March 27, 2023
Evergreen

How North Korea’s nascent consumerism has succeeded in toeing the party line

Far from challenging juche orthodoxy, DPRK-style capitalism has pushed traditional state values

In the countries of the former socialist bloc, the emergence of market advertising was the first sign of the end of Communism. North Korea is no exclusion from this rule.

However, the chosen course of “reforms without openness” made nascent North Korean advertising quite special, in many aspects different from the post-Soviet analogue.