This paper uses the lens of Neo-traditionalism to elucidate the largely unexplored political aspect of the Chollima (or Flying Horse) Movement of North Korea. With its widespread use of a mythical, speedy horse from China as a rallying cry to inspire workers, this late 1950s and early 1960s worker mobilization movement was above all a series of legitimacy-enhancing exercises and the primary means by which the North Korean regime preserved the hegemony of Kim Il Sung following the Korean War. The term Neo-traditionalism is reformulated to correspond with what the Chollima Movement involved: namely, the excavation and systematic reproduction of some element of a culture’s past, the framing of that traditional element or return to some form of traditional authority as progressive or modern, and the practice of making the reprocessed fragments of tradition a pervasive and permanent part of modern culture.