North Korea wouldn’t be that well-known if it weren't for its nuclear tests, its tyrannical
and extravagant government and its characteristic insults on international leaders, especially
those from the United States.
Comparatively speaking, it’s a rather poor country.
A country that has just over 25 million inhabitants, no relevant industry or commerce and a strikingly
low purchasing power.
However, North Korea has been, is and will be a leading player in many international
forums and summits, due to its constant human rights violations and its advanced nuclear
and ballistic program.
The fact is that 2019 was a particularly complicated year for its dictator, Kim Jong-Un, and 2020
doesn’t look much better.
Because you see, along with the effects of international sanctions on imported materials
and products of all kinds, the country is going through a severe food crisis due to
drought, floods and other circumstances that have caused crop yields to drop to a 5-year
low.
To give you an idea, food shortages are estimated to affect almost 40% of North Koreans.
This means that the State cannot guarantee the minimum nutritional requirements to more
than 10 million people.
So ten million people now depend on international humanitarian assistance.
South Korea, for example, has offered them 50,000 tons of rice to alleviate hunger.
However, as we’ve told you before on VisualPolitik, despite this difficult situation, the North
Korean economy has been growing for years.
Although growth has come in a somewhat strange, informal, chaotic way, and is largely driven
by the black market, the truth is that North Korea’s economy has made certain progress
in recent years.
We’re talking about an irregular economic growth, but it’s estimated that, in some
years, it averaged a 5% annual rate.
But don’t get excited.
We’re talking about growth rates where the starting point was extreme poverty, and growth
which has only reached certain urban centers.
40% of North Koreans living in rural areas aren’t even guaranteed energy.
Growth and the North Korean government’s investments in particular can only be seen
in very limited areas such as Pyongyang and other secondary cities like Wonsan, Sinuiju,
Rason or Samjiyon.
In the rest of North Korea, people basically have to go out to cut the few remaining trees
in the radically deforested landscape in order to keep warm in winter.
This image, this reality greatly clashes with the other that is projected.
This is the new Pyongyang that the North Korean regime is trying to build.
And we aren’t just talking about Pyongyang.
In recent years they’ve endorsed macro projects that are no longer focussed only in the capital.
Projects which have prompted the international community to ask:
Are these the result of the megalomania of Kim Jong Un, a young dictator who grew up
studying in private schools in Switzerland and watching NBA games, or are they signs
that the government wants to change?
We can’t answer that question, but in this video, we’re going to tell you about North
Korea’s main macro projects.
You may be in for a surprise.
Let's go!
By the way, if you want to know where the North Korean government gets the resources
for all these projects, don’t miss the videos
that I’ll link in the description.
(PYONGYANG, FROM STALINIST GRAY TO MULTICOLOR MEGALOMANIA)
When we think of Pyongyang, many of you may only think of the husk of that gigantic pyramid-shaped
hotel that cost a bomb to complete.
A husk that didn’t see a single worker for more than 15 years.
Between 1992 and 2008 construction was completely paralyzed, simply because the North Korean
government lacked the resources to complete it.
First as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union and then due to the effects of the Arduous
March, a famine that ended the lives of more than two million people.
It’s a building that’s been called one of the great emblems of the regime, whose
construction was implemented by Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of the Kim dynasty, and remained
unfinished throughout Kim Jong Il’s entire era, and which Kim Jong Un covered with glass
and a giant LED screen.
What’s inside, nobody can tell.
As for a hotel, a real hotel, it doesn’t look like one.
Since its completion in 2016, not a single guest has been seen to enter.
In other words, we’re looking at a first-class prop.
But don’t think that this is a useless microproject, not at all.
Wait to see what has been erected in Pyongyang in recent years, and what’s to come.
For example, there’s the Mirae street of scientists.
Mirae means “future” in Korean.
It’s a street full of residential skyscrapers, shops and restaurants serving Korean and International
food.
