What North Korea’s Unfinished Hospital Says About Its Economy | North Korea News

Kim Jong Un’s latest appearance, in which he dressed officials building an exhibition hospital, illustrates why the North Korean leader cannot afford to languish under sanctions forever if he wants to fix his economy.

On a visit to Pyongyang General Hospital, Kim lashed out at the construction committee for “serious problems with the economic organization for construction,” the official Korean central news agency said on Monday. Kim “reprimanded” the committee for not following the ruling party’s policies and accused it of a “sloppy” budget.

The tense field inspection comes less than three months before the 75th anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party on October 10, which Kim had chosen in March as the symbolic end date. The project appears to have been affected by a shortage of construction materials, underscoring the difficulty it faces in improving living conditions while working under a US-led sanctions campaign designed to curb its nuclear program.

“It simply cannot do anything more than scold officials, or people would begin to question Kim’s legitimacy in meeting people’s needs,” said Cha Du-hyeogn, a visiting researcher at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.

The country’s economy is at risk of shrinking 6% this year, according to Fitch Solutions, which would be its worst contraction since a historic famine more than two decades ago. The coronavirus, which prompted North Korea to close its borders in January, virtually eliminating what little legal trade it had, helped exacerbate the problem.

More than two years after a series of summits with the President of the United States, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping of China and Moon Jae-in of South Korea, Kim has still not achieved the sanctions relief he wanted in exchange for offers. to curtail your nuclear weapons program. In addition to curbing North Korean imports of metals, machinery and petroleum products, the sanctions also restrict Kim’s access to foreign exchange.

The language that came out of a recent Central Military Commission meeting indicates that denuclearization is off the table for now for Kim, and his regime will continue to build its atomic arsenal, website 38 North said in a comment Monday. specializes in North Korea. .

The sanctions have made it difficult to send medical equipment to the Pyongyang General Hospital site, the NK News website reported last month. Kim has devoted two of his two dozen publicly announced trips this year to the twin tower installation, which covers an area of ​​60,000 square meters (650,000 square feet), roughly the size of the former World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.

Deficiencies

Kim’s other major construction project, the East Coast Wonsan-Kalma tourist area that includes more than 100 buildings, an airfield and a sports stadium, has made great strides in the past nine years, but remains unfinished. , apparently affected by a shortage of construction materials, 38 North reported in April, based on analysis of satellite images.

North Korea learned a lesson about the dangers of expensive construction when it started building the 105-story Ryugyong Hotel in 1987, and saw work stop for 16 years because of the costs of its completion on the building that dominates the Pyongyang skyline. They could have bankrupted the state. The regime under then-leader Kim Jong Il for a time took official photographs at the hotel. It has undergone a facelift but was never opened for guests.

Rachel Minyoung Lee, a former US government analyst specializing in North Korea, said Kim’s attention to the project seemed intended to demonstrate that he is a pragmatic and practical leader.

“North Korea probably needed to launch a feasible economic project: a smaller scale, but still symbolic,” said Lee. “Kim Jong Un clearly thought that building a hospital in the country’s capital met those conditions.”