North Korea is widely seen as having among the most corrupt governments in the world. However, the Kim family regime has not always been so accepting of government wrongdoing. Drawing on archival evidence, this study shows that Kim Il-sung saw corruption as a threat to economic development and launched campaigns to curb it throughout the 1950s. I find that these campaigns were at least somewhat successful, and they contributed to post-Korean War reconstruction and rapid development afterwards. So when and why did the regime shift from combating corruption to embracing it? I argue that changes in the country's economic system following the crisis of the 1990s, especially de facto marketization, made corruption more beneficial to the regime both as a source of revenue and as an escape valve for public discontent. This study's findings contribute to our understanding of the politics of corruption control in authoritarian regimes.

Yi Sun-shin (1545–98), an admiral of the Joseon dynasty, is a Korean national hero who is admired by both North and South Korea regardless of political ideology. Yet between 1960 and 1970 North and South Korea presented Yi from different perspectives in accordance with their own political interests. In South Korea, Yi was portrayed as a solitary hero who sacrificed himself to save the country despite the blame and entrapment he suffered as a result. Alongside, North Korea presented Yi as an ideal leader with the warmth of a father figure who embraced the people's aspirations to fight against their Japanese enemies. In this article, Seong-kwan Cho and Jae-beom Hong discuss these representations of Yi and survey North Korean theatre of the 1960s, which is rarely examined in theatre scholarship outside the Korean peninsula. Seong-kwan Cho (first author) lectures in the Korean Department of Konkuk University, and published in NTQ136 on South Korean theatre censorship. Jae-beom Hong (corresponding author) is a Professor in the same Department. The pair have recently been researching North Korean realist theatre, and this article is their third on the subject. This paper was supported by Konkuk University in 2016.