North Korean leader Kim Jong-un vowed to lift living standards as he opened a landmark congress, state media said yesterday, offering a glimpse of economic strains within the sanctions-hit nation.
Kim took center stage with a speech to start the Workers’ Party congress, a gathering that directs state efforts on everything from house building to war planning.
Held just once every five years, the days-long congress offers a rare glimpse into the workings of a nation where even mundane details are shrouded in secrecy.
Photo: Korean Central News Agency via Reuters
“Today, our party is faced with heavy and urgent historic tasks of boosting economic construction and the people’s standard of living, and transforming all realms of state and social life as early as possible,” Kim said. “This requires us to wage a more active and persistent struggle without allowing even a moment’s standstill or stagnation.”
For decades, nuclear weapons and military prowess came before everything else in North Korea, even as food stocks dried up and famine took hold. However, since assuming power in 2011, Kim has stressed the need to also fortify the impoverished nation’s economy.
At the last party congress in 2021, Kim made an extremely rare admission that mistakes had been made in “almost all areas” of economic development.
Analysts believed such language is designed to head off public discontent stirred by food shortages, military spending and Pyongyang’s continued support for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.
North Korea had overcome its “worst difficulties” in the last five years, and was now entering a new stage of “optimism and confidence in the future,” Kim said.
Its economy has for years languished under heavy Western sanctions that aim to choke off funding for its nuclear weapons program, but Pyongyang refuses to surrender its atomic arsenal.
Kim has already declared this year’s congress would unveil the next phase in the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
Thousands of party elites packed the cavernous House of Culture in Pyongyang for the opening day of the congress.
It is just the ninth time the Workers’ Party congress has convened under the Kim family’s decades-long rule.
The ruling parties of China and Russia sent friendly messages to mark the start of the meeting.
“In recent years, under the strategic guidance of the top leaders of the two parties and two countries, China-DPRK relations have entered a new historical period,” a telegram from the Chinese Communist Party said, using the official acronym for North Korea.
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