Immortal Exploits of Setting Forth the Line of Building a Self-supporting National Economy in the Period of Building a New Korea

The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un said:

"Kim Il Sung was the most outstanding leader and an extraordinary veteran statesman who bequeathed imperishable exploits to his country and people and to the times and revolution by means of profound ideas and theories, uncommon leadership ability and gigantic revolutionary practice."

Today, the people of the DPRK are achieving brilliant successes by concentrating all their efforts on promoting socialist economic construction to make their country an economic giant as the country attained the status of a world-class politico-ideological power and military power under the wise leadership of the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un.

All these successes cannot be thought of separated from the immortal exploits of the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung who set forth the line of building a self-supporting national economy in the period of building a new Korea, and led this work wisely.

Before the liberation of the country, the Japanese imperialists turned Korea into their military base and a supplier of raw materials for aggression on Asia. This caused serious colonial one-sidedness to the industries of the DPRK. Japanese financial capitalists who held the monopoly of Korea's industry, only developed what they needed for their aggressive ends, reducing its economy into an appendage to Japan's economy.

As a result, in the period of Japanese occupation not a single Korean factory produced machines or spare parts, locomotives or wagons, and the processing industries were practically non-existent

The Japanese imperialists destroyed many enterprises when they fled the country, defeated. They flooded 64 coal and ore mines, partially inundated or destroyed another 178, and played havoc with the Chongjin Iron Works and Steel Plant and Suphung Power Station. In addition, they wrecked workshops, production facilities, blast furnaces, coking ovens and other vital equipment at 47 enterprises. They smashed and burnt the coking and chemical workshop of the iron works and important workshops of the Pyongyang Chemical Factory.

Around this time the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, having waged a bloody struggle against the Japanese imperialists and returned home in triumph after defeating the imperialists, successfully carried out the agrarian reform, the nationalization of key industries and other democratic reforms in a year just after the liberation, and laid a foundation for developing the national economy in a planned way. And he led rehabilitating and readjusting factories and enterprises destroyed by the Japanese imperialists and training the country's own technical cadres.

On this basis, with an outstanding ideological and theoretical insight, he set it as an important task in the development of the national economy to eliminate the colonial lopsidedness of the country's industry and lay the foundations for an independent economy that can satisfy the domestic needs for important goods.

He set forth the line of building a self-supporting national economy in several meetings like the meeting of heads of industry departments of provincial people's committees and directors of state enterprises in December 1946, a conference of scientists and technicians in October the same year and the congress of provincial, city and county people's committees in February in 1947.

In these meetings he said that for the complete national independence and sovereignty and for national prosperity and development, the country must build an independent national economy and thus fully achieve economic independence.

Economy is the lifeline of a country and nation. The country and the nation without their own material bases and the economic foundations cannot exist and develop. All the countries recognize the importance of the economy, but the strategy of building it differs from one another. This mean they differ in where they would put the economic focus on, what orientations and principles they would maintain to build their economies, how they would define the contents of the material and technical foundations and the task of their laying and how they would achieve this task.

After the Second World War almost all the countries, liberated from the imperialist colonial yoke, relied on "aid" from big and developed countries or copied their economic models. It was common sense that they could not follow the roads of their own choice as they had to build their national economies without their own theories, experiences and assets.

But, the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung set forth the line of building a self-supporting national economy with a view that if the country did not create its own assets for carrying out the important task of economic construction that had a bearing on the destiny of its own and of its people but rely on others' aid, it could never escape the fate of a slave, and so it must build a self-supporting economy by its own efforts.

His visit to the Pyongyang Cornstarch Factory in mid-April Juche 36 (1947) tells a moving story.

In the speech he made that day in front of the workers of the factory, he said: If we are to build a prosperous democratic state which is completely independent and sovereign, we must lay the firm foundations of an independent national economy; should we choose dependence on foreign countries, without looking into the future, blinded by momentary comfort, we would fail not only to build an independent national economy, but also to achieve complete independence and sovereignty and, further, our country would again become a colony; no matter what kind of difficulties and obstacles may stand in our way, we should overcome them by ourselves without relying on others, and we should lay the cornerstones of an independent national economy step by step; this is the only way to build a democratic country which is rich and strong, completely independent and sovereign, the way to create a happier life and hasten a bright future.

This on-site guidance constituted a meaningful occasion in laying the base of a prosperous and independent country.

When he was advancing the tasks of economic construction from scratch after the war, he stressed that we must effect the country's industrialization and build an independent national economy at all costs to keep ourselves from the fate of colonial slaves again.

Later, while wisely leading the work of continuously adhering to the principle of self-reliance in building the socialist economy and further consolidating the foundations of the national economy, he gave a scientific explanation of the meaning of building a self-supporting national economy.

He said that building an independent national economy means building a diversified economy, equipping it with up-to-date technology and creating one's own secure sources of raw materials, thereby building up an all-embracing economic system in which every branch of the economy is structurally interrelated, so as to produce domestically most of the products of heavy and light industry and the agricultural produce needed to make the country wealthy and powerful and to improve the people's living standards.

As an original line that no one put forward in history, the line of building a self-supporting national economy, embodiment of the Juche idea authored by the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, was the most correct line of economic construction that makes it possible to achieve political independence of a country and its development, do away with inequality among nations, bring about national prosperity and build socialism successfully.

As the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung set forth the line of building a self-supporting national economy in the period of building a new Korea, the Korean people, carving out their destiny as its masters, could build an independent and self-supporting national economy by their own efforts, and today they have built on their land a politico-ideological and military power without any vacillation in any worldwide economic upheavals and launched the great cause of building their country into an economic giant.