Despite North Korea’s strict policies for foreign travelers, some American students now have the opportunity to study in the isolated country.
Senior Jack Zhang visited the country this past June with The P’yongyang Project, a program founded in 2009 to increase academic and cultural interaction between Americans and North Koreans.
The P’yongyang Project, the only educational program that allows Americans to study in North Korea, offers a unique opportunity for students and professors to explore Northeast Asia. The project, which offers summer study abroad programs and shorter delegation trips, hopes to inspire a grassroots movement working toward peace between the nation and other parts of the world through cultural exchange.
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“When [students] think of North Korea, they think ‘bad government,’ but there is a human element as well,” said [a freshman who attended an information session. “I think it is definitely something I want to consider.”
And he directs my attention to the lengthy comment section, where he is involved in a debate with the project director of The P'yongyang Project over the merits, ethics, and authenticity of such a program. An excerpt of the first comment:
I really have no interest in visiting North Korea as it is now. The Chron article is full of bromides, like "there is a human element as well". Of course there is. It's just that foreign visitors are prevented from interacting with it in any meaningful way. The usual routine for foreigners who visit is well documented over and over again in travelogs on the web, and while some insight from direct contact is inevitable, basically its a scripted experience, guided to one personality-cult worship site after another, interspersed with false-history presentations, Potemkin villages and the like -- all the while stripping visiting foreigners of a lot of assets that go to fund activities directed to preserve the Kim-family dynasty and oppress the people.
You'll find fuller comments at the article, and participant testimonials on the official site.
I haven't yet made up my mind where I would side in that debate, though I think there are definite merits to it, provided it's an authentic experience, its participants are prepared to be open and unbiased, and are culled from a diverse background. Remaining hidden behind its borders and layers of mystery do not foster understanding among the country's residents and its foreign observers.
Only tangentially related, but a book I found interesting and illuminating on living in North Korea is titled---too alarmingly---Living With The Enemy: Inside North Korea, by western Pennsylvanian Richard Saccone about his year in-country in 2001.
8 comments:
I do not like the idea of giving funds to the DPRK government in any way, but I do see merit in cultural exchanges (to include academic exchanges).
Kushibo raises a good point - how many US dollars are being used to make their way into the country?
So what exactly are these scholars going to learn? Korean, Korean history, and will engage in 'dialogues'. Are these the same sort of 'dialogues' that the professionals have engaged in for decades?
There's also the matter of them learning Korean - the North Korean dialect, of course. Might be useful if you're going into intelligence-gathering or for future NK endeavors, but for everything else the SK dialect is going to be much more useful. I don't see them teaching that at Kim Il Sung U.
Chris, I wouldn't put personal interaction in the same category as the diplomatic talks. Even if the individual North Koreans one would meet must stay on a script, the interactions with outsiders once depicted as murderers and rapists would erode such negative images, which would have a positive effect down the road.
That's sort of my support of the Sunshine Policy in a nutshell: Interaction is like a thousand Trojan horses (the more there are the harder it is for Pyongyang to control them), so as long as (a significant amount of) money is not being passed on to the government, I see it as a positive.
Heck, I would love to study up there for a while just to get a taste of the health care system (even if what you would find in Pyongyang is the flagship stuff most North Koreans can't even dream of experiencing).
I actually had some mutual friends with the guys who started and run Pyongyang Project, and find the fact that they've taken it this far to be pretty remarkable.
The debate in the Duke article's comments was great to read, and the two sides argue their positions pretty persuasively. Your tipster raises some valid points as do commenters on this post. I found the goals and vision of the PP to be in the right place, but there are many caveats in dealing with a situation this thorny. The biggest issue that stuck out to me was that PP is trying to brand itself as going beyond NK propaganda to the "real" people and situations of the country, yet a NY Times op-ed by a participant in PP's first trip last year suggests that trip was, although eye-opening, significantly manufactured by the NK government:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/magazine/25lives-t.html
I think PP's got a great vision, but at the same time public scrutiny will be beneficial in encouraging them and participants to evaluate what the best way to engage with North Korea at the civilian level truly is.
