North Korea's Kim boasts of provincial industry development. Nighttime lights tell a different story.

[A STUDY OF KIM JONG-UN 2]

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, chain-smoking and frowning from the dais of an expanded meeting of the ruling Workers' Party Central Committee secretariat on Jan. 27, 2025, lashed out at his own ranks.

"This is a special-grade crime that our party cannot forgive even a little bit," Kim said.

The target of his anger was a group of some 40 party officials in Onchon County, South Pyongan Province, who, North Korean media reported, had spent the year-end holidays drinking with female volunteers and engaging in promiscuous behavior at a hot springs resort.

Onchon was no ordinary county. It was one of the 20 sites selected for the first year of Kim's signature Regional Development 20×10 Policy, an initiative to build modern light-industry factories in 20 rural areas every year for a decade. The misconduct occurred just before the county's Jan. 20, 2025, factory opening ceremony.

Within a week of the ribbon-cutting, Kim ordered the officials to be sternly punished.

Why did the leader react so sharply to the misbehavior of a handful of mid-level local officials? The answer lies in a speech he had given about a month earlier.

On Dec. 20, 2024, at the completion ceremony for new provincial factories in Songchon County, South Pyongan Province — the showcase site for the policy and the first to break ground — Kim suddenly invoked the 1962 Changsong Joint Conference, the meeting at which his grandfather Kim Il Sung outlined his vision for raising rural living standards. That meeting has been treated for more than half a century as North Korean scripture on regional policy.

"Why has the policy on local industry not been carried through even now, more than 60 years later? It is because there have been no clear standards or principles," Kim Jong-un said.

He went on to mock past propaganda about Changsong — "all they did was make documentary films and write songs about how Changsong had been transformed" — and acknowledged that "from the 1990s, the factories essentially came to a complete halt," a rare public reference to the famine years of the Arduous March under his father, late leader Kim Jong-il.

It was a striking move. As the first fruit of his regional development drive came online, Kim Jong-un publicly conceded the failures of the Paektu bloodline — North Korea's ruling Kim clan — and cast himself as the one who would finally do what founder Kim Il Sung had not. The Onchon misconduct, in that light, was not a small embarrassment. It was a challenge to a historic project that Kim Jong-un has called a "sacred and great undertaking."

Kim, who, as a young leader, had cultivated a physical resemblance to his grandfather, down to his hair and speech, was now testing whether his 20×10 policy could surpass the achievements of the man he had spent his life imitating.

Whether it has succeeded has been hard to determine from the ground, so the JoongAng Ilbo turned to the night sky.

Nighttime light intensity levels — a widely used proxy for real economic activity in countries that, like North Korea, release little reliable economic data — show that power briefly flooded into all 20 first-year sites in 2024. But those sites did not remain lit. Where did the light come from, and where did it all go?

A KAIST-Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy joint research team led by professors Kim Ji-hee and Cha Mee-young used satellite imagery to track nighttime brightness across 178 of North Korea's cities and counties — with Pyongyang's 18 districts treated as one — from January 2022 to October 2025. Drawing on that data, the team compared the brightness in October 2023, before the first batch of counties was named, with the brightness in October 2025, after the new factories had opened.

Lights that follow Kim

Analysis showed insufficient power to keep all 20 sites lit. Instead, the lights appeared to embrace a very Kim Jong-un approach: strategic selectivity.

Of the 20 first-year counties, only five were brighter at night in 2025 than they were in 2023: Kusong, Songchon, Kujang, Kosan and Usi. The remaining 15 sites, meanwhile, appeared just as dim as before — or even darker — despite the construction of modern factory facilities.

On average, nighttime brightness across all 20 sites fell by 36.33 percent compared to levels before the projects were selected. The sites were 1.8 percent dimmer after construction than before — effectively no different from before the factories opened, and a sign that the plants are not running as advertised.

Even the five gainers look modest against the country as a whole. Only three spots ranked among the top 30 counties nationwide for nighttime light increase between 2023 and 2025: Kusong at No. 4, Songchon at No. 20 and Kujang at No. 27.

Their gains also have explanations that have little to do with light industry. Kusong is a key hub for missile production. It hosts Panghyon Airbase, the No. 95 Factory and the Kusong Machine Tool Factory, which manufactures the computer numerical control lathes used to produce ballistic missile components.

