Powering the Socialist Future: Hydropower and Uneven Electrification in North Korea

Why did North Korea urge rural communities to generate their own electricity while celebrating the reconstruction of its major hydroelectric dams? This talk examines large dams and small rural power plants in the 1950s and 1960s, situating their development within the legacies of Japanese imperial engineering and the politics of decolonisation.

Drawing on North Korean newspapers and technical publications alongside foreign diplomatic records, the talk traces how access to electricity and responsibility for its provision were organised. The restoration of dams inherited from Japanese colonial rule drew on socialist-bloc assistance and prioritised industrial and urban supply. Rural cooperatives, meanwhile, were called upon to build and maintain small power plants using local water, materials, and labour. Official descriptions of water as abundant and affordable made this undertaking appear widely achievable. However, seasonal flows, equipment shortages, and uneven technical support shaped what communities could build and sustain.

Set alongside histories of hydropower in China and South Korea, these projects raise comparative questions about how states across Cold War divisions distributed the benefits and responsibilities of electrification. I argue that North Korea’s postcolonial reconstruction linked the promise of shared prosperity to unequal conditions of access and obligation, as communities received different levels of support and assumed different responsibilities for building and sustaining electricity supplies.

Header image credit: Hanbyul Jeong via Unsplash