North Korea's grassroots capitalism: how creeping market forces are improving life in the Hermit Kingdom.

• Author: Lankov, Andrei
• Position: 'North Korea Confidential' - Book review

WHEN MOST PEOPLE in the West hear the phrase "North Korea;" they think of a country ruled by a fat boy-man with a terrible haircut who enjoys feeding family members to dogs, shooting defense ministers with anti-aircraft guns, and meeting eccentric basketball players. If they head to the library hoping to find a scholarly or journalistic account that cuts through the rumors and offers a more solidly sourced portrait of North Korean life, they will probably be disappointed. Even "serious" publications on the subject consist of little more than speculation about the nation's nuclear capabilities and tea-leaf reading about the factions within the regime.

So it is refreshing to find a book that neither obsesses excessively over the nuclear issue nor treats the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) as simply a bad joke or the world's most irrational place. North Korea Confidential, a recent effort by the journalists Daniel Tudor and James Pearson, is one such work.

The first sentence of the first chapter makes things clear: "'Communist' and 'collectivized' are utterly outdated labels for a North Korean economy which now heavily relies on thriving person-to-person market exchanges in which individuals buy and sell private property for the purpose of generating profit." In spite of what is still almost universally believed, North Korea ceased to have a Stalinist, centralized, planned economy some 20 years ago. Tudor and Pearson's new book describes in vivid detail how this dramatic transformation has taken place.

The growth of North Korean "grassroots capitalism" (as some scholars call it) is not necessarily an unknown or unstudied phenomenon: A number of researchers, overwhelmingly but not exclusively from South Korea, have looked at North Korea's nascent bourgeoisie and market economy. They have described how people in the 1990s, amid famine and consequent social dislocation, began to create new businesses from scratch, and how those ventures grew rapidly. They have also explored the enterprises that Tudor and Pearson call "private-public partnerships." Under this very common model, state agencies lend their name to an aspiring entrepreneur, who disguises what is essentially a private operation as a state-owned enterprise. Restaurants, fishing businesses, and even some mines are de facto privately owned and operated, though they are registered as state property.

Tudor and Pearson synthesize this large body of research and ideas, along with...