Chollima movement
The Chollima movement was a measure of mass mobilization in North Korea analogous to the Soviet Stakhanov movement in the 1950s and 1960s, with the help of which the state leadership of the country wanted to achieve rapid economic progress.
The movement was launched with the beginning of the five-year plan 1957-61. The 21% increases in industrial production envisaged in this five-year plan met with resistance from the State Planning Commission, which considered the target of 230,000 tons of pig iron and 60,000 tons of rolled steel to be unrealistic and assumed that capacities would be a maximum of 190,000 tons of pig iron. The head of state and “Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung ” then visited the Kim-Chaek ironworks and the Kangson steelworks and motivated the workers there to do better. In 1957 a production of 270,000 tons of pig iron and 120,000 tons of rolled steel was recorded and the Planning Commission for Passivism and Bureaucratism was criticized. The North Korean propaganda concluded from this that the creative power of the working people was inexhaustible and gave birth to the Chollima movement.
The movement began as a reflection of the Stakhanov movement, where individual workers strived for top performance and competed with one another. The movement was later extended to entire labor brigades and extended from industry to all sectors of the economy. Unlike the Great Leap Forward in the People's Republic of China , the Chollima movement was not associated with collectivization in agriculture. It was the most successful movement in North Korean history and resulted in what appeared to be miraculous productivity gains. Industrial production grew by 44% in 1957, 42% in 1958 and 53% in 1959, so that the five-year plan 1957-61 was considered to have been achieved after only three and a half years. The late 1950s and early 1960s produced a generation of optimistic youth who had seen rapid improvements in their living conditions after the devastation of the Korean War and who believed in the superiority of socialism . The Chollima movement had no official end and had subsided around 1975.
The North Korean leader Kim Il-sung later repeatedly called on “the masses” to make special efforts when productivity increases were necessary. The Ch'ŏllima statue in Pyongyang was erected in honor of this movement. It shows the mythical horse Ch'ŏllima , which, according to legend , could run 1,000 Korean miles in one day and which gave the movement its name.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b c Lim Jae-Cheon: Kim Jong Il's leadership of North Korea . 1st edition. Routledge, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-203-88472-0 , pp. 30-31 .
- ^ A b James E. Hoare: Historical dictionary of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea . Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md. 2012, ISBN 978-0-8108-7987-4 , pp. 83-84 .