Link to the article - Hope, pride, fear: how North Koreans feel about their homeland
Quick disclaimer: I'm away from home and don't have access to anything other than my collection of e-books, so this won't be as detailed as I'd like.
Having just read the article, I think that point (and honestly, most of the paragraph that surrounds it) is a little problematic. However, in fairness to the writer, I think she's really just making a point about how the North Koreans themselves perceive this issue, rather than how a statistician or historian would see it. (Her final conclusion, which we really can't discuss here at length due to the subreddit's rules, is also within shouting distance of the consensus among Western intelligence agencies regarding NK's pursuit of nuclear weapons. In short, the Kim regime may be populated by rat bastards, but they're rat bastards who read the newspapers and know what happened to Qaddafi and Ukraine after they gave up their nukes.) She's absolutely right that many North Koreans look back on the early Cold War period with nostalgia, when things seemed to be running okay and there was enough food and clothing for everyone ... or was there?
To get us all on the same page, this is the bit in question:
Disaffection among the rank and file, who have enjoyed none of the luxuries of their superiors, is real and growing. The country was once one of the most prosperous and industrialised in the region. The state gave its people jobs, food and healthcare and promised there was “nothing to envy” in the outside world. But the devastating famine of the 90s, which killed hundreds of thousands, spelled the death blow for a system that was already struggling.
So let's tackle this point by point:
"Disaffection among the rank and file, who have enjoyed none of the luxuries of their superiors, is real and growing." True. The North Korean regime has never successfully reclaimed the absolute control it exercised over its population before the 1994-1998 famine. However, further discussion violates our 20-year rule, so we have to leave this alone.
"The country was once one of the most prosperous and industrialised in the region." Ehhhh ... sort of. The really important bit is that NK was more prosperous and industrialized than South Korea for a period between, say, 1955-1975, but I'm not sure exactly how it rates elsewhere.
To start off: I'm not totally sure what she means here by saying "region," which could have an impact on how we treat this. I assume she's referring to East Asia, and political scientists and historians generally consider East Asia to be China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Mongolia, with some wiggle room for eastern Russia, Vietnam (if you want to define East Asia on the basis of broad and historical Chinese influence) and Hong Kong/Macau. No matter how you slice it, there aren't a whole lot of countries for comparison, so that makes our job a bit easier.
When the Japanese empire annexed the Korean peninsula (arguably a process that began slowly in 1876, though not formalized until 1910), it didn't take long for colonial authorities to figure out that the mountainous northern half had a lot of valuable coal, iron, and gold veins. The south was the breadbasket. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese built a lot of mines, roads, railways, factories, and infrastructure in the north. The south's major road and rail arteries were constructed mostly with the thought of getting food to the north and to the empire's territories in Manchuria. Put simply, the north built and mined stuff, and the south grew stuff.
When Japan got drop-kicked out of Korea after World War II, none of this changed overnight, and it was still true both during and after the Korean War ... mostly. The American bombing campaign went after anything that looked like it was sticking more than two feet out of the ground, like bridges, railways, factories, and unusually tall geraniums. While the North Koreans had to rebuild and repair most of their transportation infrastructure and factories after the war, they still had a leg up on the South Koreans. It's nearly always easier to fix something that already exists than to build something from nothing, although no one seems to have informed my state's highway commission of this.
So when historians look at North Korea vs. South Korea in the postwar period, they typically start off by acknowledging that:
Basically, a lot of inherited Japanese industrial investment that they were able to build on + a tremendous amount of economic assistance from the U.S.S.R. = a fairly optimistic set of numbers for the regime. On paper at least, they were doing better than the South Koreans. NK had more easily-exploitable sources of national income, all of the road and rail links to the peninsula's only neighbors, and was significantly ahead with respect to industrialization. But how much of this is owed to Kim il-Sung, and how much of it is owed to leftover Japanese infrastructure and a relatively privileged position for trade?
People who later defected have commented that, while the 1955-1975 period was kind of a golden age for the country, and anyone old enough to remember it feels nostalgic, it was far from perfect. The population grew, but agricultural and industrial output didn't keep up. People were not allotted clothes or household goods as frequently as they would have liked, and Kim's dream of the people eating "rice with meat soup" remained a dream. Pockets of the country -- most miserably, the growing number of prison camps that Kim built to house threats to the regime, real or otherwise -- were pretty much expected to fend for themselves food-wise and generally did poorly. Moreover, the public distribution system stuck to a rigidly-enforced series of grain allotments divided by sex and occupation that wasn't that generous even at the best of times.
With respect to other nations in East Asia:
"The state gave its people jobs, food and healthcare and promised there was “nothing to envy” in the outside world." Mostly true, although the quality of the jobs, food, and healthcare provided was notso hotso. However, I'd argue that NK's health system is actually a decent argument for how much you can do with even limited resources (and, let's be frank, the coercive power of a totalitarian state; dictators can order people to report for health checks without giving a damn about whether or not they actually like going to the doctor).
"But the devastating famine of the 90s, which killed hundreds of thousands, spelled the death blow for a system that was already struggling." True. Famines are a major crisis of legitimacy for governments, and justly so; a famine can be started by a natural disaster like a flood, but it generally does not happen because of the flood, if that distinction makes any sense -- more background on this here (but read /u/Instantcoffee's critiques below too). Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland in their statistical study Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform came to the conclusion that roughly a million deaths can be directly attributed to the famine, although they discuss why even this painstakingly-researched number is problematic.
Could you add a link to the article in question so the context is included?