The DPRK has greeted a new history of comprehensive prosperity, both in the capital city and provinces and in towns and countryside.

In recent years alone, many wonderful structures have been built all over the country, including the Wonsan Kalma Coastal Tourist Area that heralds a heyday of socialist civilization, large-scale greenhouse farms equipped with highly intensive, optimized and intelligent production processes, Samjiyon City turned into an all-season mountainous tourist destination, the Komdok area transformed into a mountain gorge city and ideal rural villages.

Regional-industry factories have been built in a couple of years one after another in different cities and counties across the country, providing the regions accounting for one fifth of the country with solid foundations for their independent development.

In particular, this year began with a series of groundbreaking ceremonies of construction projects for the regional development policy, further inspiring optimism about and confidence in the future of the policy among the local people.

The essence of the Workers’ Party of Korea’s regional development policy in the new era is to ensure that all those who live in the country lead an equally affluent and civilized life under the socialist policy of the state, whether they live in the capital city or in provinces or in towns or mountain villages.

That’s why the Party adopted the Regional Development 20×10 Policy, the first of its kind since the founding of the country, expanded and developed it as a comprehensive policy covering light industry, public health, science and education and took a succession of strong measures to implement it. It intends to achieve uniform level of the whole country in material, economic and cultural life by building up the provinces well like the capital city and transforming the environment for the cultural life of the regional people. Accordingly, modern regional-industry factories, hospitals and multi-functional leisure complexes have been built across the country.

The 13th Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the WPK held in December last year set forth a grand plan to give a facelift to coal mining areas and transform some of the tideland farms on the west coast of the country into modern and civilized ones.

The efforts to implement the regional development policy in the new era are gaining momentum under the leadership of the Party which steadily advances development-oriented goals for the people and ensures that they are steadfastly carried out.

Sim Sang Hyon