Eight-year-old Min staggers forwards, unsteady on his feet from hunger and exhaustion, wearing a shabby, blue overcoat discarded by an adult twice his size, and tells the hidden camera: “My mum tried to look after me but it got too hard so she told me I have to go, so I left and now I live outside.”
Min is among dozens of homeless street kids who gather around North Korean markets begging for money and looking for scraps of food. Their lives are featured in undercover footage to be screened this week in a Channel 4 documentary.
“In North Korea, even filming everyday life is considered a form of political treason. If they are caught they’d be locked up and may never be let out again,” he said.
In interviews with more than a dozen recent defectors a picture emerged of a rapidly changing society. Each has a story of the moment they saw the outside world in foreign films and television shows: the cars, the tall buildings, the abundance of food and the apparent freedom all caused the scales to fall from their eyes.
Since the state stopped being able to feed its people in the late 1990s illegal markets sprung up all over the country. For the first time it was women who became the main breadwinners, running small market stalls to make money to survive. The state now tolerates some markets, but people are pushing the boundaries of private enterprise in what is still a communist state.
The undercover footage shows one woman chasing off a soldier trying to stop her running an illegal private bus service. “Where are your stars? If you’re an officer where are your stars then? You bastard! You’re an arsehole!”
When Eastern Europe finally rid itself of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact Russia's answer to NATO one of the contributing factors was the ability of those living in close proximity to watch and listen to television and radio broadcasts from West Germany thereby undermining the Eastern governments propaganda about the decadent West and its inability to provide a better standard of living as compared to that of the Eastern Bloc.
The lie was so obvious that it was a joke. Soft power can have a greater influence upon a population than most authoritarian governments seem to recognized. As was proven in 1989 when the Warsaw Pact crumbled not from the weight of a vast army but from the peoples ability to stand up to an obvious lie without ever having to pull the trigger.
When Eastern Europe finally rid itself of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact Russia's answer to NATO one of the contributing factors was the ability of those living in close proximity to watch and listen to television and radio broadcasts from West Germany thereby undermining the Eastern governments propaganda about the decadent West and its inability to provide a better standard of living as compared to that of the Eastern Bloc.
The lie was so obvious that it was a joke. Soft power can have a greater influence upon a population than most authoritarian governments seem to recognized. As was proven in 1989 when the Warsaw Pact crumbled not from the weight of a vast army but from the peoples ability to stand up to an obvious lie without ever having to pull the trigger.
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