中文导读
朝鲜对外政策一向封闭，虽然有超过300万人口拥有手机，但这些手机仅具备通话、拍照等基本功能，民众在接收外界资讯和网络服务等方面受到了严格的限制。一些走私外国剧集等违禁品的黑市由此应运而生，为朝鲜民众打开了接触外部世界的窗口。然而，政府的严格管控下这些违禁服务还能走多远？外国先进文明的诱惑又会对民众产生多大的影响力？这些问题仍有待时间给我们最终解答。
What North Koreans learn from their smartphones
THE world may think of North Korea as a “hermit kingdom”, but its 25m citizens are surprisingly wired. Perhaps half of all urban households now own a Chinese-made “notel”, a portable media player. Over 3m have mobile-phone subscriptions, with Northern-branded smartphones like the Pyongyang and the Arirang. South Korean NGOs that smuggle foreign films and TV shows into the North on USBs receive text messages from their contacts there with requests for specific titles (South Korean soaps and Hollywood dramas are popular).
The North Korean government, which has long relied on isolation to keep its wretched people in servitude, has nonetheless abetted this revolution. In 2008 it invited Orascom, an Egyptian telecoms firm, to develop a 3G network in a joint venture with a state-owned enterprise. There are now many more sanctioned North Korean mobile phones than illegal Chinese ones (which can pick up a signal near the border); many use them to conduct business on the black market, to which the state turns a blind eye, by checking prices elsewhere in the country. Notels, which can be bought for around $50 on the black market, are also sold in state-run shops and appear to have been legalised in 2014.
If North Koreans are more easily able to trade information within their country, attempts to expunge information from elsewhere have never been so fierce. Since Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011, signal jammers for mobile phones have been set up along the border with China. These are so powerful that they have affected Chinese living on the other side. (North Koreans are banned from calling abroad.) CCTV cameras have also been installed to catch illicit callers.
Group 109, a new squad created by Mr Kim, frequently raids homes to crack down on foreign content, Chinese mobiles and short-wave radios. Of some 300 North Korean refugees surveyed in 2015 by America’s Broadcasting Board of Governors, almost two-thirds said that it had become more dangerous to watch foreign dramas under the young, Swiss-educated Mr Kim; none said it had become less so. Most North Koreans do not have access to the internet, and the few who are allowed to go online are limited to a state-run intranet with 28 tedious websites.
Nat Kretchun, one of the authors of “Compromising Connectivity”, a recent report on North Korea’s digitisation, says that the state is arming itself with censorship methods that “go beyond what is observed even in other authoritarian states”. The toolkit he describes is sobering. The new 3G network allows the regime to automate surveillance through a home-grown operating system called Red Star. One update, rolled out in late 2013, made unsanctioned media files unreadable. TraceViewer, installed by default on North Korean phones, takes random screenshots of users’ devices. Yet another bit of software scans files for suspicious phrases and deletes them. Red Star also allows authorities to trace forbidden content from device to device, as it is copied from one friend to the next. New rules require North Koreans to register their notels, allowing the authorities to monitor them, too. Mr Kretchun thinks that, as it brings more North Koreans on to its own “clean” network of devices, the state may eventually ban notels altogether.
Many watchers believe that, if North Koreans had enough mobile phones, received enough outside news and saw enough soaps depicting the South’s freedoms and riches, the regime would founder. The example of East Germany is tantalising. Thae Yong Ho, a North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea last year, says that the regime will “collapse on its own when enough external information introduced through drones or USBs reveals the truth of the Kim regime”. In a recent poll of defectors, 98% said they had used USBs to store illegal content.
Yet the jump from watching smuggled soaps to rising up against the government is a long one. Entertainment brings colour to dreary North Korean lives; rebellion brings death. And the work of activists ferreting content into North Korea is devilishly hard. Their methods are low-tech: floating sealed bags of USBs across the Yalu river on the Chinese border; sending balloons carrying DVDs over the heavily militarised border with the South. Some radio stations play content to recently arrived defectors to check that it is relevant. But few know what gets picked up. Some groups continue to promote ideological or incendiary content—such as clips of “The Interview”, a boorish comedy about an assassination attempt on Mr Kim—which may be more of a turn-off.
All the same, even sanctioned devices are allowing North Koreans to experiment with what they watch and say. As they continue to communicate about shared economic interests, they could one day form fledgling lobbies, perhaps first of traders, says Mr Kretchun. If the currency revaluation of 2009, which wiped out people’s savings, were to happen today, these new networks would be abuzz in an instant.
Soap operation
The state’s calculation is that technology will allow it to gain more control than it gives up. It can still dictate which kinds of handsets North Koreans use; it can terrorise its people with the threat of execution or the gulag; it can shut off the mobile network altogether. In 2004 it banned all mobiles after it concluded that one had been used to ignite a bomb at a railway station soon after a train carrying Kim Jong Il, Mr Kim’s father, had left. But part of the appeal of this new network to the regime is that it knows it can no longer keep all the information out, or its people from exchanging ideas. Better to monitor them.
In the meantime, foreign media will continue to fuel what young North Koreans have begun to call their “awakening”. There is a quiet defiance in enjoying foreign media and sharing it with a small group of friends, or complaining about the government’s attempts to block it. And defiance is rare in North Korea.
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Aug 10th 2017 | Asia | 989 words
