What if the missing variable in North Korean human rights is not information, but learning?

For decades, efforts to improve human rights in North Korea have focused on expanding access to outside information. Governments, non-governmental organizations, activists and defectors have supported radio broadcasts, USB drives, foreign films and South Korean dramas as ways to challenge the regime’s monopoly over truth.

These efforts are necessary. In a country where the state controls nearly every official source of knowledge, access to outside information is not a luxury -- it is a basic human right. But information access, by itself, does not explain transformation.

Many North Korean defectors describe encountering South Korean dramas, foreign media or outside news before they began to question the system. These stories matter because they show that outside information can create cracks in a closed society. But they also raise a harder question: Why does the same information transform some people and not others?

Two people may secretly watch the same South Korean drama. One enjoys it as entertainment and moves on. The other begins to ask dangerous questions: Why do people there live differently? Why was I taught that South Korea was poor and miserable? What else have I been told that may not be true?

The difference is not the information itself. It is what happens after the information arrives, and that is shaped by context -- by whom a person trusts, what contradictions they have already lived through and whether their private experience has already begun to pull away from the official story they were given.

This is where education enters the conversation -- not education narrowly understood as schools or formal curriculum, but as a different way of asking questions. Information can be delivered. Learning cannot. What happens between those two is the question education seeks to answer.

As a North Korean defector and an education researcher, I do not believe my life changed because of a single piece of outside information. I did not escape because I watched one drama or discovered one hidden truth. My understanding shifted gradually.

I witnessed the devastating consequences of the 2009 currency reform. I saw hunger, fear and contradictions that official explanations could not resolve. I listened to others, compared what I had been taught with what I experienced and slowly began to realize that the world I had been given was not the whole world. That was not merely exposure to information. It was learning.

This distinction matters for policy. Much of the current conversation asks, “How can we get more information into North Korea?” That question remains important, but it is incomplete.

We also must ask what happens after information arrives. Does it connect to people’s lived experiences? Does it create questions they can safely hold, even if they cannot speak them aloud? Does it travel through trusted relationships, informal conversations, markets and family networks? Does it become something people can interpret, remember and use to make sense of their own lives?

These are not soft questions. They are strategic ones. If information access is treated only as delivery, success is measured by how many broadcasts, USB drives and messages cross the border. If it is understood through an educational lens, success also depends on whether that information becomes meaningful to the people who encounter it.

This does not mean outsiders can simply “teach critical thinking” inside North Korea. That would be unrealistic and dangerous. Nor does it mean information campaigns are unimportant. They are essential. But information is the beginning of change, not the whole of it. The next frontier of North Korean human rights should not abandon information access. It should deepen it by asking how people learn under authoritarian control.

Learning is what happens after information arrives

Too often, learning is mistaken for the simple acquisition of information - as if encountering new facts, ideas or images were enough to change how people understand the world.

Learning is neither confined to classrooms nor the automatic consequence of exposure. It is a fundamentally social process through which people interpret new information, connect it with prior knowledge and lived experience, negotiate meaning through dialogue and relationships, and gradually reconstruct their understanding of themselves and the world.

Information does not transform people on its own. People transform information -- and they do so together. Under authoritarian conditions, this social dimension becomes decisive. People rarely change simply because they encounter new information. They change as they interpret it with others, compare experiences, question contradictions and construct new understandings within relationships of trust.

Information is transferable. Meaning is not; it must be constructed. That single distinction reframes the central policy question. For years it has been, How do we get more information into North Korea? Education invites another: How does information become meaningful once it arrives?

The answer lies not in the information, but in the environments where people interpret it. So where does such learning happen in a society where public expression is dangerous and official institutions exist to reinforce the existing order rather than challenge it?

That is rarely through formal institutions alone. Schools may teach obedience, but they do not monopolize learning. People also learn through conversations with trusted friends, quiet discussions within families, observations in the marketplace, encounters with contradiction and private reflection on everyday experience.

In North Korea, the jangmadang is usually understood as an economic institution. Yet, it is also a learning space. Beyond goods, people exchange stories, observations, rumors and interpretations of daily life. They compare official narratives with lived experience, test new ideas quietly and make sense of contradictions together.

Only after studying literacy and learning did I recognize that what transformed me was not exposure to new information, but rather the countless conversations through which information gradually acquired meaning. Questions I could not answer alone grew clearer as I compared my experiences with those of others. Meaning was not something I discovered by myself. It was something we constructed together. That, too, was learning.

The political scientist James C. Scott observed that authoritarian societies contain informal spaces where people quietly compare official ideology with lived experience, developing what he called “hidden transcripts”-- private understandings that diverge from the public story the regime demands.

The literacy scholar Gerald Campano built on a related insight -- that marginalized communities do not simply receive knowledge, but actively co-construct shared meaning through dialogue, relationships and everyday experience. Together, these frameworks point to something human rights discourse has largely overlooked.

The places where North Koreans quietly compare, question, and interpret -- the marketplace conversation, the family dinner, the trusted friendship -- are not merely sites of survival. They are sites of learning.

I call this network of relationships, conversations, lived experience and informal interaction a transformative learning ecology. Within it, information does not remain information for long. It is questioned, compared, confirmed, rejected and reinterpreted, and through this ongoing process of collective meaning, making it gradually becomes learning and, over time, a new way of seeing.

The process is neither rapid nor visible. But historically it is how people under authoritarian rule have begun to imagine that the world they were given is not the only world possible.

