North Korea Needs China and Russia – But Doesn’t Want Its People Admiring Them

For decades, North Korean authorities have taught ordinary citizens not to harbor illusions about South Korea, the United States, and Japan, on the grounds that admiring the culture and lifestyles of “hostile states” could erode faith in the system. But recent developments inside the country suggest the authorities’ vigilance extends well beyond these so-called hostile states. Even China and Russia – partners with whom North Korea is deepening strategic cooperation – are no exception.

North Korea needs Chinese goods and capital, and is expanding military and economic cooperation with Russia. Yet it does not permit ordinary citizens to envy China’s standard of living or Russia’s technological prowess. The state may draw closer to both countries; however, its people are not allowed to hold any “illusions” about them. This contradiction reveals less about North Korea’s foreign policy than about the underlying logic that keeps its system intact.

Even a Friendly Nation May Not Be Seen However One Wishes

According to Daily NK’s reporting, the Organization and Guidance Department of North Korea’s Central Committee instructed border-area party organizations and workers’ groups in June to tighten discipline and ideological control, emphasizing that people “must not harbor illusions about Chinese-style socialism.” The move has been widely interpreted as a preemptive effort to stop North Koreans from taking interest in China’s market economy and living standards – and comparing them to conditions at home – as cross-border trade and personal exchanges with China expand.

China is North Korea’s largest trading partner and its closest socialist ally – which may be exactly what makes it such a dangerous point of comparison. People might ask: If we are both socialist countries, why can individuals in China run businesses and earn money? Why are China’s cities and villages better off than ours? Why does the state accept Chinese goods and technology while demanding that ordinary people practice total self-reliance?

A similar pattern is visible with Russia. When a new destroyer capsized during launch at the Chongjin shipyard in May 2025, some officials in the munitions sector reportedly proposed importing a large Russian crane as the most realistic way to salvage the situation. Instead, they were dismissed from their posts, and Kim Jong Un reportedly rebuked them, warning against “harboring illusions about foreign countries.” North Korea’s relationship with Russia has effectively reached the level of a military alliance – yet treating Russian technology as superior to North Korea’s own has become a political liability.

The information controls surrounding North Korea’s troop deployment to Russia fit the same pattern. Family members of deployed soldiers interviewed by Daily NK said they had not been told in advance that their sons were headed to a war zone – only that they were leaving for “study-abroad training” or “training to represent the fatherland.” Word of the deployment reached families late, not through any official notice but through letters, rumor, and word-of-mouth. Before officially acknowledging the deployment, the authorities branded the rumors as false and moved to suppress them.

AsiaPress likewise reported that, even while Pyongyang refused to officially confirm the deployment, information about casualties among North Korean troops in Russia reached the country and unsettled parents. That information is believed to have spread through South Korean broadcasts, Chinese mobile phones in border areas, and word of mouth. Facts the authorities tried to conceal reached ordinary people through multiple informal information networks.

North Korean authorities present cooperation with Russia as a diplomatic achievement of Kim Jong Un’s. But specifics – the scale of the deployment, casualty figures, how the soldiers are treated, what Russia gives North Korea in return – remain matters ordinary people are not supposed to know, let alone ask about. What Pyongyang wants is not a population devoid of pro-Russia sentiment, but one that views Russia only in the terms the authorities permit.

What North Korea Fears Is Not Information but Comparison

North Korea holds up self-reliance and self-determination as basic principles of state governance. In its view, North Korea’s problems must be solved the North Korean way, and there is no alternative to the path laid out by the party and the leader.

Within this framework, admiration for foreign countries can never remain a matter of personal taste. The moment North Koreans compare wages, consumption levels, healthcare, education, or freedom of movement and communication abroad with conditions in their country, they risk reaching conclusions the authorities never sanctioned. What threatens the system is not so much the fact that life may be better elsewhere, but the fact that a society can be run differently from North Korea’s own model.

A Korea Institute for National Unification study published last year found that as marketization and the spread of information technology converge in North Korea, outside information is flowing in quietly but deeply, and reshaping people’s perceptions and desires. Markets are not simply places to trade goods; they function as spaces where all kinds of information circulates and new lifestyles and cultural habits take root. To rein in this organic change, North Korean authorities have stepped up controls on what they label “non-socialist” and “anti-socialist” behavior.