This avenue was opened as a prize for the nuclear program’s scientists, and for university
professors who were in step with the regime.
It has car access control, which makes it a kind of gated neighborhood.
Social classes?
Who said social classes?
And that’s not all, the most recent one, in Ryomyong Avenue, was inaugurated in April
2017, and has almost 20 residential skyscrapers, many of them painted with blue and turquoise
and decorated with lots of tiles, to imitate the color of the glass of modern skyscrapers
in neighbouring South Korea and China.
Now, what exactly is the real objective of these projects?
Well... here the goal is twofold: A local objective and an international one.
The local goal was the message that Kim Jong Un wanted to transmit to the North Korean
power core in his early years as a leader.
Kim wanted to convey the idea that even though he was young, he would be the one to modernize,
develop and transform the country, no matter what happened outside.
And in a way, this was the best news for the international community: an apparent change
of spirit.
Although the truth is that wasting resources on such sterile projects doesn’t look like
the best way to achieve it.
And on the other hand, Kim builds all these works, which he can’t afford, to convey
a message to the world.
Something like:
Hey, “You can throw all the sanctions you want at me, Juche socialism is strong and
will resist.”
Because that’s precisely the message that holds Kim in power, his chest beat before
the West.
Even if he’s only pretending to be something he isn’t.
In any case, what seems clear is that this kind of golden veneer will continue for a
while for Pyongyang.
Kim Jong Un just presented a new macro project in 2019, to completely change the neighborhood
that surrounds the ghost hotel.
(AUDIO: KCTV reveals large-scale plans for district surrounding iconic Ryugyong Hotel
- NK News)
But just a second.
So far, we’ve only talked about the capital but... what’s happening outside Pyongyang?
Is Kim also promoting these types of projects outside the flashy capital?
The answer is yes, he is.
In fact, the most outlandish projects are being carried out beyond the capital.
In particular Samjiyon and the Kalma Peninsula, in the city of Wonsan.
But, of course, I know you’re thinking: Simon, who’s ever heard of those places?
Well, until now they had no relevance whatsoever.
But, Kim, as a good kid who was educated in Switzerland, wanted to have his own version
of a European-style ski resort, as well as his own summer vacation town.
And that’s exactly what he’s making.
The objective?
Supposedly to flood his country with tourism.
In 2018, North Korea received a record number of visitors: 1.2 million Chinese tourists,
50% more than in 2017.
And along with them, the odd handful of tourists from other nationalities.
Of course, all duly accompanied by guides who control their movements at all times.
But yes, tourism fever seems to be reaching even as far as North Korea.
Would you like to know more about Kim's ultimate commitment to gain the foreign currency he
direly needs after all the international sanctions?
Well, listen up.
(TWO NEW CITIES FOR WINTER AND SUMMER)
To turn North Korea into something like the Thailand of Northeast Asia, Kim Jong Un is
spending a lot of money – a lot, considering the country’s true economic standing, – to
create tourist complexes.
We can see the two greatest examples in Samjiyon and Kalma.
Samjiyon is a town located at the foot of Mount Paektu, which according to Korean tradition
is the place where Korea was founded.
And also where, according to North Korean propaganda cartoons, Kim Jong Il was born,
you know while birds sang and a bright rainbow danced on the horizon.
The fact is that, today this region is better known for being one of the most beautiful
natural places in the country and for having fantastic conditions for winter sports.
And that’s precisely where Kim Jong Un decided to build his miniature Switzerland.
Therefore, he ordered the entire town to be demolished to build a new one with a large
hotel, shops, apartment blocks and houses with colored roofs, to house 4,000 families,
380 public and industrial buildings and, of course, a few ski slopes.
All this was built in a year and a half.
Of course, when we look behind the curtains, the story isn’t as impressive.
To complete the build, the regime employed semi-slave labor and even the army itself.
Workers were mobilized from forced labor camps, and electricity had to be redirected from
the surrounding towns, leaving the towns without power.
