Disciplined Society Campaign
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The Disciplined Society Campaign (Menghean: 훈련된 사회 / 訓練된 社會, hunryŏndoen sahoe) was a social and ideological rectification campaign which the Menghean Socialist Party carried out between 1996 and 2003. It was intended to correct a perceived loosening of social norms following Menghe's economic reforms, and targeted both government officials and the general populace. Its timing coincided with the height of Choe Sŭng-min's cult of personality, and marked his most determined effort to reshape society to his image.
In punitive terms, the Disciplined Society Campaign involved a crackdown on an enormous variety of perceived social ills, ranging from corruption and drug abuse to littering and pornography. At the campaign's totalitarian height, untidy hairstyles were discouraged and the sale or performance of rock music was forbidden. In place of these "decadent practices," the Party attempted to instill nationalism, ideological fervor, and norms of orderly behavior, through the promotion of alternative cultural events and the holding of mass rallies.
Choe Sŭng-min formally announced the end of the Disciplined Society Campaign at the Fourth Party Congress in May 2003, stating that in spite of overzealous implementation the effort had achieved its goals. From that point onward, the Party loosened its grip on society, reverting from a fully totalitarian system to a merely authoritarian one. In some areas, however, the legacy of the Disciplined Society Campaign remains in place, most notably in the MSP's socially conservative tone and its more subtle efforts to improve public behavior.
Background
After coming to power, one of Choe Sŭng-min's first initiatives for the new Menghean government was to open the country to international travel and trade and streamline its economic system for increased efficiency. The latter goal eventually led Choe to embrace a partial liberalization of Menghe's previously state-run economy: small private enterprises were legalized in 1991, and by 1995 eight cities had opened special economic zones in which foreign companies could open factories of their own.
The rapid acceleration in economic growth which resulted from these policies, combined with the collapse of the DPRM's rigid social order, brought profound social changes to Menghe: rural youth flocked to cities in violation of the national Household Registration System, inefficient state-owned enterprises began to lay off workers, and the communist norms of self-sacrifice gave way to a social order which tolerated and even encouraged entrepreneurial self-interest. Statistics on crime and drug abuse showed sharp increases, and reports of corruption grew more widespread as officials exploited their ill-regulated power to embezzle development funds or extort bribes from private entrepreneurs who violated regulations on firm size and working conditions.
Two cases in particular shocked the nation in 1996. The first was the arrest of Oh Jae-hyŏk, the Provincial Party Secretary of Gangwŏn, on corruption charges which included the embezzlement of ₩1 billion and the appointment of relatives and cronies to dozens of government positions. The sensational investigation which followed found that Oh had used state funds to pay for lavish banquets which included gold-leaf desserts and nude performances by a personal "pleasure clique." Another highly-publicized controversy emerged later in the same year, when 16-year-old Song Ji-hye was kidnapped, raped, and murdered; initial reports of the crime suggested that dozens of bystanders had seen her calling for help as she was first aggressively groped, then pulled to the assailant's van, but none of them had intervened. In both cases, the perpetrator was found guilty and sentenced to death, but the extreme nature of their crimes fed a whirlwind of public discussion about corruption and crime.
A number of high-ranking government officials, including Choe Sŭng-min himself, interpreted these reports as signs that economic liberalization and opening-up had resulted in the decay of public morals. Rather than halting the reform process, a response viewed as untenable given the importance of carrying on with economic development, Choe concluded that the Party would have to undertake a militant effort to restore morality and good character. In a speech to the plenary session of the MSP Central Committee on March 12th, 1996, he called for a "mass campaign to discipline state, party, and public through emergency means, as a precondition to building a virtuous and prosperous society." This became known as the "Disciplined Society Campaign." At the conclusion of the plenary session, the Central Committee voted on a pre-written resolution on the campaign's goals, and instructions on implementation were transmitted downward to lower-ranking Party members. At the core of the new program was the slogan of "sweep apathy from the Party, sweep corruption from the government, and sweep decadence from the population," a three-pronged project for comprehensive social change.
