sinonk.com http://sinonk.com/2015/01/27/mountains-and-seas-of-gold-2015-new-years-message/ Mountains and Seas of Gold: 2015 New Year’s Message Kim Jong-un visited the KPA-run No.18 Fisheries Station in November 2014. | Image: KCNA Another year, another New Year’s Address from the Supreme Leader of the DPRK . Were you to have perused only third-party media coverage of Kim Jong-un’s annual message, delivered to the viewing public early on the morning of January 1 via Korean Central Television (as is once again the tradition now that Kim Il-sung’s mode of delivery has been revived, and the years when Kim Jong-il delivered his musings through the print media put firmly to bed) you might think that it focused exclusively on (pretending, it is widely believed by most, but not Andrei Lankov) to offer the Park Geun-hye administration a roadmap to a third inter-Korean summit . However, beyond Kim’s tactically astute but probably empty appeals to brotherly affection, the message contained far more, including reference to developmental challenges new and old. It was, in the words of Robert Winstanley-Chesters, “a hymn to revolutionary stasis, a developmental treading of urgent water in anticipation of imagined new Utopian possibility.” Robert will now explain. – Christopher Green, Co-editor Mountains and Seas of Gold: 2015 New Year’s Message by Robert Winstanley-Chesters Forecasting the genuinely new in an annual message from North Korea’s Supreme Leader is to anticipate category failure and disappointment. Novelty by definition requires the potential for change or difference… and contemporary North Korea has never been marked by either. It seems that no matter how much it is wished for and conceptualized, Pyongyang has deflected, co-opted, negativized or outright ignored potential challenges to the core of its system. Nevertheless, that does not mean that the New Year’s Address can be discounted. The 2014 New Year’s Address was acutely demonstrative of the genre’s form as a ‘directional beacon’ highlighting the narrative and developmental direction of the state for the coming year. Where 2013 had been a year of multiple revolutionary speeds, Masik Pass and other megaprojects, so 2014 focused on a key text from Pyongyang’s developmental history: 1964’s Rural Theses on the Solution to the Socialist Rural Question, a conceptual linchpin of practical and ideological progress in agriculture during a more governmentally coherent (though no less difficult) period in North Korean history. The return of the Rural Theses in 2014 suggested a structural cohesiveness to the developmental strategy of the Kim Jong-un government that, of course, may not really be present (a fantasy on the part of Pyongyang agricultural institutions); but, vitally, it politically underpinned the developmental goals of the Address. Like most North Korea watchers, I was caught unawares by the prominence of the Rural Theses in the 2014 speech, in-spite of having written a considerable portion of my recent monograph on their structure and impact. The anniversary had not seemed significant. The 2014 Address sought to move on from the construction of dramatic megaprojects such as the Masik Pass Ski Resort, applying the Theses’ charismatic impetus to programs that had seemed fairly esoteric and diffuse, such as the Sepho Grassland Reclamation Project . Doing so appeared to be an exercise in reinforcement of their potential, which had hitherto appeared tenuous at best. The North Korean media continued to make reference to the Theses and their place in the New Year’s Address for much of the year, with mentions in Rodong Sinmun as late as the end of October. Caught between the Tides: Predicting 2015 | In the lead up to January 1 this year, I racked my brain and delved deep into Kim Il-sung’s Works in search of agricultural/developmental focal points around which Kim Jong-un’s statement could coalesce. Of course, environmental historians of North Korea will be aware that the next significant developmental publication following the publication of the Rural Theses in 1964 was 1968’s ‘For the Large-scale Reclamation of Tidelands’. Therefore, lacking an obvious textual anniversary for 2015, the potential of the coming January remained a mystery. Kim Jong-un’s message of January 1, 2015 heavily focuses on narrative, legitimacy and authority. It makes deep connection (as ever) with the historical narratives of Korean liberation in 1945 and the pre-history of that moment;