Ordinary North Koreans are the true audience for Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons tests

Among the many snippets of advice North Korean leader Kim Jong-il gave to his people was to wrap themselves in mystery, so their enemies could never quite figure them out. By enemies, Kim meant all foreigners, who continue to be baffled by a regime that has since passed over to hereditary successor Kim Jong-un.

In 2016, as North Korea steps up provocations with a nuclear test, a rocket launch and threats to turn the South Korean capital into “powder”, Kim’s philosophy of mystique explains Pyongyang’s more bewildering policies. The former leader, after all, was the chief agent responsible for restarting Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme, and with good reason: missiles provide a spectacle for and a means to control the masses. Televised and staged images of missile launches also provide excellent material for the state’s greatest weapon – its propaganda apparatus.

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That may sound self-evident, but what’s less obvious is the regime’s motive for violating nearly all the UN Security Council’s sanctions resolutions: to win back North Korean hearts and minds with displays of military power, and to create an atmosphere of heightened tensions to step up control, as more people in the not-so-isolated country come into contact with foreign and South Korean media circulating in the country’s grey markets.

The North Korean regime is escalating its belligerent stance because it has lost unprecedented control of the country.

Millions of people, including those in the North Korean upper class, are now familiar with South Korean media, and North Korean defectors I’ve spoken to say watching South Korean soap operas motivated them to leave in hope of a better life. For ordinary North Koreans, the availability of capitalist media not only proves the government is telling lies, but also appeals amid the demands of daily life in the new, every-man-for-himself society that emerged after the famine. Individuals are being left to fend for themselves, but they also have more freedom. For authorities, the loss of control over the population represents a brewing crisis that has only grown with increasing corruption and bribery, the rise of grey markets and the circulation of illegal foreign and South Korean films.

The North Korean leadership has been painfully aware of competing forces for quite some time. As early as 2000, the state arrested more than a hundred people for illicit business dealings in the border city of Hyesan, but punishment was mitigated when Kim Jong-il discovered party officials were too heavily involved. With the emergence of hundreds of unofficial markets, ordinary people are buying into images of South Korea and that trend is irreversible. There’s not much the state can do at this point.