There is a place in Pyongyang where the streets are wider, the apartment blocks have freshly painted facades, and the shop windows display products that the vast majority of North Koreans will never be able to buy. There live the men and women who sustain Kim Jong-un's regime: diplomats, high-ranking officials of the ruling Workers' Party, military leaders, and state enterprise executives. From the outside, they seem to belong to a shielded aristocracy. However, from within, many live with the constant fear that an accusation or a family member's mistake could erase everything that the regime granted them in an instant.
The fate of Jang Song-thaek best encapsulates the fragility of the North Korean elite. Kim Jong-un's uncle, for years considered the second most powerful man in the country and the leader's main mentor after his rise to power. He controlled significant sectors of the economy, oversaw lucrative businesses with China, and many analysts saw him as the true strongman of the country. But in December 2013, he was accused of corruption, treason, and attempting to build his own faction. Just a few days later, he was executed. His downfall triggered a broad purge among relatives, collaborators, and officials linked to him.
Jieun Baek, one of the leading international experts on North Korea, explains that these cases perfectly illustrate that, in the Kim dictatorship, the highest rank does not guarantee any protection: the closer one is to power, the more devastating the fall can be.
Baek elaborates on this in her new book: Privileged but Powerless. Her research, based on interviews with diplomats, party officials, state entrepreneurs, officials from Office 39 - the body responsible for earning foreign currency for the Kim family - and former bodyguards, provides an unprecedented look into the internal workings of power in Pyongyang. All the testimonies were born, studied, or worked in the capital, the political heart of the country, and experienced firsthand the regime's machinery.
"The mistaken idea is to think that privilege necessarily implies power or security," explains Baek in an interview with LOC. "The elites may enjoy better housing, education, food, healthcare, employment, and access to consumer goods than the vast majority of the population. Some travel abroad, hold important positions, or live in the most exclusive neighborhoods of Pyongyang. However, almost none of these advantages are protected rights. All these privileges are conditional, dependent on political criteria, and can be revoked at any time."
The researcher recounts how a shift in political winds, a self-serving denunciation by a rival, a comment interpreted as disloyalty, or even the behavior of a brother, a son, or a cousin can trigger purges capable of sweeping entire families away.
Many of the interviewees had held positions that any foreign observer would associate with immense influence. However, behind the privileges, they described lives dominated by anxiety. "These individuals live closer to the center of power, but also closer to its dangers," summarizes Baek. "Their position exposes them to greater scrutiny, competition, and suspicion. Many described lives marked by profound insecurity and the certainty that none of their achievements could protect them from the State."
Baek explains that members of the North Korean elite do not always know where the boundaries lie, which relationships remain secure, or what behavior could later be reinterpreted as disloyalty. And that mechanism has a devastating effect: it prevents the leaders themselves from trusting each other. No one truly knows what their office mate thinks, the neighbor in the building reserved for high officials, or the colleague from the ministry. They all publicly represent absolute loyalty while harboring doubts they never dare to share.
"The system does not hold together because all high-ranking officials wholeheartedly believe in it," argues Baek. "It holds, in part, because no one can truly know what others think, whom to trust, or if collective action is possible. The regime remains extremely effective at rewarding obedience and raising the cost of any act of dissent."
Baek's interest in North Korea arose by chance. In 2005, during her first semester as a student at Harvard, she attended a lecture by Kang Chol-hwan, a survivor of one of the toughest prison camps in the Asian country, imprisoned with three generations of his family when he was just nine years old. "What I had in front of me was the story of a child whose life had been shattered simply for being born in a totalitarian state," she states. Since then, she has devoted over two decades to studying a society of which the world barely knows fragments.
She initially researched how movies, USB memories, and information from abroad were silently transforming the daily lives of North Koreans. Now, she has decided to focus on those who occupy the highest echelons of power. "Too often, North Koreans are portrayed as helpless victims or as faceless subjects of an all-powerful state," she asserts. "The people I have met are observant, resourceful, ambitious, with a sense of humor, fearful, brave, and morally complex, like human beings anywhere in the world."