And all this in order to finish as planned, in the first quarter of 2020, to be able to
take advantage of that year's winter campaign.
Because if there’s one thing Kim needs, it's cash.
Dollars, euros, yen, yuan...
Money!
Perhaps, with a bit of luck, one or two Chinese tourists will go down his ski slopes and stay
in one of his soulless accommodations.
Anyway, Samjiyon has been sold by the regime as “the socialist utopia”, the demonstration
that the regime can create a winter paradise.
However, Martha Thorne, executive director of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize,
doesn’t see it that way.
Check this out.
(“It's just a simple ski resort.
It doesn't reflect any new ways of living.
It puts little emphasis on urban quality and public land use.
And it doesn't project spaces where people can develop a full life.”
Martha Thorne, executive director of the Prtizker Prize)
But well beyond these debates about urban planning and the fact that it seems economically
unfeasible, Samjiyon is currently one of the best places in the worst place on the planet.
The question now is whether they’ll be able to reproduce this in Kalma, in the city of
Wonsan.
What is being built there is almost the opposite of the snowy Samjiyon.
We’re talking about a true summer vacation city.
From end to end, it consists of almost five kilometers of buildings that are all currently
under construction.
All this with a newly remodeled airport and a beautiful and shiny terminal, to which nobody
flies.
Kim Jong Un wants it to be the Cancun of the East Sea, the North Korean Miami, the Communist
Benidorm.
The project’s magnitude makes it perhaps the most expensively unrestrained project
of the last decade for impoverished North Korea.
We’re talking about 12 hotels, 2 shopping centers, 26 commercial buildings, cinemas,
an exhibition palace, an arcade game building, an indoor water park, an ice-skating rink,
a restaurant complex and more than 48 mansions and 200 Luxury chalets to lure the tourist
dollar.
All this in a country that’s closed to the world and anchored in extreme poverty, where
a large part of the population has trouble even getting the minimum nutrients they need
to live.
Obviously, most North Koreans won’t be able to enjoy this.
The country's elites, senior officials and perhaps some tourists may use these services.
But the others... obviously won’t.
And it doesn’t stop there, because in addition to Pyongyang, Samjiyon and Wonsan, other cities
like Sinuiju, on the border with China, are also seeing a certain real estate boom.
For example, there’s the construction of this sun-shaped hotel in the Kangmun district.
It’s designed to house businessmen once the Sinuiju Special Economic Zone between
North Korea and China is activated.
Right now that zone is crippled by international sanctions.
Kim's idea is to reform the entire riverfront of the Yalu River, to not only exploit the
growing economic activity that is brewing in this area thanks to trade with China and
the black market – in which the government itself participates – but also to make the
view from the other side, where the prosperous Chinese city of Dangdong is located, a picture
of development and prosperity.
Now that you’re familiar with North Korea’s main macro projects, there’s something we
really need to clarify.
All these projects may look like examples of development...
But the reality is very different.
In most cases, these types of projects simply end up empty, because there are no people
to attend or customers to pay for anything….
Ghost towns.
If he doesn’t radically open up to the world, Kim Jong Un will be wasting hundreds of millions
of dollars, which could be used for many more necessary things, such as improving the country's
poor infrastructure.
To give you an idea, of the more than 25,500 kilometers of roads that the country has,
only 800 are paved.
That’s barely 3%.
These resources could also be spent on dams, pipelines and dikes to avoid flooding when
it rains heavily, and also to collect water reserves to prevent recurrent droughts and
therefore food shortages.
Or, it could also be spent on boosting electricity production once and for all, since most of
the country is shrouded in darkness at night.
But of course, a ski resort or a vacation town is much more chic.
Anyway, what do you think, do you think that the country, in general, can benefit from
these tourism projects?
How can they fill these hotels while North Korea remains such a repressed place, where
one can’t even move without a guide?
Leave your answer in the comments.
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