North Korea has shut down its largest wholesale market because of its apparent concern that big markets spread capitalist influence, a South Korean monitoring group said yesterday.
Authorities closed the Pyongsong market on the outskirts of the capital of Pyongyang in the middle of June and set up two smaller markets in nearby districts, the Seoul-based Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights said in a newsletter provided yesterday.
The move is believed to be an attempt to “control an excessive spread of markets,” while still allowing hungry people to seek food on their own at small markets, said Kim Yoon-tae, group secretary-general.
Kim said Pyongsong was the North’s biggest wholesale market with some 30,000 to 40,000 stalls.
The group regularly issues a newsletter on developments inside the North, citing information collected from sources it does not identify inside the country. North Korea is one of the world’s most closed nations, keeping tight control over its 24 million people without tolerating dissent or independent media.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles Seoul’s relations with the North, said it could not confirm the report.
Street markets have been allowed to spring up in communist North Korea in recent years as a way for hungry people to seek food and other necessities at a time when the central government is unable to adequately feed them.
However, the regime has grown wary of capitalist influence resulting from the spread of markets where imported goods, including DVDs of South Korean films and TV dramas, are sold, according to analysts, defectors and news reports.
South Korea’s mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported in January that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il had ordered a crackdown on street markets, and that all manufactured goods and imported items must be sold at state-run shops.
But analysts and North Korea watchers say the North can’t close all markets because its central rationing system is not working.
“North Korea is in a dilemma,” said Kim of the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights. “It does not want markets, but can’t get rid of them either.”
Koh Yu-hwan, an expert on North Korea at Seoul’s Dongguk University, also said that the North sees “negative effects” of markets, but cannot close them all because it could leave the hungry without any means to seek food or other goods.
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