Escape from Camp 14: – 2013 by Blaine Harden

 Escape from North Korea  read4/5/16

This book is more than just the story of Shim's escape it explains the history of North Korea which is not a communist state as such, but the worst of totalitarian regimes badly run by the "Kim dynasty."
The reality is it is more a medieval feudal society with a system of castes; those closest to the ruler live in privilege in and around Pyongyang and their children get a proper education. Those who have shown any form of disloyalty to the regime or have family in South Korea at the bottom or even kept locked in gulag type camps and their children are also prisoners worked to death as the total untouchables.
1948 to 1994  Kim Il Sung
1994 to 2011  Kim Jung Ill
2011 onwards  Kim Jung Un
The book gives examples of a scam how N. Korea took reinsurance and then claimed money for millions and Lloyds of London and a Swiss Insurance lost out but once only.  To the starving people corn and pickled cabbage was the cheapest food available the better off could afford rice. In summer they managed to gather mushrooms and berries in the forest, rats was one of the sources of some protein but most people are malnourished, uneducated and shorter than the S. Koreans and not equipped for modern society.
There was a severe famine in the 1990 and the Americans sent food without the chance to see that it was distributed to the starving.  Instead government officials sold it to merchants and this resulted in a market developing beyond the government control.

The book describes dam building as hand work of thousand and after he finished school was sent to work on a pig farm and later became a sewing machine repairer and trained a person Kemp  into the job. Kemp was from the political elite who had fallen out of favour and told Shim about the outside world but what interested Shim was that there was plenty of food abroad. The border crossing to China had become an industry to many officers and soldiers taking bribes but most of the money came from families in South Korea. Even transport which was supposed to be government owned was an industry with bribes taken by government officials.

South Korea has world trade 255 time  of that of the North     The South pays a lot to absorb Northern defectors and tries to appease the North to keep peace.  If the North were united to the South it would cost 2 and a half time what West Germany paid to absorb their East.
The South has a population of 51 million while the north has 24 million.
The South has a GDP of $36 000pp while the north it is as little as $1 800pp
This book was extremely interesting in trying to explain a closed society of which we know so little of and how destructive it is to its own people.