Juche

The Juche Idea, sometimes spelled Chuch'e (Korean pronunciation: [tɕutɕʰe]) is a political thesis of Kim Il-sung, the founder of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which says that the Korean masses are the masters of the country's development. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Kim elaborated the Juche Idea into a set of principles that the government uses to justify its policy decisions. Among these are independence from great powers, a strong military posture, and reliance on Korean national resources. The name comes from juche, meaning "main body" or "mainstream," and is sometimes translated in North Korean sources as "independent stand" or "spirit of self-reliance." It has also been interpreted as "always putting Korean things first." According to Kim Il-sung, the Juche Idea is based on the belief that "man is the master of everything and decides everything."

Origin

Juche Hangul 주체사상 Hanja 主體思想 Revised Romanization Juche sasang

North Korean sources trace the origins of Juche to the 1930s. According to these sources the earliest mention of Juche was in a June 30, 1930 speech by Kim Il-sung, who was then 18 years old. The authenticity of these early speeches, however, is disputed.

The first known reference to Juche was a speech given by Kim Il-sung on December 28, 1955, titled "On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work." In this speech, Kim urged party propagandists not to import ideas and customs from the Soviet Union, but to portray Korea as a revolutionary nation in its own right. He stated,

To make revolution in Korea we must know Korean history and geography as well as the customs of the Korean people. Only then is it possible to educate our people in a way that suits them and to inspire in them an ardent love for their native place and their motherland.

Kim focuses on the importance of education and learning Korean history. Through the education of Korean people's own history will it "stimulate their national pride and rouse the broad masses to revolutionary struggle". Kim talks throughout his speech bulleting monumental events of the past and how certain outcomes could have been prevented. He stresses the importance of remembering their struggle, and that not learning their past, or denying it would "mean that our people did nothing."

Hwang Jang-yeop, Kim's top adviser on ideology, discovered this speech later in the 1950s when Kim sought to develop his own version of Marxism–Leninism, which Juche was originally seen as a progression of, and began to craft the idea birthing it into the society-defining credo it became. By 1958, Kim Il-sung had established himself as "the unrivaled ruler in North Korea" and thus started the language used to reference the people's devotion to Kim. This resulted in building a personality cult around him to glorify Kim Il-sung and his family's history and legitimacy as leaders. Even following Kim Il-sung's death he remains the eternal president and even those who were critical of his son Kim Jung-il still passionately revered him. The rewritten history of Korea goes as far back as 1866 when the "heroic" Kim family and his great-grandfather had fought against American imperialism. This is an example of the way in which the North Korean political machine began to mythologize Kim's history and abilities. The cult of personality surrounding the Kim family has both legitimated and helped garner support for the Juche ideology. Kim Il-sung was revered as the "supreme leader and the sun" of all people.

The Juche Idea itself gradually emerged as a systematic ideological doctrine under the political pressures of the Sino-Soviet split. Development of an independent approach to Marxism-Leninism was necessary to remain neutral as the split intensified. The ideology was pushed aside for almost a decade, until it reemerged when Kim spoke of the chuch'e principles to the Korean People's Army in 1963. Kim Il-sung outlined the three fundamental principles of Juche in his April 14, 1965, speech "On Socialist Construction and the South Korean Revolution in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea":

Former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il officially authored the definitive statement on Juche in a 1982 document titled On the Juche Idea. He had final authority over the interpretation of the state ideology and incorporated the Songun (army-first) policy into it in 1996.

The idea of Juche was developed by Kim Il-sung as the guide and foundation of all conduct in North Korea. The meaning of Juche is "self-reliance" and "independence" in politics, economics, defense, and ideology. Juche emphasized independence in political work, self-sustenance in economic endeavors, and self-defense in national defense. Chajusong (self-reliance), minjok tongnip (national or ethnic independence), charip kyongje (independent economy), the common factors that all the colonized peoples wanted at mid-century, are the synonyms of Juche and can be the antonyms of sadaejuui, which means serving and relying upon foreign power. The second character of Juche, che, is found in the late-nineteenth century self-strengthening movement of Li Hung-chang’s term. Che of Juche is same as ti of ti-yung in Chinese learning and tai of kokutai in Japanese learning. The Koreans use Juche in their case with the goal of creating a subjective, solipsistic state of mind, the correct thought that must precede and that will then determine correct action but also as a means of defining what is simultaneously modern and Korean.

Ideology and practical application

According to Kim Jong-il's On the Juche Idea, the application of Juche in state policy entails the following:

The people must have independence (chajusong) in thought and politics, economic self-sufficiency, and self-reliance in defense.

