SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to lift living standards as he opened a landmark congress, state media said Friday, offering a glimpse of economic strains within the sanctions-hit nation.
Supreme Leader 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.
“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 in his opening speech.
“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.
But 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 believe such language is designed to head off public discontent stirred by food shortages, military spending, and North Korea’s continued support for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.
Kim said 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.”
North Korea’s 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 will unveil the next phase in the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
Ruling dynasty
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 meeting was shelved under Kim’s father Kim Jong Il, but was revived in 2016.
Kim Jong Un has spent years stoking his cult of personality in reclusive North Korea, and the congress offers another chance to demonstrate his absolute grip on power.
Footage showed Kim stepping out of a black limousine and striding into the meeting flanked by officials.
Delegates broke into hearty applause as he took his place at the center of the imposing rostrum overlooking proceedings.
Analysts will scour photographs to see which officials are seated closest to Kim, and who is banished to the back row.
Particular attention will be placed on the whereabouts of Kim’s teenage daughter Ju Ae, who has emerged as North Korea’s heir apparent, according to Seoul’s national intelligence service.
’Biggest enemy’
The ruling parties of China and Russia — North Korea’s longtime allies — 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,” said a telegram from the Chinese Communist Party, using the official acronym for North Korea.
Kim appeared alongside China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin at a military parade in Beijing last year — a striking display of his elevated status in global politics.
At the previous congress five years ago, Kim declared that the United States was his nation’s “biggest enemy.”
There is keen interest in whether Kim might use the congress to soften this stance, or double down.
US President Donald Trump stepped up his courtship of Kim during a tour of Asia last year, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting.
Kim has so far largely shunned efforts to resume top-level diplomatic dialogue.