Women’s union members in North Korea’s Musan county are being mobilized daily to haul sand from the Tumen River and nearby mine sites to construction projects under Kim Jong Un’s “Local Development 20×10 Policy” — and they are not hiding their frustration.
A source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK on Wednesday that members of the Korean Socialist Women’s Union, known by its Korean acronym yeomaeng, have been dispatched to construction sites in Musan county nearly every day since early this month. “Pulling carts and hauling sand has become a daily routine,” the source said.
According to the source, each yeomaeng member is required to arrive at a construction site with a cart loaded with sand. A procession of women pulling carts from the Tumen River to the building sites has become a fixture of the county’s daily life. The mobilization reflects an acute shortage of construction materials: with steel rebar, cement, and even basic sand in short supply, authorities have turned to manual labor as a substitute.
Women’s union members have also been collecting sand near the Musan Mine, North Korea’s largest iron ore operation. The circumstances have prompted a sardonic running joke among those mobilized: “The sand has iron ore mixed in, so the buildings will be extra sturdy.” The dark humor thinly veils deeper frustration at being sent to scrape ore-contaminated mine tailings to fill a materials gap that state supply chains have failed to close.
“They are somehow cobbling together materials through sheer labor to get these buildings up,” the source said, adding that construction workers on site have remarked that it would be remarkable if structures built under such conditions do not eventually collapse.
Daily disruption to livelihoods
The daily mobilizations are cutting directly into the time yeomaeng members have available for market activity, their primary source of income.
“Many people head out to the riverbed at dawn to scrape sand, because they can only go about their trading once that obligation is done,” the source said. The round trip from the county seat to the Tumen River takes about an hour each way, and adding the onward leg to the construction site pushes the total to more than two hours — time subtracted from whatever market activity might otherwise be possible that day.
Despite the burden, open refusal is not an option. The construction drive is a party policy initiative, and yeomaeng members who appear insufficiently cooperative risk being flagged for ideological struggle sessions.
Frustration is spilling into open complaint nonetheless. The source relayed that women among those mobilized have been saying: “They say they’re building local factories, hospitals, and service facilities for the people, but it’s the people who are suffering through it,” and “Even if a new factory goes up, no one actually believes it’s going to operate properly.”
North Korea is currently in the second year of the Local Development 20×10 Policy, under which construction of factories, hospitals, and service facilities is underway in 20 counties per year. Rodong Sinmun reported Feb. 7 that groundbreaking ceremonies for projects under the policy had been held in Musan county and several other areas.
Reporting from inside North Korea
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