Marble Floors and Empty Stomachs: The Secret Two-Tier City Kim Jong-un Built While His People Starved

On a freezing morning in January 2020, a woman named Choi Hye-young watched from her crumbling apartment window in Pyongyang's Rakrang District as construction crews put the finishing touches on a gleaming new residential complex less than two kilometers away. The workers, she later told investigators after defecting to South Korea in October 2021, were moving at a frantic pace — not because of any labor enthusiasm, but because a deadline set personally by Kim Jong-un was approaching. The complex, part of the Ryomyong Street development, was being built exclusively for scientists, military officers, and senior Party cadres. Choi's family had not had running hot water for three months. "They were building paradise," she told debriefing officials in Seoul, "and we were not allowed inside."

Mansu Hill Grand Monument
Mansu Hill Grand Monument — Wikimedia Commons

A Capital Reborn — For the Chosen

Since assuming power following the death of his father Kim Jong-il in December 2011, Kim Jong-un has embarked on the most ambitious urban transformation Pyongyang has witnessed since Kim Il-sung flattened the city's colonial-era architecture in the 1950s and rebuilt it as a Stalinist showcase. Satellite imagery analyzed by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, published in March 2022, documented at least fourteen major construction zones active simultaneously within Pyongyang's city limits between 2012 and 2021. The projects — stretching from the Mirae Scientists Street inaugurated in November 2015 to the Songhwa Street residential towers completed in April 2023 — share a common denominator: they are designed not for North Korea's 25 million citizens, but for the estimated 200,000-strong core elite who service the regime's survival.

Defector testimonies collected by the Seoul-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights between 2018 and 2023 paint a consistent portrait of a capital city deliberately engineered along apartheid lines. Park Sung-jin, a former mid-level official in the Korean Workers' Party's Organization and Guidance Department who crossed the Tumen River into China in August 2019, described a permit system so rigid that even residents of Pyongyang's outer districts were barred from entering the inner city zones without advance authorization. "There are checkpoints," he said in an interview conducted in Seoul in February 2022. "Not just at the city limits. Inside the city itself. You need documents to walk certain streets."

The Architecture of Privilege

The centerpiece of Kim's vanity urbanism is Ryomyong Street, a 70-story cluster of pastel-colored skyscrapers unveiled with extraordinary fanfare on April 13, 2017 — the eve of the birthday celebration of Kim Il-sung, a date chosen with deliberate propagandistic precision. State television broadcast footage of Kim Jong-un touring the complex with generals and scientists, running his hands approvingly along Italian-style kitchen countertops and inspecting floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Taedong River. What the broadcast did not show — and what multiple sources have since confirmed — is that the apartments were allocated strictly according to loyalty metrics maintained by the State Security Department. Residents were assigned units based on their songbun classification, the hereditary loyalty rating that has governed North Korean social hierarchy since the 1950s.

Lee Hyun-seung, a former architect who worked on state construction projects in Pyongyang before defecting via Laos in June 2018, described the interior specifications that ordinary North Koreans will never see. Speaking to North Korea Untold in December 2022, he detailed underfloor heating systems, elevators serviced by dedicated maintenance crews, and building lobbies stocked with imported Chinese and Russian goods. "The wallpaper alone in one lobby cost more than a worker's salary for five years," he said. "We were told this was to show the superiority of socialism. But everyone working on those buildings knew the truth."

Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang
Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang — Wikimedia Commons

Monuments to a Leader, Ruins for Everyone Else

The starkest symbol of Pyongyang's engineered inequality stands 330 meters above the city skyline: the Ryugyong Hotel, a concrete pyramid whose construction began in 1987, was abandoned in 1992, restarted in 2008 with Egyptian contractor Orascom Telecom's investment, and remains — as of 2024 — structurally incomplete and uninhabited after more than three decades and an estimated expenditure exceeding 750 million US dollars. Economists at the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated in a 2021 report that the resources consumed by Pyongyang's showcase construction boom between 2012 and 2019 alone could have funded nutritional supplementation for North Korea's entire rural population for eight years. Meanwhile, UN World Food Programme assessments from 2019 documented acute malnutrition affecting 42 percent of the national population — a figure analysts believe worsened dramatically following Kim's near-total border closure in January 2020.