Through that collective meaning-making, communities gradually develop collective agency -- the shared capacity to interpret the world differently, imagine alternative futures and recognize that the existing order is neither inevitable nor immutable.

In North Korea, this matters in a particular way. The regime’s power rests not only on surveillance and coercion, but also on its ability to make the current order appear to be the only one possible. Collective agency quietly erodes that assumption. Long before visible political change occurs, something more fundamental is already underway-- people are beginning to understand their world differently, and to do so together.

Breaking North Korea’s information blockade remains essential. Without access to outside information, there is little opportunity for learning. But information is the beginning of the story, not its end.

The more important question is not whether information crosses borders, but what people do with it once it arrives. Lasting transformation depends not only on the movement of information, but also on the processes through which people construct meaning together, develop collective agency and gradually reimagine what is possible.

Information crosses borders. Learning changes people. People change societies.

Jihyang Kim is a North Korean defector, Fulbright Scholar, and graduate student in education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Born and raised in Hyesan, Ryanggang Province, North Korea, she resettled in South Korea in 2016 with her young son after escaping the economic collapse triggered by North Korea’s 2009 currency reform. Having received only an elementary school education in North Korea, she went on to excel academically in South Korea, earning numerous awards and leadership recognition, while pursuing her passion for education.

Drawing on her educational journey across North Korea, South Korea and the United States, Kim is passionate about literacy education and expanding educational opportunities for underserved children, particularly those who experience difficulties with reading and writing. She plans to pursue doctoral study to advance evidence-based literacy instruction and intervention, with the long-term goal of building a more equitable and democratic education system for future generations on the Korean Peninsula.

I crossed four national borders illegally, evading the guns behind me and the soldiers and police watching for people like me. I tumbled down mountainsides. I nearly capsized on a river whose depth I could not guess. There were moments when I was close to fainting from hunger and could not ask a single person for help, because I had entered each of those countries without a passport.

This is an experience possible only for people from a country where most citizens will never hold a passport in their lives, and where leaving is, in nearly every form, a crime.

Until a few years ago, that was where I lived: a place where every life runs along a track laid out in advance, where the content of your education is decided before you are born, where what you wear, what you listen to, and what you may say are all determined for you. And even inside that society, I carried a particular status. I was the daughter of a traitor.

I was born in the late 1990s, during the years when the most North Koreans starved to death. No reliable figures have ever been released, but researchers estimate that somewhere between several hundred thousand and a million people died. My family, who had believed in the state and served it more faithfully than most, were especially exposed when the rations simply stopped. To save her mother, who had collapsed from malnutrition, and her young daughter, my mother crossed the border into China. Many people in the border regions did the same, for the same reason.

Those who crossed in those years were not pursuing anything as grand as freedom, nor anything as comfortable as wealth. Their thinking was simpler: if sacrificing myself brings back a little food, and if that food keeps my child and my aging parents alive, then it is worth it. The state declared such people traitors, and it surveilled, discriminated against, and punished the families they left behind for the rest of their lives.

After my mother left, it was my grandmother who raised me.

She told me the same things over and over. Say less when you are outside. Stand a step behind everyone else. If something unjust happens to you, do not let it show on your face. I found it tiresome. These were adults who accepted the money my mother sent from South Korea and then donated part of it to a fund honoring Kim Jong Il. I could not understand it. I decided that the elders in my family were simply dull people who had never managed to escape their indoctrination.

It was only in high school, as I began to understand more, that I learned how closely I had been watched, and how long my family had been punished. Their excessive honesty, their demonstrations of loyalty, their control over me — none of it came from ignorance. It was the only method available to them for keeping me safe from a merciless state. What I had been calling foolishness was, in fact, love.

Once I understood that, I decided to raise my own status. Eleven years of compulsory education had taught me that if I worked hard and lived as society demanded, the mark my mother had left on me could be lifted.

I applied to a teachers’ college. My scores were high enough, but the authorities said no: I was the family member of a defector. I applied to the post office. I applied to the trade bureau. I liked working with numbers, and I thought I could be good at keeping accounts. The answers came back nearly identical. The only work available to me was manual labor, or whatever I could do with skills I already had. Every position that might allow me to influence other people was closed.

The education I had absorbed for eleven years — that even with a family’s guilt on your record, your own effort could earn the Party’s trust — turned out to be fiction. Each time I was rejected, I listened to the reason and could not accept it. Eventually I decided to leave.

After I first told my mother in South Korea what I intended to do, a year of preparation followed. I could not tell my family or my friends. Not my cousins, who used to ask me to take them along if I ever went to find my mother. Not the people who had loved me most.

It was not that I distrusted them. It was that the security apparatus around me would have read the grief of parting on their faces, and then all of us would have been taken, interrogated, and punished. Through my family’s experience I knew what the state security bureau and the labor camps were, and I had decided that if I were caught, I would take my own life rather than be arrested.

On the morning I left, I said goodbye to my grandmother the way I did every other day. She did not know it was the last time.

After a frightening, lonely year, I escaped. It was the moment I left behind a system that had tormented and exploited me, the moment I set down years of wondering whether I would be shot or seized by a soldier. And I felt no elation at all.

The instant I crossed the Tumen River and set foot on Chinese soil, a pain went through my chest as though something had collapsed, and I sank to the ground. Everything that had been my entire life until then — everything I loved and everything that had loved me — was behind me, and I was walking toward a place I could never return from.

