The Hidden People of North Korea
VIEW EVENT DETAILS"Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh's portrait of Mr. Kim's hyper-sybaritic lifestyle is detailed and devastating."
— The New York Times
In examining the history and the present status of the regime, Hassig and Oh provide a lucid guide to the mechanics by which Kim Jong Il's Soviet-style socialist totalitarianism has endured into this century.
In this state survey, scholars Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh gather behind-the-scenes research to expose day-to-day life in North Korea. In vivid detail, the authors describe how the government of Kim Jong-il shapes every aspect of its citizens' lives, how the command socialist economy has failed, and how ordinary individuals struggle to survive through small-scale capitalism. Weighing the very limited individual rights allowed, the authors illustrate how the political class system and the legal system serve solely as tools of the regime.
The key to understanding how the North Korean people live, the authors argue, "is to realize that their only allowed role is to support Kim Jong-il, whose father founded the country in the late 1940s." Kim Jong-il controls his people by keeping them isolated and banning most foreigners. Yet the world is ever-so slightly changing.
The book concludes that in order for the North Korean people to realize the downsides of North Korean propoganda, the United States needs to feed the North Korean public more information.
Ralph Hassig is a consultant and an adjunct professor of psychology at University of Maryland. His field of research is East Asian and Korean issues, with an emphasis on North Korean affairs. He has taught psychology at Albion College, the University of Maryland University College, and George Mason University. For seven years he taught psychology and marketing courses with the University of Maryland's undergraduate programs on military bases in Asia and Europe. He is a graduate of Albion College (Albion, Michigan), where he received a B.A. in psychology in 1968. He went on to earn an M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1974) at UCLA, majoring in social psychology and minoring in personality psychology and sociology.
Kongdan (Katy) Oh is a Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is a life time member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Korea Working Group member of the United States Institute of Peace, Member of the Board of Directors of the United States Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, and the Co-Founder & Co-Director of The Korea Club in Washington, DC. Her recent publications include Inside North Korea (Institute for Defense Analyses, 2005), Kim Jong-il's North Korea: Divide and Rule (IDA, 2006), "Twin Peaks of Pyongyang," ORBIS, Winter 2006, "Golden Eggs," The World Today, May 2007, and How Stable Is North Korea? (IDA, 2007).
Partial sponsorship for the North Korea Film & Literature series has been provided by Lisa B. Barry.
The North Korea Freedom Coalition (NKFC) and Korea Economic Institute (KEI) are outreach partners for this series.
Event Details
Asia Society Washington, The Cinnabar Room, Whittemore House, 2nd Flr., 1526 New Hampshire Ave, NW