Life’s a beach in North Korea, Kim Jong-un will tell a million foreign tourists (2024)

There is a three-mile expanse of sand with long lines of breakers rolling in from the ocean. Forests of pine and oak and modern hotels are near by. During the summer the temperature is in the 30s and some of the biggest cities in the world are just a few hours away.

This is not France, New England or Japan, but Myongsasipri beach in North Korea, the world’s most isolated and repressive dictatorship — and, potentially at least, the next big thing in Asian tourism.

This is not only the view of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, who recently visited the Wonsan-Kalma coastal tourist zone, which includes Myongsasipri, and ordered its completion by next April. President Trump has spoken of his hopes for North Korean tourism. “They have great beaches,” he declared, after his summit in Singapore with Mr Kim this month.

“You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean, right? I said, ‘Boy, look at the view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo behind?’ . . . I said [to Mr Kim], ‘You know, instead of doing that, you could have the best hotels in the world right there’.”

Tourism is not unknown in North Korea: 100,000 people visit every year, largely Chinese, but its attractions are not obvious. Having turned from developing nuclear missiles to diplomacy, this is something Mr Kim seems determined to change.

Inspired, perhaps, by attending a Swiss school, he opened the Masikryong ski resort in 2013. Kalma airport, close to Myongsasipri, has been opened up to civilian flights; services began last week from the capital, Pyongyang.

According to a brochure published in 2015, he intends to put $7.8 billion into the Wonsan area by 2025 and hopes to bring in a million foreign tourists a year. Such ambitions are in keeping with his strategic pivot from “byungjin”, which gave equal priority to nuclear and economic development, to a new drive to construct a “powerful socialist economy”. He has also renewed reconciliation efforts with South Korea. The countries have agreed this summer to hold reunions of families divided by the Korean War, the first since 2015.

Such talk pleases Mr Trump, who claims that he has convinced Mr Kim to denuclearise in return for an end to economic sanctions, although no concrete commitments have been made by Pyongyang. It pleases China, which began its own transformation from a command economy to authoritarian capitalism four decades ago.

It would not be the first time that Pyongyang has experimented with the free market. In the famine of the late 1990s local markets sprang up, as people bartered food to stay alive. Mr Kim has tolerated widespread de facto privatisation of state enterprises, but has remained suspicious of foreign investment, aware of how the Trojan horse of economic modernisation can smuggle in pressure for political change.

• President Trump has declared that North Korea still poses an “extraordinary threat” to the US. In an executive order last night, he extended for one year the so-called national emergency with respect to Pyongyang, nine days after tweeting: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”

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