100-Year History of Kim Il Sung’s Korea

Apr 15, 1912

For the history of a nation, the period of one hundred years is not so long. But, for the Korean people, the one hundred years from the birth (April 15, 1912) of President Kim Il Sung, founder of socialist Korea, to the present day is a period noteworthy in their five-millennia history.

In this period Korea achieved its national liberation and brilliantly defended its dignity and sovereignty from imperialist aggression.

During the Japanese military occupation of Korea (1905-1945), Kim Il Sung, relying on the strength of the masses of the people, waged a 15-year-long anti-Japanese armed struggle with no support from any home front or regular army. He rallied broad sections of the people around the anti-Japanese national united front and led them to put up an all-people resistance in step with the general offensive by the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army, thus defeating Japanese imperialism and liberating the country on August 15, 1945, at long last.

The Korean people won a historic victory in the Fatherland Liberation War (Korean war between 1950 and 1953) against aggression of the United States. The US, which had boasted of its “greatest” might, hurled into the war two-million-strong forces, including the forces from its 15 satellite states, the south Korean puppet army and the remnants of the former Japanese army, who, aware of being the masters of their own destiny, turned out in the struggle to defend their national dignity and sovereignty honorably.

After the war they won one victory after another in the half-century long political and military showdown with the US imperialists, a typical example being the Pueblo incident, a US armed spy ship, in 1968, which ended with a letter of apology sent by the US government for the first time in its history.

In the 1990s the US instigated the International Atomic Energy Agency to adopt a forced inspection of military sites in Korea, and taking advantage of this, attempted to throttle Korea completely. Rising to this challenge, the Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army declared a semi-war state throughout the country, and the DPRK government made public a statement, declaring its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT. All these measures plunged the provokers into consternation. Today Korea, equipped with strong war deterrent, distinguishes itself as an invincible and impregnable socialist fortress.

The 100-year history of Kim Il Sung’s Korea is a history, in which the country that had been writhing in centuries-old backwardness and poverty has developed into a prosperous socialist power.

Korea, a backward agricultural state in the days of the Japanese imperialist rule, entered, after its liberation, upon the roads of new development in the course of carrying out the tasks of democratic revolution. But the Korean War reduced it to ashes. Americans were so proud as to say that “Korea would not stand on its own feet again in a hundred years.”

Kim Il Sung roused all the Korean people in the struggle for post-war rehabilitation and socialist construction. The unusual zeal displayed by the Korean people, who were determined to take ten or a hundred steps when others were taking one, gave rise to the Chollima Movement. Through this mass innovation movement, Korea’s economic development stood at the growth rate unprecedented in world history. As a result, Korea turned into a socialist industrial state in a matter of 14 years.

Socialist Korea has developed into a people-oriented country, where universal free medical care and 11-year compulsory education are enforced and the state takes full responsibility for people’s living-food, clothing and housing.

Korea produced a 10,000-ton press and large-sized oxygen plant, and built the 8km-long West Sea Barrage across the wild sea in a matter of five years. It demonstrates Korea’s gigantic economic might.

In August 1998 Korea succeeded in launching an entirely home-made artificial satellite Kwangmyongsong No. 1, a signal that it launched the building of a thriving nation. Its economic self-sufficiency has remarkably been consolidated through the successive establishment of a new steel-making system that does not rely on coke and scrap iron, fertilizer production system based on coal gasification, and a modern production line of vinalon. As Korea seized the supremacy in CNC technology, a number of factories and enterprises have applied the technology in their production. Land realignment projects were successfully undertaken to standardize the fields across the country, large-scale gravitational waterways built, and overall agriculture, including fruit culture and stockbreeding, took on a new appearance on the basis of modern technology. Nationwide efforts are directed to the development of light industry, with the result that a new leap forward is being made in improving the people’s standard of living. In Pyongyang, the capital of the DPRK, the construction of 100 000 flats is progressing full steam ahead. The Huichon Power Station and other important construction projects have entered the stage of completion.

In 2012 the Korean people will surely open the gates of a thriving nation.