North Korea Just Changed Its Flag for the First Time in 78 Years — Here's What It Means

For 78 years, North Korea flew the same flag in the same proportions. Then, without a parade or an announcement, the flag quietly changed shape — and the change says more about where the country is heading than any missile test this year.

The new proportions were revealed this week in North Korea's revised constitution, published on Naenara, the state's external propaganda website. Article 166 now states that the ratio of the flag's height to its width is 1:1.65, replacing the 1:2 ratio that had stood since the country was founded in 1948. It is the first change to the flag's proportions since the regime began — and it is not a cosmetic tweak. It is the latest, most visible step in Kim Jong-un's project to rewrite what North Korea is.

What exactly changed

The flag most people picture has not disappeared. The design is the same: a wide red band across the middle, narrow white stripes above and below it, blue stripes along the top and bottom edges, and a red five-pointed star set inside a white circle near the flagpole. What changed is the shape. At 1:2, the old flag was twice as wide as it was tall. At 1:1.65, the new flag is noticeably shorter and squarer — less elongated, more compact.

There is one more detail. The two white stripes have become thicker, now roughly a third as wide as the blue stripes that frame them. It is a small adjustment, but on a flag, small adjustments are the point: every line is deliberate, and nothing changes by accident.

The revised constitution was approved at the first session of the 15th Supreme People's Assembly on March 23, and the full text was published by Naenara in November. The flag, it turns out, had already changed in practice before the paperwork caught up: the new version appeared in a state-media photograph of the launch of the naval destroyer Kang Kon on September 7, and North Korean athletes were seen holding it at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games on September 9.

The reunification line that vanished

The flag is only half the story. The same constitutional revision removes the language that defined reunification with South Korea as a national goal, and Article 2 now defines North Korea's territory as the land bordering China and Russia to the north and South Korea to the south, along with its territorial waters and airspace. South Korea is, in the constitution's own words, a separate neighbouring state.

This is the legal form of a policy Kim Jong-un announced as the "two hostile states" doctrine: the two Koreas are not one divided nation waiting to be reunited, but two separate states in permanent confrontation. The flag change sits inside that same logic. A country that no longer claims the whole peninsula has no use for the symbols of that claim.

The pattern is not new. In 2024, North Korea revised the lyrics of its national anthem, replacing "three thousand ri" — a reference to the entire Korean Peninsula — with "this world". The anthem, the constitution, and now the flag are being edited in the same direction: away from the founding generation's story and toward a national identity that belongs to Kim Jong-un alone.

Why now — and why a flag

Flags are not changed casually, and in North Korea they are not changed at all without the leader's decision. Analysts read this one as part of Kim's effort to build a national image distinct from his father and grandfather — the men who created the original flag in 1948. The Wall Street Journal described it as ditching the Soviet-era version, and that framing captures something real: the old proportions were a product of the country's founding moment, and the new ones belong to the current era.

There is also a practical reading. A flag is the most public symbol a state owns. Changing its proportions in the constitution, rather than by decree, gives the change legal permanence — it is written into the document that defines the state itself. And because the new flag was already flying at a warship launch and a sporting event months before the announcement, the change was road-tested in public before it was ever explained.

What the colours mean

Naenara itself explains the symbolism, and it is worth reading straight: the red band represents the blood shed by anti-Japanese revolutionary fighters; the white circle and stripes signify loyalty to the ruling party and its leader; the blue stripes represent anti-imperialist independence, world peace, friendship and the country's sovereignty. None of that has changed. The message is the same; only the frame around it is different.

That is, in the end, the point. North Korea did not redesign its flag. It re-proportioned it — kept the symbols, changed the shape, and deleted the reunification promise in the same document. The country that flies it is telling the world, and its own people, that the old story is over. The flag is the first thing anyone sees. Now it looks like the new story.

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Sources: Korea Herald, Korea JoongAng Daily