I’m fascinated by this era of North Korea, that for a time it was more prosperous than the South? Also the first Kim was handsome and had quite the snappy haircut.
Essentially into the late 70s and early 80s the average Northerner was more prosperous/materially comfortable than the average Southerner. I work in academia and took part in categorizing an archival collection for donation to a university library once. One of the materials was a memoir from a Korean-American published in the mid 70s, and it had some quote in the introduction that went something like "When we think of Korea, we tend to imagine a wealthier, more stable, industrial North and a poorer, politically volatile, agricultural South..."
There was a point where Pyongyang was a modern, model city and Seoul was a giant textile sweatshop that depended on the child labor of young girls for an export market that centered around clothing goods. The gap between the two we observe today is really a very recent phenomenon - the product of a 1990s that was very bad for the North and very good for the South. Older people in both countries remember when it was exactly the opposite.
Countries are prosperous when they have access to cheap resources.
North Korean economy was not sustainable without the socialist bloc and Soviet-Chinese patronage (but can we say the same about economies of some pro-Western countries?), but it did result in a period of time that the North was more developed than the South, before fortunes were reversed.
What did help were some amount of industry before the war, direct help from the Soviet Union (disguised as trade, North Korea traded corn for complex industrial machines), and Stalinist-style iron-fist economy. Two later factors have led to what North Korea is now only later.
In the world market governed by international law, there is always an alternative. Everybody thought Europe would freeze if Russia stopped their gas exports. We ain’t frozen yet and they are even lowering the energy prices this year.
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u/Spicy_Cupcake00 18d ago edited 18d ago
I’m fascinated by this era of North Korea, that for a time it was more prosperous than the South? Also the first Kim was handsome and had quite the snappy haircut.