This is North Korea in the nineties, poverty, hunger, and even starvation, and the people are destitute! This is the popular impression of North Korea.
But if I told you that North Korea was once a quasi-developed country, and it was even called the "East Asian Duo" with Japan, would you wonder when this happened? How did he go from a rich man to a poor child overnight?
In today's article, let's unveil the mystery of North Korea and talk about this country that we have always been curious about!
At the Third Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea in 1970, Kim Il Sung proudly announced that the DPRK had successfully entered the socialist industrialized country.
Kim Il Sung did not brag that North Korea was indeed one of the most industrialized countries in Asia at that time.
In the sixties of the last century, North Korea has achieved electricity in rural households, and the whole country has been fully electrified, and the annual per capita electricity consumption has reached 1184 degrees. In 1978, China's per capita electricity consumption was only 261 kWh, less than a quarter of North Korea's in the sixties. By the end of the seventies, North Korea had achieved complete self-sufficiency in grain, and by the early eighties, North Korea had achieved widespread mechanization in agriculture, of which 70% of the country's arable land was irrigated, 95% of rice planting and 70% of harvesting were all mechanized. By the eighties, the urbanization rate reached 70%, and the above data has not been achieved even in China now, you can imagine how far the North Korean economy has reached that year!
With the development of the economy, the welfare of the North Korean people has also been significantly improved. By the end of the 70s, North Korea had achieved free medical care for all, and education was free from kindergarten to university. Kindergarten children will even have free clothes and shoes handed. Not only do they provide free housing, but even the decoration has been solved, and the cost of water, electricity, gas, heating and so on is all free!
Compared with South Korea during the same period, unemployment remained high, agricultural production was unfavorable, inflation was serious, and people's lives were extremely difficult, and half of their fiscal revenue could even be solved by US aid. So at that time, many people were running north.
North Korea's rapid take-off depends on three main points. First of all, North Korea has made the right decision centered on economic construction. Second, external aid helped it take off, and second, the international environment gave North Korea enough time and space to develop its economy.
Before Japan's surrender, as a springboard, Japan attached great importance to the economic construction of the Korean Peninsula, thus establishing very complete industrial facilities. Therefore, after 1945, the level of industrialization in North Korea was significantly higher than that of the mainland, and even during the Liberation War, some industrial raw materials of the military industry in the northeast region came from North Korea.
But the Peninsular War completely destroyed everything that North Korea had!
Therefore, after the war, North Korea formulated a basic national policy centered on economic construction. Beginning in 1954, North Korea quickly entered the process of restoring the national economy, and with the assistance of China, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the North Korean economy took off rapidly, with an annual growth rate of as high as 25%.
Hence the "economic miracle of the Far East", which was praised by the East German media! It is even called "East Asian Heroes" together with Japan!
In 1976, North Korea's industrial production level had reached an annual production of 33 billion kWh of electricity, 50 million tons of coal, 4 million tons of steel, 30,000 machine tools, 30,000 tractors, 3 million tons of fertilizer, 8 million tons of cement, and 600 million meters of textiles. In the same period, South Korea's GDP was just the same as North Korea's, but South Korea's population was twice as large, and the gap between the rich and the poor was extremely serious! We'll focus on this in the next episode. Interested friends, please like and follow!
In terms of aid to the DPRK, the mainland can be described as sparing no effort! First of all, the volunteers stationed in the DPRK, in the eight years after the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, they built a total of 881 public places, 45,412 houses, 4,263 large and small bridges, 2,295 canals, and other kinds of livelihood facilities could not be counted at all, and these were all donated to the DPRK free of charge.
At the national level, in the five years from 1958 to 1963, we had the most difficult three years, but even so, we still sent 29 complete sets of projects to the DPRK in the form of interest-free loans, including textile factories, bearing factories, sugar factories, thermal instrument factories, relay factories, electron tube factories, and radio parts factories, during which we even loaned 420 million rubles to the DPRK for economic construction. All 126,000 spindles of cotton textile equipment from the Fifth Textile Plant were dismantled to North Korea, and in 1972, an oil pipeline with an annual oil transmission of 4 million tons was built.
Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union provided 1.3 billion rubles in aid to the DPRK and 3.6 billion rubles in low-interest loans. And aid in the construction of steel mills, thermal power stations, oil refineries, etc.
Among them, the assistance of the two big brothers in the fifties was more about internal unity. After the Sino-Soviet conflict in 1960, it included the consideration of taking sides, while North Korea crisscrossed between the two major powers.
In addition, as an observer country of the Economic Mutual Council, the DPRK also enjoys the same preferential treatment as the member countries of the Economic Mutual Council. This economic and mutual meeting is a socialist version of the WTO led by the Soviet Union after the establishment of the Warsaw Pact. For example, the Soviet Union required North Korea to complete agriculture and light industry, Bulgaria produced motors, motors and electronic equipment, Hungary produced automobiles, the GDR engaged in shipbuilding, chemical, textile machines, forging equipment, passenger car production, Poland manufactured ships and construction machines, Romania produced oil extraction equipment and locomotives, Czechoslovakia produced metallurgical and chemical equipment, cars, nuclear power plant equipment, The USSR was dominated by the aviation industry and electromechanical products.
In the early years of its establishment, the national income of the member countries increased by an average of 7.6 times.
At that time, China was also invited to join the Economic Mutual Council, and we did not join from the perspective of independence and self-determination, but it also became an observer country. Later, for well-known reasons, we quit completely. And how far-sighted this decision is now!
Other countries, led by the United States, are struggling with the oil crisis that began in the seventies!
The oil crisis after the Middle East war caused oil to soar from $3 a barrel to $13 a barrel, and the fourfold explosion made the Soviet Union make a lot of money, in order to reflect the generosity of the big brother, and in order to pinch the little brother of North Korea, the Soviet Union sold oil to North Korea at one-third of the international oil price!
And such a low price directly boosts the glory of North Korea's oil agriculture! At the same time, it also laid the groundwork for the collapse of the North Korean economy!
The pendulum will swing!
First of all, while creating an economic miracle, North Korea also has a long-cherished desire for reunification, so North Korea began to actively prepare for war: on the one hand, weapons and ammunition, on the other hand, food security!
Weapons and ammunition are easy to solve, as long as a perfect military-industrial system can be established, at the end of the sixties, in addition to aircraft and warships, North Korea can basically achieve its own production!
Food security is more difficult to solve! Because the terrain of North Korea is mountainous and less plain! North Korea accounts for only 18 percent of the country's arable land, and three-quarters of that arable land is mountainous, which is not conducive to reclamation and irrigation, so North Korea has not been able to feed itself.
There is not enough food to eat, let alone hoard it because of preparations for war! So North Korea began the vigorous "Maxima Movement", determined to reach an annual output of 10 million tons by the end of the seventies. You know, North Korea, fueled by oil agriculture, has reached an output of 6 million tons in 1970, which is almost impossible without revolutionary technological innovation!
Technology can't do it! Then multi-field!
Hilly? Rice up the mountain to make terraces!
Long coastline? Rice into the sea! Reclamation!
Mountains and rocks? Blowing up rocks to move mountains, filling in soil to reclaim fields!
In short, in order to increase grain production, fight the heavens and the earth!
And all these efforts, in the short term, the effect is absolutely amazing!
In 1984, North Korea's total grain production exceeded 10 million tons, which was not only able to stock up on grain, but even had surplus for export. When South Korea suffered floods in the eighties, they also lovingly helped a handful of compatriots in the "south"!
However, North Korea's feat of "man conquering the sky" has sown the source of the food crisis.
First of all, judging from the results of the increase in agricultural production in North Korea, both mechanization and the use of fertilizers require oil as a basic raw material! The Soviet Union could provide cheap oil to North Korea when it was healthy, but in the 80s, the Soviet Union was already tormented in Afghanistan, the "graveyard of empires", and North Korea's oil agriculture had shown the characteristics of insufficient stamina at this time, but North Korea was already carried away by this time.