Policy must reflect the will and aspirations of the masses and employ them fully in revolution and construction.

Methods of revolution and construction must be suitable to the situation of the country.

The most important work of revolution and construction is molding people ideologically as communists and mobilizing them to constructive action.

The Juche outlook requires absolute loyalty to the revolutionary party and leader. In North Korea, these are the Workers' Party of Korea and the supreme commander, formerly Kim Jong-il.

In official North Korean histories, one of the first purported applications of Juche was the Five-Year Plan of 1956-1961, also known as the Chollima Movement, which led to the Chongsan-ri Method and the Taean Work System. The Five-Year Plan involved rapid economic development of North Korea, with a focus on heavy industry, to ensure political independence from both the Soviet Union and China. The Chollima Movement, however, applied the same method of centralized state planning that began with the Soviet First Five-Year Plan in 1928. The campaign also coincided with and was partially based on Mao's First Five-Year Plan and the Great Leap Forward. North Korea was apparently able to avoid the catastrophes of the Great Leap Forward.

Despite its aspirations to self-sufficiency, North Korea has continually  relied on economic assistance from other countries. Historically, North Korea received most  of its assistance from the USSR until its collapse in 1991. In the period after the Korean War, North Korea relied on economic assistance and loans from "fraternal" countries from 1953–1963 and also depended considerably on Soviet industrial aid from 1953 to 1976. Following the fall of the USSR, the North Korean economy went into a crisis, with consequent infrastructural failures contributing to the mass famine of the mid-1990s. After several years of starvation, the People's Republic of China agreed to be a substitute for the Soviet Union as a major aid provider, supplying over US$400 million per year in humanitarian assistance. Since 2007, North Korea also received large supplies of heavy fuel oil and technical assistance as scheduled in the six-party talks framework. North Korea was the second largest recipient of international food aid in 2005, and continues to suffer chronic food shortages.

In 1972, Juche replaced Marxism-Leninism in the revised North Korean constitution as the official state ideology, this being a response to the Sino-Soviet split. Juche was nonetheless defined as a "creative application of Marxism-Leninism." Kim Il-sung also explained that Juche was not original to North Korea and that in formulating it he only laid stress on a programmatic orientation that is inherent to all Stalinist states.

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea’s greatest economic benefactor, all reference to Marxism-Leninism was dropped in the revised 1998 constitution. Some Marxist-Leninist phraseology remained in occasional use, but in 2009, the word 공산주의 ("communism") itself was dropped from the constitution altogether. The establishment of the Songun doctrine in the mid-1990s, however, has formally designated the military, not the proletariat or working class, as the main revolutionary force in North Korea.

Many commentators, journalists, and scholars outside North Korea equate Juche with Stalinism and call North Korea a Stalinist country. Some specialists have argued otherwise and have attempted to characterize the North Korean state as corporatist (Bruce Cumings), national socialist (Brian Myers), guerrillaist (Wada Haruki), monarchist (Dae Sook-suh), and theocratic (Han S. Park, Christopher Hitchens). Those who have made conditional arguments that North Korea is a Stalinist regime include Charles Armstrong, Adrian Buzo, Chong-sik Lee, and Robert Scalapino.

Kim Il-sung's policy statements and speeches from the 1940s and 1950s confirm that the North Korean government accepted Joseph Stalin's 1924 theory of Socialism in One Country and its model of centralized autarkic economic development. Following Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, the North Korean leader wrote an emotional obituary in his honor titled "Stalin Is the Inspiration for the Peoples Struggling for Their Freedom and Independence" in a special issue of the WPK newspaper Rodong Sinmun (March 10, 1953), the opening of which reads:

Stalin has died. The ardent heart of the great leader of progressive mankind has ceased to beat. This sad news has spread over Korean territory like lightning, inflicting a bitter blow to the hearts of millions of people. Korean People's Army soldiers, workers, farmers, and students, as well as all residents of both South and North Korea, have heard the sad news with profound grief. The very being of Korea has seemed to bow down, and mothers who had apparently exhausted their tears in weeping for the children they had lost in the bombing of the [American] air bandits sobbed again.

Despite this, statements by Kim Il-sung concerning learning from Stalin and the Soviet experience were later removed from public record.

After Stalin's death, Stalin's cult of personality was denounced at the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, North Korean state authorities ended overt adulation of the Soviet leader. But the regime refused to follow the example of Soviet political reform, which it decried as modern revisionism, or join the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), the major international trade organization of Marxist-Leninist states subordinated to the economic development of the Soviet Union. At present, the North Korean government admits no connection between Juche and the ideas of Stalin, though occasional mention is made of his supposed political merits.

