City of Lies: How Kim Jong-un Built a Gilded Capital While Millions Starved

{"title": "City of Lies: How Kim Jong-un Built a Gilded Capital While Millions Starved", "content": "

On the morning of April 15, 2012 — the centenary of Kim Il-sung's birth — a skyline changed forever. Cranes bristled across Pyongyang's Changjon Street as thousands of workers, many of them unpaid soldiers conscripted from the Korean People's Army, raced to complete a cluster of pastel-colored high-rises before the world's cameras arrived. The deadline was met. The ribbon was cut. And Kim Jong-un, just months into his reign, had his first propaganda masterpiece. What the cameras did not show — what they were never allowed to show — was the city within the city: a parallel Pyongyang of dolphinariums, ski resorts, waterslides and imported Italian marble, engineered exclusively for the loyalty elite while the nation's countryside rationed grass soup. This is the story of that city, told by the people who built it, served it, and finally fled it.

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Kim Il Sung Square, Pyongyang — Wikimedia Commons

The Architecture of Loyalty

To understand Pyongyang, you must first understand who is allowed to live there. Residency in the capital is not a right — it is a reward, allocated by the Korean Workers' Party according to a classification system known as songbun, a hereditary loyalty score that determines every North Korean's access to food, education, employment and housing. Only those ranked in the top tiers of the songbun hierarchy — senior party cadres, military officers, scientists deemed strategically vital — are permitted to call Pyongyang home. The city's official population of roughly 2.9 million represents, in effect, a curated audience for Kim Jong-un's architectural theatre.

Park Ji-hyun — a pseudonym used at her request for her protection — worked as a secretary in the Korean Workers' Party's Organisation and Guidance Department on Pyongyang's Jungsong Street until she defected via China in March 2019. She describes the capital in terms that sound surreal against the backdrop of what is known about the rest of the country. "There were new apartment blocks going up every year," she told North Korea Untold in an interview conducted in Seoul in January 2024. "Officials got assigned flats in Ryomyong Street, in Changjon. They had elevators, underfloor heating. The shops near the Central Committee building sold things I never saw anywhere else — South Korean cosmetics with the labels peeled off, Japanese snacks, bottles of Johnnie Walker." She pauses. "People in Hamgyong province were eating bark. I knew this. Everyone knew this. We did not speak of it."

Ryomyong: The Showcase District Kim Built Himself

No project better embodies Kim Jong-un's Pyongyang than Ryomyong Street, unveiled on April 13, 2017, two days before the anniversary of Kim Il-sung's birth — a date chosen, analysts at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification noted at the time, with deliberate symbolic precision. The development, a cluster of futuristic high-rises soaring up to 70 stories, was constructed in just 74 weeks according to state media — a claim treated with deep skepticism by outside engineers but one that served its propagandistic purpose perfectly. Kim Jong-un personally supervised key construction phases, appearing in state photographs hard-hatted and pointing at blueprints, projecting the image of a modernising, visionary leader.

What those photographs concealed was the human cost. Lee Sung-min, a former construction brigade political officer who defected to South Korea in 2020, described the Ryomyong project in testimony to the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights in Seoul. "The soldiers working on Ryomyong were not volunteers," he said. "They were assigned from KPA engineering units. Some were there for two years without a single day of leave. There were accidents. I personally witnessed a scaffold collapse on the eastern tower in the autumn of 2016 — three men fell. We were ordered not to report it through normal channels. The work did not stop."

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Arch of Triumph, Pyongyang — Wikimedia Commons

The Pleasure Belt: Waterparks, Dolphins and Imported Champagne

In the winter of 2013, Kim Jong-un opened the Masikryong ski resort in Kangwon Province, a two-hour drive from Pyongyang, constructed in under a year by military labour. Western ski instructors were reportedly recruited — a recruitment drive that drew a formal warning from the European Union, which noted it potentially violated sanctions. The following year, the Munsu Water Park opened on the banks of the Taedong River in central Pyongyang, complete with wave pools, a lazy river and an indoor aquatic centre whose facilities, in photographs released by state media, were indistinguishable from a mid-range resort in suburban Seoul or Beijing. In 2015, the Rungna Dolphinarium opened on Rungna Island, offering shows featuring bottlenose dolphins transported — according to intelligence assessments cited by Reuters in 2016 — from Russian suppliers via a sanctions-circumventing procurement network routed through front companies in Dalian, China.

These facilities are not open to ordinary Pyongyang residents, let alone to the rural population. Access is controlled through a system of party-issued vouchers and unit-level allocations. Choi Hyun-jung, a former Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies lecturer who left North Korea in 2021 and now advises the Seoul-based think tank 38 North, told this reporter: "The water park, the dolphin show — these were for cadres and their families. Occasionally a school group from a good songbun background would go, as a reward. But a factory worker, a farmer — they would never see the inside of those places. The existence of them, however, was broadcast on television nationwide. That was the point. The spectacle was the message."

Sanctions, Smuggling and the Supply Chain of Luxury

The question that haunts every account of Kim Jong-un's Pyongyang is a logistical one: where does the money come from? United Nations Panel of Experts reports, compiled annually until Russia vetoed the panel's renewal in March 2024, documented in granular detail the mechanisms by which North Korea funds its elite consumption under international sanctions. Ship-to-ship oil transfers in international waters. Coal exports laundered through third-country intermediaries. Cyberattacks — attributed by the US Treasury Department to the Lazarus Group, a state-sponsored hacking collective — that netted an estimated $3 billion in stolen cryptocurrency between 2017 and 2023 alone, according to a February 2024 report by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.

That money does not flow to hospitals or grain imports. It flows, in significant part, to maintaining the loyalty infrastructure of Pyongyang. A classified South Korean National Intelligence Service assessment leaked to the Hankyoreh newspaper in November 2022 estimated that Kim Jong-un's personal "court economy" — the network of offices managing luxury imports and elite distribution — was spending in the region of $600 million to $900 million annually, even in the years when North Korea's official GDP was collapsing under the compounded pressure of sanctions, pandemic border closures and agricultural failure.

'We Knew It Was a Stage Set'

Park Ji-hyun, the former party secretary, remembers the moment her understanding of Pyongyang permanently shifted. It was the summer of 2018, during a rare visit to relatives in South Hwanghae Province — a trip that required written authorisation and was logged by the local People's Safety Ministry office. "The children there were tiny," she says quietly. "Not the way children are small. The way children are small when they have not eaten properly for years. I came back to Pyongyang and I looked at the Ryomyong buildings, and I understood for the first time what they actually were. Not a city. A set. Built to be photographed. Built so that Kim Jong-un could show the world — and show us — that everything was fine." She defected eight months later, crossing the Tumen River on a moonless night in March 2019, paying a broker 2,000 US dollars she had saved over three years.

Today she lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Nowon District, Seoul. On a shelf beside her window she keeps a photograph of Pyongyang's skyline, taken from a tourist postcard she bought in a Beijing market during her transit north. She looks at it most mornings, she says. "I want to remember what it looked like," she explains. "So I never forget what it was hiding."

", "labels": ["North Korea", "Kim Jong-un", "Pyongyang", "Elite Privilege", "Human Rights", "Defector Testimony", "Sanctions"]}

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