivial” and that “The open endorsement of Americana is a highly unusual for a country where the United States is (and has been for 60 years) a byword for evil.”

Reuters reported comments from a South Korean analyst who argued that the performance, “shows Kim Jong-un is readying for cultural reform and opening”,.

Being a journalist, I have some idea why my colleagues in the media give space to suggestions that North Korea is evolving. ‘Reclusive dictatorship finally opening to the outside world’ is a much more enticing story than Reclusive dictatorship staying pretty much the same.’
The task of a journalist is to chronicle social and political change over time, and it’s more rewarding to bear witness as a society undergoes substantial change.

There is also a grinding, Groundhog Day-like quality of covering North Korea. The cycle of news coverage is made up of repeated stories about missile launches, hostile rhetoric, rising or falling tensions, and will-they-or-won’t-they chatter about the possibility of nuclear tests. Even small drops of difference can appear vivid against this drab background.

Another reason, I think, such changes drew so much attention is that they were out of sync with how we expect dictators to introduce liberalizing changes. Kim didn’t bring Disney to North Korea because of some popular uprising demanding changes, but of his of accord. Dictators usually only loosen the reins of control under pressure. Kim taking a softer line on cultural imports raised the prospects that he could make further, more substantive changes. This might have indicated that he did carry with him lessons from his youth in Europe, and he could spearhead real changes.

I was spurred to reconsider these questions when I came across a fascinating essay by by David Zeglen titled “It’s the Thought That Counts: North Korea’s Glocalization of the Celebrity Couple and the Mediated Politics of Reform.” Zeglen argues that westerners misread signs of celebrity culture in foreign countries as indicating a shift in that society toward western values.

I reached out to Zeglen to ask him why we tend to expect eccentric dictatorships to gradually become like us, adopting our culture and values. Also, why do western observers of dictatorships pounce on any detail that can be as a sign of reform? “There is just a general assumption among the media (and the public) about how cultural globalization works,” he wrote me in an email.

Though North Korea was showing bits of celebrity culture common in the west, it is important to read such signs in the uniqueness of the North Korean context, Zeglen writes, explaining, “the flow of Global North celebrity culture to North Korea should be understood as having undergone glocalization, a process that involves the selective borrowing of foreign styles which are then imbued with domestic meaning.”

Zeglen argues that assumptions that foreign radio and television broadcasts played a major role in the collapse of the Soviet Union lack concrete evidence, and that “this narrative extends to the appearance of Western culture in non-Western countries, and assumes that locals in these countries passively receive cultural objects, and that these objects are inherently imbued with Western values that the locals will gradually adopt.”

In short, it is unwise to assume that non-western audiences will interpret Disney characters or celebrity romance in a predictable way. “Locals almost always read imported culture differently from the originator culture's audiences based on their own cultural and semiotic traditions,” Zeglen told me.

Reflecting on the summer of 2012 four years later, suggestions that North Korea was on the cusp of reform seem naive. The optimism that Kim would initiate meaningful change has evaporated and it’s clear now that he is intent on keeping up the family tradition of lording over a repressive state. The occasional flash of glamor doesn’t necessarily mean anything, regardless of how bad we might want it to.

 *Steven Borowiec covers Korea for the Los Angeles Times