Political thinking from Maoist China has greatly influenced North Korea, such as the North's Chollima mass mobilization movements, which were based on China's Great Leap Forward. However, the ruling party in Pyongyang strongly denounces any Maoist influences on Juche in an attempt to appear independent. So even though the influence of Mao Zedong is also not formally acknowledged in North Korea, WPK ideologists and speech writers began to openly use Maoist ideas, such as the concept of self-regeneration, in the 1950s and 1960s. Maoist theories of art also began to influence North Korean musical theater during this time. These developments occurred as a result of the influence of the Chinese Army's involvement during the Korean War, as well as during the Sino-Soviet split when Kim Il-sung sided with Mao against Soviet de-Stalinization. Kim attended middle school[17] in China, he was conversant in Chinese, and he had been a guerrilla partisan in the Communist Party of China from about 1931-1941. The postwar Kim Il-sung regime had also emulated Mao’s Great Leap Forward, his theory of the Mass line (qunzhong luxian), and the guerrilla tradition. Juche, however, does not exactly share the Maoist faith in the peasantry over the working class and the village over the city.

Post-Mao

After Mao's death, the policies of Maoist autarchic peasant-based socialism were phased out in China. Deng Xiaoping launched the Four Modernizations program in 1978 and opened China to sweeping economic reforms that incorporated elements of the market economy. Deng Xiaoping Theory was officially instituted in the 1980s. Despite relatively cordial Beijing-Pyongyang relations in this period, the North Korean regime was reluctant to adopt the Chinese open-door policy and model of economic modernization, because its leadership feared such reforms would compromise the Juche ideology and result in political destabilization and events similar to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (Lee, p. 1998, 1999 ). After the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc between 1989 and 1991, with the consequent loss of economic aid, North Korea began to undertake cautious, experimental, and selective emulation of the Chinese model.

The Joint Venture Law of 1984 was, however, among the first Deng-inspired North Korean attempts to attract foreign capital within the programmatic orientation of Juche doctrine. This was followed by emulation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. North Korea established its first capitalist SEZ in 1991, the Rajin-Sonbong Economic Special Zone. The 1998 Juche constitution was also written with provisions to defend private property and joint venture enterprises with capitalist countries, making possible the establishment of the Pyongyang-based Research Institute on Capitalism in 2000, and allowing for the price and wage reforms of July 1, 2002. Deng Xiaoping Theory accepts marketization of the Chinese economy as "socialism with Chinese characteristics" or a "socialist market economy," and the North Korean Juche ideology rationalizes such reforms under the concept of "socialism of our style."

On the role of the nation-state in Juche, according to Kim Il-sung’s “On the Questions of the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (1967) and Kim Jong-il’s “On Preserving the Juche Character and National Character of the Revolution and Construction” (1997), the goal of revolution and construction under Juche is the establishment of socialism and communism within the national borders of North Korea. Contrary to the perspectives of classical Marxism, Juche also maintains that Koreans are a blood-based national community, that the Korean nation-state will remain forever, and that Koreans will always live in Korea and speak Korean (The Khmer Rouge also incorporated Khmer Nationalism as an ideological platform, though Marx opposed identity politics).

Despite the nationalism of Juche, North Korean ideologists have argued that other countries can and should learn from Juche and adapt its principles to their national conditions. The North Korean government admits that Juche addresses questions previously considered in classical Marxism and its subsequent developments in Soviet Marxism-Leninism, but now distances itself from and even repudiates aspects of these political philosophies. The official position as maintained in Kim Jong-il’s “The Juche Philosophy Is an Original Revolutionary Philosophy” (1996) is that Juche is a completely new ideology created by Kim Il-sung, who does not depend on the Marxist classics. As a result, the North Korean Constitution has no mention of Marxism-Leninism, but rather occupies its entire preamble with statements about Kim Il-sung.

While advocating that Juche is tailored to the national peculiarities of North Korea, as opposed to conforming to the premises of classical Marxist international socialism (i.e., the workers of the world have no nation and workers of the world, unite), the North Korean government does make some reference to the classical internationalists Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, as well as Vladimir Lenin and his successor Joseph Stalin, as creditable leaders of the socialist movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before the advent of Juche in 1955. By contrast, Maoism is rarely mentioned, and Deng Xiaoping's ideology for economic reform is basically suppressed in its entirety by the Kim Jong-Il regime. In addition, the writings of classical Marxism are generally forbidden for lay readers in North Korea. All references to communism have been removed from the 2009 constitution.