Have you ever climbed mountain paths for more than twelve hours a day, then crossed a river of unknown depth on a raft that looked like a few planks nailed together? I swallowed my grief and traveled through China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand until I reached South Korea. Looking back now, the hardest part of that journey does not register as difficult or frightening — probably because I was submerged in a loss more intense than any of it.

After arriving, I began to study. For the first time in my life, I chose what I wanted to learn. I chose accounting: the work I had been drawn to since the days I knocked on the door of the trade bureau, and which that society never allowed me. Numbers do not ask about your family background. A ledger does not care whose daughter you are. That fact has been a comfort to me for a long time.

But the more I enjoyed studying, the more I missed the people still inside the place I had escaped, and the more my own happiness began to feel like selfishness. If someone ever asks me what I did for them, I want to be able to say that I did as much as I loved them. That is why I began human rights work.

Working with public institutions and NGOs, I have ended up speaking on platforms abroad. What I saw in that process was that a surprising number of people spend their time on behalf of strangers they will never meet. Nothing obliged them to. They said the names of North Koreans anyway, and they kept records. Watching them, I came to feel more urgently that for someone like me, this work is not a choice but an obligation.

I intend to keep studying accounting and to practice it, and to continue human rights work at the same time. Living well while doing what I want to do, and working on behalf of North Koreans, are both my way of loving the people who raised me and loved me. As my grandmother showed me, love often wears a face that does not look like love at the time.

You who are reading this do not have to lose your family, your hometown, and your friends in order to be free. You do not have to carry a longing that will ache for the rest of your life, or dreams in which you are being chased. You were born in a place where freedom already exists. And for the sake of the ordinary day you may find tedious or exhausting, someone right now is staking everything they have.

People say that freedom is not free. I know the weight of that sentence, because I have paid. But I pray that for my friends still in North Korea, freedom will one day arrive at no cost at all — with the plain, unremarkable face of an ordinary day.

Yoonseo Chae is a graduate student at Dongguk University, a North Korean human rights advocate, and a member of the North Korean Young Leaders Assembly. Born during North Korea’s devastating famine of the 1990s, she grew up under constant surveillance and discrimination as the daughter of a North Korean defector. Before escaping the country in 2019, she worked as a nurse but was repeatedly denied educational and career opportunities because of her family’s political background.

After a year of secretly preparing her escape, Yoonseo crossed four international borders through China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand before reaching freedom in South Korea. Since resettling, she has earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Dongguk University and has worked with South Korea’s Ministry of Unification and leading civil society organizations to advance North Korean human rights and unification education. She currently serves as a unification education instructor while pursuing graduate studies.

Drawing on both her lived experience and public advocacy, Yoonseo writes about North Korea, authoritarianism, and human dignity. She hopes to continue using education, research, and public engagement to amplify the voices of North Koreans who remain unable to speak freely.

This July, the United States turns 250. There will be fireworks over the National Mall, parades down small-town Main Streets, and the familiar rereading of a sentence that still startles you if you slow down enough to hear it -- that all people are created equal, born with rights no government may grant or take away.

I did not grow up with that sentence. I grew up in North Korea, where believing it could cost you your life. The state did not merely govern us; it tried to own the inside of our heads. Loyalty was measured, ranked, inherited. People were sorted at birth into classes of trustworthy and hostile, and the sorting followed you like a shadow you could never outrun. To imagine yourself as free -- not someday, not in another country, but free by right, simply because you were born -- was the most dangerous thought a person could have.

And yet some of us had it.

That is the thing I want my fellow Americans to understand as you celebrate this anniversary. The men who signed their names in 1776 had no army worth the name, no treasury, no guarantee they would not be hanged for what they wrote. What they had was a conviction so stubborn it outran their own safety. I have met that same conviction. I have seen it in young people who carried it across frozen rivers and through Chinese hiding places and past the constant threat of being sent back to die. They are North Korean escapees, and they are some of the most natural believers in your founding creed I have ever known -- because they paid for the belief before they ever heard the words.

For years, I thought escape was the whole story. It is not. Tearing down a wall and building what stands in its place are two different acts, requiring two different kinds of people, and history is unkind to movements that master only the first. Liberation needs courage. What comes after liberation needs something rarer: people who have prepared themselves to lead, to draft laws, to sit across a table from the powerful and not flinch, to imagine a country in detail rather than only in longing.

When the regime in Pyongyang finally falls -- and it will, because no system built on that much fear lasts forever -- the dangerous question will not be how it ended. It will be who is ready to build what comes next. Will a free North Korea be handed to whoever is closest to the old machinery of power? Or will there be a generation of North Koreans, raised partly in freedom, who understand foreign policy and international law and the unglamorous mechanics of a functioning state, ready to take the pen?

That question is why I founded the North Korean Young Leaders Assembly. Each year we bring a small group of young North Korean escapees to the United States and put them in the rooms where decisions are made -- across from lawmakers, diplomats, scholars, and human rights experts. We do it because I once needed exactly this and never had it. I had survived. I did not yet know how to lead. No one had shown me that the testimony of a person who escaped a dictatorship could move a senator, or that a refugee could become a strategist, an advocate, a founder in waiting rather than a permanent victim of someone else’s history.

The transformation is not abstract. I have watched a young woman raised in the “hostile” caste of North Korean society stand in a university seminar she could never once have dreamed of and discuss and debate policy with the poise of someone who knows this is exactly where she belongs. I have watched a young mother who spent years hiding in China, flinching at every knock on the door, learn to speak in a public hearing before the U.S. Congress so that others would no longer have to hide. I have watched a person who once believed he had no voice testify before officials in Washington and say aloud the truth he had risked his life to keep secret. None of them are finished. That is the point. They are becoming.

