SEOUL, South Korea - North Koreans cheered leader Kim Jong Il when he appeared at a Lunar New Year celebration, state-run media said Tuesday, as the regime continued its campaign to quell speculation about the reclusive leader's health.
Kim disappeared from public view last year, with South Korean and U.S. officials saying it was because he suffered a stroke in August. But the North's state media in recent weeks has widely publicized appearances by Kim, who met with a Chinese envoy last week in what is believed to be his first face-to-face contact with a foreign official since reportedly falling ill.
Kim celebrated the new year by attending a choral concert along with other top North Korean officials, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Tuesday in a dispatch monitored in Seoul.
"When he appeared in the auditorium the audience broke into the stormy cheers of 'Hurrah!' and extended the warmest lunar New Year greetings to him," KCNA said.
While state media reported his appearance, they did not release any photos or footage of the leader at the ceremonies.
Kim waved to the performers and audience when the show was over, KCNA said. The report did not say when the concert took place; Monday was the first day of the new lunar year.
The public appearance is the latest indication Kim, who turns 67 next month, has regained his health and remains in control of the Stalinist nation of 23 million.
Kim's health is of keen interest because the authoritarian leader -- who inherited power from his father, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, in 1994 -- has not publicly named a successor. He wields absolute authority over the impoverished, nuclear-armed nation.
Isolated North Korea has relied on foreign assistance to help feed its people since the economy was devastated by natural disasters and mismanagement in the mid-1990s.
In 2007, the regime agreed to an international disarmament-for-aid pact that called for dismantling its nuclear program in exchange for much-needed aid. However, that process has been stalled since August.
North Korea's regime says it will turn the country into a "prosperous and powerful" nation by 2012 -- the 100th anniversary of founder Kim's birth -- and exhorted its people to work harder to achieve that goal.
"We're sure we can do what it takes to make a prosperous and powerful nation," Pak Guk Song, a Pyongyang resident, told APTN on Monday. "We will rely on our inexhaustible spiritual strength, even though we have to face difficulties and ordeals."