Effects on the economy

North Korea's economic program under Juche is to “build a rich and strong state that can guarantee our nation’s chajusong.” Kim Il-sung guaranteed the chajusong (freedom) of North Korea’s national economy claiming that North Korea must use its own domestic resources and its own strength to be independent of external sources from other countries. Even though Juche was not the ultimate cause of North Korea’s famine and unstable economy, the idea had drastically reformed the country’s economic system. Due to the Juche idea of the principles of chaju (independence in politics) and charip (self-sustenance in the economy), which are the two of the three fundamental principles that Kim Il-sung outlined in 1965, the country isolated itself from rest of the world and hardly opened up diplomatic relationships with other countries until the collapse of the Soviet bloc forced it to engage with other countries. The charip idea of a self-contained economy was unlike other countries that withdrew themselves from the world economy such as Albania under Enver Hoxha and Myanma (Burma), two countries that "withdrew" to no apparent purpose as their economies idled along or got worse; North Korea didn't idle but grew until the 1980s.

The North Koreans withdrew from the world economy in order to develop their economy and country. By being able to sustain their own economy, they would, in theory, be independent of other countries and would be self-reliable. However, they had to rely on USSR and China to sustain their livelihood. In 1986, Kim Il-sung set the goal of ten million tons of grain production. Yet the plan failed and the country produced only four million tons of grain and North Korea had to rely on foreign aid to provide them with two million tons of grain. The six million tons of grain they managed to get a hold of was the bare minimum to feed their population. The economic crisis continued to be visible even in the 1990s. "Most of the blame was attributed not to North Korea's ponderous socialist system but to 'the collapse of socialist countries and the socialist market of the world,' which 'shattered' many of P'yongyang's trade partners and agreements.” The fall of the socialist market and trade partners led North Korea into a crisis that was simply not manageable with their current system. As a result, paradoxical to the Juche philosophy of autarky, North Korea established the Najin-Sonbong free economic and trade zone during the mid-1990s.

Investors from firms in Hong Kong, Japan, France, South Korea, and the United States are some of the countries that opened manufacturing facilities in the DPRK. The Shell Oil Corporation (in 1995) is one example of large multinational corporations that invested in the open trade area. Near the parallel, North Korea also opened the city of Kaesong for exports until 2010 when South Korea imposed economic sanctions after the sinking of a South Korean warship.

The third principle of the Juche idea, chawi (self-defense in national defense), caused North Korea to spend much of its capital for military purposes, thus decreasing the amount of capital that could be used for developing the economy (it is estimated that 25 percent of the annual budget goes to the military). Kim Jong Il explicitly expressed his "army first" policy since the mid-1990s.

Although in 1949, common objects such as pens or watches were rare in North Korea, by the mid 1960s North Korea's economy was growing faster than the South's. In 1957-1961, the Five Year Plan placed reconstructing and developing the major industries destroyed by the war on the top of the priority list and placed consumer goods at the bottom of the priorities. This bias toward rebuilding major industries, "combined with unprecedentedly large amounts of aid from the Soviet bloc, pushed the economy forward at world-beating growth rates in the 1950s and 1960s".

Social class

Unlike the Choson dynasty where there was a huge gap between the upper and lower classes, North Korea had adopted a unified social mass, also known as the gathered-together "people". Instead of a strict social hierarchy or a class divided society, North Korea had, in theory, divided the union into three classes-peasant, worker, and the samuwon (intellectuals and professionals) where each sect is just as important as the other. The samuwon class consisted of clerks, small traders, bureaucrats, professors and writers. This was a unique class that was created in order to increase the education and literature of North Korea. Normally Communist nations would value only the farmers or laborers, thus in the USSR intelligentsia was not an independent class of its own, but an insertion between the classes proletariat and bourgeoisie. Language reforms followed revolutions more than once, such as the simplification of Chinese characters under Mao (a consequence of the divergent orthographic choices of Taiwan and the People's Republic of China), or the simplification of Russian language after the 1917 revolution in Russia and consequent struggle against illiteracy, known in Soviet Russia as Likbez (Likvidaciya Bezgramotnosti, liquidation of illiteracy).

The emphasis on literacy and education stems from the understanding, explained by Lenin, that illiterate workers or peasants can't become subjects of political struggle. It was necessary, as well, to create a class of highly skilled workers, which was impossible without a pool of literate workers to draw from. North Korea, too, believed that promoting the education of the populace was as important as economic growth. These three ideas are cherished, and are symbolized through the symbol or statue of a writing brush across the hammer and sickle. North Korea also adopted a Soviet-style socialism approach. They believed in the rapid industrialization through labor and believed in subjecting nature to human will. By restructuring the social class into a mass of people who are theoretically all equal, the North Korean government claimed it would be able to attain self-reliance or Juche in the upcoming years. This is questionable, as the country suffers massive food shortages annually and is heavily dependent on foreign aid.