Americans sometimes ask why this should concern them, an ocean and a closed border away. The honest answer is the same one your founders would have given. The creed you celebrate this summer was never meant to be a private possession. It was a claim about every human being, including the twenty-five million still living inside the most closed country on earth, who cannot read this sentence and would be punished for thinking it. A 250th anniversary that means anything has to mean more than nostalgia for one nation’s good fortune. It has to be a reminder of what the words were for.

There is also a practical stake. The future of the Korean peninsula -- its peace, its stability, the shape of a region that matters enormously to the world -- will be written in part by which North Koreans are prepared when the moment comes. Investing in that preparation now is not charity. It is foresight.

I think often about the asymmetry of that signing in 1776. A handful of people put their names to a document on behalf of millions who could not be in the room, and on behalf of generations not yet born. The signature was a kind of trust extended across time. The people I work with are trying to extend the same trust toward a country that does not yet exist -- to speak, today, for the millions inside North Korea who still cannot speak, and for the free homeland those millions deserve.

This July, as you watch the fireworks, I would ask only that you widen the circle of who you are celebrating. Somewhere not far from those crowds, ten young people who chose freedom over fear will be sketching the blueprint of a homeland they were forced to flee. They are not asking to be rescued. They have already done the hardest part of that themselves. They are asking for what every founder needs: people willing to stand with them while they prepare to build.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a few people picked up a pen and signed their names to a promise far larger than their own lives. They did not live to see it kept. That was never the point. The point was that the promise could outlast them -- that the pen, once lifted, was meant to be passed from one hand to the next, to anyone with the courage to take it up.

Young North Koreans are reaching for that same pen.

Hyunseung Lee is a North Korean escapee, lead strategist at the Global Peace Foundation, founder of the North Korean Young Leaders Assembly and a regular contributor to the Korea Regional Review. He has experience in North Korea’s shipping and mining sectors and as a sergeant in the DPRK Army Special Force. He fled in 2014 due to severe governmental purges. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Dongbei University of Finance and Economics and a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University.

On the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield, the moment a North Korean soldier finds himself surrounded, his hand does not reach for his rifle — it reaches for a grenade pin. The world’s media calls this fanaticism. I see it differently. I was trained the same way. I recited the same oaths. I sang the same songs.

In North Korea, I served in the Korean People’s Army for over three years. I am not writing this to condemn the dead. I am writing to explain why they made that choice — and how that choice was engineered to feel like the only natural one — through the internal logic of the world I once lived inside.

LOGIC PLANTED BEFORE BIRTH

A North Korean soldier does not first encounter the concept of “dying for the Supreme Leader” when he enlists. It begins in kindergarten. Children learn the song “We will defend General Kim Jong-un with our lives“ before they learn to read the Korean alphabet. The first page of every elementary school textbook bears the portrait of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un, and children are conditioned to love those faces as they would a father. Suryong Gyeolsa Ongwi — pledging one’s life to defend the Supreme Leader — is not a slogan. In North Korea, it is the foundational grammar of a person’s identity.

This may look like brainwashing from the outside. But for a person who has lived within it for twenty years or more, it is not a “belief” — it is simply reality. Just as we do not question gravity, a North Korean soldier does not question self-sacrifice for the leader. It is as natural as breathing.

In that surrounded moment, what operates inside the soldier’s mind is not fanaticism. It is twenty years of accumulated reality — the knowledge that surrender means his family dies.

A SYSTEM THAT TAKES FAMILIES HOSTAGE

The most powerful force driving a soldier toward self-destruction on the front line is not ideology — it is the system of collective punishment known as Yeonjwaje (Guilt-by-association). In North Korea, if a soldier becomes a prisoner of war, the consequences extend far beyond that individual. His parents, siblings, and spouse left behind at home are immediately reclassified as “the family of a traitor.” Deportation to a political prison camp or a remote coal mine awaits them. The “betrayal” of a single person rewrites the fate of an entire family.

The testimonies of North Korean soldiers captured by Ukrainian forces confirm this. Even as one soldier slipped toward unconsciousness from blood loss, bound and restrained, he threw himself headfirst into a wall in a desperate attempt to die. That is not madness. That is a cold calculation: If I survive and am captured, my family is destroyed. If I die, my family survives — perhaps even honored as the family of a hero. Reports that Kim Jong-un has arranged for fallen soldiers’ families to reside in Pyongyang and for their children to be admitted to elite revolutionary schools complete that calculation perfectly.

A REALITY WITH NO OUTSIDE WORLD

Almost all North Korean defectors, before they escape, have no idea how ordinary people live beyond the country’s borders. The world beyond our map was darkness. The soldiers deployed to the Ukrainian front were operating under extreme information deprivation. What it would mean to be taken prisoner by Ukrainian forces — the Geneva Conventions, the treatment of POWs, the possibility of a life afterward — existed for them as a complete unknown. What happens when you surrender, on the other hand, they knew with bone-deep certainty: the collective punishment system would be activated against everyone they loved.

What you do not know, you fear. What you fear, you avoid. Human beings dread an uncertain future more than a certain terror. For a North Korean soldier, the certainty of death is less frightening than the uncertainty of surviving in a world he cannot imagine.