Implementation
Party ideology
According to Choe Sŭng-min's analysis, one of the root causes of public moral decay was the Menghean Socialist Party's increasingly apathetic attitude toward ideology. The expulsion of suspected old-regime loyalists, the generous recruitment of new members, and the toleration of private enterprise - three changes which Choe himself had directed - had brought in a great mass of largely instrumental members who were motivated by self-interest rather than Socialist ideology. As such, one of the first priorities of the campaign was to restore the MSP's ideological fervor.
This effort began with a flurry of mass meetings in which rank-and-file Party members were treated to energetic lectures on the nature of "New Socialism" and its importance for national restoration, and were instructed to study Choe Sŭng-min Thought for guidance on proper conduct. In "self-criticism and self-improvement sessions," they then reviewed their mistakes and errors before a crowd of peers and laid out plans to bring their lives into harmony with Socialist teachings. Initial rallies were confused and contradictory, as even organizers were frequently unsure about the proper interpretation of MSP ideology, but with strong central direction from the Party center, the core platform steadily drifted toward a coherent mixture of nationalism, corporatism, and traditional values.
When the "little black book" of Collected Quotations from Choe Sŭng-min was first published in 1997, all Party members were issued a fresh copy, and local committees held a flurry of meetings to review and study its contents. Party education also drew on Choe Sŭng-min's early writings, which were composed during the Democratic People's Republic of Menghe, and his more recent speeches and instructions. As Choe's personality cult was especially prominent during this time, and the Menghean Socialist Party was still relatively new, Choe's words held enormous sway in the development of Party ideology; after the Third Party Congress, in which he endorsed private and semi-private enterprises as the new core driver of the economy, the Donggyŏng State Press rushed to throw together a new edition of the Collected Quotations which included these new pronouncements.
Public morality
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The core effort of the Disciplined Society Campaign focused on improving the morality of the population. Based on Choe Sŭng-min's 1992 statement that "people should follow the long-term needs of the society, rather than the short-term desires of the individual," the Party campaign planners developed a program to eradicate the "three incorrect thoughts:" myopia (gŭnsijuyi), hedonism (hwangrakjuyi), and individualism (gaeinjuyi). The Party classified these as "Western Bourgeois values," and claimed that they not only obstructed economic development, as Choe had originally suggested, but also threatened to undermine social well-being.
In its effort to combat bourgeois values, the Party began at the level of the Youth Vanguard and the Joguk Janyŏ. It expanded these groups' after-school meetings and rallies to include a greater focus on moral education, which also crept into public school curricula. Much of this early material was fairly benign: children were taught about the negative health effects of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, sent on volunteer assignments to clean the local streets and parks, and presented with semi-fictional stories about "model citizens" who had made great sacrifices in order to help others. There were, of course, political elements as well. Many of the morality stories focused on Choe Sŭng-min himself, ranging from his service as a child volunteer in the Menghean War of Liberation to his seizure of power in the Decembrist Revolution. Schools also reintroduced an Oath of Allegiance, modeled after the version used by the Greater Menghean Empire, and required students to stand and recite it every morning in front of the Menghean flag and a portrait of Choe Sŭng-min.
As the campaign intensified, the Party called on "upright citizens" to join the grassroots moral education effort, and bands of Youth Vanguard members were being sent onto the streets to identify and denounce citizens who didn't meet the country's new moral standards. Many of the organizers were former members of the Red Guards of the Revolution, Ryŏ Ho-jun's radical youth organization, and in the absence of clear central direction they applied the same tactics they had learned in the 1980s. Particularly in small towns, social outcasts were paraded through the streets carrying signs that identified them as thieves, drunkards, or adulterers.