Criticism

Human rights monitoring organizations and political analysts such as Brian Reynolds Myers continually report that the actual situation in North Korea bears no resemblance to Juche theory. Myers in fact goes so far as to propose Juche is nothing but a sham developed to establish Kim Il-sung as a political thinker alongside Mao Zedong. The country's economy has depended heavily on imports and foreign aid before and after the collapse of the Communist trading bloc. They also claim that the opinions of the people have no actual weight in decision-making. Leading Juche theorist Hwang Jang-yop joined these criticisms after defecting to South Korea, although he maintained his belief in the Juche Idea as he understood it. Political scientist Han S. Park in his book Juche: The Politics of Unconventional Wisdom (2002) and theologian Thomas J. Belke in Juche: A Christian Study of North Korea's State Religion (1999) liken Juche to a religious movement.

In the People's Republic of China and Vietnam, countries that have both moved away from personality-dominated autocratic institutions of state, Juche is characterized as a ridiculous idea by various internet communities, and has become the subject of satire by influential Chinese novelty film director Hu Ge.[28] Juche is seen by some as a post-Maoist extreme that propels the Korean dictator to a god-like status, while others see it as a Maoist emulation. Because of the nature of Juche ideology and its incorporation of Korean nationalism, it has been reported that North Korea continues to ignore the contributions of China's People's Liberation Army in the Korean War.

Outside North Korea

During the Cold War, North Korea promoted Juche and the principle of "self-reliance" as a guide for other countries, particularly third world countries, to develop their economies. Indonesian president Sukarno visited North Korea in 1964 and attempted to implement the North Korean economic program in his country,[29] but it resulted in a military coup. Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu was impressed by ideological mobilization and mass adulation in North Korea during his Asia visit in 1971, and began his systematization campaign shortly afterward with those features.

The North Korean government hosted its first international seminar on the Juche Idea in September 1977. Juche study groups might exist in several countries around the world. The Korean Central News Agency and the Voice of Korea sometimes refer to statements by these groups. However, since Juche study groups are seldom mentioned in reports other than those state-run agencies (KCNA and Voice of Korea), most Juche study groups are likely fabrications of North Korean propaganda. According to the North Korean-run website www.Korea-dpr.com, two of the most prominent of these groups are International Institute of the Juche Idea in Japan and the Korean Friendship Association, an international organisation presided over by Spanish national Alejandro Cao de Benos de Les y Pérez. Similarly, a small stalinist-inclined organisation called Partei der Arbeit Deutschlands (PdAD, 'Labour Party of Germany') may have emerged in Germany. The party collaborated closely with Gesellschaft zum Studium und Verbreitung der Dschutsche-Ideologie in Deutschland ('Society of Studying and Disseminating the Juche Ideology in Germany'). Both were led by Michael Koth, who later moved towards neo-Nazi positions. The modern Communist Party of Germany has Juche influences. Kim Jong-il emphasized that other countries should not apply Juche formulaically, but should use methods suitable to the situation, consistent with criticisms that Juche ideology is flawed.

Calendar

The North Korean government and associated organizations use a variation of the Gregorian calendar with a Juche year based on April 15, 1912 CE (AD), the date of birth of Kim Il-sung, as year 1. The calendar was introduced in 1997. Months are unchanged from those in the standard Gregorian calendar. In many instances, the Juche year is given after the CE year, for example, 27 June 2007 Juche 96. But in North Korean publications, the Juche year is usually placed before the corresponding CE year, as in Juche 96 (2007). Calendar schemes based on political era are also found in the Japanese era name (Nengo) system and in the Minguo calendar used in the Republic of China (Taiwan), though these are not based on the birth of an individual as in the Gregorian and Juche calendars. Incidentally, the year numbers of the Juche calendar, Minguo calendar, and Japan's Taishō period correspond to each other even though they were not meant to be related.

In August 1997 the Central People's Committee of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea promulgated regulations regarding use of the Juche Era calendar, according to which for dates occurring before 1912 the Gregorian calendar year is used exclusively, so that there is no "negative" Juche year, or "Before Juche" concept. For example, 1682 is rendered as "1682", while 2012 is rendered as "Juche 101, 2012" or as "Juche 101 (2012)." Critics of Juche charge that the "Juche dating system", as it is based on a person's birth date rather than a political era, reflects a dynastic tradition where era names are specified for ruling Emperors of Japan and China, as well as the Korean sovereigns.

(in Wikipedia)

Juche can be fun...