The North Hamgyong Province branch of North Korea’s ruling party recently convened a year-end meeting that reviewed how well work units have fulfilled the construction targets of the first year of the current five-year plan, which was presented during the Eighth Party Congress.
According to a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong Province on Monday, the meeting comprehensively reviewed results and “tendencies” in the construction sector and reported the findings to the Central Committee.
However, the meeting found more faults than accomplishments. That is, the meeting revealed many problems in city, county and company-level plans to build housing to transform every region in the province into a socialist utopia, as well construction performance at the work unit level.
Examining statistical data, the meeting found that officials excessively demolished old buildings to build new ones. This means they did not properly carry out the party’s order to build more new buildings or bridges where none existed before.
That is to say, the provincial party committee found the lack of new construction to be the biggest problem, believing new construction to be more statistically meaningful than simple remodeling.
More specifically, the provincial party committee stressed that the construction of new homes, hospitals, schools and factories in cities and rural villages is the “lofty ideal” of the party, but in the end, officials perfunctorily “repaired” facilities while reporting them as “new” in the statistics.
Moreover, the provincial party said officials should have constructed many more modern homes in rural and urban areas considering all the cement they have received from the state, materials they have received from the province, and “self-sufficiency supplies” they have received from city and county authorities.
Moreover, officials dispatched by the provincial party committee to construction sites to get a comprehensive grasp on the state of progress found that conditions differed from what lower level officials were reporting. The provincial party committee said fewer houses were being constructed than reported to the party this year, and builders were reporting buildings as finished when they were anything but.
The party committee said officials need to carry out all planned construction, renovation and repair work with the “drive and loyalty demanded of today’s age” to produce “model creations” that “future generations can make full use of even 50 or 100 years from now.” Instead, the party committee went on, they have caused the party “anxiety.”
In particular, the party committee said a lower level work unit reported that the officials in charge of construction in Yonsa County and Orang County visited the construction sites in their jurisdictions only two or three times this year.
The party committee criticized the attitude of the officials who “sit at their desks unaware of conditions on the ground, simply relaying reports from below to their superiors.” The responsible party secretaries in the two counties received serious warnings and will face an intensive, month-long investigation by the provincial party committee’s organization department.
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