After the Covid-19 pandemic led to the complete shut-down of North Korea’s borders, tourists’ travels, though still heavily restricted, have recently resumed in Samjiyon. The area has been described by the North Korean government as a “model of a highly-civilized mountain city”.
Before the pandemic had forced the borders to close, tourism was severely minimal and some tour companies have said that five thousand people visit every year. To put this number into perspective, South Korea has seen eleven million tourists in just 2023. On the other hand, many have explained that the reason for this is because North Korea does not need to rely on the tourist industry as its main industries are military products, machine building, chemicals, and mining,
This new law will be put into action at the end of 2024. Plans to remodel the city of Samjiyon have been underway including designs to “rebuild its airport, convert a military ski base into a resort, and build new railways and hotels for foreign tourists”. The area also has significant cultural meaning as some believe that the country’s founder Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of the current president Kim Jong Un, won a battle against the Japanese and launched a revolution.
Furthermore, US and Malaysian citizens have been prohibited from traveling to North Korea The Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that their ban is due to “the escalation of tensions in the Korean Peninsula and related developments arising from missile tests.” The US banned travel to North Korea in 2017 after the death of college student Otto Warmbier. He was punished to fifteen years of imprisonment and hard labor for attempting to steal a propaganda poster from his hotel room. However, a year after imprisonment he was released to his parents in America in a coma. He died soon after. The CEO of US-based analysis firm Korea Risk Group, Chad O’Carroll, has said that visitors will mostly be “Russian tourists and possibly Chinese visiting in any real numbers at first”.
While this renormalization after the pandemic had happened much earlier in some aspects and in some countries, tourism in North Korea has just begun reopening, albeit much more slowly than expected.