Tourism or propaganda: how ethical is your North Korean holiday?

Yet despite tight restrictions and widespread human rights abuses, the number of people visiting North Korea is booming. 2005 when Ji defected with his sister and mother, the number of Western tourists was in the hundreds. Now 5,000 visit yearly, says Koryo Tours, the biggest operator taking tourists to the isolated communist dictatorship. That number is still dwarfed by Chinese tourists, estimated to be 100,000 annually. And the North Korean government wants more. In recent years it has opened new attractions such as the five-starMasikryong ski resort, the “tourist city” of Wonsan, and is training future tour guides at Pyongyang tourism college. In June, they said by 2020, they want two million foreigners to visit annually.

A force for good?

The tour companies taking visitors encourage the view that tourism is a positive thing, but the extent to which it helps remains difficult to unpick, with many remaining skeptical. “If tourism were opening North Korea [up], over the 15 years of this industry, we ought to have seen some evolution in the restrictions and permissible exposure of foreigners to North Korean society,” says Joshua Stanton, founder of the OneFreeKorea blog. “[But] we haven’t.” “Kim Jong-un has redoubled his efforts to isolate the majority of his people … cracking down on cross-border cell phones, smuggling, and refugee flows,” he adds.

This is also the attitude the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea held, supporting defectors such as Ji. They argue that the tourism industry serves only “to fund and legitimize the regime”. As destinations go, North Korea is unique. State guides will accompany you throughout, and there is no deviation from the government-approved itinerary. Trips aren’t cheap either – four nights can cost around £1,000 excluding flights – and it is profitable for all involved. But those working in the industry argue that the money trickling through to the government is small – and if they were to cease operations tomorrow, the impact on the regime would be negligible.

‘Tourism helped the citizens of the USSR.’

Andrei Lankov, a specialist in Korean studies who attended Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung University in the 1980s but has since been blocked, supports the view that tourism can subtly undermine the authoritarian government. He draws from his experience growing up in a working-class family in the Soviet Union and recalls seeing tourists from Finland who would visit the USSR for cheap alcohol. “We didn’t talk to them, but everybody saw how they dressed and behaved, and nobody could view them as poor victims of capitalist exploitation,” he says.

Tourism

“They showed a very high level of living and individual freedom. Not a single person had any doubt that people in Western countries lived [a] better [life] than us.” Lankov believes that a revolution in North Korea cannot be forced. He’s a proponent of slow evolution, in which tourism can play a “minor and marginal” role. But Ji places less emphasis on the tourist connection. It’s easier than ever for North Koreans to get information from outside sources – radio transmissions from China and South Korea are the prime example.

Hyeonseo Lee, a North Korean activist, and author of The Girl With Seven Names, the story of her escape in 1997, is equally cynical. North Koreans can get in serious trouble for trying to talk to a foreigner about substantive issues, so she says this is “hardly constructive engagement,” she says. Besides, most North Korean tourists in Pyongyang are part of the elite, with little incentive to resist. “Tourists are used as propaganda,” says Hyeonseo. “They are required to bow to the large statue of our first dictator, Kim Il-sung,” these images are used by “propagandists to show North Koreans that foreigners come from all over the world to pay homage to the Dear Leader.”

She adds: “This is an effective brainwashing technique for the North Korean people, who think that if foreigners are making a pilgrimage to respect the leader … North Korea’s supremacy must be true.” Hyeonseo is also critical of the tour companies. They have full access to information about the regime’s injustices yet still take people there, she says, “and profit in the process.” One of the first travel companies to specialize in trips to North Korea is Koryo Tours, founded in 1993, which takes around 40% of the Western visitors to the country.

Vicky Mohieddeen, creative projects manager for Koryo Tours, says that many more North Koreans are now employed as guides, coach drivers, restaurant workers, and other jobs catering to the influx of tourists. “They enjoy certain benefits because they work in the tourism industry,” she says. “They are healthy and enjoy the wages and benefits of working as a tour guide; they get to meet foreign people, practice foreign languages, and get a glimpse of the outside world.” Gareth Johnson, the founder of Young Pioneer Tours, believes the gentle requests from travel companies to take visitors to new locations have played a “huge role” in encouraging the North Korean government to relax.