Government agencies joined the effort from above, with the Ministry of Culture under Wang Jŏng-hyi receiving expanded powers over censorship. Concerts, movie screenings, and other performances now had to receive approval from county-level or higher authorities, rather than the village or town councils which had managed them in the past. Foreign films in particular were singled out for editing or prohibition, and even domestic ones had to pass ambiguously worded requirements that they would not "pollute national morality." Similarly, the national police launched a crackdown on brothels, sex shops, and adult media stores, which had proliferated during the early 1990s due to the legalization of small businesses and the widespread bribery of local regulators. In cases where local police could not be trusted to carry out orders, the Gunchal and the IIA organized their own parallel investigations, culminating in a 2001 raid on a strip club in which four civilians were killed and eleven wounded in what military representatives claimed was a shootout with members of an organized crime cell.
At the 3rd NSCC, which convened in November 2000, delegates proposed a general prohibition on alcoholic beverages, on the basis that this would decrease crime and increase labor productivity. Choe Sŭng-min, who had given up drinking for the duration of the campaign and may have inspired the NSCC's proposal, allowed it to go forward to the National Assembly, which debated the proposal and debated passing it into law, driven mainly by the perception that Choe had tacitly approved it and would not tolerate its rejection. As public outcry mounted - even in an authoritarian system, the proposal turned out to be deeply unpopular - Choe distanced himself from the proposal and the National Assembly tabled it indefinitely.
Contrary to popular belief, the Menghean government did not actually ban rock music or issue state-sanctioned lists of acceptable haircuts. In the former case, censors did restrict the sale of records, tapes, and CDs which they found objectionable, and the Ministry of Culture forbade public concert venues from hosting non-approved performances, but these never amounted to a blanket ban and citizens were still allowed to listen to rock music in private. In the latter, members of the Youth Vanguard and Joguk Janyŏ, as well as reporters from local media offices, were encouraged to find citizens with "degenerate hairstyles or outfits" and subject them to public criticism, but no formal law was ever passed, police officers were not directly involved, and the guidelines on what constituted a "degenerate" or "correct" hairstyle or outfit were never particularly clear.
Consumer culture
In place of suppressed bourgeois desires, the Menghean Socialist Party attempted to promote "New Socialist Values." These included modern asceticism (hyŏndae gŭmyokjuyi), which demanded that the people accept longer working hours and re-invest their savings in order to contribute to economic development. State propaganda revived the DPRM-era "cult of labor," glorifying factory workers while urging them on to higher productivity, and combined it with a military ideology comparing diligence in one's work to military duty on the battlefield. In a revival of a policy which Sim Jin-hwan had promoted in the 1970s, workers and farmers who achieved high productivity levels were given Chŏllima medals and generous bonuses and honored in newspapers as "heroes of labor." In 1995 Choe Sŭng-min instructed the Ministry of the Economy to draw up plans for compensating all workers on a scale that tied pay to productivity, though this was eventually dropped.
The most memorable aspect of this propaganda campaign was the glorification of "model citizens," individuals who had demonstrated exceptional selflessness in their work or daily lives. These stories were allegedly factual reports about real people, though it is likely that they were embellished in the course of reporting, and some may have been complete fabrications. The most famous of these was Gang Yi, a Haenam villager who had served in an Army construction brigade during his military service and subsequently enlisted as a volunteer in the same unit, eventually dying in 1997 while trying to rescue fellow workers from a collapsing mine. Though large stretches of his biography were almost certainly fictionalized, Gang Yi nevertheless became a cultural icon of selfless determination and loyalty to Choe Sŭng-min.
Outside of propaganda, the Menghean government also built this new ideology into its economic policies. The Central Bank of Menghe artificially depressed interest rates to facilitate borrowing, even though this combined with high inflation to erode the savings of middle-class account holders. The Ministry of Finance also expanded its schedule of high taxes on luxury goods, in some cases charging over 300% of the original value, in order to redistribute wealth and discourage excessive consumption. These taxes had the double effect of serving as hidden tariffs, as foreign goods were frequently placed in this category due to their higher status value. For the working class, the campaign amounted to a rolling-back of DPRM-era labor welfare protections, as official state unions encouraged workers to accept longer hours and stagnating wages in the name of national economic development.
