Juche

The Juche Idea (pronounced /tɕutɕʰe/ in Korean, approximately "joo-cheh") is the official state ideology of North Korea. It teaches that "man is the master of everything and decides everything," and that the Korean people are the masters of Korea's revolution. Juche is a component of Kimilsungism, North Korea's political system. The word literally means "main body" or "subject"; it has also been translated in North Korean sources as "independent stand" and the "spirit of self-reliance".

Origin

Kim Il-sung advanced Juche as a slogan in a December 28, 1955, speech titled "On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work" in rejection of the policy of de-Stalinization (bureaucratic self-reform) in the Soviet Union. The Juche Idea itself gradually emerged as a systematic ideological doctrine under the political pressures of the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s. The word "Juche" also began to appear in untranslated form in English-language North Korean works from around 1965. Kim Il-sung outlined the three fundamental principles of Juche in his April 14, 1965, speech “On Socialist Construction and the South Korean Revolution in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”. The principles are "independence in politics" (chaju), "self-sustenance in the economy" (charip) and "self-defense in national defense" (chawi). Current North Korean leader Kim Jong-il officially authored the definitive statement on Juche in a 1982 document titled On the Juche Idea. He has final authority over the interpretation of the state ideology and incorporated the Songun (army-first) policy into it in 1996.

Practical application

According to Kim Jong-il's On the Juche Idea, the application of Juche in state policy entails the following:

1. The people must have independence (chajusong) in thought and politics, economic self-sufficiency, and self-reliance in defense.
2. Policy must reflect the will and aspirations of the masses and employ them fully in revolution and construction.
3. Methods of revolution and construction must be suitable to the situation of the country.
4. The most important work of revolution and construction is molding people ideologically as communists and mobilizing them to constructive action.

The Juche outlook also requires absolute loyalty to the party and leader. In North Korea, these are the Workers' Party of Korea and Kim Jong-il, respectively.

In official North Korean histories, one of the first purported applications of Juche was the Five-Year Plan of 1956-1961, also known as the Chollima Movement, which led to the Chongsan-ri Method and the Taean Work System. The Five-Year Plan involved rapid economic development of North Korea, with a focus on heavy industry, to ensure political independence from both the Soviet Union and the Mao Zedong regime in China. The Chollima Movement, however, applied the same method of centralized state planning that began with the Soviet First Five-Year Plan in 1928. The campaign also coincided with and was partially based on Mao's First Five-Year Plan and the Great Leap Forward. North Korea was apparently able to avoid the catastrophes of the Great Leap Forward.

Despite its aspirations to self-sufficiency, North Korea has continually relied on economic assistance from other countries. Historically, North Korea received most of its assistance from the USSR until its collapse in 1991. In the period after the Korean War, North Korea relied on economic assistance and loans from "fraternal" countries from 1953-1963 and also depended considerably on Soviet industrial aid from 1953-1976. Following the fall of the USSR, the North Korean economy went into a crisis, with consequent infrastructural failures leading to the mass famine of the mid-1990s. After several years of starvation, the People's Republic of China agreed to be a substitute for the Soviet Union as a major aid provider, supplying over 400 million dollars per year in humanitarian assistance. Since 2007, North Korea also received large supplies of heavy fuel oil and technical assistance as scheduled in the six-party talks framework. North Korea was the second largest recipient of international food aid in 2005, and continues to suffer chronic food shortages.

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