Second, in the mountainous and forested North Korea, the forest coverage rate plummeted from 74% to 40% during the war against the sea and moving mountains, and the result of deforestation and land reclamation was serious soil erosion. Once heavy rainfall occurs, it is easy to form mudslides and cause larger secondary disasters.
The consequences of reclamation are even more serious, as the Datong River basin, as a major grain-producing area, due to frequent typhoons in autumn, there will be seawater backwater to form a salty tide, and salty tide water cannot be used for irrigation. Therefore, in the vigorous campaign, the DPRK spent five years of hard work, using 1.1 million tons of cement, 280,000 tons of steel, 140,000 cubic meters of wood and 500 tons of non-ferrous metals, leveled 10 mountains, invested hundreds of thousands of manpower and more than 4 billion US dollars, and built the 8-kilometer-long West Sea Gate. Their self-proclaimed "eighth wonder of the world" West Sea Gate can store billions of cubic meters of fresh water, which not only irrigates newly reclaimed land in South Pyongan and South Hwanghai Provinces, but also provides water for cities and villages in the lower reaches of the Datong River and for industry in Nanpu and Da'an.
However, this sluice gate does not completely isolate the fresh water from the sea, it still has 36 gates and 3 fish roads connected to the sea, so the fresh water is completely salted over time. As a result, the fertile land on both sides of the Datong River gradually salinized.
In addition, in order to increase the unlimited use of chemical fertilizers to increase yields, many land compactions were acidified, resulting in a serious decline in soil fertility.
The result of this series of operations directly led to the fact that the land can only produce 150 kilograms of rice per acre, while the mainland can already produce 500 kilograms per acre!
Then, in 1991, the Economic Association disbanded! The collapse of the USSR!
After that, Great Russia, which inherited the mantle of the Soviet Union, demanded the use of dollars or gold for international trade settlement, who has these things? I think that everyone bartered in rubles. As a result, North Korea's oil imports plummeted from 18.47 million barrels in 1990 to 3.88 million barrels.
If you can't buy oil, you can't produce fertilizer, and there is no fertilizer in farmland!
It is also impossible to provide fuel for agricultural machinery, and a large number of agricultural machinery is nested!
North Korea's oil agriculture suddenly collapsed overnight!
And then something more serious followed!
North Korea suddenly had a natural disaster in 1994-1996!
In particular, in 1995, the highest rainfall in parts of North Pyongan Province in North Korea reached 845 mm (four times that of the 2021 heavy rainfall in Zhengzhou), and the concentrated rainfall in North Korea reached 300 mm in a single day (close to the level of Zhengzhou's heavy rainfall), affecting nearly 900,000 people.
The sudden rainstorm is the best for North Korea! The bare mountains could not withstand the torrential rains, and as a result, this torrential rain alone lost 30,000 acres of terraced land in North Korea, and 40,000 hectares of land could not be recovered.
The three-year natural disaster hit North Korea from an annual output of 12 million tons of grain in the late eighties, directly penetrating the 5 million tons of food line, to 2.5 million tons in 1996!
What is the concept? Only one of two people can eat well! As a result, countless people who did not have enough to eat fled to the mainland and South Korea!
At this time, North Korea instantly degraded from a quasi-industrial country to a bottom-level agricultural country.
The international community has assistance, but it is far from meeting basic needs!
How many people starved to death during the famine varies from 240,000 to 3.5 million!
And this history will become a pain that North Korea can never forget!
In the future, North Korea, which was once crisscrossed and left and right, became a self-enclosed and wild and helpless North Korea.
Slowly, he came out of his pain and chose Kim Jong-un after 80 as the leader, whether he can lead North Korea out of the predicament and restore its former glory, let's wait and see!
I am Jotun, pay attention to me and see the world with a thinking eye!