North Korea:
State of Paranoia
by Paul French
(Zed Books, £9.99)

HAVING read Paul French’s North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula, published a decade ago, I was looking forward to a greatly updated version and even an answer as to why there had been a change in title.

Unfortunately, this version is approximately 90 per cent the same as its predecessor, with entire chapters repeated virtually verbatim. Only a foreword and concluding chapter constitute any genuinely new material.

Understandably perhaps, given the restrictions on foreign media and the paucity of reliable official statistics from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, French bases his book primarily on a wealth of second-hand Western sources.

However, he too rarely sifts the gold from the gravel, essential when dealing with the silt of propaganda and disinformation that envelops North Korea.

A glance through the footnotes of both versions suggests that French finished his manuscript in late 2003, making the bulk of his sources at least a dozen years old. In the intervening years, a mass of material has appeared — from dubious defector tales that catch the tabloid headlines to well informed critical eyewitness accounts from regular visitors, such as the Vienna-based academic Rudiger Frank.

Yet French has added far too little updated material to gain the benefit of hindsight.

An example is French discussing the startling US claim that the North mass-produced counterfeit 100 dollar bills.

This was new and perhaps plausible in 2003 yet, just four or five years later, banknote printing experts were fairly unanimous in their scepticism of Pyonyang’s involvement, with some even beginning to suspect that the “superdollars” could in fact be part of a CIA programme.

There have been other more crucial changes. In 2002, North Korea’s main trading partner was still Japan, yet today China accounts for an estimated 90 per cent of the country’s foreign trade. That expansion of markets and private trade has continued apace. The North has also joined the club of nuclear-armed nations.

While French has added references to these processes and events, the book suffers from the failure to thoroughly rewrite the text, never mind fundamentally rethink the issues.

French sticks to his belief that the central problem of North Korea was “Stalinist” central planning rather than the stifling family cult of the Kims. Yet he rattles off impressive economic statistics from the 1950s and 1960s, when northern per capita income was twice that of the south.

This was achieved by exactly the same system. Why and how the North Korean economy stagnated by the 1980s, and later spiralled into crisis, cannot be explained within French’s simplistic framework. Likewise, his handling of the vexed question of North Korea’s “juche” (self-reliance in Korean) ideology and its changing relationship with mainstream Marxism is too superficial to be convincing.

Which brings us to the book’s title. As the old joke has it: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

Paranoia suggests irrational fears, which fits with Western notions of Pyongyang’s behaviour but not a dispassionate look at Korean history.

Japan’s decades of colonial brutality threatened to snuff out Korean identity and the suppression of left-wing and democratic forces in South Korea blocked reunification after 1945 as well as possible alternative paths to socialism, while the Korean war destroyed the flower of Korean youth, the nation’s economy and reinforced what became the “army first” philosophy in the north.

This is to say nothing of Korean perspectives on recent US regime-change wars in the Middle East, which have not gone unnoticed in Pyongyang.

As a reissue, this book is a wasted opportunity in addressing such realities.