Asia Pacific Modern. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. US$35.00, ebook. ISBN 9780520392847.
Andre Schmid’s book is a rich and impressive study of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPKR, North Korea) to 1965. The author focuses on daily life in North Korea by providing a multifaceted picture of society at a time of reconstruction and the struggles of ordinary people and families to return to normal life after years of war and dislocation. North Korea’s Mundane Revolution fills a gap in the scholarship on North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s, which focuses primarily on leadership, party, state, and international relations. Schmid uses an admirable range of primary sources from North Korean media and discourse that cast a light on building a socialist country from the perspective of New Living (sinsaenghwal)—that is, people’s aspirations that were met and negotiated by Party-state goals. The author defines these decentred processes of negotiation that took place in parallel with the Party-state’s drive to reestablish and expand its power as the main subject of the book (4).
Schmid offers three main narratives in his analysis: the revolutionary narrative of the “new” in the socialist project (5); “Party-state time,” or a timeline of the official socialist objectives (6); and the repeated use of developmentalist conceptions of time (9). One of the book’s main arguments is that on an individual level, New Living depoliticized gender and class, which are core to the Party’s revolutionary narrative, thus the DPRK avoided the extremes of class struggle by its socialist brethren and supporters—the Soviet Union and China (10). Another argument is that there was no single author of the postwar era’s discourse in North Korea, as Kim Il Sung Thought was announced as official ideology in 1972 (17).
The author discusses topics such as population, family, and gender, and he astutely links these segments to period of almost incessant warfare between 1937 and 1953, thus providing better historical context (23). The introductory first chapter also addresses “Fordism” or industrial productivity in the reconstruction period. This is part of the developmental socialist paradigm which is inherent in communist ideology—socialism (and eventually communism) is superior to capitalism in the economic efficiency sphere, according to the Marxist dictum. Schmid rightly refers to East European sources and scholarship for the socialist help provided to the DPRK during the reconstruction period, as domestic media tended to underestimate the scope of foreign aid, particularly toward the end of the 1950s. At the end of each chapter, there is a section called “flash of criticism” featuring a piece from North Korean media that displays a limited degree of disagreement by distancing itself from a certain policy line, including one presented by Mao Zedong’s speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” (36–38).
The first part of the book deals with “cultural living” or “social life,” featuring advice literature and self-improvement, the politics of criticism, and surveillance in localities. The author discusses important issues of the reconstruction, such as urban planning and development, and related prescriptions of decorum, speech, and fashion. Shmid makes an interesting point, noting a trend of discarding “old words” and Koreanization of expressions in the North Korean medium (57). Another aspect of collective life was group- and self-criticism as well as surveillance practice of worker dormitories (65). The elaborate guidelines for personal conduct and self-reform can be viewed as a manual of regularized individual behaviour in the milieu of socialist construction and asserting the Party-state’s control over people and communities.
The second part covers issues of efficiency in construction and production as well as the ideological pivot in the economy. Schmid discusses the nuts and bolts of factory organization, including the single-manager system, the payment scale (citing the slogan “socialism does not mean equalism”), and the gap between central plans and the ability of managers to realize them, among others (83, 85, 91). Another important theme is the famine in 1955, which the Party-state explained partially by the migration of people from the countryside to the cities. The authorities tried to solve the unregulated migration by employing “dependent family members”; this led to the emergence of a new icon: the mother-worker (98). The famine had institutional causes too, such as the implementation of collectivized farming and the associated challenges in the transitional period. The author uses valid comparisons between the two Koreas to illustrate that the Northern residents in the cities were generally better-off than Seoul workers, and one of the explanations was the North Korean campaign of apartments building in the cities (108–09). The ideological pivot was manifested through an enhanced party role in management, as ideology became a measurement for economic success and failure (123).
The main subject of part 3 is the nuclear family as a locus for reformed gender relations, as a solution to demographic problems, and as a social unit for the ideological education of the next generation. Schmid discusses the material conditions for the nuclear family, and addresses its fragmentation by war and the issue of orphans. The author concludes that in the 1950s, the national and familial narratives coalesced in the apartment-building campaign (140). The issues of divorce and coping with demographic crises are addressed. Schmid argues that the first cult in the DPRK was not Kim Il Sung but rather one centred on motherhood. Perhaps this explains why North Korea’s population grew comparatively faster than the South in the postwar years (155–57). There are other factors at play: the North Korean population was hit harder than the one in the South during the war and the North recovered faster economically than the South. Schmid pays attention to an important local unit, called the “neighbourhood committee” (inminban, known also as the “people’s group”), which consisted of local households for welfare services, surveillance, labour, and other functions (173–74).
The last part of the book is devoted to consumption, called “Produce and Save!” by the state, light industries, quality problems in production, household craft work, and home interiors and style. For example, the author reveals that radios and sewing machines became indicators of consumption and rising living standards in North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s (206–07). Schmid posits that by 1964, writers in North Korean periodicals steered away from the Party’s pillar of gender politics, which was women’s participation in labour as a means of achieving gender equality and as a solution to the labour shortage, due to the depoliticization of class and gender (218).
The study presents a comprehensive picture of North Korean social life through the prism of labour, family, and gender issues as reflected in periodicals. It would be interesting to connect the recontraction of the social fabric of society with the evolution of institutions in the postwar period, putting into play the perspectives of politics and ideology in the tracking of the rise of Kim Il Sung. For example, further examination of juche discourse (it is mentioned in the conclusion) would cast more light on Kim Il Sung’s power consolidation and personality cult. Overall, Schmid’s book is a remarkable study with great depth and width, and enormously contributes to understanding North Korea from the inside, something that has been lacking in the English-language literature.
Avram Agov
Langara College, Vancouver