Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Kim Jong Un strengthens grip
This week’s Workers’ Party confab provides big platform
N. Korean leader calls first Workers’ Party meet since 1980.
PYONGYANG, North Korea — The streets of Pyongyang, this most Potemkin of villages, are festooned with red this week, as the North Korean regime prepares to open the seventh congress of its ruling Workers’ Party.
It will be the highest meeting of the communist organization through which the Kim family has kept a grip on this state for three generations, and the first such confab since 1980 — several years before the current leader, Kim Jong Un, was even born.
And no effort is being spared in the lead-up to the event.
The entire country has been caught up in a “70-day speed battle” to prepare for the congress, painting buildings bright colors, decorating hedges with colored lights and attaching red Workers’ Party flags to street lamps — which, unusually, are even illuminated.
On almost every block in the center of this showcase capital, hand-painted red and white signs feature slogans such as “Together with the party forever.” On Tuesday night, hundreds of people gathered near Kim Il Sung Square in the driving rain to practice for a torchlight parade.
With many adults out working until after 10 p.m., residents of Pyongyang and recent visitors say that the 70-day campaign has had a much greater effect on the state’s ability to function properly than the sanctions imposed following North Korea’s January nuclear test. But what will take place at the congress this week is, like many things about North Korea, unknown to outsiders.
China and the Soviet Union used congresses to announce major new policy changes, such as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” under Deng Xiaoping and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev. At the last congress in North Korea, 36 years ago, Kim Il Sung, the founding president of North Korea, unveiled his son, Kim Jong Il, as his successor.
While some analysts expect significant policy announcements or personnel changes, others are betting that Kim Jong Un, the founder’s grandson, will play it safe.
“There is a general superstition about big announcements in North Korea,” said Michael Madden, who runs the North Korean Leadership Watch website. “They don’t want to announce a huge policy and have it be a failure.”
Madden instead expects Kim, who promised to raise living standards when he took over at the end of 2011, to focus on the economy.
Kim has already allowed more of the market reforms that began under his father, tolerating more private trade and enabling people to earn livelihoods that are not dependent on the cashstrapped state. He also changed the agricultural quota system, allowing farmers to keep or sell more of their crops.
But these changes have been tentative, and most have not been officially announced, enabling the regime to roll them back if they do not work — or if they work too well.
The economy has been growing in recent years, thanks in part to a commodity boom and heavy demand in neighboring China for North Korea’s coal, iron ore and other minerals.
Now, China’s economy is slowing, and tightened international sanctions on North Korea following its nuclear and missile tests this year have been designed to hurt the regime.
Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea analyst at the Sejong Institute near Seoul, expects a significant reordering in the Workers’ Party.
“I think a big change from this party congress will be the shuffling of positions,” he said. “They’ve been going through the backgrounds of all the middle- and highlevel officials for evidence of corruption and wrongdoing.”
This explains some of the purges and disappearances of recent months, he added.