Viral Photo Of North Korea's New Map Claims To Reflect Kim Jong-Un's Policy Shift

The tension between North and South Korea is legendary. Since the Korean War in the 1950s, reconciliation efforts have not been successful. And now, a photo of North Korea's map circulating on the internet has baffled policy researchers and other users. The map has been shared on the Chinese social media platform RedNote (Xiaohongshu) and claims the revised map was shared in April 2024, as per a report in Newsweek. It marks a major shift in the country's policy on unification by showing the Korean Peninsula divided into two separate parts, further driving home North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's break from the long-standing goal of eventual reunification with the South.

For decades, Pyongyang had demanded to be reunited with the South but always on its terms. The three-year Korean War, which started when communist North invaded South, ended in an armistice in 1953 without a peace treaty ever being signed. Still, Pyongyang kept preaching reunification for many years afterward, according to the news portal.

According to Newsweek, labelled "Joseon," the term North Korea typically uses for itself, the map displayed administrative districts only for the North and omitted them for the South-unlike older charts that have been made public.

Instead, South Korea was shown in grey like China and labelled simply as "South Korea. This was a departure from the previously used term "Puppet Korea", which implied the South was not an independent country but a US puppet state.

Kim Jong Un, supreme leader of North Korea, said in an October speech: "In the previous period, we talked a lot about liberating the South and unifying the country by force, but now we are not interested in that at all, and since we declared two countries, we are not even conscious of that country."

North Korea's rhetoric on the South has been subdued since the December political crisis in Seoul following now-jailed President Yoon Suk-yeol's brief declaration of martial law. Despite this, experts believe Kim Jong Un will not reverse his purge of unification symbols.