Review | Inside North Korea’s secret underground, where information and goods flow
Jieun Baek punctures the idea of North Korean isolation, revealing a clandestine world of USBs filled with media, and a generation that buy their food at markets
by Jieun Baek (read by Caroline McLaughlin)
Tantor Audio (audiobook)
Jangmadang in Korean means “market grounds”. It is also the name given to North Koreans who have grown up on capitalism and are dependent on informal markets for their food and other provisions. The Jangmadang generation, writes Jieun Baek, are individualistic and, unlike their parents and grandparents, do not stand in lines for government rations. These North Koreans, many of whom were born after the famine of the 1990s, are sceptical of state propaganda and have access to alternative sources of information, which is fuelling change. Baek, who interviewed scores of defectors for her book, tells of traders smuggling in USB drives filled with foreign movies, South Korean dramas, e-books and the like. The images she draws erase that of the country as an impenetrable black box.