Chollima on the Wing

The story

"Chollima on the Wing" is a North Korean song made to stir popular support for the Chollima Movement, the state's first and best-known mass mobilisation campaign. The Chollima of its title is the winged horse of East Asian legend, the qianlima of the Chinese classics, said to be too swift to be ridden by any mortal and named for its ability to cover a thousand li in a single day. From the 3rd century BCE Chinese writers used the word for people of exceptional talent. Kim Il Sung took up the image to urge the workers of North Korea to bring the country out of the rubble of the Korean War and build a more prosperous one in a short time.

Kim Il Sung first used the term in December 1956, shortly before the five-year plan of 1957 to 1961, when he called on the Workers' Party to produce more, practise economy and overfulfil the plan ahead of schedule. The movement is dated to 1956 or 1958. Its first success was claimed in 1957, when a steel works in Kangdong County near Pyongyang, with a capacity of 60,000 tons, was asked for 10,000 tons more and reported 120,000; the title of "Chollima rider" went to workers who surpassed their targets, and a slogan urged them to "dash forward in the spirit of Chollima". In 1959 the Chollima Work Team Movement, begun by the worker Chin Ung-won, set teams competing for production targets under a national evaluation, with banners, flags and notebooks embossed with the horse for those that won the title; it had 178,000 members within a year and a half. The song belongs to this campaign, alongside the 1960 short story "A Letter from Haeju-Hasong", whose hero is an exemplary Chollima rider.

The campaign emphasised ideological incentives to work harder and the personal guidance of Kim Il Sung over economic management. It produced short-term gains in quantity at the cost of quality, distorted the economy and exhausted the workforce; by 1961 output was falling, and in the mid-1960s the state stopped publishing economic statistics beyond percentage increases. North Korea has never acknowledged the movement's failures. The winged horse became an icon of the state: the 46-metre Chollima Statue on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang, unveiled on 15 April 1961 as a gift for Kim Il Sung's 49th birthday, carries a worker raising the "Red Letter" of the party's Central Committee and a peasant woman holding a sheaf of rice; the horse has named trucks, buses and tractors, a line of the Pyongyang Metro, the national football team and a rocket, and has appeared on banknotes since 1978 and on stamps. In the late 1990s, during the famine, the government called for a second Chollima movement, and "Chollima speed" is still the state's phrase for work done fast.

The song is performed today by the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble, formed on 4 June 1985 from the electronic music section of the Mansudae Art Troupe as the country's first electronic pop group, heard on North Korean radio and state television and reported to be one of its most popular groups. North Korean music is composed under the principles of Juche ideology, and under Kim Il Sung only music judged ideologically correct was allowed; its popular songs are usually sung by young women with an electric ensemble, with the state's campaigns and leaders among their common themes.

What it says

A song of the Chollima campaign, presenting the pace of the winged horse as the pace at which the nation should work; brisk and exhortatory.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.