Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

In 2018, I got connected to 5 refugees who escaped North Korea to the USA. What surprised me was all 5 were able to escape by different variations of saving up enough money to bribe people along the way.

The only way to save up money for their ages (16-23) was to become "entrepreneurial"

EDIT:

If you are interested in North Korea, check out the stories by some friends of mine:

Charles - North Korean refugee turned programmer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ziqq5gUXu8g

North Korean Spy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9rLqYXTaFI

Girl with parents who worked in the government whose whole family escaped https://www.youtube.com/c/Pyonghattan/videos

This seems universal to authoritarian states where corruption is the only viable strategy to get ahead.

Unfortunately, it also seems to consistently produce an entrenched, corrupt power class that persists long after the regime is overthrown.

See also the former Soviet Bloc.

Interesting. I guess you speak Korean?

How did you get connected with those refugees, if you don't mind my curiosity?

All power structures are authoritarian. Get rid of congress, and you'll simply have your local landholders pay private enforcers to keep the rabble in line. Property rights in theory apply to everyone, but in practice, are consistently enforced in a way that protects large, wealthy property owners more than everyone else.

An event held by LINK - https://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/

They are a nonprofit that helps people escape from North Korea

Just Chinese and learning Russian now :)

Some of them speak English, others we had a translator.

I've met and worked with an organization that sort of comes from the other side of the equation. They are involved in helping North Koreans flee from the country, as well as helping those that have already managed to get across the border on their own *. The end goal is to get them into South Korea.

This sometimes involves providing the bribes that you speak of.

* Often times for women, there is a second level of escape. "Brokers" help them cross the border into China, where they are then forced into prostitution, sexual slavery, or "sold" as brides. This organization also bribes the various peoples/groups (often times gangsters, pimps, etc.) holding these North Koreans in bondage in China into letting them go.

Back in the 80s when I was a scientist in the old USSR's Academy of Science we've had few Koreans in our lab. I think they were studying in the Universities and later had somehow managed not to return to Korea.

They were all insanely nice.

Erm, no? That's unnecessarily reductionist. "Can compel you to pay taxes" is not the same as "authoritarian". Go ahead, criticize the President online in the United States. Notice how you weren't jailed or executed? Now try something similar in an authoritarian nation.

Did they prefer USSR to DPRK?

Seemingly, right?

Trying to imply they were the same? Make a wild guess. While not a shining citadel of freedom USSR in the 80s was infinitely better than North Korea. Their words, not mine.

Laws are enforced through use of force or literally denying freedom of movement, or by threatening to do the above to subjects who do not obey.

It’s a spectrum. How violent are the reprisals, how lethal, how indiscriminate. How egregious are the prison terms, how outsized are the fines and fees. But all governments are inherently authoritarian, unless they allow subjects to instead choose punishment by exile instead of strongarm tactics. I’m not aware of any that do. Mostly because there’s nowhere to be exiled to. All governments have claimed all of the available land, so you can’t even choose exile independently. Societies vary on the freedoms they allow; all governmental bodies are by nature authoritarian. If no one were to submit to them, nations would have no standing to declare binding authority over members of the public. Governments are systems of control, and that control is allegedly by consent of the governed. However, if one is never given a reasonable alternative or opportunity to object, they are not free. They are only as free as their society allows them to be. This one-sided state of affairs makes freely-given consent to be governed impossible.

I am open to being convinced otherwise, though. We’re freer than we’ve ever been, but we’ve only changed the window dressing. We’re still beholden to government representatives that themselves have multiple competing interests. Full direct democracy with vote delegation for those who want it is a start. Proportional representation instead of first past the post elections would also be necessary.

No implication at all, I was simply curious. I think in the West we assume that the communist experience was bad, but I have no frame of reference for this, as I wasn’t there at the time. Then comes comparing between communist regimes, which is farther removed from my experience.

I wish the CIA would’ve let democratically elected communist regimes alone, like Vietnam or certain Latin American countries. It just grinds my gears I guess. We claim to support democracy, except when we say that they’re holding it wrong, or doing it wrong. Who are we to say that?

We have modern Venezuela as a ripe example.

I’m not sure that is the same. Would you consider Venezuela a democracy?

