Tickets to Singapore

At the time of the Hanoi summit between the United States and North Korea, I had emotional expectations and concerns about President Kim Jong-un. I was anticipated because President Kim Jong-un was young, and I was worried that President Kim Jong-un was young. Before that, I had experienced a lot of disgust with the agile brains of people a generation ahead of me, so I wanted to group young leaders such as President Kim Jong-un and President Macron of France in a more pure group.

  

Russia's President Putin promised North Korea 20,000 tons of food aid and China's President Xi Jinping promised a huge amount of food aid in order to break the deadlock in the North's economic situation after the Hanoi summit failed. And shortly afterwards, a South Korean group was criticized by President Kim Jong-un for driving a wedge between North Korea and China. Looking back, I wonder if they probably said that President Putin's manly promises of support should be trusted to some extent and that President Xi Jinping of China should reflect on his promises. - I wish China had provided a little food aid during the North's miserable march.

 

Over the past few days, my blog has become very popular in Singapore. Singapore is definitely welcome. Simpson, the cartoon character, says that chicken is delicious when put in tagine, fried, or in any way cooked. Singapore, which has grown into a small but democratic powerhouse despite its one-man rule, is good for North Korea to design itself as an ideal country, negotiate with the U.S. in Singapore, and bring in many of my bloggers from Singapore. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew deserves respect for being a good dictator who overcame difficult times.

 

I've discussed it a lot with AI, but it bites my three-way perspective. I'm a purposeful third party. AI says that even if there are a lot of visitors to my blog in Singapore, it's possible that another country just passed IP. But anyway, it's good because it's through Singapore. One of the realizations of a politically growing citizen or leader is that there is no reliable ally in international relations to the end. It means that it's right to go my way rather than hate it.

 

The Political Economy of Pyongyang: Growth Poles, the Singapore Model, and the Structural Conditions of US–North Korea Negotiations

Lee Hyeong-chun · Independent Columnist

Abstract

Satellite imagery analyzed in the first half of 2026 shows that nighttime lighting in Pyongyang has steadily expanded since Kim Jong-un assumed power. This paper re-examines that expansion through the lens of Park Chung-hee's growth-pole development strategy, analyzing the political-economic significance of the formal similarities and functional differences between the two. It then assesses the structural conditions under which North Korea could adopt a Singapore-style model of one-man rule combined with economic prosperity, comparing it against Vietnam's Doi Moi reforms as a more realistic path. Finally, it examines how an external variable — the Trump administration's shifting foreign-policy priorities following the provisional settlement of the Iran war and the resurgence of denuclearization on its agenda — interacts with North Korea's internal motives for change. The paper argues that Pyongyang's modernization, the question of regime-model transition, and the dynamics of diplomatic negotiation may converge on a single political logic: the preemptive accumulation of domestic achievements to strengthen Kim's negotiating position.

Keywords: North Korea, growth-pole development, Pyongyang, Singapore model, Doi Moi, US–North Korea negotiations, denuclearization

I. Introduction

For approximately twenty-five years, the author has participated in informal back-channel exchanges concerning North Korea, guided consistently by the proposition: “keep your nuclear weapons, but save your people.” This formulation sought to decouple regime security from the welfare of the population, creating logical space for gradual change that does not require denuclearization as a precondition. Against this background of long-term engagement, this paper examines whether three phenomena observed in the first half of 2026 — the physical modernization of Pyongyang, external attempts to persuade North Korea toward a one-man-rule market economy model, and the Trump administration's shifting foreign policy — are independent events or are bound together by a single structural logic.

II. The Expansion of Pyongyang's Nighttime Lighting and the Political Economy of Growth-Pole Development

Nighttime satellite imagery from NASA and NOAA, analyzed by 38 North and the Stimson Center, shows that the luminous area around Pyongyang has expanded at an accelerating pace since 2014, particularly since 2021. This timing coincides with Kim Jong-un's directive to build 50,000 apartments in Pyongyang between 2021 and 2026, with the lit area expanding from the Taedong River core into northern districts such as Ryongsong. Areas outside Pyongyang — Hamhung, Wonsan, Anju, Kaesong — remain comparatively dim, and the quality of light (white versus gray) differs markedly from the capital.

Comparing this phenomenon to Park Chung-hee's growth-pole strategy of the 1960s–70s reveals both formal similarity and functional divergence. Park's growth poles (Ulsan, Gumi, Masan) were export-oriented production bases that generated a cycle of foreign-currency accumulation and reinvestment. Pyongyang's lighting expansion, by contrast, is concentrated in consumption- and display-oriented infrastructure — apartments, monuments, building facades — that depletes rather than earns foreign currency under sanctions. Both cases share a spatial concentration of resources, but Park's poles faced outward toward world markets while Pyongyang's face inward, toward the management of elite loyalty — placing the two in functionally opposite roles despite their structural resemblance.

III. Market-Economy Transition Under One-Man Rule: The Applicability and Limits of the Singapore Model

As a case of sustained one-man rule combined with economic prosperity, Singapore can serve as a psychologically appealing reference point for an authoritarian leader. Indeed, certain informal diplomatic channels have proposed the Singapore developmental-state model to North Korea and recommended Singapore as the negotiation venue with the United States, partly to cultivate Kim Jong-un's psychological affinity with the model. However, Singapore's success did not derive from one-man or one-party rule itself, but from three institutional conditions layered on top of it: predictable rule of law, a bureaucracy selected on merit rather than loyalty, and a strategy that converted its geography — the Strait of Malacca — into an asset for entrepot trade and finance.

