What will bring change to North Korea?
The Human Rights Foundation’s Flash Drives for Freedom campaign aims to break North Korea’s information blockade
Once thought of as the most rigid of societies where change was not possible under the heavy grip of dictatorship and indoctrination, North Korea has undergone shifts since the famine of the 1990s, and even now is struggling toward change.
The collapse of the socialist planned economy, the tacit acceptance of private property, and advances in communication technology are all emblematic of this transformation.
For instance, mobile phones, virtually nonexistent before 2000, jumped from roughly 100,000 in 2008 to approximately 7 million in 2023, and are now in the hands of more than half of all households.
The spread of markets nationwide, the 2012 “June 28 Policy” allowing limited private land use, and the 2014 “May 30 Measures” that expanded individual responsibility within cooperative farms all pushed the country’s long-entrenched model into the past.
Today, as long as citizens pay greater dues to the state, the regime permits private business and turns a blind eye to personal wealth accumulation.
However, these changes have not yet translated into fundamental improvements in freedom and human rights.
That is because they have not been driven from the bottom-up by the people and for the benefit of the people. Rather they have come top-down as a consequence of policy adjustments and institutional reforms designed by the regime to preserve its grip on power.
The greatest barrier to bottom-up change is not only the suppression of free speech and free press, but the deep distrust among citizens fostered by the regime itself.
There is a saying in the country that captures this: “If three people gather, one is a spy.” From elementary school through old age, state-imposed systems of mutual criticism and surveillance have systematically severed trust between individuals, making social control more efficient.
As a result, no civic solidarity has been able to emerge that could channel discontent and calls for reform into a genuine force for change.
Recently, however, signs of restored trust between individuals have begun to appear. At the center of this phenomenon are young people, and the driving force behind it is content coming in from the outside.
Since the late 1990s, a steady flow of foreign culture and information has entered North Korea. It has been smuggled across the Chinese border, been carried in by ocean currents, come on the air waves in the form of foreign radio broadcasts, and it has arrived in on USB sticks and SD cards born on the wind in balloons.
This material carries stories focused on human instincts and emotions. They depict free expressions of affection, tell of the dating culture, and show colorful, creative fashion and design.
Such content has captivated the isolated North Koreans, opening up new worlds they could never imagine, let alone experience, inside their country, and allowing them to live vicariously.
Defectors often say, “There may be a breeze you’ve never felt before, but there’s no such thing as a person who’s seen it only once.” Despite harsher punishment since Kim Jong-un took over, young people’s thirst for outside content has kept the exchange alive.
Because sharing or watching foreign material in North Korea carries enormous risks, the relationships formed through this activity goes beyond a simple sense of closeness. They engender what is known as risk-based trust. This concept refers to the implicit promise and silent acknowledgement that neither side will betray the other, and it is creating powerful new social bonds within the regime’s repressive surveillance system.
The shared experience of watching outside dramas and videos also generates complicity-based trust. The very act of possessing and exchanging forbidden content forms a shared secret that gives people a sense of belonging and a psychological bond as members of the same side.
Trust built on risk and complicity, formed through outside content, has thus become a vital social resource, nurturing informal communities and the potential for resistant solidarity even within such a closed society.
Beyond entertainment or curiosity about the outside world, these materials act as catalysts, prompting people to recognize their own inhumane reality and ask new questions. The shifts in awareness and the slow rebuilding of trust that follow become essential engines of bottom-up change.
True change will come not from outside powers but from the North Korean people. It is possible, especially if its youth awaken on their own, recognize the problems, place trust in one another, and unite.
Our effort as outsiders should be to protect this spark and ensure it does not go out. We must broaden social consensus so that more people understand that the inflow of information is not mere outside interference, but rather a seed of human rights, freedom, and change.
Through the cooperation of civic groups, governments, and the international community, we must make sure that information reaches North Korea through safer and more diverse channels.
Eun-ju is a North Korean defector and the author of "A Thousand Miles to Freedom." She currently works as a social cooperation officer and researcher at the EUM Research Institute, contributing regularly to research on North Korea and defectors. Eun-ju holds a master’s degree in sociology from Korea University.
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