During the pandemic, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who had long billed himself as invincible, made a stunning, teary-eyed apology on national television.
“I am really sorry,” he said, as the coronavirus, coupled with food shortages and international sanctions, was ravaging his country. “My efforts and sincerity have not been sufficient enough to rid our people of the difficulties in their life.”
But while ordinary North Koreans were suffering, Kim, 42, seized the crisis as a unique opportunity. Now, he is brimming with confidence. He is recognized at home and abroad as North Korea’s most powerful leader to date, surpassing even his grandfather, the country’s founder, because he has achieved the status of a de facto nuclear power.
He started during the pandemic by shutting down the border with China, issuing shoot-to-kill orders to stop North Koreans fleeing across the boundary. He clamped down on trade and smuggling across the border, forcing his people to rely less on imports and produce more goods domestically. His campaign also targeted the informal markets where many had eked out a living — trading Chinese goods and foreign entertainment smuggled in on thumb drives — ever since the devastating famine of the 1990s.
By dismantling these underground markets, Kim strengthened the regime’s monopoly over the economy and ideology. Enforcement was brutal. Those caught distributing K-pop or K-dramas were publicly executed.
At the same time, he flouted international sanctions to steadily expand his nuclear arsenal. North Korea built a new generation of missiles capable of striking its nearest adversaries, South Korea and Japan, with nuclear warheads. It is also developing the means to target the American mainland, through nuclear-powered submarines and intercontinental ballistic missile technology.
Kim also seized an unexpected opening abroad. As Russia struggled in its war against Ukraine, he gave it weapons and troops. Moscow reciprocated with weapons technology to help modernize North Korea’s air defenses and other vulnerable parts of its military, along with badly needed food, oil and even tourists. The two nations signed a mutual defense and cooperation treaty, easing Pyongyang’s economic isolation and lifting its international status.
Since then, he has rebuffed any idea of renewing talks with President Donald Trump or reconciling with South Korea. And his tilt toward Russia has prodded China to warm up to North Korea, a neighbor that Beijing views as hard to manage but whose hostility toward Washington gives it diplomatic leverage.
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, arrived in North Korea on Monday for a two-day state visit, his first in seven years. He is expected to underscore China’s indispensable position as North Korea’s dominant trading partner. The countries are already expanding trade again, resuming train service and adding more flights between Beijing and Pyongyang. They are close to completing a new modern road bridge across the Yalu River border, which is expected to facilitate bilateral exchanges, including an influx of Chinese tourists and aid.
Poverty endures outside Pyongyang, yet analysts say the recent developments have given the government confidence and the public some hope. At his Workers’ Party congress earlier this year, Kim triumphantly declared that North Korea was in a glorious and more prosperous new era, a far cry from his weeping apology in 2020. People can now hope to have “both sweets and bullets,” the party said, referring to its policy of seeking both economic recovery and military prowess.
To uncover how Kim pulled off this transformation, The New York Times spoke with more than a dozen postpandemic defectors, interviewed experts with inside connections, and scrutinized state media and leaked regime documents.
Jiro Ishimaru, the chief editor of the Japan-based Asia Press International, which has clandestine correspondents inside North Korea, said, “In the past few years, Kim Jong Un has traveled from hell to heaven.”
The Threat
North Korea claims that it defeated COVID without vaccines, losing only a few dozen people.
But as the virus spread, Kim Il Hyeok saw people die in unusual numbers in his neighborhood in Hwanghae province, a breadbasket region. Authorities were siphoning rice from the region to feed the elites in Pyongyang and the military, he said. There were no COVID tests available so it was hard to tell whether they died of hunger or the virus. Those who fell sick did not report it to authorities for fear of being quarantined without food. Lacking medication, they resorted to folk remedies, such as drinking tree-bark juice, that often worsened their condition.
“Families didn’t have money for coffins,” said Kim, 36, who fled to South Korea by boat with eight relatives in 2023. “Some were not even strong enough to dig a hole.”
Kim Yu Mi, his sister-in-law, made the two-hour escape with him. She said her hometown on the southwestern coast of North Korea was so close to South Korea that in clear weather she could see shiny passenger jets flying in and out of the South’s Incheon International Airport.
“Those planes symbolized freedom for our children,” she said. “When a North Korean patrol ship detected our boat fleeing to the South and chased, we threw everything we had overboard to help it gain speed.”
The family’s escape represented the threat the outside world, especially South Korea, posed to the regime.
North Koreans’ trust in the government has been waning since the 1990s famine, according to defectors. As the government’s ration system collapsed, North Koreans learned to fend for themselves through informal markets where they traded goods, including those smuggled from China. The markets also became a breeding ground for corruption as officials collected kickbacks from tradespeople.