Cameron, that's an interesting NYTimes article -- thanks for sharing. The author is a Korean-speaker, and she was plainly entirely unconvinced about the spontaneous human interaction encountered during her PP-arranged visit to NK.
Incidentally, I'm BOLT in the Duke Chron comments-section debate. What impressed me most about the exchange with PP-director Michael Reichel was the odd way in which he favored the North Korean regime in his remarks, both through explicit comments and through silence. For instance, in finding North Korean distrust of foreigners "understandable", without qualification or elaboration, and in advocating, seemingly naively, for the regime's fatuous Peace-Treaty proposal. I responded to these comments in my remarks, even though their bearing on the ethics of participating in the PP programs was somewhat attenuated -- but I did think they required a response. By contrast, however, Mr. Reichel did not respond to most of my remarks about the specific nature of NK's totalitarian regime, including its criminal enterprises, outrageous threats to the world community, attacks on innocent South Koreans, and oppression of its own people. Silence. Why? How can that be reconciled with the objective scholarship on which an academic visitation program must be predicated? (I don't refer to it as an exchange program, though that terminology is in common usage, because it perhaps goes without saying that there is no reciprocal visits involving North Korean "scholars".) As I did note in my remarks, PP's web site continues this tilted and distorted treatment of the regime in using, for example, a North Korean propaganda euphemism for the policy-induced famines of the 1990s.
(continued . . .)
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What I infer from Mr. Reichel's tendency to give the regime a pass on its outrageous conduct in our exchange is that adopting such a biased public face is inherent in maintaining access to North Korea which, of course, requires regime approval -- whether or not it reflects sincere beliefs on Mr. Reichel's part or not. That lack of program integrity and objectivity cannot be reconciled with any realistic possibility of meeting Brian's tough tests of whether particpation in PP's program makes sense. Apparently PP is not alone in being co-opted. Earlier this year, the World Health Organization and Amnesty International got into a dispute about whether North Korea's health-care system was in shambles, as AI contended based in part on refugee accounts. WHO defended NK -- but it is also playing a big role within the country to promote better health delivery -- which, of course, requires country access. As an AP article at the time noted, "Some groups may fear being expelled from the country if they are openly critical of Pyongyang, which is highly sensitive to outside criticism." I strongly suspect, now, that the same applies to PP and other travel-arrangers. While I am prepared to accept silence on the part of NGOs and transnational agencies that need access to perform critical humanitarian missions and thereby directly help people, I cannot say the same for an organization that is merely facilitating tourists and would-be "scholars" who are schlepped among various regime sites and exposed to carefully staged encounters with select groups of citizens (as recounted in Ms. Lee's NYTimes article).
Finally, I question the premise that simple human contact controlled by the regime can open minds among ordinary North Koreans. I would agree that allowing Americans to visit Cuba would have that effect, because interaction with Cubans in numerous ordinary situations is possible. Cuba is not North Korea. We know of some of the techniques through which the regime innoculates itself from foreign contacts, and we can imagine there are other techniques we don't know. We do know, for instance, that the slightest act of "disloyalty" (which anywhere else would be regarded an exercise in basic human rights), including listening to a foreign radio station, exposes citizens (and their family members) to incarceration within an extensive network of concentration camps (another analogy to Nazi Germany). The fatality rate within these camps is reportedly extremely high. In any ordinary country, even authoritarian ones, receiving bags of food during periods of hunger as gifts from America with an American flag on the side would be a major source of good will. In North Korea, the regime tells the people the food bags are reparations, confirming the guilt of America. Black is white and day is night. That's exactly the world Orwell described. Unfortunately, well-motivated visitors won't undermine its foundations.
The BBC has a piece on January 2nd:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11965295
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