North Korea remains structurally distant from all three conditions. First, a history of arbitrary confiscation and purges undermines the predictability of property rights and contracts that foreign capital requires. Second, North Korean cadre selection treats political background (songbun) as the absolute criterion; shifting toward meritocracy would directly threaten the interests of the existing elite cartel and, by extension, regime stability itself. Third, converting geography into an asset through openness entails an inflow of information that risks undermining the regime's legitimacy, which depends on blocking comparison with the outside world.

A more realistic comparator, therefore, is not Singapore but Vietnam's Doi Moi model. Under the principle of “closing politics while opening the economy,” Doi Moi preserved the Communist Party's monopoly on power while gradually introducing market elements — separating political legitimacy from economic openness in a way that better fits North Korea's structural constraints. Still, “Singapore” as a name — not as a precise institutional template — may function as a symbol that Kim Jong-un finds emotionally acceptable, one that could later be deployed as a justifying narrative if real reform proceeds.

IV. The External Variable: The Trump Administration's Foreign-Policy Shift and the Politics of Negotiation

As of June 2026, the war between the United States and Iran has entered a provisional lull through a memorandum of understanding centered on a sixty-day ceasefire and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, though the nuclear question has been deferred to future technical negotiations and sanctions relief remains a conditional promise rather than a resolution. Washington presents this as a diplomatic achievement, but Iran incurred significant costs to reach this point — strikes on its leadership, sustained bombing, a maritime blockade, and economic pressure — so the characterization of “a settlement with no losses” may reflect a US-centric framing; a balanced assessment must weigh the costs borne by both sides.

At the same time, US officials have stated that North Korean denuclearization is again being placed very high among policy priorities, and the fact sheet issued after the Trump–Xi summit as well as the G7 joint statement both reaffirmed a commitment to denuclearization. This lends empirical support to the hypothesis that the Trump administration, having settled the Iran question to some degree, is now turning to North Korea as its next diplomatic agenda item. Experts nonetheless anticipate that, given North Korea's posture, any forthcoming negotiation will involve “a difficult back-and-forth.”

This shift in the external environment gives Kim Jong-un a specific strategic incentive. The motive to accumulate domestic achievements — Pyongyang's modernization, visible improvements in living standards — before sitting at the negotiating table, in order to strengthen his bargaining position, may coincide in timing with the acceleration of Pyongyang's modernization. Under this reading, Pyongyang's lights serve a dual function simultaneously: a card for external negotiation and a card for internal cohesion.

V. An Interpretive Hypothesis: Model-Learning Among Authoritarian Leaders

The claim that Putin explicitly named Park Chung-hee as his own developmental model is widely circulated within South Korea, but its primary source cannot be clearly traced, and it should not be treated as an academically verified fact. Some Russian-language analyses instead emphasize a key difference — that Russia formally retains a multi-party democratic structure — and caution against a simple equation of the two leaders. This connection should therefore be treated as a politically circulating claim rather than an established fact.

Independent of that claim, however, a separate inference holds: North Korea's decision to deploy troops to Russia is structurally analogous to the effects that Park Chung-hee's deployment of troops to Vietnam produced for South Korea — dollar inflows, military modernization, and the building of military trust with an allied power. The factual question of whether Putin invoked Park Chung-hee by name should be analytically separated from the structural-pattern question of whether the deployment was undertaken in anticipation of economic compensation; the latter is the more robust of the two arguments.

VI. Synthesis and Conclusion

The three threads examined in this paper — the physical modernization of Pyongyang, the possibility of a transition toward a one-man-rule market-economy model, and the Trump administration's foreign-policy shift — are each independent variables, but given the coincidence of timing and the rational incentives of the actors involved, they may converge on a single political logic. That logic can be summarized as follows: Kim Jong-un is preemptively accumulating domestic achievements (Pyongyang's modernization) to strengthen his negotiating position ahead of an anticipated denuclearization negotiation phase; in this process he may draw on the externally proposed symbol of Singapore as an emotional reference point; and the actual institutional transition is likely to follow a path closer to Vietnam-style gradual economic opening than to the Singapore model proper.

This study has clear limitations. First, satellite lighting data demonstrates the existence of infrastructure investment but cannot directly prove its funding source or policy intent. Second, because direct access to Kim Jong-un's internal decision-making process is unavailable, the motivational analysis offered here is necessarily circumstantial. Third, certain arguments — such as the Putin–Park Chung-hee connection — rest on unverified popular claims and must be confined to hypothetical status. Nevertheless, the convergence hypothesis proposed here offers verifiable observational indicators for tracking North Korea's future policy trajectory: the timing of any resumed denuclearization talks, legislative activity related to special economic zones, and changes in the criteria for elite selection.

References

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Liberty Korea Post. (2023). “North Korea's Changed Night Skyline: Kim Jong-un's Priority Development Projects Light Up.”

Tongil & Future. (2023). “Gradually Brightening but Still Dark: Pyongyang Has Visibly Brightened Under Kim Jong-un.”

Russia Beyond (Korean edition). (2013). “Putin and Park Chung-hee.”

Segye Ilbo. (2013). “[Editorial Column] Putin and Park Chung-hee.”

Kyunghyang Shinmun. (2012). “[Reporter's Column] Russia's Park Chung-hee.”

VOA Korea. (2026). “US Official: North Korean Denuclearization a Very High Priority for the Trump Administration.”

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