I wouldn't be surprised if they did. The post-Stalin Soviet Union would be a much freer place than North Korea. Here's a couple of quotes from Andrei Lankov's* book "Essays on Daily Life in North Korea" on how Soviets viewed North Korea:

"When I arrived in North Korea for the first time on a sunny day in September 1984, I felt perplexed. I came to study at the Kim 11 Sung University, as a participant in an exchange program between the then-USSR and North Korea. It was the first overseas trip of my life, and I was thrilled, but I also had some preconceived ideas - and in the first hours and days it became clear that the situation did not feel like I thought it should.

At that time I was fully aware that I was in what in 1984 was arguably the world's most brutal dictatorship. The Soviet Union was not exactly a democracy itself, but even for us, the people from Moscow and Leningrad, North Korea stood for the embodiment of inefficiency, brutality and, above all, repressive dictatorship. Even the official Soviet media sometimes allowed some subtle hints at what was going on there."

--

"Quite often the inflated tributes to the Great Leader and to the Dear Leader, delivered in a badly edited foreign version, produce the opposite of the intended effect on the audience, making the North into a laughingstock. I still remember how in the 1970s, when I was a teenager in the then Soviet Union in my native Leningrad, many barbershops stocked copies of Korea magazine, a lavishly illustrated North Korean propaganda monthly. What was such a publication doing in the barbershops? The answer, I suspect, would be quite embarrassing for its editors: it was subscribed to in order to amuse the patrons who were waiting for a haircut. The North Korean propaganda appeared very weird to the Russians - not least because it looked like a grossly exaggerated version of their own official propaganda. The grotesquely bad Russian translation of the texts also provided unintended comical effects."

* - Andrei Lankov is a Russian born in the Soviet Union and now lives in Seoul. His books and articles on North Korea are very interesting and worthwhile.

At the very least, the US should be taking responsibility for the political and economic fates of those countries they "Monroe Doctrine"-ed out of self-determination, including economic and stability-oriented military support (at a similar level provided to NATO countries, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia) and accepting their refugees with open arms.

Modern day Venezuela has a larger amount of private, for profit economic activity and employement than France.

It's meaningfully a socialist economy, just an insanely corrupt mixed-market economy with a government pretending to be socialist to keep power.

Are you aware what the current date is and its significance to dissidents of the current regime in Washington? Hundreds of (primarily non-violent) dissidents prosecuted and incarcerated in the last year alone.

To be clear, I don't agree politically with those dissidents.

> Modern day Venezuela has a larger amount of private, for profit economic activity and employement than France.

Is that supposed to reflect well on Venezuela or be a slight at France? Because Venezuela isn't exactly doing to hot in the economics department right now.

It's not supposed to reflect well on Venezuela, nor supposed to be a slight to France. I'm just saying that Venezuela is not an especially socialist economy.

Here is a source:

https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/private-cons...

Compared to:

https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/france/private-consump...

As well as

https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/public-consu...

Compared to:

https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/france/public-consumpt...

That makes more sense.

I thought you were claiming that the overall dollar amount was larger.

This was exactly the kind of context I was missing. Thanks for this.

I remember some high-profile expats immigrating to China in the 1950s and 60s, and writing about their experiences publicly to acclaim and disdain. Do you know if any of these are critically well-received?

I'm not sure which high-profile expats you're referring to. That's not an area I'm familiar with. I do know about the fates of some westerners who went to North Korea. But don't know much about those who went to China.

Under the heading Notable People[0], there are a fair number, American McGee and Sidney Rittenberg[1] especially jump out at me, the latter for being the first American citizen to join the CCP and for his work with Bill Gates to break into the Chinese market. Yes, that Bill Gates.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_in_China

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Rittenberg

It just occurred to me that the closest we have in USA to self-exile is joining a Native American tribe via marriage, or otherwise being adopted onto a reservation and settling on res.

I’ve done humanitarian work and outreach with various Native American/Indian tribes in western states. My great-uncles both married Native women. No disrespect is intended in any of my above statements. I don’t take these issues lightly, but for the purposes of debate, I included this post to illuminate how hard it is to be freer in a free society that has its warts and issues.