A LANGUAGE THAT GLORIFIES DEATH

The narration accompanying the footage broadcast on Korean Central TV called self-detonation “the heroic sacrifice of warriors in the heat of battle.” Kim Jong-un published a letter of condolence written in his own hand. A Wall of Remembrance went up in Pyongyang. A national memorial was built. Senior Russian officials visited Pyongyang to lay flowers.

Whatever the political calculation behind all of this — whether it is designed to extract greater compensation from Russia, or to reframe as glory what was once kept secret — the message it sends to surviving soldiers is singular: Those who self-destruct become heroes. Their families are rewarded. Those who are captured become traitors. Their families disappear.

The moment a state pins a medal on death, death becomes a legitimate option. And surviving — choosing to live — becomes an act that requires courage.

THE SELF THAT WAS HOLLOWED OUT

In the North Korean military, the individual does not exist. There is no “I” — only “our Supreme Leader,” “our Party,” “our Homeland.” The instinct for personal survival is conditioned to feel shameful in the face of collective honor. When a fellow soldier has cleared the path by detonating himself, raising your hands in surrender — within the inner architecture of a North Korean soldier’s identity — is an act of self-annihilation. It is a shame more unbearable than death.

It was in China, encountering the outside world for the first time, that I began to sense something was wrong — though I only realized much later that I had been trusting North Korea’s propaganda and indoctrination more than what my own eyes were showing me. Coming to understand that fully took years. The soldiers on the front line have no time, no information, and no experience that would allow them to reach that understanding.

WHAT IT MEANS TO UNDERSTAND THEM

I did not write this essay to praise these soldiers. I am not saying their deaths were right. I want to help the world understand them as accurately as possible — because without understanding, the structure that produces this cannot be changed.

While Kim Jong-un packages self-destruction as a national honor, the soldiers who survived and were taken prisoner are almost certainly still living in terror over their own choices. International human rights organizations are right to condemn this as a violation of international humanitarian law. But that condemnation does not reach North Korean soldiers. The language simply does not exist in the world they inhabit.

To stop the hand that pulls the pin, we must first understand why that hand learned the motion so naturally. I am one of the people who knows. That is why I wrote this. And that is why I will not stop.

Hyunseung Lee is a North Korean escapee, the lead strategist at the Global Peace Foundation, the founder of North Korean Young Leaders Assembly and a guest contributor to UPI. He has prior experience in North Korea’s shipping and mining sectors and as a sergeant in the DPRK Army Special Force. He fled in 2014 due to severe governmental purges. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Dongbei University of Finance and Economics and a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University.

#NorthKoreaUkraine #NorthKoreaRussia #NorthKoreanTroops #SelfDetonation #GrenadeSuicide #AvoidCapture #CollectivePunishment #Yeonjwaje #NorthKoreaHumanRights #DefectorStory #Totalitarianism #Authoritarianism #KoreanPeninsula #Geopolitics #WarReporting

The Lifelong Wish of North Korea’s People

Imagine this for a moment.

If you were trapped in a small space your entire life, never once stepping beyond its boundaries, what dreams would fill your nights? If you asked ordinary North Koreans selling wild herbs at the jangmadang markets to make ends meet what their lifelong wish is, what would they say?

Most outsiders would assume that people struggling for basic survival would wish for better food or a warmer home. Yet surprisingly, the most common lifelong wish among North Koreans is singular and profound.

The chance to travel abroad.

Our Daily Routine, Their Distant Dream

When you wake up in the morning, you can hold a cup of coffee in one hand and search for your next travel destination online. The Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Statue of Liberty in New York, Tokyo’s dazzling neon lights. A few clicks and you can book a flight; within days, you could be standing there.

But for ordinary North Koreans, such a scenario exists only in dreams. To them, traveling abroad is as distant as a journey to the moon.

This wish transcends the simple desire for tourism. It reflects a profound yearning to escape the confines of their lives and witness firsthand a world of freedom. North Korea has maintained thorough isolation for decades, and its people have almost no access to information about the outside world. The world beyond North Korea’s borders is a forbidden paradise to them.

Between Official Wishes and True Desires

In North Korea, when people are asked about their lifelong wish, an unwritten rule requires them to say: “The eternal health of our beloved Supreme Leader.“ Even personal wishes must be tied to the leader’s well-being—an implicit rule imposed on all North Korean citizens.

Publicly expressing a desire to “travel abroad“ can be viewed as ideological impurity. It would be interpreted as saying “our system is inadequate.”

Nevertheless, in truly private moments, people carefully share their real lifelong wishes. In 2013, every time I returned to Pyongyang from business trips to China, my close friend would ask with a voice tinged with envy:

“China is more prosperous than our country, isn’t it? When will the day come when our families can freely travel abroad together?”

His eyes held an indescribable mix of despair and hope.

This friend who asked these questions was my high school classmate and a member of the Kim family, a distant relative of Kim Jong-un. He belonged to Pyongyang’s privileged class, raised in the best environment anyone could have. Yet even he had never seen the world outside.

At that moment, I couldn’t answer his question. I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to crush his hopes. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the truth: “No, probably not until the country opens up.”

Sighs Passed Down Through Generations

The North Korean people’s wish to travel abroad goes beyond simple curiosity. They wonder how people live outside the system they’ve known all their lives, what a world where people speak and act freely looks like.

The elderly express this wish even more desperately.

A mid-level Party cadre who was a friend of my father’s once said:

“Our generation will end without ever seeing the outside world, but you must create a world where you can freely come and go abroad.”