With those goods came memory sticks containing South Korean shows, including “Crash Landing on You,” in which a paragliding mishap takes a South Korean heiress into North Korea and into the arms of a People’s Army officer. North Koreans consumed them with a vengeance — behind closed doors and under blankets for fear of the secret police, who routinely monitored neighborhoods, Kim Yu Mi said.
In 2010, Kim’s coastal town was caught in an artillery duel between the two Koreas. Residents rushed to take down portraits of state leaders to protect the images, a sign of their devotion and loyalty. By 2023, Kim said, about 8 out of 10 people in her neighborhood were watching South Korean shows — a sign of how much had changed.
“Loyalty to the party was no longer as important as making money,” she said.
This shift alarmed Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un was increasingly worried about “nonsocialist” content corrupting young North Koreans, likening it to a “vicious cancer.” His regime called those who exposed themselves to outside influence “treasonous” and called for “striking them mercilessly,” according to a classified document dated June 2024 that was obtained by the Human Rights Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit. The Times has also viewed similar internal documents smuggled out of North Korea.
For Kim, the threat posed by freedom of information was deeply personal — his crackdown, analysts say, was driven in part by a desire to suppress knowledge of his lineage.
His mother, Ko Yong Hui, was born in Japan, according to outside historians. That made her of an inferior class in North Korea, a country built on deep hatred for Japan after decades of colonial rule. His father apparently never introduced Ko and their son to Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, defectors have said. The boy was sent to spend part of his adolescence in Switzerland.
The background of Kim’s mother — long suppressed inside North Korea — became a centerpiece of propaganda for South Korean activists in recent years. They flew leaflets by balloons with this information into North Korea, which helped set off Kim’s sweeping crackdown on outside information.
“He was a child hidden from his grandfather, exiled overseas and brought back home after the grandfather’s death,” said Kim Kang, a North Korean diplomat in Russia who defected to South Korea.
Before she died in 2004, Ko helped ensure that Kim Jong Il chose their son as heir. Still, Kim’s “complex was that of the son of a royal concubine,” said Kwak Gil-sup, a North Korea expert at the Seoul-based One Korea Center.
“When his father was alive, he struggled to win his favor,” Kwak said. “After he took power, he was driven to prove different and better than his father.”
The Crackdown
When he succeeded his father in 2011, Kim promised North Koreans that they would no longer have to “tighten their belt.” He cast himself as a “people-first” leader, surveying floodwaters by speedboat, visiting victims in temporary shelters and cradling babies on his lap.
But his expensive pursuit of nuclear weapons and his own extravagant lifestyle jarred with the reality of regular citizens.
While humanitarian agencies reported widespread malnourishment in the country, Kim’s waistline ballooned, his weight raising questions about his health. Inheriting his father’s love for wining and dining, he gorged on Wagyu steak, toro tuna, shark fin soup, Swiss cheese, lobster, caviar and foie gras, according to chefs familiar with his dining habits. He guzzled Bordeaux wine and Cristal Champagne.
Defectors said the capital, Pyongyang, often didn’t have enough electricity to run elevators. But Kim spent millions of dollars to smuggle a fleet of Mercedes and other luxury cars for personal use, Orlov Trotters from Russia for his private horse-riding tracks and dolphins for a new dolphinarium.
He exerted power by unleashing what South Korean officials called a reign of terror. He executed those who rubbed him the wrong way, including his own uncle, Jang Song Thaek. He sent agents to assassinate Kim Jong Nam, his half brother who, as his father’s first son, posed a threat to Kim’s dynastic throne.
Lee Ilkyu, a former North Korean diplomat in Cuba who fled to Seoul in 2023, recalled how Han Song Ryol, another North Korean diplomat, was executed on spying charges in 2019. Lee said witnesses told him that hundreds of bullets tore Han to smithereens.
“They lost their appetite for days,” he said.
Still, the state’s control had loosened in the decades following the famine. Then the pandemic helped Kim reassert his grip.
He enacted laws with draconian penalties, including executions by firing squad, for those consuming and distributing anti-socialist content, or even mimicking South Korean speech and fashion styles. Officials raided homes, pulling out drawers and turning over blankets to find memory sticks with foreign entertainment, according to defectors.
Kim Il Hyeok, the defector who fled by boat, said he saw a score of killings in his town in the three years before his escape, compared with half a dozen in the previous two decades. Executions took place in schoolyards and other open spaces where the condemned were denounced before thousands of people. Kim recounted how a 22-year-old man he knew was executed in 2022 for distributing three South Korean dramas and 70 K-pop songs. He was clad in a long white sack-like robe and had a hood over his head. Three gunmen each fired five shots.
“When you watch enough of them, you grow numb, unable to tell a human from an animal,” he said.
By the time they fled North Korea, authorities had all but stamped out unofficial markets, his sister-in-law, Kim, said. They reinstalled socialist control on the production and distribution of goods. Rice and other grains were available only through government stores.