These directives were aimed in particular at the rising upper and middle classes, whose members had grown wealthy in the period since opening-up and reform began, and at government officials who had built up small fortunes through bribery and misuse of state funds. The Party leadership held a very real concern that inequality would dissolve national unity and undermine faith in Socialist ideology. Choe Sŭng-min set himself out as a model frugal official, cutting spending on banquets, traveling in a Menghean-made car, and wearing a Sinmengsam rather than a Western business suit.
Anti-crime effort
Stricter punishments awaited those who violated the law. The number of arrests and the number of executions soared, as police forces were expanded and officers instructed to adopt aggressive strategies. During the first year of the campaign, the court and prison systems were nearly overwhelmed, resulting in a dip in arrests in 1998 as the Ministry of Justice requested increased funding to expand its operations. Arrest rates leveled off again in 2000 under the renewed strain, and in 2001 prisons began releasing inmates early and issuing more parole opportunities.
The Ministry of Justice adopted an especially harsh approach to drug trafficking, authorizing death sentences for individuals in possession of large quantities of controlled substances. Conscripts from the Menghean Army were sent to the border with Innominada as an interim measure to combat smuggling, and on several occasions they fired live ammunition at suspicious individuals crossing outside approved checkpoints. This fed diplomatic tensions with the Innominadan government, especially after one body was found on Innominadan soil; Menghean border guards testified that the culprit had climbed the fence while wounded and collapsed after continuing to run, but Innominadan authorities dismissed the account as inconsistent.
As part of the competition to drive down crime rates, some cities and counties adopted a practice of assigning arrest quotas to individual towns and villages, or rewarding the town and village officials who made the most arrests. This resulted in haphazard roundups of vagrants, petty criminals, paupers, and village outcasts, many of them detained without any notification of the reason for their arrest. These quotas were exclusively a local policy response, and were never ordered by the central government; in fact, in 2000 the Ministry of Justice issued a memorandum instructing county- and town-level governments to stop issuing arrest quotas and review cases which may have been brought in with insufficient evidence.
Twenty years later, there is still debate as to how greatly, if at all, the harsher enforcement of the Disciplined Society period actually decreased crime rates. Menghean government statistics from the period are unreliable, as record-keeping was inconsistent and local agencies had incentives to distort the numbers. Other related factors, such as the expansion of the police force, the improvement of police salaries, and the rise in average incomes may have contributed to a long-run decrease in violent crime, with the wider use of executions playing only a minor role.
Anti-corruption effort
Amidst the popular tumult of discipline enforcement, Choe Sŭng-min stepped up the prosecution of corruption cases at all levels. He strengthened the Party's Central Discipline Inspection Committee, giving it authority over cases of corruption, and paired it with the newly created General-Directorate of Discipline Inspection, which had even broader jurisdiction. As head of the latter organ, he appointed his trusted subordinate Jang Sŏng-su, an MNDA 2 classmate who had a reputation for loyalty and rigor.
Arrests on corruption charges soared after the inauguration of the new GDDI, which received generous funding for its effort. Jang hand-picked investigators known for their ideological purity and resistance to bribery, and wherever possible assigned them to districts far from their hometowns so that they would not find themselves investigating former friends and relatives. Initially, the surge in prosecution was mainly directed at mid-level officials, who had accumulated large fortunes but lacked protection within the inner circle; but Jang steadily expanded its scope to include low-ranking bureaucrats accused of taking bribes, and in 2001 he indicted the Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Pak Sŏng-hyŏn, for accepting millions of dollars from foreign companies in exchange for fishing rights in Menghe's exclusive economic zone.
