"North Korea said on Tuesday that its leader, Kim Jong-un, had opened a new mountain resort this week, calling it 'an epitome of modern civilization'..."

"...  as the isolated country tries to attract more foreign tourists to blunt the pain of international sanctions.... Tourism is excluded from the sanctions that the United Nations has imposed on the North, which prevent it from earning hard currency by exporting its coal, iron ore, fisheries and textiles. ​Transforming Samjiyon​ from a decrepit holiday town into a modern resort complex complete with ski slopes, spas and hotels has been one of ​Mr. Kim’s pet projects....  As his diplomatic efforts with Mr. Trump have faltered, Mr. Kim has increasingly emphasized a 'self-reliant' economy.... He has been particularly ​focused on building resort towns, a taste some analysts suspect he had acquired when he studied in Switzerland in his teens...."

The NYT reports. The tourists come from China.

According to Wikipedia, Kim Jong-un lived in Switzerland from about 1992 until 1998 — something like ages 9 to 15. (He's only 35 or 36 now (did you realize he was so young?).)

He was described as shy, a good student who got along well with his classmates... a well-integrated and ambitious student who liked to play basketball.... According to some reports, Kim was described by classmates as a shy child who was awkward with girls and indifferent to political issues, but who distinguished himself in sports and had a fascination with the American National Basketball Association and Michael Jordan....

The Washington Post reported in 2009 that Kim Jong-un's school friends recalled he "spent hours doing meticulous pencil drawings of Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan". He was obsessed with basketball and computer games, and was a fan of Jackie Chan action movies....

On the topic of tourism and a country's economy, let me give you this passage I read last night in "The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity" (a book I put in my Kindle a while back, perhaps because one of my readers recommended it):

[T]he British sociologist John Urry... speaks of “the tourist gaze” as a social force that actually does change environments. First of all, it alters the world by the simple choice of what to linger on: what is in fact picturesque, what is mundane, what is romantic, what is pure and what is polluted. And Urry is right about the ultimate power of the “gaze,” if you consider the scope of tourism and the way it shapes economies and individual lives and, in fact, places.... It undermines independence, indentures populations, institutionalizes humiliation. It is a self-inflicted colonialism.... Tourism has caused lots of people to lament the loss of the world, their world, as they know it....

Urry’s book was published in 1995, when tourism was on a track to become the largest commercial enterprise in the world, a standing it seems now to have achieved. If you look at this in one way, it occurs to you that in many parts of the world whole populations depend for their existence on, in effect, being looked at. It is an unsettling, even an awful fact, and one that we desperately want to suppress whenever we are one of those doing the looking, a part of the “touristic wave.”... [F]ond as we may be of the notion of ourselves as “travelers,” shrewd as we may be in our choice of destination and lodging and wines, we are aware of ourselves as part of that declassed, identity-blurred worldwide mob.

The author, Richard Todd, is writing about the places people like to think of as authentic and unspoiled. But what of the concocted places, that were never authentic or that are authentic as aspirations to something fantastical? I see there's a later chapter in the book about Disney World and the Las Vegas strip, and that seems to be more the sort of thing that Kim Jong-Un is doing in Samjiyon. As a traveler, you don't have to worry about spoiling the place by your very presence. It's a resort, built for travelers, and you only have to worry about spending too much of your money... or  that tourist money is creating a damaging dependency on tourism, "the largest commercial enterprise in the world."

But North Korea — under those U.N. sanctions — is desperate as it chooses tourism. It's a strange form of "self-reliance." There's something discordant in that choice.