“The most difficult part of Kim Jong Un’s rule was that we were not allowed to make money,” Kim said. “He tightened the noose on his people, as if he didn’t want them to have a better life.”
The War Bonanza
Around this time, Ishimaru of Asia Press received covert reports from North Korea of a nation sinking into despair.
Citizens, he said, “saw no way forward, didn’t know how they were supposed to live on” — paralyzed by Kim’s relentless push for a “self‑reliant” economy, a tired slogan that took on a devastating new meaning during pandemic-driven shortages.
But even as Kim strangled foreign influence at home, he was scheming abroad — maneuvering to arrest his country’s economic tailspin.
With all its major exports blocked under international sanctions, North Korea sought revenue by smuggling out coal and collecting wages earned by its workers in China, who continued to work for Kim’s government during the pandemic. Kim unleashed an army of hackers and computer engineers online to steal billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency and earn cash by doing freelance information technology work with false identities.
Gold nuggets became an important item to smuggle out of North Korea to sell and raise foreign currency for the state, favored because of their small size, said a senior North Korean trade official who operated in Asia for a decade before defecting to South Korea last year. An internal North Korean document seen by the Times noted that a North Korean consulate vehicle in Dandong, a Chinese border city, was used to smuggle gold into China.
North Korean government smugglers imported precision tools used to make weapons, paying high margins for middlemen involved in evading sanctions, said the former trade official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his relatives in the North.
But Kim needed more to revive an economy that had been hobbled by the double whammy of the world’s severest sanctions and the pandemic.
Kim saw an opportunity after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, offering North Korean troops and munitions.
Munitions factories roared to meet demand for Russia’s war effort. About 16,000 North Korean troops have fought in the war, testing their weapons in combat and gaining valuable insights into modern warfare, including the use of drones, according to South Korean intelligence officials. North Korea also sent workers to Russia to earn cash for its regime, they said. Military experts fear that with Russian help, North Korea is building its first nuclear-powered submarine and other modern warships, as well as a fleet of military drones.
In 2024, North Korea’s economy expanded 3.7%, the highest growth rate in eight years, according to most recent estimates by South Korea’s central bank.
Outside Threats
The Russia-North Korea military partnership has openly undermined U.N. sanctions — one of Washington’s most relied-upon diplomatic levers. The deepening relationship also serves Kim’s broader strategic aim: balancing ties between China and Russia.
“North Korea has the most leverage today that it has had in the last 30 years,” said Frank Aum, a former Korea expert at the Pentagon.
But North Korea is not out of the woods yet.
Its official exports to China have been dominated by items it could export without violating U.N. sanctions — wigs and false eyelashes and mustaches and tungsten ores. Kim’s crackdown on informal markets impeded the flow of cash. As trade with China rebounded, North Korea imported far more than it exported, eroding its foreign currency reserves. In the past year, the North Korean won has depreciated more than two-thirds against the dollar while rice prices there have more than tripled.
Transactions with Russia have not significantly helped ease North Korea’s shortage of foreign currency. Neither side can convert their cash piles into usable currencies without attracting regulatory scrutiny, said Olena Guseinova, a lecturer at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.
But in the past couple of years, there have been clear signs of economic improvement in North Korea. Kim finished some of his long-delayed pet projects, like large seaside and ski and spa resort towns and greenhouse complexes built on airfields, including one the size of 400 soccer fields. New apartment towers rose not only in Pyongyang but also in provincial cities. Kim mobilized soldiers for these construction projects, funding them with remittances from North Koreans working abroad and forced donations from individuals who grew wealthy through smuggling and market activities, according to defectors and analysts.
North Korea has added more oil terminals at its ports and there are more cars, buses, trucks and construction equipment visible across the country, said Joung Eunlee, an analyst at the Seoul-based Korea Institute for Unification Studies, who studied satellite imagery and interviewed recent visitors.
In Pyongyang, which was once dimly lit at night, neon signs blaze brighter than ever.
High-rise apartment towers operate their elevators at least for a few hours a day, according to recent defectors and visitors. There are more gas stations and more privately owned cars, some of them electric vehicles from China. People have lined up at beer halls in Pyongyang. Families use smartphone apps to shop and order home-delivery food.
Senior officials and their families in Pyongyang still live a life the rest of the country can hardly imagine: spacious apartments with saunas, maids, Chinese and Japanese electronics, and elevators running 24/7, said the former trade official who defected last year.
Addressing North Korea’s rubber-stamp parliament in March, Kim spoke in triumphant terms of a “miraculous transformation.” He pointed to manifold increases in investment and sweeping large-scale residential construction.
“Ours is no longer a country that is susceptible to threats from others, ” he said.
The New York Times Services