As in the anti-crime effort, the pressure to impose strict punishments led the GDDI to apply the death penalty at an increased rate. Formally, Menghean law specifies that capital punishment may only be applied to an act of corruption which "results directly or indirectly in a loss of life, or which poses a grave risk to the lives of many;" yet the vague wording of this provision allowed prosecutors to interpret it broadly, for example in cases where civil servants allowed a factory to continue operating despite violations of health and safety regulations. Capital punishment was especially prevalent in high-profile cases, accounting for 11% of all sentences of officials of Prefecture-tier rank and above according to one independent estimate.
Combined with the more public-oriented imperative to "live simply and frugally," the intensity of the anti-corruption campaign led many government officials and private entrepreneurs to avoid any kind of conspicuous consumption, as excessive displays of wealth could attract the suspicion of Discipline Inspection units. This paired well with simultaneous campaigns to promote the Sinmengsam in place of the Western business suit and Menghean-made automobiles in place of foreign ones. Nevertheless, evasion remained widespread, with one cynical joke remarking that businessmen and regulators changed their behavior by holding their meetings at three-star restaurants instead of five-star ones.
Conclusion of the campaign
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From its inception, the Disciplined Society Campaign drew mixed responses from the Socialist Party leadership. While there was a fairly wide consensus among the ruling conservative military officers and ex-Communist officials that economic growth had led to moral decay, there was less agreement on whether the situation merited the kind of response which Choe proposed. Local Party organizers were particularly baffled by some of their new mandates. By this time, Choe Sŭng-min had fully consolidated his power, and neither lower-ranking nor upper-ranking officials were willing to risk openly challenging his decisions.
As the campaign unfolded, rank-and-file Party members began to fall behind it, if only because of the surge in propaganda coming from the Party center. New Party members were particularly enthusiastic, as surging economic growth and the decollectivization of agriculture so soon after the disastrous Menghean famine of 1985-87 had combined to produce almost fanatical devotion to Choe Sŭng-min's personality cult. Much of this enthusiasm flowed into the campaign's enforcement, which frequently exceeded even Choe's authoritarian directives. The MSP's cadre promotion system added to the problem by creating strong career incentives to surpass central directives, especially in measurable metrics like the number of criminals arrested or the number of rallies held.
The increasingly energetic execution of the campaign at the grassroots level became a growing source of concern for upper-level Party members and bureaucrats, for whom it was eerily reminiscent of the "perpetual revolution" campaign under the recently deposed Ryŏ Ho-jun. Some of the more pragmatic officials in the government also worried that the campaign could detract from economic growth if carried too far, a concern which intensified during the 1999 Menghean financial crisis and only briefly wavered during the recovery that followed it. The National Assembly's discussion of a proposal in 2001 to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol - discussion which went ahead only because representatives were afraid of retaliation from higher up - seemed to drive home the message that the campaign was at risk of drifting out of control.
On the evening of April 30th, 2003, twelve members of Choe's inner circle - all of them holding high posts on the Supreme Council and the Central Standing Committee of the Party - confronted Choe Sŭng-min in his personal quarters in the Donggwangsan palace to pressure him to end the Disciplined Society Campaign. Citing the risk to foreign investors, the excesses of local campaign leaders, and the memory of political chaos under Ryŏ Ho-jun, they threatened to resign in unison if the campaign were not terminated during next month's Party Congress. This marked the most direct effort by any group of elites to challenge Choe's leadership. Yet it was not a fundamental challenge; throughout the hours of discussion that followed, the officials present made it clear that they did not intend to displace the Chairman by force. Three of them were his MNDA 2 classmates, and all of them had worked closely with Choe in some capacity for the last ten years. They also understood that Choe Sŭng-min remained extremely popular among the general population due to the country's continuing economic development and more than a decade of propaganda, and knew that a power grab would leave them unable to maintain control of the country. Choe apparently understood the scope of their intentions, and did not order their arrest, unwilling to see his most valuable advisors resign over a policy which he had already started to doubt was effective.
