Comrade Kim Il Sung, who liberated the fatherland through a 15-year anti-Japanese armed struggle (August 15, 1945), delivered a speech on October 14, 1945, at a mass welcome rally held in Pyongyang, bearing the joy of his triumphal return.

The main content of that speech is as follows. The time has come to rally the forces for the building of a new democratic Korea. People from all walks of life must display patriotic enthusiasm and turn out for the building of a new Korea. Everyone must contribute to nation-building. Those with strength should help with strength, those with knowledge with knowledge, and those with money with money. All who love the country and democracy must unite and build a democratic, independent and sovereign state. This was his ideal for state building.

He appealed to all who loved the country—workers, peasants, intellectuals, entrepreneurs and religious people alike—to turn out as one for the building of a new fatherland. All the Korean people responded to his appeal.

From that time onward, a new history of Korea unfolded, in which the Korean people achieved century-scale transformations with the strength of their united will.

The Pothong River improvement project carried out in May 1946 clearly showed how great was the united strength of the Korean people who had turned out for the building of a new Korea.

The Japanese imperialist aggressors who had invaded Korea indiscriminately felled the trees in the upper reaches of the Pothong River, and this gave rise to landslides. As a result, even a little rain caused flood damage along the banks of the Pothong River.

Comrade Kim Il Sung set forth the concept of beginning the great nature-remaking project for building a prosperous democratic, independent and sovereign state with the Pothong River improvement project, and aroused the citizens of Pyongyang to a patriotic labour struggle. And he himself broke the first ground at the site.

Under his leadership, the citizens completed this project in no more than 55 days.

In this way, the political, economic and cultural foundations for state building were firmly laid by the united strength of the Korean people, and at last, on September 9, 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was founded.

Afterwards, under the leadership of the great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, the Korean people built, at every period and every stage of the postwar rehabilitation and construction, the socialist revolution and socialist construction, and with united strength, a socialist state that is independent in politics, self-reliant in the economy and self-defensive in national defence, and a socialist system serving the interests of the popular masses.