His words carried deep regret about his own life alongside hope for the future. He wished that the next generation could see the world he would never witness, that young people could enjoy the freedom he was denied.

Even a cadre who had devoted his entire life to loyalty to the Party harbored such a wish. What he desired wasn’t wealth or glory. Just once—just a single time—to see the world freely.

What the Regime Fears

This wish symbolizes the yearning for freedom that has been thoroughly suppressed by the state.

Life in North Korea unfolds within limited choices and controlled information. People are always under the surveillance of authorities, and even minor deviations can lead to grave consequences.

Yet traveling abroad represents an opportunity for them to transcend these environmental constraints, to see the world through their own eyes, and to feel the freedom to make their own decisions.

Indeed, some North Korean elites who have experienced life abroad come to recognize the contradictions of the North Korean system more clearly by comparing what they’ve seen with their homeland.

A friend who had returned from studying in Europe once told me when I was still in high school without overseas experience:

“I lived in Europe for three years. People there could criticize the government without being arrested, read whatever books they wanted, and watch any movies they chose. Only our country restricts foreign films and books.”

Because of such a reason, North Korean authorities thoroughly block ordinary citizens from traveling abroad. Only a small number of elites can go overseas under restricted conditions—and even then, only under close surveillance and in group activities.

​​Leaving aside family reunions or official trips, almost no ordinary citizens receive permission to travel abroad in any given year.

An Undying Yearning

Despite this reality, North Koreans’ longing for the outside world does not fade.

Deep in their hearts, traveling abroad is not merely a vacation but a symbol of freedom and hope.

My little niece would beg me to show her photos from China whenever she saw me. Looking at pictures of glamorous shopping centers, streets, and amusement parks, she would whisper softly:

“I want to go there too.”

Her finger would slowly trace over the photographs, as if by doing so she could somehow reach those places.

My younger cousin, about to begin military service, asked me:

“Brother, in China, can people really take airplanes to other countries anytime they want? Don’t they need travel permits?”

When I answered “That’s right,” he thought for a long while before asking again:

“Do those people know how fortunate they are?”

Toward That Day Yet to Come

The lifelong wish of North Koreans to travel abroad is not a simple dream.

It is the most precious hope in their lives, the only thing that allows them to dream within the reality they inhabit.

Will the day come when this wish is fulfilled?

The day they can step out into the world and travel freely, when their dreams become reality, North Korean history will reach a new turning point.

When that day comes, my young cousins will walk the streets of foreign lands themselves.

My friend will travel abroad with his family.

And that elderly former Party cadre will stand at an airport, holding his grandson’s hand.

Until that day, we must remember:

At this very moment, 26 million people are gazing beyond the iron bars, dreaming.

#BeyondTheIronCurtain #NorthKoreanDreams #YearningForFreedom #26MillionVoices #ForgottenCries #HumanDignity

The Great Divide

When people in the West and around the world think of North Korea, they likely conjure three images: a leader with a distinctive hairstyle, Kim Jong-un; a military regime obsessed with nuclear weapons and missile development; and the tragic reality of people starving to death. But ask North Korean citizens about their homeland, and they’ll tell you three entirely different things. What occupies their minds is: the great Leader Kim Jong-un, a proud nuclear power, and North Korea as an earthly paradise.

This stark contrast reveals one of the most profound information gaps in the modern world. For over seventy years, the North Korean regime has constructed an alternate reality for its 25 million citizens—a reality so complete that most have no idea how drastically it differs from the world’s perception of their country.

The First Search

In 2006, when I first arrived in China, the very first thing I did after connecting to the internet was type “Kim Jong-il” and “Joseon” into a search bar. My hands were shaking as I entered those words. This was forbidden, even dangerous. If someone saw my search history on the computer and reported it to the Workers’ Party, the consequences would be severe—not just for me, but potentially for my entire family.

Yet I had to know. For years, we North Korean citizens had been told that our Supreme Leader was revered worldwide, that foreign leaders envied our system, that North Korea was “a beacon of socialism.” I had to see what the outside world actually said about us.

What I discovered shattered everything I had ever believed.

The Architecture of Ignorance

The North Korean regime doesn’t merely control information—it constructs an entirely alternate reality. This isn’t accidental; it’s the foundation of the regime’s survival. Citizens have virtually no access to foreign media, international internet, or uncensored news. Radios are sealed with frequencies fixed to receive only government broadcasts. Televisions pick up only state channels. Even conversations with foreigners are thoroughly monitored and restricted.

In this vacuum, the regime fills every space with its own narrative. From kindergarten onward, children are taught that Kim Il-sung was a great general who defeated the Japanese and American imperialists and is our benevolent father who cared only for the people. They learn that America tried to invade North Korea to enslave us. They’re told that despite international sanctions and “temporary difficulties,” North Korea remains one of the world’s most powerful and respected nations.

But humans are instinctively curious creatures. No matter how perfect the information blockade, questions inevitably arise. If we’re truly an earthly paradise, why is it so hard to avoid starvation? If our leader is so internationally respected, why are we so isolated? Why are there such strict regulations on what we can watch, read, and say?

These questions don’t disappear. They simply go underground—whispered among trusted people or kept locked deep in one’s own mind.

The Dangerous Search for Truth

For North Koreans sent abroad—whether as diplomats, workers, or operatives—the temptation to access forbidden information becomes overwhelming. Nearly all North Koreans working overseas engage in some form of information-seeking, despite enormous risks.