The spread of smartphones poses a similar double-edged challenge for the authorities. 38 North reported that in 2026, smartphones are becoming increasingly embedded in North Koreans’ daily lives, with the spread of electronic wallets and mobile payments. Smartphones give the state an efficient means of managing the economy and its people – but they are also tools that let people exchange information and keep their own records.

According to AsiaPress reporting, authorities have checked the stored data on phones left at repair shops and caught people who had watched Chinese films. Authorities have inspected phones simply because their owners had taken photographs on the street. Sources say even photographing homeless people, market price tags, or the scene of an accident can bring on a crackdown. Phone ownership is permitted, but using a phone to document and share reality is not.

The Korea Institute for National Unification’s White Paper on North Korean Human Rights 2025 likewise noted that, since 2021, North Korea has toughened penalties for foreign culture and expression through special laws such as the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law and the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Law – some of which prescribe the death penalty. North Korea treats access to information and freedom of expression as crimes that threaten the security of the system.

This tightening of control does not indicate that the ideological foundations of North Korea’s system are solid – if anything, the opposite is more likely true. Repeated lectures, censorship, punishment, and mutual surveillance are necessary precisely because the authorities judge that mere exposure to life abroad could unsettle people ideologically. That’s why isolation, repression, and fear have deepened in North Korea over the past decade, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

What North Korea’s government fears most is not simply outside information. It is the process that follows – a North Korean citizen believing that information, comparing it with their own life, discussing it with others, and concluding that North Korea’s problems might have different solutions. What the authorities are trying to monopolize is not information alone, but people’s right to interpret it.

What North Koreans Need May Not Simply Be More Information

This reality poses an important challenge for efforts aimed at changing North Koreans’ consciousness.

First, simply increasing the volume of outside information is not enough. What is needed is concrete information people can directly compare with their own daily lives: how Chinese workers are paid and how they spend their wages, how Russian workers stay in touch with their families, what responsibilities hospitals and schools bear in other countries, and what steps governments take when disaster or food shortages strike.

China and Russia can serve as especially valuable points of comparison. Because Pyongyang officially presents both as friendly nations, it is harder for the authorities to dismiss information about them as “hostile propaganda” the way they can with material about South Korea or the United States. Of course, China and Russia should not be portrayed as ideal societies – both countries have their own problems with corruption, inequality, and human rights. But the simple fact that citizens of North Korea’s own allies enjoy more choice than North Koreans do in work, income, movement, and communication can raise important questions.

The content of that information should not stay at the level of abstract explanations of freedom and democracy. It should start from concrete problems of daily life: why workers are not paid their wages in full, why North Koreans must cover the operating costs of hospitals and schools, and why the state negotiates freely with foreign countries while blocking people from calling family members abroad.

It is also worth guarding against the impulse to inject a predetermined conclusion into North Koreans’ minds. Rather than repeating the verdict that “the North Korean system is wrong,” it is more important to give people the facts and questions they need to judge reality for themselves. Those who convey information should not hand down conclusions on North Koreans’ behalf, but should provide the standards people can use to compare and judge for themselves.

At the same time, the media outlets and sources that report from inside North Korea deserve more attention. Without the reporting done by outlets such as Radio Free Asia and AsiaPress, it would be far harder to grasp the specifics of Pyongyang’s double standard toward China and Russia, and how North Koreans are responding to it. Reporting from inside North Korea is as much about carrying North Koreans’ voices and realities out to the wider world as it is about bringing outside information in. Protecting sources must remain the top priority, alongside building long-term systems for documentation and cross-verification.

North Korea accepts Chinese and Russian technology and resources, even as it tries to stop people from measuring North Korea against the realities of those two countries. The conclusion this contradiction points to is clear: what North Korean authorities fear most is not outside information itself, but the possibility that North Koreans will use it to compare and judge their own reality.

That makes the international community’s own task clear as well. The goal is not to hand North Koreans an answer we have already settled on, but to give them the facts – and a safe channel – through which they can question, compare, and reach conclusions on their own. If what North Korea fears most is comparison, then what we should prepare most seriously for is making that comparison possible.