The Pyongyang Republic — The Hidden Blueprint of 70 Years of North Korean Dictatorship

Introduction

Inside North Korea, there is another country.

I call it the "Pyongyang Republic."

Most North Korean citizens have never heard this term. It is spoken only among a tiny number of officials and intellectuals who know the regime's secrets — shared only with those they trust completely. I heard it myself, inside North Korea. Of course, inside the country the expression takes a different form:

"Only in Pyongyang can you live like a human being. Pyongyang is a country where people actually live."

The Pyongyang Republic is not simply a privileged capital city. It is a system designed to preserve absolute power, guarantee and induce loyalty, suppress resistance and preempt coups, and enforce total control — all in service of building an eternal dynasty for the Kim family. It is a mechanism for sustaining dictatorship with no parallel in world history.

This essay dissects that blueprint for the first time.

 

1. The 1950s — When Freedom Existed

I heard older North Koreans say this:

"In the old days, you could live wherever you wanted."

It was true. Through the early-to-mid 1950s, North Koreans could move relatively freely. In the chaos following the Korean War, people traveled to find family, find work, find a place to call home.

That began to end in 1957.

Cabinet Decision No. 149. That year, the authorities began classifying citizens by family background and restricting the residence of those deemed politically impure. In 1958, a sweeping campaign — the Central Party Concentrated Guidance Operation — purged dissidents across the country.

In 1967, Kim Il-sung crushed the Gapsan faction and consolidated his monopoly on power. A national re-registration of citizens was conducted. The internal travel permit system was formalized. People could no longer move between regions without permission.

Then came 1972. The decisive turning point.

North Korea adopted a new constitution. The 1948 constitution had declared:

"The capital of the Republic is Seoul."

The 1972 constitution changed that:

"The capital is Pyongyang."

This was not a mere administrative change. It was a proclamation. Pyongyang was no longer simply the seat of government — it was elevated to a revolutionary sacred site, a space apart. Kim Il-sung issued this directive:

"Pyongyang is the revolutionary capital. Only those who uphold the Party have the right to live here."

That was the seed. But planting a seed and cultivating it into a precise system are different things. The man who completed that system was Kim Jong-il.

 

2. The Five Structures Kim Jong-il Designed

From the mid-1970s, as Kim Jong-il consolidated his position as heir, he systematically redesigned Pyongyang. Five structural pillars.

 

First — Physical Exclusion

Checkpoints were erected on every road leading into Pyongyang. For a provincial resident to enter the city, a standard travel permit is not enough. A separate, higher-level authorization is required. Without money and connections, it is simply impossible.

These checkpoints function as de facto border crossings. A boundary has been drawn inside North Korea, separating one country from another. The "authorization number" required to travel to Pyongyang was, in effect, a visa.

 

Second — Concentration of Resources

The best agricultural produce, food products, and daily necessities from across the country flow to Pyongyang. Article 39 of the Pyongyang City Management Law is explicit: supplies must be delivered to Pyongyang "before other sectors." The provinces exist to serve the capital.

During the famine of the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands were dying of starvation in the provinces, Pyongyang's food rationing system held. Some senior officials in Pyongyang had no idea that millions were dying in the rest of the country. It happened within the same nation.

This was not an accident. It was a deliberate disparity.

 

Third — Identity Document Discrimination

In ordinary North Korean usage, the word "citizen" is not used. Pyongyang is the sole exception. Since 1997, Pyongyang residents have been issued a separate dark-blue plastic Pyongyang Citizen's Card, distinct from the ordinary identification card issued to provincial residents. Holders of the Pyongyang card can travel freely throughout the country without additional permits, except near the Chinese border.

Not even Kaesong — the most heavily monitored city in North Korea due to its proximity to the demilitarized zone — has its own separate citizen's card. Only Pyongyang does. North Korea is the only country in the world that issues a distinct resident identity document exclusively for its capital.

 

Cover of the Pyongyang Citizen's Card, issued by the Ministry of People's Security of the DPRK. Since 1997, this separate identity document has been issued exclusively to residents of Pyongyang.

Fourth — Sale of Residency Rights and Territorial Expansion

Pyongyang residency can be purchased. Ethnic Koreans in Japan who paid large sums of foreign currency to the state received Pyongyang residency rights. The right to a Pyongyang address became a privilege that could be bought and sold.

And the boundaries of Pyongyang itself expand when needed. In 1995, parts of Pyongsong city were incorporated into Pyongyang. More recently, Banghyeon-dong in Kusong, North Pyongan Province, was absorbed into Pyongyang. Pyongyang is not a fixed city. It is a strategic space that is redrawn whenever the regime requires it.