A North Korean computer engineer who was dispatched to Dalian, China in 2012 told me: “Before leaving the country, we received continuous education: don’t watch South Korean dramas, don’t search for North Korea-related information on the internet, don’t make contact with South Koreans. They said there were eyes watching us, that there were informants among us. But on my first night in the Chinese dormitory, after my roommates fell asleep, I put in earphones and found South Korean news broadcasts online. I watched for hours, barely breathing, terrified of being discovered. The first news I searched for was how people around the world were mourning the passing of General Kim Jong-il.”

What drives people to take such risks isn’t simple curiosity. It’s a deep, desperate need to verify whether the life they’ve lived is built on truth or lies.

Many begin by searching for the most basic facts: What is North Korea’s actual economic standing? How does the international media portray Kim Jong-un? Do people in other countries really envy the North Korean system? The answers they encounter can be devastating. Learning that North Korea is among the world’s poorest countries, that its leaders are sometimes objects of ridicule in the international community, that the outside world views their homeland not with admiration but with pity—this creates profound psychological shock.

The Instinct for Verification

This yearning for truth reveals something fundamental about human nature. People need to know whether their lives are legitimate, whether the sacrifices they’ve endured have meaning, whether the system they’ve defended truly deserves their loyalty.

I remember my own moment of reckoning vividly. While searching Korean news, I came across articles describing North Korea as a “hermit kingdom,” a “failed state,” an “oppressive regime.” The 1990s famine, which we’d been taught was caused by American economic sanctions and anti-DPRK conspiracies, was explained as a man-made disaster resulting from North Korean regime policies. Kim Jong-il was portrayed not as a brilliant strategist but as an eccentric dictator.

My first reaction was rage. Surely this was false propaganda spread by the CIA or the South Korean puppet regime. But as I continued reading articles over several months, a terrible thought slowly crept in: What if they were telling the truth? What if everything I’d believed, everything I’d been taught, everything I’d sacrificed for—what if all of it was built on lies?

This is the question that haunts every North Korean who glimpses the outside world’s perspective.

The Burden of Knowing

The regime understands this danger all too well. That’s why it imposes such harsh punishments for accessing outside information. Getting caught watching South Korean dramas can result in years in a labor camp, and sharing such information with others can lead to execution. The regime knows that information poses a more lethal threat to its survival than any external military danger.

Yet North Koreans continue seeking the truth. USB drives containing foreign films and dramas circulate secretly through underground markets. People with illegal radios listen clandestinely to foreign broadcasts in the dead of night. Workers sent abroad find ways to access the internet, even if only briefly. Each act of information-seeking is a small rebellion, a refusal to accept enforced ignorance.

What They Most Want to Know

When North Koreans finally access outside information, the questions that repeatedly surface are remarkably similar:

Is our country truly respected internationally, or is it isolated and ridiculed? Are other countries really worse off than us, or have we been deceived about our relative prosperity? Do foreign leaders truly respect Kim Jong-un, or do they view him as a threat or a joke? Are we really a nuclear power the world fears, or just a struggling nation barely holding on?

And the most painful question: Have we wasted our lives serving a lie?

These aren’t abstract political questions. They strike directly at the core of personal identity and life’s meaning. For someone who has endured poverty, sacrificed personal desires, monitored and reported on neighbors, and lived in constant fear—all for the system—discovering that the system itself is built on lies is devastating beyond words.

The Day Truth Arrives

The truth North Koreans most desperately seek remains largely beyond their reach. But each small crack in the information barrier matters. Each smuggled USB drive, each secretly heard radio broadcast, each whispered conversation about what someone saw abroad—these become seeds of awareness. Once planted, these seeds aren’t easily uprooted.

What the regime fears most isn’t military invasion but “collective enlightenment”—the day when enough North Koreans learn their country’s true standing in the world and the international assessment of their leaders. That day hasn’t arrived yet, but the cracks in the information wall are widening. Technological advancement makes information increasingly difficult to contain. Economic desperation drives more North Koreans into overseas labor, exposing them to outside perspectives in the process. Even within North Korea, smuggled foreign media continues to spread despite severe crackdowns.

On the day when the majority of North Koreans understand how the world actually views their country and leaders, the regime will face its greatest challenge. That challenge won’t come from foreign powers, but from its own people armed with the most powerful weapon of all: truth.

Until that day arrives, North Koreans will continue their dangerous pursuit of truth, one forbidden search at a time. Because the human instinct to understand reality, to verify whether one’s life has meaning and legitimacy, is stronger than any threat of punishment.

And this, ultimately, is what terrifies the regime most.

#KimJongUn #NorthKorea #Truth #Regime #Propaganda #1990famine #CIA #ForeignMedia #KoreanDrama #China #SouthKorea

While people around the world celebrate the New Year clinking champagne glasses and setting personal goals, North Koreans begin their year in an entirely different manner. Instead of the warm scenes of families gathered around tables sharing New Year’s wishes, or crowds cheering as the ball drops in Times Square, North Korean citizens face a carefully orchestrated schedule of political obligations.

On New Year’s Day, they have no choice. What to do, where to go, even whom to spend time with—everything has already been decided. In a society where the state and the Party take precedence over individual freedom and family happiness, the start of the new year is not a celebration but an extension of duty.

The Pilgrimage to Mansudae Hill: The First Ritual of the New Year

The North Korean New Year begins in front of statues. Early on New Year’s morning, even before dawn breaks, people take carefully prepared flower bouquets and head out into the streets. But these flowers aren’t destined for beloved family members or friends. They’re for the statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.