At the Fourth Party Congress on May 25th, 2003, Choe Sŭng-min formally announced an end to the Disciplined Society Campaign, following through on a change of direction which he had already been signaling for the last few weeks. In his speech, he stated that the basic goals of the campaign had already been achieved, presenting it as a satisfactory success. While he admitted some personal fault in any instability which the campaign had caused, he also directed the bulk of the blame at the "overzealous implementation" of lower-level officials and Party fanatics, warning them that pragmatic and honest criticism of the Party Center was preferable to blind enthusiasm. This entire announcement occupied only a portion of his broader opening speech, which devoted most of its content to matters of economic reform and public welfare.
Assessment
In formal terms, the Disciplined Society Campaign lasted from March 12, 1996, to May 25, 2003, spanning seven years and two months. This made it two years longer than the "perpetual revolution" which shook the DPRM's political sphere between 1982 and 1987. Yet for all the accounts of its totalitarian intrusion and excessive enforcement, it never reached the same dizzying intensity as its predecessor, which brought regular life to a standstill and contributed to the DPRM's economic stagnation. Mob violence, while not absent, was limited to a few specific outbursts, and purges of lower-ranking political officials were handled by centralized State and Party organs rather than local citizens.
More recent research has found that as early as 1998 the central government was already taking steps to tone down the Disciplined Society campaign. Ri Yŏng-ha found that the number of Youth Vanguard street rallies declined sharply in 1999 and steadily in the years that followed, and his survey of local archives uncovered signs that local Party committees were not only reining in enforcement, they were doing it in accordance with directives from higher up. One reason for this was economic: because Cadre promotion incentives gave higher priority to economic growth and the expansion of education, local officials could not afford to pull students out of schools and workers out of factories, and government agencies had to continue operating efficiently. Fatigue from the disastrous perpetual revolution may also have played a role, conveying valuable lessons about the dangers of excessive instability. Choe Sŭng-min himself was markedly more restrained and pragmatic than Ryŏ Ho-jun, a trait best demonstrated by his willingness to suspend the campaign at the Fourth Party Congress. This change is also reflected in Ri Yŏng-ha's observation that "the DSC [Disciplined Society Campaign] relied on positive measures (i.e. propaganda, education) rather than negative measures (i.e., mass criticism, public beatings) to shape the public's values."
A wider debate exists over the long-term effects of the Disciplined Society period. The Socialist Party still defends the campaign on the basis that it contributed to Menghe's current low crime levels, but the data here are mixed. The Menghean government only started collecting crime victimization statistics in 1997, and while these do show a steep decline in the first four years, the only pre-DSC baseline comes from the annual number of arrests, which spiked as a result of high enforcement. Menghe's modest crime and alcoholism rates from the 2000s onward were more likely tied to structural factors, such as the expansion of the police force, the spread of compulsory education, and the rise in employment.
Similarly, estimates of corruption levels show that bribe-taking and embezzlement continued to increase during the DSC period, fueled by the many opportunities for self-enrichment which grew out of economic liberalization. Only around 2010 do independent statistics suggest a leveling-off and decline of corruption, supporting the argument that this, too, was due to structural factors. Conversely, it is possible that corruption rates could have soared even higher during the late 1990s in the absence of the campaign, which saw a record number of investigations and prosecutions.
The longer political effect of the Disciplined Society Campaign seems to have been its influence on ideology. Two decades later, the Menghean Socialist Party remains socially conservative on issues relating to crime, drug use, and morality, and themes of discipline and self-sacrifice are woven through its rhetoric. Menghean laws on capital punishment still permit it in cases of drug trafficking, rape, and corruption, though the maximum penalty is not applied as frequently. Public opinion surveys of Menghean citizens have also found higher support for collectivist and authoritarian viewpoints than income-based correlations would suggest, particularly among the generation who came of age during the 1990s, although it is hard to disentangle that correlation from the effects of rapid economic growth and more general propaganda.