Inside Pyongyang: The City Kim Jong-un Built for the Privileged Few

The City That Doesn't Exist for Most North Koreans

I've stood at the Friendship Bridge in Dandong more times than I can count, staring across the Yalu River into Sinuiju, watching the lights flicker on the North Korean side as dusk falls. And every time, I think about what Choi Sung-jin told me in a cramped apartment in Suwon back in March 2019. He'd been a mid-level official in the Korean Workers' Party, stationed in Pyongyang until 2016. "It's a movie set," he said, not looking at me. "A very expensive, very cruel movie set."

North Korea Untold

Pyongyang is not a city. Not really. It's a monument to a family's vanity — three generations of Kims who decided that if they couldn't give their people prosperity, they'd at least give the world a skyline to photograph. And under Kim Jong-un, that project has accelerated in ways that even veteran Korea-watchers have struggled to keep up with.

What follows is drawn from interviews with eleven defectors conducted between 2017 and 2023, commercial satellite imagery analysis, and documents smuggled out via brokers operating along the Tumen River corridor. None of it is comfortable reading. It wasn't comfortable reporting either.

Who Actually Gets to Live There

Let's start with the most basic fact, the one that gets buried under all the architectural analysis and the missile-launch speculation: the overwhelming majority of North Korea's 26 million people will never set foot in Pyongyang. Not because they don't want to. Because they're not allowed to.

Residency in the capital is controlled through a system called the jumin deungnok — household registration — tied directly to an individual's songbun, the hereditary loyalty classification that the regime inherited from the Soviet model and refined into something far more totalizing. Your grandfather collaborated with Japanese occupiers? Your family's songbun is stained. You're not going to Pyongyang. Your great-uncle fled south during the Korean War? Forget it. You'll spend your life in Hamgyong Province, eating what little there is.

One woman I interviewed — I'll call her Park Ji-young, not her real name — grew up in Chongjin, the industrial port city in the northeast that functioned as ground zero for the famine in the 1990s. She told me she saw a photograph of Pyongyang in a state-issued calendar when she was nine years old. "I thought it was a picture of another country," she said. "I honestly didn't believe it was real."

She was right to be skeptical. Because even by North Korean standards, Pyongyang is a fiction maintained through extraordinary brutality.

The Construction Binge

Kim Jong-un took power in December 2011, and within about eighteen months it became obvious he had something to prove architecturally. His father, Kim Jong-il, had been content to let Pyongyang stagnate — a few showcase buildings, the eternal half-finished Ryugyong Hotel looming over everything like an accusation. But the son wanted towers. Wanted them fast. Wanted them visible from space, literally, because he understood that satellite imagery had become a form of propaganda too.

The Changjon Street development was one of the first signals. By 2012, photographs — both state-released and captured by commercial satellites — showed a cluster of high-rise residential buildings going up at a pace that defied any normal construction logic. Sources inside the construction industry, including one defector who worked as a structural engineer before leaving through the Chinese border in October 2018, told me that military units were conscripted for the labor. "Soldiers," he said. "Not construction workers. Soldiers who had no idea what they were doing. The quality was — " he paused, chose his word carefully — "theatrical."

And he wasn't wrong. By 2014, there were already reports filtering out through brokers and traders that some of the newer buildings on Changjon Street had significant structural problems. Elevators that didn't work. Windows that let in the winter. One account I received secondhand — so take it with appropriate skepticism — described a partial ceiling collapse in a residential unit in early 2015. The family was relocated. No one talked about it.

But Kim didn't slow down. The Mirae Scientists Street development followed in 2015. Ryomyong Street in 2017 — that one was a full propaganda spectacle, complete with a public opening ceremony attended by the Supreme Leader himself. Satellite analysis by groups like 38 North documented the construction timeline with impressive precision, but what the satellites couldn't capture was the human cost behind it.

What It Costs — And Who Pays

Here's something that rarely makes it into the architecture pieces about Pyongyang's new skyline: nothing is free, not even in a nominally communist state. Especially not in this one.

The apartments in prestige developments like Ryomyong are nominally "assigned" by the state, but in practice — according to multiple sources with direct knowledge — units are bought and sold through an elaborate gray-market system. Prices, denominated in US dollars or Chinese yuan because nobody trusts the won, can reach figures that would be staggering even in Seoul. One source, a trader who operated between Pyongyang and Sinuiju until 2020, told me that a decent apartment in the Ryomyong complex was changing hands for $80,000 to $120,000. In a country where the official monthly salary might be worth, on a good day, a few dollars.

Where does that money come from? Corruption, mostly. The donju — the emerging merchant class that has grown up in the shadow of the state's failure to provide — have become the real economic engine of North Korea, and Pyongyang real estate is where they park their money. Senior party officials, military officers, managers of state enterprises who've learned to skim — these are the people filling the gleaming towers Kim keeps building.

"It's like Moscow in the nineties," Choi Sung-jin told me, "except nobody can leave and nobody can complain."

The Showcase Neighborhoods — and What's Behind Them

Every diplomat, every journalist who gets into Pyongyang on one of the state-managed tours, gets taken to the same places. The Mirae Scientists Street, with its pastel towers and its — frankly impressive — visual coherence. The Munsu Water Park. The Masikryong ski resort, built in 2013 in about a year, largely by military conscripts. The May Day Stadium. Kim Jong-un understands tourism as theater in a way his father never quite did.

