North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un Vows To Improve Social System & Foreign Relations

Seoul: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has vowed to further improve social system and foreign relations at the ongoing party congress, a state media report said on Friday.

In the report, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said that Kim suggested practical ways to give full play to the advantages of the country's social system during third-day session of the eighth Congress of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea on Thursday, reports Xinhua news agency.

In his report reviewing the work of the Party's seventh Central Committee, Kim analysed and evaluated in depth the shortcomings exposed and lessons drawn from work in the past five years, setting forth "directions and ways for opening up a fresh golden age" by carrying out reforms in such fields as "education, public health, literature and arts", KCNA said.

During the session, Kim and the congress attendees also doubled down on the Party's general stance to comprehensively expand and forge external relations, including ties with South Korea, KCNA added.

Relations with Seoul went cold starting June, 2020 after Pyongyang demolished an inter-Korean liaison office in the border town of Kaesong in retaliation for the South's failure to stop activists from sending anti-North Korean leaflets.

North Korea opened the eighth Party Congress on Tuesday amid expectations of a new five-year economic development plan and new policies on relationship with the US.

The Congress will continue on Friday is the first in nearly five years, according to the KCNA report.

During the previous Congress held in 2016 for the first time in more than 30 years, the North announced its five-year development plan that ended last year and declared the "byongjin" policy of simultaneously seeking nuclear weapons and economic advance.

(With IANS Inputs)