Kim Jong Il planned the “200-Day Battle” in an attempt to turn the tide of famine in 1998, but the ideological campaign went up in smoke due to a lack of material supplies.
This time it’s the “150-day battle.” North Korea is first trying to restore the capacity of existing factories and equipment, then to accomplish further purposes with the supplies that this should, in theory, engender. This differs from the past “Battle” campaigns, in which the focus was just on rapid economic construction.
According to sources from North Korea, the primary purposes of the 150-Day Battle are to construct houses, to restore farming, local factories and mines, and to expand production of metals and daily necessities.
A source explained, “To be brief, the strategy of the 150-day battle is to restore first the things that can be revived soonest. The key parts during this campaign seem to be local manufacturing companies: normalization and restoration of their production capacity.
The North Korean authorities had already emphasized community solidarity and self-revitalization through the normalization of local manufacturing industries in their 2009 New Year’s Statement.
In 2002, when the July 1st Economic Management Reform Measure was adopted, some local manufacturers were mothballed or merged with others. The reason for that was that multiple local factories were not needed to produce as many goods, at lower unit costs, as one large factory.
However, as central factories were forced to suspend their work so provision of the necessities of life also stopped.
The source bemoaned the results of this failure, “The authorities claimed that one large factory could produce as many goods as the people could consume, but in reality we even had to buy toothbrushes and toothpaste made in China.”
