Kim Jong-un reportedly berated members of his communist “Workers’ Party” on Monday for “serious problems” in the construction of the Pyongyang General Hospital and ordered his senior officers to “replace all the officials responsible” for the “careless” budgeting around its construction.
The Pyongyang General Hospital has become Kim’s most prominent construction project this year, reaching heightened importance in light of the ongoing Chinese coronavirus pandemic. North Korea refuses to admit to even a single Chinese coronavirus case despite its poor socialist healthcare system and the fact that it borders China, Russia, and South Korea, some of the most severely affected nations in the world.
Kim’s state media have touted the Pyongyang General Hospital as a towering achievement in communist governance for months, only to publish a report on Monday revealing frustration on Kim’s part at his government’s failure to properly manage the project. While the report was published on Monday, the article did not specify if Kim’s visit to the site occurred on that day or in the past.
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea’s main state propaganda outlet, went to great lengths to emphasize that dictator Kim was pleased with the construction workers building the actual hospital facility and limited his outrage only to the white-collar officials in charge of planning and budgeting for hospital construction supplies.
“Touring the construction site, he [Kim Jong-un] highly appreciated the builders for their labor feats, saying that lots of things have been done so far and the construction has made exceptionally rapid progress despite difficult situation [sic],” KCNA reported, without elaborating on the “difficult situation,” though presumably referring to the pandemic. Kim reportedly credited only “the patriotic zeal and devoted efforts of the builders and the working people in charge of equipment and materials” for the project, notably excluding officials in charge of planning.
Kim reportedly scolded those officials on Monday, during what KCNA deemed an official “field guidance” visit to the site of the future hospital.
“After hearing a detailed report on the overall situation of the construction from the construction coordination commission on the spot, he pointed out serious problems in economic organization for the construction,” KCNA reported of Kim. “He said that the construction coordination commission is organizing economy in a careless manner with no budget for the construction properly set up, yet.”
Kim reportedly expressed particular dissatisfaction with officials asking local residents to help pay for the construction of the hospital, rather than budgeting properly to do it without asking for donations. Kim “severely rebuked it [Party leadership] for burdening the people by encouraging all kinds of ‘assistance,'” KCNA reported.
The report concluded that Kim would “replace all the officials responsible and make strict referral of them.” Officials who fall out of Kim’s grace typically face execution or extended stays in the nation’s labor camps, where they face torture and killing. North Korean media have yet to identify any officials by name facing punishment for their failure to please Kim.
Kim announced the construction of the Pyongyang General Hospital, the first new medical facility in the country publicized in years, in March, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in China. KCNA claimed the project was the result of Kim feeling “miserably self-critical” about the dire state of North Korea’s healthcare system. Kim reportedly expected the project completed by October.
KCNA had been churning out positive content about the Pyongyang General Hospital as recently as three days before Kim’s tirade against his own officials.
“Rapid Progress Made in Construction of Pyongyang General Hospital,” KCNA titled an article on Friday. Like Kim’s statements, praise for the project was limited to the construction workers on the ground.
“Soldier-builders have finished the external plastering in the main and hastened the installation of windows, plastering of interior walls, ceilings and floors, etc.,” KCNA claimed, adding:
Builders of the Eighth Construction Bureau, too, are speeding up the external wire-mesh concrete tamping and the external wall plastering. They have also registered gratifying results in excavation and concrete tamping of cylinder caissons by introducing new building methods into cylinder caisson project for the intake of geothermal water.
The South Korean newswire service Yonhap speculated that Kim’s harsh statements on Monday indicate, however, that the dictator’s trust in his construction workers has its limit and that significant evidence exists that workers will not be able to complete the project by October.
Given that North Korea refuses to admit to a single Chinese coronavirus case within its borders, journalists outside of the country have been unable to gauge how much the pandemic has affected the construction of the hospital – or if the hospital project itself is a response to the pandemic. Some reports in South Korea, based on unnamed sources, claim that North Korea has documented as many as 500 coronavirus deaths in secret since the pandemic began and that it is struggling to keep its senior leadership healthy. In April, Kim canceled several public appearances, leading to speculation that he had contracted the virus, but he emerged from isolation apparently healthy.
The first reports of a North Korean city instituting a full coronavirus lockdown surfaced in June. Last week, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported that sources within the country had heard that citizens who do not wear sanitary masks to prevent the spread of the virus could face punishment in the country’s labor camps.
In early July, Kim warned his officials that the pandemic could become an “unimaginable and irretrievable crisis” if Pyongyang did not act swiftly. At the time, KCNA reported that Kim also scolded his underlings for failure to treat the situation with the seriousness he demanded, offering “sharp criticism of inattention, onlooking and chronic attitude getting prevalent among officials, and violation of the rules of the emergency anti-epidemic work as this work takes on a protracted character.”
Despite claiming to have zero coronavirus cases in the country and Kim’s public frustration with his country’s response to the outbreak, Pyongyang also announced on Saturday that it had begun research on a vaccine against the coronavirus. There is no evidence that North Korea possesses any facilities with the capacity to develop a vaccine; no vaccine exists against any known coronavirus.