[4] The following month Kim presided over a plenum of the cabinet at Kanggye, where he assigned blame for what he claimed were military failures during the losing phase of the war.

In addition, highways connect it to Pyongyang and other locations, with the road network of Chagang province being centered on the city.

[7] Kanggye has a trolleybus (무궤도전차) system, opened on April 17, 1992, with one 12 km line running from Changja-dong to Kong'in-dong, following the embankment of the Changja and Puchon rivers.

It airs programs that cover topics such as ideological education or local weather information.

Kanggye has a mining industry producing copper, zinc ore, coal and graphite.

Kanggye hosts one of the main timber processing factories of Chagang province and North Korea.

At the start of operations, it produced only two kinds of furniture (dining tables and sterilized chopsticks) through manual labour.

Amongst machinery in use are three- and four-faced automatic planes, all-purpose polishers, joining machines, and grooving saws.

Meanwhile, the factory has directed an effort into the programme of modernizing the drying job, which is an important part of the woodworking process.

[15] South Korean sources put the number of fatalities at six times that amount or more based on the claims of survivors of the incident.