Former residents of North Hamgyong Province — the region consistently identified as bearing the worst food insecurity — describe receiving state media broadcasts about Pyongyang's new hospitals, schools, and leisure complexes as a form of psychological torment. Kim Myong-chul, a farmer from Chongjin who reached South Korea in March 2023 via a dangerous overland route through China and Southeast Asia, described watching a state television segment in 2022 about the newly completed Yangdok County Hot Spring Resort — a luxury recreational complex Kim Jong-un personally inspected on horseback in October 2019 — while his youngest son recovered from malnutrition-related illness. "They showed women in swimsuits in heated pools," he said, his voice dropping. "My son had not eaten meat in two years."

The Surveillance State Behind the Showcase

Maintaining the fiction that Pyongyang represents a universally prosperous socialist capital requires an infrastructure of control as elaborate as the construction projects themselves. Analysts at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification documented in a January 2023 report that the number of inminban — neighborhood surveillance units tasked with monitoring residents' movements, conversations, and consumption habits — had been significantly reinforced in Pyongyang's elite residential districts following the COVID-19 border closure. The paradox is acute: the very neighborhoods built to reward loyalty are also the most heavily surveilled, as the regime calculates that proximity to power increases the risk of exposure to uncomfortable truths.

Choi Hye-young, the defector whose testimony opened this investigation, said that in her final months in Pyongyang before her escape she had begun to understand the city's architecture in a new way. The wide boulevards that foreign visitors sometimes describe as eerily empty were not, she explained, a product of low car ownership alone. They were empty because movement itself was controlled. "Pyongyang is a stage set," she said. "The buildings are real. The marble is real. But the city is a performance. And most North Koreans are not in the audience. They are not even allowed near the theater." As Kim Jong-un's construction crews break ground on yet another showcase district — the Hwasong residential zone, announced in state media in February 2024 — the distance between that performance and the lives of 25 million people shows no sign of narrowing.

댓글

댓글 쓰기

이 블로그의 인기 게시물

North Korea's Secret Rich Class: How the Donju Merchants Are Reshaping the Hermit Kingdom From Within

The Man With the Mercedes In the spring of 2016, a black Mercedes-Benz S-Class edged through the potholed streets of Pyongyang's Moranbong district, past the grey concrete apartment blocks and the billboards praising the Supreme Leader. Behind the wheel sat a man in his fifties wearing a tailored suit — not a party uniform, not a military jacket, but the kind of Italian cut that would not look out of place in Seoul or Shanghai. His name, according to two defectors who separately described the same figure to this reporter, was Choe Yong-nam. He was not a general. He was not a senior party official. He was a coal trader. And he was, by any measure, extraordinarily wealthy. Choe Yong-nam represents a phenomenon that has quietly redefined the social and economic fabric of North Korea over the past two decades: the donju . The word translates roughly as "masters of money," and it refers to a class of private merchants and entrepreneurs who have accumulated significant capital...
자세한 내용 보기

Signal in the Dark: How North Koreans Risk Everything to Hold a Smuggled Phone

이미지
{"title": "Signal in the Dark: How North Koreans Risk Everything to Hold a Smuggled Phone", "content": " On a freezing night in January 2019, a 24-year-old factory worker in Hyesan — a border city hugging the Yalu River that separates North Korea from China — pressed a smuggled Chinese smartphone against her chest and held her breath. She had climbed to the rooftop of her dormitory building, wrapped in a military-surplus coat, waiting for a single bar of Chinese mobile signal to bleed across the frozen river. Her name was Park Soonja. She was not calling a lover. She was not ordering food. She was, in the eyes of the North Korean state, committing an act of treason. She was trying to call her mother, who had escaped to Seoul three years earlier and whom she had not heard from since. What happened next — and what is happening across the northern border regions of the most hermetically sealed nation on earth — constitutes one of the most remarkable and ...
자세한 내용 보기

Jangmadang Nation: How North Korea's Black Market Became the Only Thing Keeping People Alive

이미지
The Market That Wasn't Supposed to Exist The first time I spoke to someone who'd actually run a stall in a North Korean jangmadang — that's the informal market, the black market, depending on who you ask and how afraid they are — I was sitting in a cramped apartment in Shenyang, China, in February 2019. The woman across from me, I'll call her Minju, was 41 years old, originally from Chongjin, and she kept glancing at the door even though we were four floors up and nobody knew we were there. Old habits. She'd been selling salt, then dried fish, then eventually Chinese-made electronics for nearly a decade before she got out. She told me the market wasn't just her income. It was her entire life. Her identity. Her survival mechanism. And the state, officially, pretended it barely existed — even as state officials took their cut of every single transaction. North Korea Untold That's the paradox at the heart of this story. North Korea's leadership has spent de...
자세한 내용 보기