A technician at a coal mining machinery factory in Chongjin lost a finger recently while attempting to produce insulating paper using scrap lumber, an accident that workers and staff are attributing directly to North Korea’s “self-reliance” policy and the impossible demands it places on factory floors, a source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK on Tuesday.
The injured technician had been tasked with fabricating insulating paper for use in electrode production at the facility. Lacking proper materials and equipment, he and a single assistant had been attempting to repurpose leftover timber from mold-making for the project. The effort had been underway for three years without meaningful results when the accident occurred.
The source said the technician’s hand was caught in machinery during a test run of the improvised process. “They were trying to use scrap wood as insulating material, but the factory had almost none of the necessary equipment for that,” the source said. “In the end, without any proper verification, they pushed ahead under the banner of self-reliance and the accident happened.”
Unworkable demands, predictable results
Producing insulating paper from raw wood is not a simple task. The process requires pulping, chemical treatment, pressing, and drying across multiple industrial stages. The factory, a coal mining machinery plant with no relevant production infrastructure, had none of those capabilities. Workers had reportedly been making trips outside the facility to conduct tests, scrambling to make the project work with whatever was at hand.
Following the accident, voices inside the factory have grown louder in criticizing the approach. Workers say that using improvised workarounds to fill gaps caused by chronic material and equipment shortages creates conditions for further accidents. Despite the injury, management has not moved to address the underlying problem, instead continuing to issue directives to make maximum use of available materials.
“The order from above is simply to be self-reliant, and that’s the end of it,” the source said. “The burden always falls on the shop floor. Pushing ahead to make paper with no equipment is the kind of self-reliance that ends up costing people their fingers.”
North Korea’s self-reliance policy, a longstanding ideological directive requiring factories and institutions to resolve production shortfalls through their own means rather than relying on state supply chains, has intensified since the Ninth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea in February 2026. Workers and enterprise managers across the country have reported mounting pressure to meet quotas without the inputs necessary to do so.
Reporting from inside North Korea
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April 14, 2026 at 10:39PM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)