In Songchon County, stable electricity supplies appeared to follow after Kim personally oversaw the area as a model case for his regional development initiative. He personally visited Songchon three times. The county is also home to Factory No. 67, which produces missile components.

Ribbon-cutting, then darkness

The monthly numbers told a story of light moving around for political reasons rather than industrial ones.

At 17 of the 20 sites, the brightness dropped in the first full month after the factory opened. Kumya County, which completed its plant in February 2025, was 17.2 percent dimmer the following month. Across all 20 sites, brightness fell an average of 5.2 percent in the month after the ribbon-cutting.

The dimming deepened as the spring lean season set in. By April 2025, brightness at the 20 sites had fallen 11.5 percent on average from completion-month levels.

Even as the lights flickered at sites tied to Kim’s so-called sacred initiatives, Pyongyang was living in a different world. It's April 2025, nighttime light reading rose 4.4 percent from March. April is when the regime stages the Day of the Sun, the commemoration of Kim Il Sung's birthday, with celebrations running day and night across the capital.

When national power resources ran short, Kim Jong-un chose a shining Pyongyang over the balanced regional development he had promised — a quiet diversion of light from the provinces to the politically charged anniversary in the capital.

In May 2025, with farmers and soldiers mobilized for rice planting and other work that runs late into the night, brightness at the 20 sites jumped back up by 20.8 percent from completion-month levels. Pyongyang's brightness fell in the same month, suggesting that the limited national power supply was being shuffled between political priorities rather than expanded.

Brightness at the 20 sites slumped again in July and August before surging in October, when each site grew brighter month-on-month by an average of 12.1 percent. Oct. 10 is the founding day of the Workers' Party, and 2025 marked the party's 80th anniversary — the kind of jubilee year, in multiples of five and 10, that the North celebrates with propaganda blitzes, gift distributions and other state-orchestrated displays of largesse.

The way nighttime brightness in regional development zones rises and falls with domestic circumstances may suggest that electricity allocation in North Korea is being carried out with little regard for the original goal of balanced development. In effect, the country’s limited power supply appears to be shuffled around according to Kim’s political showcase schedule — a kind of zero-sum game.

Lights move with the propaganda

The actual pattern of nighttime brightness closely tracked reports in North Korean state media.

Between March and April 2024 — shortly after North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun reported that many regional development sites had “accelerated foundation concrete work and moved up construction schedules” — nighttime brightness increased in 16 of the 20 locations analyzed. Despite the seasonal spring food shortage likely still being in effect in April 2024, the data suggests that at least some electricity was funneled into the areas immediately after construction began.

Songchon, the showcase, did the opposite. Brightness there surged in March 2024 after Kim personally visited the construction site on Feb. 28, and state media continued reporting on the project for some time afterward. But the data suggests that electricity was heavily concentrated there for publicity purposes, only for power supplies to decline once full-scale construction began after the foundation work. In other words, even in an area personally overseen by the supreme leader, electricity appeared to be pulled back once the showcase phase was over.

In October and November 2024, North Korean state media churned out reports declaring that “the factories had taken shape,” signaling that completion was near. In December, the party plenum declared that "the first-year construction of regional industrial factories in 20 cities and counties has been successfully concluded."

The lights moved with the press releases. Month-on-month average brightness fell 16.4 percent in September, rose 17.7 percent in October, slipped 4.5 percent in November and rose 5.7 percent in December — an erratic pattern more consistent with rationed propaganda boosts than with steady industrial activity.

Normal construction sites would brighten steadily through the run-up to a ribbon-cutting; these brightened only when the central party turned up the volume of its publicity drive. The approach echoes older North Korean mobilizations such as the "50-day battle" and "100-day battle," in which the regime concentrates labor on a single political target for a fixed window before redirecting it elsewhere.

Kim is not slowing down. On Jan. 29 this year, he attended the groundbreaking for the 2026 batch of 20×10 sites in Unryul County, South Hwanghae Province, where he pressed the button to signal the start of construction.

"This year, in the third year of regional development, nearly a third of the country's cities and counties will undergo a complete transformation," he said.

Arithmetically, the math works. North Korea divides its territory into roughly 200 administrative units, and 20 sites a year over three years comes to 60, or about 30 percent. But the satellite data points to a different story behind the numbers — ghost factories built, lit for the ribbon-cutting and then left in the dark. If the pattern holds, the lights at Unryul will not be on for long either.

BY YOO JEE-HYE, SHIM SEOK-YONG [[email protected]]