Hidden People of North Korea - 2nd Edition by Ralph Hassig & Kongdan Oh (Paperback)

About the Book

This unique book, now fully updated, provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of life in North Korea today. Drawing on decades of experience, noted experts Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh explore a secretive, oppressed, and hungry world few outsiders can imagine.

Book Synopsis

This unique book, now fully updated, provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of life in North Korea today. Drawing on decades of experience, noted experts Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh explore a secretive, oppressed, and hungry world few outsiders can imagine.

Review Quotes

[The authors] provide a fascinating account of the political forces that have shaped the barriers between the Hermit Kingdom and the rest of the world. . . . It's in these tales of everyday life that the book makes its greatest contribution. . . . The North Korean people, long denied any voice in their society, will decide the fate of the nation, and as this book convincingly shows in preceding pages, they have finally turned their back on the regime.

A must-read for serious students of North Korea. The wealth of information peels back layers of mystique to provide a genuinely understandable glimpse of the inner workings of Kim Jong-il's North Korea. The chapter on the Kim family is absolutely essential to understanding why North Korea is the unique nation that it is. It should be required reading for American policymakers.

An extraordinarily penetrating look behind the walls of North Korea's secretive society by two renowned specialists who identify the cracks developing in the ideological, economic, and political foundations of this totalitarian system.

And if you really wonder what life is like under Dear Leader, the team of Kongdan 'Katy' Oh and Ralph Hassig have produced the definitive work to date.

As extreme economic hardship has driven more North Koreans to the south, they are bringing with them an inside look at a very closed nation. In an updated edition of their 2009 book, Hassig and Oh look at the slowly fracturing secretiveness of the Hermit Kingdom. From the defectors come details of numerous individual efforts to quietly subvert the dictates of the Kim dynasty by illegally growing crops on patches of appropriated land or trading goods on black markets to survive. Since the late 1940s when Kim Il-sung took control, the country has been controlled by the Kim dynasty, demanding loyalty and obedience in the face of continued failure to provide for citizens despite overblown claims of collectivist harmony and abundance. In their highly secretive and regimented society, citizens are compelled to join mandatory groups that meet to discuss work or community issues and to criticize themselves for purported shortcomings in service to the government. This is a fascinating look at the very slow infiltration of outside influences despite efforts by the North Korean government to maintain isolation.

As often as North Korea is in the news, we have little reliable information about what life is actually like in this 'hermit kingdom, ' and that's no accident. Husband-and-wife Korea experts Hassig and Oh begin this illuminating national portrait with a quote from its leader, Kim Jong-il: 'We must envelop our environment in a dense fog to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.' . . . Hassig and Oh provide chilling information and haunting photographs that starkly delineate the crisis state of North Korea's economy, agriculture, and health care; the abundance of political prisons; and the tyranny of perpetual surveillance.

As Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig note in their informative book, the apparatchiks are soon holding lectures warning that North Korea could go the way of the Warsaw Pact if Party functionaries can't stem the corrosive effects of entertainment from the outside world.

Examining the history and present of the regime, the authors provide a lucid guide to the mechanics by which Kim Jong Il's Soviet-style socialist totalitarianism has endured into this century. . . . [Readers] will find much that's fascinating and shocking: a nation of castes and concentration camps, replete with a politics of fear that rivals the worst Orwell could imagine. . . . Hassig and Oh provide a valuable catalog of oppression.

Hassig and Oh . . . offer a detailed picture of the lives of Kim Jong Il and the members of his entourage and a study of why and how defectors break for the outside. [They] show that the regime is under stress, but they also reveal the mechanisms by which, for the time being, it is holding tight.

Hassig and Oh give a panoramic view of this hermit nation. It is probably the most comprehensive work currently available because it covers almost every aspect of life in this isolated society. The authors provide rich data in their examination of the three-generation Kim regime to let readers understand its historical development, its tight political control over its citizens, and its failures in agriculture, health care, other economic areas, and international relationships. More important, based on surveys and interviews with numerous northern defectors, the authors illustrate the lives of ordinary people in the north, such as how they cope with their daily lives under political control, how they doggedly try to survive during natural and economic hardships, and how they perceive the Kim regime and the outside world. Most important, the authors emphasize the change of people in the change of a regime. Continuous exposure to external information is the most important way for North Koreans to better understand their lives under dictatorship and broaden their perceptions of the outside world, which will eventually lead to fundamental changes in the nation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

In The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom, longtime Korea watchers Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh cover topics from the ruling Kims down to the struggles of ordinary North Koreans. In their view, buttressed by interviews with some 200 defectors, the state is fraying. . . . Experts have been predicting the endgame for the Kim regime for decades. [This book]--[an] important [addition] to the North Korea canon--suggest[s] that the moment of change is approaching.

Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig--analysts of unique experience and depth--look behind North Korea's bluster, blasts, and missiles to the eroding country they hide. The authors shine a light on the country's people--from dictator Kim Jong-il and his privileged inner circle to the millions of Koreans who struggle through desperate lives of hunger, want, and fear. That this system has changed in recent years makes the book especially timely and invaluable for making sense of an inflammatory and unpredictable rogue state.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh's portrait of Mr. Kim's hyper-sybaritic lifestyle is detailed and devastating.

Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh have opened a peephole through the locked door that is North Korea. They draw on their deep knowledge of the country and extensive interviewing of refugees to provide a rich and textured picture of the life of a people who are victims of their leaders' megalomania. New insights and information spring from every page.

Revealing the haunting details of daily life in an authoritarian state, the authors boldly declare that the current regime is unraveling despite its feverish attempts to hold on to power; even sprouts of capitalism are appearing in North Korean society. . . . Western readers will gain a rare view of the hidden world of North Korean citizens. Recommended for those interested in international affairs or inquisitive about this last remnant of the Communist world.

The Hidden People is important as the first comprehensive guide to a new, post-famine North Korean society made available to an English-speaking audience. . . . I am often asked what I consider to be the best introduction for readers curious about the basics of North Korean life. From now on, The Hidden People will be my recommendation.

Wonderful. . . . Solid and persuasive. . . . Focuses on an often-overlooked facet of the North Korean story: the people. . . . Hassig and Oh actively and judiciously introduce other very rich data sources to complete their picture. . . . This comprehensive and careful work analyzing almost every aspect of North Korean society is not only very informative, but also turns out to be a surprisingly pleasurable read. Overall, the lucid, precise and prosaic writing makes this work an even more significant landmark contribution to the field. . . . Hassig and Oh's The Hidden People of North Korea would make wonderful briefing material not only for lay readers, but also as introductory reading for undergraduate as well as graduate level courses on North Korea and the Korean peninsula.

About the Author

Ralph Hassig is an independent consultant and retired adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Maryland University College. Kongdan Oh is a Senior Asia Specialist at the Institute for Defense Analyses and an invited columnist for the Asia Times.