On Mansudae Hill in Pyongyang stand two massive bronze statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, each towering over 20 meters high. On New Year’s Day, tens of thousands gather here. Despite the bitter cold of winter, people line up from early morning, waiting their turn. The flowers in their hands freeze in the frigid air, but no one dares complain.

The wreath-laying ceremony proceeds with great solemnity. Upon reaching the statues, people bow deeply at the waist and place their bouquets in designated spots. Every expression, every gesture must be carefully controlled. Watchful eyes are always present, and any sign of disrespect can result in criticism. Some gaze up at the statues with reverence, while others shed tears. Whether genuine emotion or performance—or perhaps an inseparable mixture of both—remains unclear.

This isn’t limited to Pyongyang. In cities and villages across the country, large and small statues or portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il exist, and identical flower-laying ceremonies take place at each one. In a sense, the entire nation performs one massive ritual on New Year’s Day.

This ceremony is not simply about offering flowers—it’s a political act, a public display of absolute loyalty and devotion to the Kim family. Those who don’t participate are branded as disloyal, and even those who do participate face criticism if they don’t appear sufficiently sincere. For North Koreans, the New Year doesn’t begin with family but “officially” starts in front of these statues. This is their first obligation of the year, an inescapable ritual.

New Year’s Address Study: State-Mandated Resolutions

After the flower-laying ceremony, what awaits the citizens is the study of Chairman Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s address. This isn’t merely a seasonal greeting. It serves as a guidebook setting all political and social direction for the year, a document outlining the “revolutionary tasks” assigned to the people.

The New Year’s address typically runs about 10,000 Korean characters and is packed with content covering economic policies, military directives, and ideological education guidelines. The problem is that simply listening and understanding isn’t enough. Everyone from elementary school students to retired seniors must memorize, word for word, the Party policies relevant to their field.

Factory workers must memorize sections related to production goals, farmers must learn passages about agricultural increases, and teachers must know the educational directives by heart. Each institution holds study sessions that continue for days, and people frantically take notes and drill the passages into their minds like students preparing for college entrance exams.

During study sessions, merely reciting memorized content isn’t sufficient. Participants must respond to questions like “How shall we carry out these directives?” with self-criticism and pledges of determination. Someone confesses, “My revolutionary fervor was insufficient,” while another vows, “This year, I will fulfill the Party’s will and achieve 150% of our production targets.”

I, too, repeated this process every year in school and the military. I spent days memorizing content without understanding why it was necessary. I simply thought I had to follow because the Party commanded it. Looking back now, it was a waste of time that contributed nothing to my life.

But failing to memorize results in being summoned by superiors for public criticism and humiliation before colleagues. Questions rain down: “Why do you neglect the words of our Leader? Is your revolutionary determination lacking?” Being branded as having weak loyalty doesn’t end with mere embarrassment. It means being passed over for promotions, pushed to the back of the ration line, and even facing collective punishment that affects one’s entire family.

Out of this fear, people perform this task not for personal development or improving their quality of life, but solely to prove their loyalty to the Party. New Year’s resolutions aren’t self-determined—they’re assigned by the state, and achieving them becomes a matter of survival.

Loyalty Pledge: Only One New Year’s Resolution

After the flower-laying and New Year’s address study, one final obligation remains: the loyalty pledge gathering. At every workplace, school, and village, citizens assemble to collectively swear their allegiance.

The gatherings proceed with the solemnity and tension of soldiers rallying before battle. First, everyone sings “Song of General Kim Il-sung” and “Song of General Kim Jong-il”—not the national anthem of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, but songs pledging loyalty to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. This is not allegiance to the nation, but a pledge of devotion to two leaders.

After the songs, the Party secretary reads the pledge, and we automatically repeat after them:

“We pledge... united firmly around our beloved Comrade Kim Jong-un, we will definitely accomplish the goals set by the Party! We will defend our Party and Leader with our lives! We will crush the schemes of imperialists and dedicate everything to building a socialist powerhouse!”

These slogans continue endlessly. People raise their voices, competing to demonstrate their loyalty. After years of repetition, perhaps the boundary between sincerity and performance has blurred.

While people around the world set personal goals like “get healthier,” “learn a new language,” “spend more time with family,” or “travel more,” North Koreans have only one New Year’s resolution: to offer endless loyalty and obedience to the Kim family. Personal dreams and happiness come second. Or perhaps they don’t exist at all.

A New Year Without Choice

The North Korean New Year’s Day presents a scene that would seem alien and shocking to people around the world. Instead of dreaming of a hopeful future with family, citizens spend their day following a state-mandated schedule: at the statues, in study sessions, at pledge gatherings.

Sleeping in on New Year’s morning, enjoying a leisurely brunch with family, going to see a movie with friends—such simple freedoms are denied to North Koreans. Their time flows according to a predetermined schedule, a schedule written not by individuals but by the state.

Do they truly want this kind of New Year? Or are they simply complying and surviving? What does a “meaningful New Year” even mean for them?

No one can easily answer these questions. What is certain is that the North Korean New Year is filled not with free choice and personal happiness, but with collective duty and political loyalty. And this is their daily reality, an inescapable existence.

#NorthKorea #DPRK #HumanRights #LifeInNorthKorea #NewYearInNorthKorea #InsideNorthKorea #NKDefector #FreedomMatters #TrueStory #Awareness