and new restaurants serving a dozen varieties of pizza and pasta accompanied by wine or beer.
Consumerism has been entrenched, embraced, and encouraged. Since Kim came to power, more North Koreans enjoy smartphones, taxis, flat-screen televisions, and home appliances made in Japan and South Korea. A wide range of these and similar goods are available in hundreds of markets and state-run shops. Wall described what she called “mundane life and everyday happiness: uniformed military couples holding hands at Pyongyang’s funfair; roller-skating girls in pink sweats buying ice cream; bored parents waiting on benches in the shade.” A year later, Oliver Wainwright, the architecture and design critic for The Guardian, also noted signs of an emerging prosperity, at least in Pyongyang. “Kids zoom around the public spaces on rollerblades,” he wrote, “while women sport brightly coloured fitted jackets and high heels, shading their faces from the sun with glittery lace parasols and oversized sunglasses—fashion accessories that were unheard of just a few years ago.”
Outside Pyongyang, starting in 2014, Kim has also sought to develop the east coast area of Wonsan, roughly 150 square miles of it, aiming to attract millions of tourists. It is one of the few North Korean economic ventures not under international or U.S. sanctions, even though he has conducted scores of missile tests from the area. The Korea Maritime Institute, a South Korean think tank, estimated that tourism pumps the equivalent of around $44 million into the North Korean economy, with 80 percent of the visitors coming from China. According to a North Korean brochure seeking foreign investors that was analyzed by Reuters, Kim sought backers to help build a $7.3 million department store and a $123 million golf course, and had sent a delegation to Spain to study several successful tourist attractions there. The regime had already constructed a new airport and a ski resort in the area to spur Wonsan’s development.
The images that the regime chooses to disseminate and weave into Kim’s hagiography say a lot about how he envisions North Korea’s future and his place in it. The master builder of Pyongyang, who chose to juxtapose war monuments and nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles with his country’s newly available luxuries and resorts, might be trying to educate the people about how they have this prosperity because of the nuclear weapons program that keeps them safe from the hostile outside world and provides them with status.
Kim may also be using the imagery of these amenities as a corrective, a way to undermine the dominant external narrative of a decaying, starving, economically hobbled North Korea. And the reality is that outside Pyongyang, a city of around three million where only the elite have the privilege of living and working, roughly twenty-two million North Koreans live in a bleak, denuded landscape, where they eke out a living from what remains of the public distribution system, engaging in market activity and receiving urgently needed goods and services from international aid groups, with little hope of ever visiting the glitzy capital, much less dining at one of the high-end restaurants.
More important, Kim may be deploying these signs of affluence not as mere window dressing but to show the world the success of North Korea’s self-reliance and to craft an internal narrative about North Korea’s well-being at a time when his people are being exposed to more and more information about South Korea’s wealth. DVDs and flash drives of the South’s soap operas and K-pop have been smuggled into the North in ever greater numbers, infiltrating its previously sealed mental and cultural landscape and presenting a danger to the regime. As a result, Kim has engaged in border crackdowns, as in the spring of 2014, and strengthened punishment for crimes including illegal contact with foreigners, viewing South Korean shows and listening to foreign radio broadcasts, and aiding defectors, among a slew of other acts. The international advocacy organization Human Rights Watch noted in a 2019 report that Kim has not relented on his desire to maintain control over North Koreans’ movement and access to information and goods. He has upped the number of CCTV cameras, barbed wire fences, and border guards along the 880-mile border with China. This has led to a dramatic decrease in the number of North Koreans successfully defecting to South Korea, from 2,706 in 2011 to only around 800 in 2018.
Kim’s focus on leisure and entertainment suggests that he is concentrating on the younger generations whose minds are more pliable and susceptible to fantastical claims