But there are neighborhoods that foreigners don't see. Can't see, because they're not on the route.

Rakrang District, on the eastern edge of the city, is one of them. Sources describe it as a place where older housing stock from the 1970s and 1980s sits largely unimproved — buildings with chronic water shortages, power that comes on for maybe four hours a day if you're lucky, residents who lack the connections or the cash to move somewhere better. "The hierarchy is visible," one source told me. "You can read the city like a map of who matters."

And then there are the so-called "hidden" residential zones — compounds, essentially, where the true elite live. Senior party leadership. Generals. The families of Kim's inner circle. These don't appear prominently in the propaganda photography. They don't need to. The people who live there know who they are.

The Electricity Question

I keep coming back to this because it strikes me as the most honest metric of what Pyongyang actually is versus what it claims to be.

North Korea has a chronic electricity shortage that has lasted, in various forms, for thirty years. Outside the capital, power cuts are the norm — sixteen, eighteen hours a day without electricity is common in provincial cities. In the countryside it can be worse. But Pyongyang — specifically, the showcase districts of Pyongyang — gets priority power. Always has.

Satellite imagery taken at night has documented this for years: Pyongyang glows while the rest of the country sits in darkness. It's one of the starkest visualizations of inequality I've ever seen. You can literally see the lie from space.

But here's the thing that rarely gets mentioned: even within Pyongyang, the power isn't distributed evenly. The showpiece streets get reliable electricity — need it, for the lights in the tower lobbies, for the elevators, for the appearances. The less photographed neighborhoods? Less reliable. One defector who left in 2021 after living in the Songsin District area told me that even close to the city center, planned power cuts were routine. "We had a schedule," she said, with a kind of weary humor. "Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we had electricity in the evening. The other days, no."

The Human Architecture — Loyalty, Performance, Surveillance

You can't write about Pyongyang without writing about the surveillance. It's not incidental. It's structural, as much a part of the city as the concrete.

The inminban — neighborhood watch units of about 20 to 40 households each — function as the capillary system of state control. Your inminban leader knows when you come home. Knows if you have a guest. Knows, in theory, if you're watching foreign media, which is technically a crime that can result in anything from a fine to a labor camp sentence depending on what you were watching and who found out.

In Pyongyang, the inminban system runs alongside something more sophisticated — a network of informants, both paid and coerced, operating within workplaces, within apartment buildings, within the party cells that every adult is required to participate in. "You trust no one," Choi Sung-jin told me. "Not your neighbor. Sometimes not your spouse."

And yet — and this is where it gets genuinely complicated — there is something like real life happening inside this surveillance state. Markets where people joke with each other. Restaurants that stay open late. A small but real underground economy of foreign films distributed on USB drives called notel, passed between people who've calculated, correctly or not, that the risk is manageable. Pyongyang isn't a ghost city. It's a city of people who've learned to live within an architecture of control so pervasive they've largely stopped seeing it. Which might be the most chilling thing about it.

Kim Jong-un's Personal Imprint

One thing that comes through clearly in defector accounts from people who were in Pyongyang during the early years of Kim Jong-un's rule — roughly 2012 to 2016 — is a palpable sense that the new leader was genuinely trying to signal a different kind of modernization. The amusement parks. The ski resort. The water parks. The very visible presence of his wife, Ri Sol-ju, in public. There was, apparently, a moment — brief, conditional, probably always illusory — when some people in the elite genuinely wondered if things might loosen up.

They didn't. The execution of Jang Song-thaek in December 2013 — Kim's own uncle, dragged out of a party meeting and killed within days — ended that speculation pretty efficiently. What followed was a consolidation of personal power that has continued without meaningful interruption since. The construction continued. The missiles continued. The purges continued, quieter, less theatrical, but continuous.

The city Kim is building is a monument to his own authority. Every tower is a statement. Every showcase neighborhood is a message: I can do this. I control the future. The people living in those towers, eating at those restaurants, sending their children to those schools — they are props in a performance whose primary audience is Kim Jong-un himself.

What Stays Hidden

I want to end with something a broker told me on the Chinese side of the border in the autumn of 2022. He moved people and goods — mostly goods, he was careful to say — and had contacts in Pyongyang going back fifteen years. We were sitting in a noodle shop in Yanji, Jilin Province, and he'd been talking for about two hours.

"The thing about Pyongyang," he said, switching between Korean and Mandarin in a way that my interpreter struggled with, "is that everyone inside knows it's a performance. The officials know. The residents know. Even the tourists, a little bit, they know. But knowing doesn't change anything. The performance continues."

He poured more tea. Outside, it was starting to rain.

"There are people in those buildings who have never been hungry a day in their lives. And there are people two hundred kilometers away who are eating grass. And both of those things are true at the same time, and the people in the buildings mostly don't think about it."

I've thought about that conversation a lot since. About what it means to build a showcase capital in a starving country. About who the showcase is actually for. About the people — millions of them — who will live and die without ever seeing the skyline they've subsidized with their labor and their hunger and their silence.

Pyongyang is real. The suffering that built it is real. And the gap between those two realities is where the story of North Korea actually lives.