 

Fifth — Selection of Population

Kim Jong-il rigorously sorted those who could enter Pyongyang from those who had to leave.

Only the core class — loyal members of the Party and military — may reside in Pyongyang. The wavering class and the hostile class are categorically excluded. The classification of citizens into three tiers and 51 subcategories is directly tied to eligibility for Pyongyang residence.

And there is the "evacuation operation." Since the mid-1970s, the authorities have periodically used political events as occasions to expel a portion of Pyongyang's residents to the provinces, maintaining what they consider an appropriate population size. Those whose loyalty diminishes or who cause problems are expelled. Banishment from Pyongyang is a social death sentence. Residency rights are the reward for loyalty; their revocation is the punishment for disloyalty.

The most extreme expression of this policy was the expulsion of disabled people and those with dwarfism. From the 1960s, authorities surveyed Pyongyang's disabled residents and forcibly relocated them to places like Gangdong and Junghwa counties. In the lead-up to the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students, remaining disabled residents were expelled to remote mountain villages in Hamgyong Province and isolated islands in the Yellow Sea. The goal was to present Pyongyang as a visually perfect city demonstrating the superiority of the system — to maintain the illusion by erasing its blemishes.

 

3. The Trap of Hope — Designing the Compliance of Twenty Million

Kim Jong-il is reported to have said:

"All I need are three million loyal people and the military."

Those three million are the population of Pyongyang.

This single sentence contains the core logic of North Korean dictatorship. Feeding twenty million people is impossible. But it is possible to hold three million firmly in place — and have the remaining seventeen million comply voluntarily because they want to become one of those three million.

Human beings always move toward something better. When hungry, they seek food. When fed, they seek comfort. When comfortable, they seek recognition and privilege. Kim Jong-il understood this fundamental human psychology precisely.

He designed Pyongyang as a desirable place to live, and engineered the aspiration to enter it as the supreme goal of a lifetime. Attending a Pyongyang university becomes a source of pride. Being from Pyongyang becomes a calling card. The Pyongyang Citizen's Card becomes the emblem of privilege. The wealthy and powerful in the provinces dream of gaining entry to Pyongyang as the ambition of their lives. For ordinary people, the poorer the province, the greater the longing for Pyongyang. The wider the gap, the stronger the hope. And that hope produces compliance.

This is the trap of hope.

This is also why the outside world must be blocked. Pyongyang appears impressive only because the comparison is with provincial towns and villages. The moment the comparison becomes Seoul or Tokyo, the illusion collapses. So it is prevented. Thoroughly.

 

4. The Pyongyang Republic I Witnessed

In 1984, before I was assigned to the "Three Revolutions Team" — the university student field supervision unit — I visited Pyongyang for orientation. Even for me, from Hamhung, the second or third largest city in North Korea, Pyongyang was a shock.

When we stepped off the train at Pyongyang Station, a group of boys standing near the entrance looked us over and said with casual contempt:

"The country bumpkins have arrived."

The streets were wide and clean. The department store had goods on the shelves. People dressed differently. To those of us from the provinces — living worse than people had under Japanese colonial rule — Pyongyang looked like paradise. University graduates gathered from across the country encountered an elevator for the first time in the People's Palace of Culture. Everyone wanted a turn; we rode it up and down until it broke. Pyongyang was a place where simply visiting once was the greatest aspiration of a lifetime.

In 1991, I was assigned to a timber-cutting labor detail in Russia. The Soviet Union was collapsing at that very moment. The Russian economy was in ruins. And yet, in a small shop next to a train station in the Siberian wilderness, the shelves were full of food, freely available for purchase.

It hit me like a hammer blow. However fine Pyongyang was, it was nothing more than a relative privilege inside a vast prison. That realization was one of the starting points of my decision to defect.

If I had never gone to Russia — if I had never seen the outside world — I, too, would have spent my life longing for the Pyongyang Republic. That is the terrifying power of the design.

 

5. Inside the Pyongyang Republic, Another Pyongyang Republic

But the Pyongyang Republic does not end with the city of Pyongyang itself.

According to defector testimony, even within Pyongyang, the highest-ranking officials cannot live in ordinary apartment buildings. They are assigned to state-designated residences. Even direct family members cannot enter without prior authorization. Those without approval must meet outside the building.

Inside the Pyongyang Republic, there is another Pyongyang Republic. Within privilege, there is further privilege. Within control, there is further control.

Provincial residents look up at Pyongyang with longing. Ordinary Pyongyang residents look up at the elite residential zones with longing. The elite look up at an even higher tier. The chain of aspiration has no end.

