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Bloomberg
Kim Jong-un’s latest appearance, in which he dressed down officials building a showcase hospital, illustrates why the North Korean leader can’t afford to languish under sanctions forever if he wants to fix his economy.
In a visit to the Pyongyang General Hospital, Kim lashed out at the building committee over “serious problems in economic organisation for the construction,†the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. Kim “rebuked†the committee for not following ruling party policies and accused it of “careless†budgeting.
The tense field inspection comes less than three months before the 75th anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea on October 10, which Kim in March had chosen as a symbolic completion date. The project appears to have been hit by a shortage of building materials, underscoring the difficulty he faces to improve living conditions while toiling under a US-led sanctions campaign designed to curb his nuclear program.
“There’s simply nothing more he can do but to scold officials, or people would start questioning Kim’s legitimacy to deliver people’s needs,†said Cha Du-hyeogn, a visiting research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.
The country’s economy risks shrinking 6% this year, according to Fitch Solutions, which would be its worst contraction since a historic famine more than two decades ago. The coronavirus, which prompted North Korea to shut its borders in January — virtually eliminating what little legal trade it had — helped exacerbate the problem.
More than two years after a flurry of summits with US President Donald Trump, China’s
Xi Jinping and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in, Kim still hasn’t achieved the sanctions relief he wanted in exchange for any offers to scale back his nuclear weapons program.
Sanctions have made it difficult to get medical equipment to the Pyongyang General Hospital site, the NK News web site reported last month. Kim has dedicated two of his two dozen publicly announced trips this year visit to the twin-towered facility, which covers an area of 60,000 square metres — roughly the size of the former World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan.