Attending the rally were Kim Yong Il, Choe Thae Bok, Yang Hyong Sop, Kim Jung Rin, leading officials of ministries, national institutions and working people's organizations and others including over 100,000 citizens.

Read out there was the letter of the complex employees addressed to the working people across the country.

In December last year General Secretary Kim Jong Il visited the Chollima Steel Complex to kindle the torch of a great revolutionary surge and put forward the workers in Kangson as the vanguard of grand advance for building a thriving nation.

The workers in Kangson adopted a letter calling upon all the working people of the country to bring about a great surge by pooling their will and efforts. In the wake of it, the newspapers of the party, the army and the youth league made public a joint New Year editorial advancing the militant tasks to glorify this year as a year of new revolutionary upsurge.

Choe Thae Bok, alternate member of the Political Bureau and secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, made a report at the rally.

The reporter said that the idea consistent in the letter and the joint editorial is that the whole country and all the people should bring about a new revolutionary surge on all fronts of socialist construction in hearty response to the WPK's call as in the period of a great Chollima upsurge in the 1950s and thus open the gate to a great prosperous powerful nation in 2012 at any cost and demonstrate to the full the dignity and might of Songun Korea.

The New Year Juche 98 (2009) is a year of epoch-making changes, in which noteworthy events will be recorded in the history of building a great prosperous and powerful, socialist nation, and a year of a new revolutionary surge, in which all the people should launch a general offensive to make a historic leap on all fronts, he said, urging all the officials, party members and working people in the city of Pyongyang to take the lead in the nationwide drive to make a new history of a great revolutionary surge in the 21st century.

The reporter expressed the will to steadily adhere to the idea of "By our nation itself" under the banner of the June 15 joint declaration and the October 4 declaration, reunification programmes common to the nation, and smash every move of the separatist forces and accomplish the cause of national reunification without fail.

He said: The victory is in store for us in the worthwhile struggle to effect a new revolutionary surge as long as there are the experienced and seasoned leadership of Kim Jong Il and the invincible military power, the infinite spiritual strength of our army and people and the inexhaustible potentials of the independent economy.

Speeches were made at the rally by Jong Myong Su, manager of the East Pyongyang Thermal-power Plant, Kim Yong Bok, chairperson of the management board of the Mangyongdae Farm in Mangyongdae District, Ri Kun Chol, first secretary of the Pyongyang City Committee of the
Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League, and Kim Jong Chol, a researcher of Kim Chaek University of Technology.