Uninterrupted Offensive and Drastic Changes

An offensive is usually a mode of action adopted in the military field. Yet it also serves as the key to victory in socialist economic construction.

Today you can see the standardized fields anywhere in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which are the showcase of the tremendous changes Chairman Kim Jong Il brought about with his lofty love for the country, his bold and audacious plan and uninterrupted offensive.

The Chairman saw land realignment as a patriotic campaign of lasting value that would not only increase grain production by obtaining additional acreage of arable land and effect comprehensive mechanization of rural economy, but also lay the foundation of Juche Korea. He made a solemn declaration of large-scale land realignment despite the greatest-ever difficulties the country was suffering, and wisely led the struggle to transform the entire land of the country as befits the land of socialist Korea in a few years through a daring offensive, thus bringing about great changes.

Chairman Kim Jong Il said:

"We have performed nature-transformation feats by realigning the fields in Kangwon, North Phyongan and South Hwanghae provinces over the past few years. We should now realign all the paddy and non-paddy fields into standardized fields as befits the land of socialist Korea in the coming few years."

Soon after liberation, President Kim Il Sung carried out an agrarian reform to make the peasants the masters of the land, and after the Fatherland Liberation War, he, through agricultural cooperativization, put an end to all kinds of relations of exploitation in the rural communities once and for all and developed them into socialist workers.

In the countryside, however, the land still remained largely unchanged from that of feudal age. It was obvious that land realignment was essential for expanding the area under cultivation and introducing machines into farming in a comprehensive way to free the agricultural workers from hard jobs, increase grain production and completely eliminate the remnants of feudal land ownership in the rural communities.

Chairman Kim Jong Il was passing Taebaek-ri, Changdo County, Kangwon Province on his way of inspection of the front in May Juche 87(1998), when he noticed small patches of land of the local cooperative farm. Then and there, he suggested a far-reaching plan to realign the land of the country in a revolutionary way.

Later, saying that crop fields should be realigned not in a short-sighted way but with an eye to the distant future, he initiated a bold plan to ensure that the whole country turned out to make the land realignment project in Kangwon Province a model one, and to popularize its experience in realigning crop fields to the rest of the country.

His plan of land realignment and the struggle for its implementation led to a gigantic nature-remaking campaign of uninterrupted offensive.

Chairman Kim Jong Il attached great importance to the land realignment in Kangwon Province, the first step of the campaign, and saw to it that the whole nation buckled down to the work to develop the fields into larger standardized ones in a matter of months.

After the land realignment in Kangwon Province was completed, he immediately dispatched the construction forces to North Phyongan Province for a similar project, thus creating a new legendary tale on the Handre Plain. He also saw to it that the land in South Hwanghae and South Phyongan provinces and Pyongyang, the granaries of the country, was realigned at a great speed.

Thanks to his wise leadership and the devoted efforts of the people and the personnel of the Korean People's Army, the patches of paddy and non-paddy fields, which had been handed down century after century, were turned into standardized fields, good enough to do farming jobs with the help of machines, as befits the land of Juche Korea, which led to remarkable expansion of the area of cultivated land and the complete elimination of the remnants of feudal land ownership. This was all done in a matter of a few years.

These tremendous changes were a vivid demonstration of the might of uninterrupted offensive typical of Chairman Kim Jong Il.