Spick and Span: How North Korea's Clean Streets Sanitize Its Image Abroad

Signs that North Korea plans to further ease its COVID-19 border closure and reopen to tourism mean foreigners could start visiting Pyongyang in large numbers again soon, and when they do, there's one unexpected feature of the capital that is likely to fascinate many of them—the city's clean streets.

This was demonstrated mostly recently when Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang and a Russian state media journalist noted his admiration for the modern, clean streets of the DPRK in a vlog.

Unbeknownst to him, this observation perpetuated a longstanding pattern among foreign visitors, who often express surprise at North Korea's cleanliness and orderly urban areas.

This fascination with Pyongyang's pristine boulevards and litter-free streets reveals as much about the stereotypes of North Korea as it does about North Korean society. It highlights the regime's success in controlling the narrative and presenting an image of efficiency and purity to the outside world.

From the Rubble

After the brutal air bombardment of the Korean War and the near total destruction of North Korean infrastructure, the DPRK government invested heavily in postwar reconstruction. With the help of its socialist bloc allies, the government built high-rise apartment buildings across Pyongyang and the country rapidly rehabilitated.

This literal clearing away of debris left an imprint on the North Korean national psyche, making the regime obsessed with maintaining a façade of cleanliness and order to showcase their recovery and strength. This obsession is reflected in the meticulously maintained public spaces and the emphasis on “clean” appearances in regime propaganda.

Moreover, the DPRK's highly authoritarian and centralized political system fosters a highly disciplined and regimented population, which maintains its environment under the compulsion of party-state authorities.

Local people's committees are often responsible for cleaning their respective neighborhoods. This daily cleaning also functions as a surveillance mechanism for the regime, allowing authorities to monitor residents' activities and ensure conformity to party-state policies.

The Admiration of Friends

When foreign socialists started visiting Pyongyang, they immediately took note of its clean appearance.

During his 1970 visit to North Korea, Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver wrote in his notebook, “The DPRK is beautiful, clean, honest, free, and totally revolutionary. It is a new civilization called socialism.” In making this comparison, he aimed to highlight the stark contrast between the neglected inner cities of Black America and the revolutionary socialist society of North Korea.

Fred Carrier, co-chairman of the American-Korean Friendship and Information Center, said something similar during his 1974 tour of the DPRK. In a report, he wrote, “Pyongyang, where one million people live, has streets which are clean and safe at night.”

He also visited a school during his trip and noted that “one simple evidence of the working of socialism” was “the neatness of student notebooks, the clean halls and playgrounds (policed and raked each morning, rain or shine, by student work forces).”

In a 1963 DPRK government-published book featuring foreign travelogs, Chilean political figure Carlos Morales Abarzua is quoted (PDF) as saying, “Pyongyang is the cleanest city I have ever seen in my life.”

In the same book, Japanese writer Mosuke Mamiya recalls seeing an old woman clearing leaves on the banks of the Taedong River for pedestrians.

“The old woman took the road to be her own,” she wrote. “Not only this road, but all the thoroughfares in Pyongyang and the whole land of Korea she was regarding as her own. For her, to keep a promenade clean was tantamount to keeping the whole land clean.”

These accounts underscore the DPRK's commitment to projecting an image of impeccable cleanliness and collective responsibility to foreigners.

A Trope Is Born

This love affair for North Korea's clean streets extends beyond U.S radical leftists and pro-North Korean propagandists. Right-wing political figures have also lauded the cleanliness of the DPRK.

After a 2014 trip to North Korea, Italian right-wing politician Antonio Razzi praised the “very, very clean” streets of the DPRK and compared it favorably to Switzerland.

Interestingly enough, former Black Panther Party member Kathleen Cleaver, who accompanied her ex-husband to the DPRK in 1970 and actually gave birth in Pyongyang, also said the DPRK “seemed like a sort of Stalinist Switzerland: high up in the hills, very clean, very quiet.”

Swiss parliamentarians visited the DPRK in 2014 and noted the clean streets of North Korea. “Everywhere, even in the villages, there are always teams of civilians and soldiers cleaning and mopping,” Swiss politician Peter Vollmer observed.

This common trope of foreigners expressing amazement at Pyongyang's clean streets reflects the rose-colored lenses that travelers often have when they visit the country on tightly monitored excursions.

Many visitors seek to ignore the overall repressiveness of the DPRK government. The prevailing notion is that if the DPRK maintains clean streets, the country cannot be entirely negative.

Of course, beyond the Stalinist façade presented on state-sanctioned trips to foreign delegations, the streets of many North Korean cities have their fill of litter and refuse. Proper sanitation and access to clean water are areas of constant concern for humanitarian aid groups in the DPRK.

These issues are exacerbated by the country's ongoing economic struggles and the regime's prioritization of its military development, which hinder the government's ability to maintain and improve public infrastructure.

One need only venture outside the capital to find poorly maintained roads, houses without windows, and other infrastructure in a general state of disrepair.

Consequently, the disparity between the sanitized image shown to visitors and the actual living conditions faced by the population becomes starkly evident.