If you think of North Korea as a relentlessly grim country where people live on crumbs, endure poverty as a way of life and have no access to the outside world, you would be only 90 percent correct. Under dictator Kim Jong-Un’s iron-fist, a lucky 10 percent of North Koreans sip $8 lattes, tool around in Western automobiles, fly over the city in small private airplanes and flaunt designer goods. Known as donju — which translates to mean “masters of money” — they are the equivalent of the hermit republic’s 1 percent.
Speaking about how the donju get away with their double standard of living, which seems to go against Kim’s dictatorial grain, Seoul-based journalist Chad O’Carroll, tells the Daily Mail: “It became difficult for the regime to rule with an iron fist over products or private wealth. There was an increase in toleration. The government don’t want to upset where they feel they have nothing to gain, so they have to accept these groups even if they are contradictory to its socialist constitution.”
According to the Daily Mail, the fancy goods come into North Korea via China. Imported illegally, they are sold for high premiums and under deep cover.
“One thing you don’t see in pictures [of donju] is the luxury brands being sold — the widescreen TVs, Mont Blanc belts, wallets, the Audi A6 proudly on display,” O’Carroll says. “There are six independent taxi companies in Pyongyang and they take payment in US dollars, not local currency.”
The new class of wealthy North Koreans haunt a ritzy neighborhood nicknamed Pyonghattan. The Washington Post reports that members of the donju exercise for aesthetic reasons and watch Disney cartoons while on treadmills and yoga mats.
More than 10 percent of North Koreans now have cellphones and an emerging merchant class has played a large role in cultivating a sector of elites who enjoy elevated standards of living. Trappings aside, life as a Britney Spears-obsessed donju — who, like everyone else, must wear pins that depict smiling images of Kim and his deceased father — is nothing like being well-off in the West.
“If your clothes are too radical or extreme, or they’re not in line with North Korean style, the police might take your name and then your name will be broadcast on the radio,” a defector told the Washington Post.