North Korea's new rich keen to purchase a large refrigerator

The size of electrical appliances in North Korean homes can, to a large extent, reflect the social status of the family. The government will use refrigerators to reward those honorary citizens, including gold medallists for the 2008 Olympic Games. In North Korea, most of the more affluent cadres are keen to buy refrigerators, but few people actually use refrigerators to refrigerate food. Why is this?

Due to the increasingly frequent trade between China and the DPRK and the increase in the number of black market transactions, a small portion of elite officials and merchants in North Korea (about 3.5 million people) have become increasingly depressed. According to Andrei Lankov, a professor at Korea National University, North Koreans like to use refrigerators as their primary purchase. “North Korea is very poor, but in the past 5-10 years, North Korea’s economy has been greatly developed, and these semi-legal deals among cutting-edges also contribute to economic recovery.”

Lankov estimates that there are an average of 15 to 20 households in Pyongyang and northwestern North Korea. In contrast, in 1999, there was only one refrigerator per 100 households.

It is alleged that many refrigerators were imported from China. In recent years, the Sino-Korean trade exchanges have increased dramatically. This is accompanied by the North Korean famine in the 1990s that undermined the dominance of North Korea’s national distribution system and allowed the unorthodox market to take root in North Korea.

However, using such a high-end, domineering refrigerator is not an easy task in this totally under-rich country. Due to frequent power cuts in the city, few families actually store food in the refrigerator, except those who can connect their home power supply system to the military or industrial grid. So what exactly does North Koreans put into their own refrigerators?

For example, books.