President Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) sought to build a powerful self-sufficient economy from the early years of founding the DPRK.

When Korea was liberated on August 15, 1945 from the Japanese military occupation (1905-1945), the Korean people found themselves left only with a backward economy, which was crippled by the Japanese imperialists before the liberation, and an empty coffer. However, they built a new country by their own efforts under the leadership of Kim Il Sung and rebuilt the economy on their own from scratch after the three-year Fatherland Liberation War (1950-1953).

At the time President Kim Il Sung brought up two principles concerning the vital task of economic construction.

One of them was to build the national economy on the country’s own effort because it can never get out of indebtedness if it relies on others without laying its own foundations.

The other one was to possess a material and economic strength powerful enough to ride out the pressure and blockade by the imperialists, which he thought is inevitable as long as the country opted for an independent life.

He laid down the basic line of socialist economic construction which called for giving priority to heavy industry while developing light industry and agriculture simultaneously.

Hostile forces launched harsh political and military offensives and further tightened economic blockade to check the DPRK’s economic construction, while big-power chauvinists took issue with the DPRK over its economic line and attempted to shackle it to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance under the pretext of the “socialist international division of labour.”

But nothing could check the advance of the Korean people along the road of building a self-sufficient national economy.

Led by Kim Il Sung , they realized the socialist industrialization in a matter of 14 years by themselves and built an advanced rural economy.

The reality of the DPRK shows that its self-sufficient economy was designed on the basis of the plan and intention of Kim Il Sung , not any classic theory, and it was built in a Korean way to meet the requirements of the specific realities of the country and the demand of the people, not by blindly following others’ experience. It also tells that the Korean economy was built up by the nation’s own efforts and wisdom, not with the help of the strength and technology of big countries.

The expansion of a multi-faceted economic structure, formation of solid material bases, equipment of all economic sectors with modern technology and training of native technical cadres—this is the gist of the line of building a self-sufficient national economy.

The self-sufficient national economy created under the leadership of Kim Il Sung greatly helps the DPRK break through the extreme economic blockade of the hostile forces by dint of self-reliance.

Kim Tae Ho