North Korea's rural factory push fades after ribbon-cuttings, satellite data shows Lights that follow Kim Ribbon-cutting, then darkness Lights move with the propaganda

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. 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, Son...