Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)

The most closed state in the world, and the only communist country to have passed power through three generations of one family. The northern half of Korea was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945 and Kim Il-sung, a guerrilla who had fought the Japanese in Manchuria, was installed and then invaded the south in June 1950, beginning a war that drew in the United States and China and flattened most northern cities under American bombing. The state that emerged built itself on juche, an ideology of self-reliance, and on a personality cult of unusual intensity - Kim Il-sung remains eternal president more than thirty years after his death. Soviet subsidy sustained the economy until 1991, and the famine of the mid-1990s killed somewhere between several hundred thousand and a million people. The songbun system classifies citizens by inherited political loyalty and determines where they live and work. A network of political prison camps has been documented by a United Nations commission that found crimes against humanity. Nuclear weapons were first tested in 2006 and the programme has continued. Pyongyang is the capital and is reserved for the trusted. The country has about twenty-six million people. It uses its own calendar counting from Kim Il-sung's birth in 1912. Private car ownership is negligible and electricity supply is visibly intermittent from orbit. Around a quarter of the population is estimated to be undernourished. The border with China at the Yalu is the main route for trade and defection. The country fields one of the largest standing armies in the world relative to population.

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