And yet even the highest officials cannot freely admit their own relatives into their apartments. They enjoy privilege while being surveilled. Reward and control are inseparable. The greater the privilege, the deeper the surveillance.

The Pyongyang Republic is a pyramid. At its apex sits the Kim family. Across North Korea's factories, enterprises, and collective farms, there exist units known as "Workshop No. 8" and "Workshop No. 9." Workshop No. 8 produces everything the Kim family eats, uses, and consumes. Workshop No. 9 produces everything for the Kim family's relatives and the highest tier of the North Korean elite.

In 1981, during agricultural labor mobilization in Kumya County, South Hamgyong Province, I heard directly from the head of a Workshop No. 8 unit: every summer, a 30-kilogram sack of sugar is poured around each apple tree and pear tree that Kim Il-sung would eat from. In North Korea, sugar is used like medicine — it is that scarce. One sack of that sugar per fruit tree. We thought nothing of it at the time. That is what the apex of the Pyongyang Republic pyramid looks like.

Except for the Kim family itself, no one is free. People simply live in better or worse prisons, depending on their rank.

 

6. The Army That Defends Pyongyang — Preempting the Coup

There is one final layer to the Pyongyang Republic's design. The military layer.

The Pyongyang Defense Command — now reorganized as the 91st Capital Defense Corps — and the Guard Command. The core mission of these two forces is not to repel external enemies. It is to defend the leadership and the capital against military coups.

There is a decisive fact here. According to defector testimony, these two forces are equipped with North Korea's most advanced weapons — the best the country has. No number of regular army divisions could defeat them in a fight.

North Korea's generals know this. No matter how many troops they could assemble, they could not march on Pyongyang. The moment a coup is contemplated, it collides with an insurmountable wall.

This is not a balance of fear. It is the overwhelming of fear.

Hope binds the civilian population. Cutting-edge weapons bind the military. The Pyongyang Republic is a system that controls both simultaneously — from above and below.

 

7. Why This Has No Parallel in World History

Throughout history, dictators have relied on two methods to maintain power: suppression through fear, or appeasement through bread.

The Soviet Union made Moscow a city of privilege. China concentrated resources in Beijing. Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu visited North Korea in 1971 — not only Pyongyang, but Hamhung as well. I was myself mobilized to a welcoming ceremony on a Hamhung bridge that day. Ceaușescu was so impressed by Kim Il-sung's system of governance and the Pyongyang Republic's design that upon returning home he launched Romania's own version of the Juche ideological movement and built the People's Palace in Bucharest. This is already well documented in historical literature.

But no country has done what North Korea has done.

No country has legally codified residency in the capital by class origin, issued a separate identity document for capital residents, institutionalized dual-layer entry controls, expelled people of unfavorable class background and the disabled, maintained a permanent system of periodic population purges — while simultaneously deploying over 100,000 elite troops with cutting-edge weapons to preempt coups, and engineering the voluntary aspiration and compliance of seventeen million people through the architecture of hope.

It is the fusion of suppression and appeasement into a single spatial system.

If Kim Il-sung dreamed of recreating the inner and outer walls of Joseon-era Hanyang, Kim Jong-il turned that dream into a precision instrument for sustaining dictatorship in the twenty-first century.

 

Conclusion

North Korea has not survived seventy years because its people are meek or ignorant. It is not simply because they fear guns and bayonets.

It has survived because there is hope. And that hope was engineered.

For those with even a small measure of power, there is the hope of becoming a citizen of the Pyongyang Republic — of climbing one more step. That hope is the most powerful chain binding twenty million people.

But cracks are appearing in this structure. The jangmadang generation has never received state food rations. They survived on their own. They have watched South Korean dramas on illegal USB drives. They know that however impressive Pyongyang may be, it looks shabby compared to Seoul.

For the illusion of the Pyongyang Republic to hold, the only point of comparison must be the provincial countryside. The moment that comparison shifts to Seoul or Tokyo, the illusion collapses.

Kim Jong-un knows this. That is why he keeps building — Ryomyong Street, Hwasong District, new high-rise apartments. It is a desperate investment to sustain the illusion his father built. But simultaneously, he tightens fear. He executes people for watching foreign videos. He is trying to protect the illusion through terror.

The speed at which hope disintegrates versus the speed at which fear holds. That is the race now underway inside North Korea.

 

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Author: Seung-chul Kim (pen name: NKMAN)

Defected from North Korea in 1993. Research fellow, Institute for North Korean Studies, 1997–2007. Director, North Korea Reform Broadcasting, 2008–2025.

Currently operates the YouTube channel "North Korea Man NKMAN."