Only what they say is true, anything else about them, including from independent journalists, is propoganda

In my experience, it's more akin to:

Source: Literally anything! That isn't corrupt and Western!

"Like what?"

Source: Anything!

"Can I use Al Jazeera? Or Wikipedia? Or can you give me a few sources that I can look at?"

Source: No, those are corrupt and Western! You're lying! Look at this UN report!

"This UN report says the opposite of what you said."

Source: That's because the UN is corrupt, and lying! And Western!

"Can you just tell me where you got this information in the first place? Even if it's not 'reliable' per se, surely someone told it to you in the first place. Who was that? Where do you get your news?"

Source: Shut up! You're sealioning! You're being bad! You're lying! Blocked. Cry some more!

But... it's very rare that sustained international intervention into a basically hostile country to solve a decades-long issue ever even works the way it's supposed to in the first place, let alone reduces the problem it was trying to address from "crisis" to "totally nonexistent" within the space of one year.

Here are some other stats about hunger in North Korea over time:

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/PRK/north-korea/hunger-statistics

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-of-chronic-malnutrition-among-North-Korean-children-by-year_fig2_322157603

I am sure there is variation by how you measure things, which is why those graphs look radically different, but my point is that they don't shoop down to 0 all of a sudden in one year and then stay there.

My suspicion is that it stopped being possible to get good data in 2003, for some reason, and they just fell back on horrible data instead, which is why the sudden discontinuous change that's at odds with all the other data sources I could find.

And it’s still shameful that it’s increasing in the US.

Agreed. And that probably does correspond to actual desperate poverty.

Of course, not the NK lying.

You fell for their propaganda.

Recently an economist, who writes for an economics paper in China, showed a billion people in China lived on 280 USD, or less, per month, which would mean most of China's population is still in poverty, and their 800 million number was either not true, or that there was a big back slide they have been covering up. He used meta-data from Chinese academic institutes, and the CCP's own reports.

Since that report went viral on Weibo, then the west, the CCP, and foreign groups they operate through, have nearly erased it. When you would search for "billion people in china still in poverty" Google would have like 10 links to articles about it. Now it is buried down page, behind a dozen or so links about China lifting varying numbers of people from poverty. The ones still there are from only less reputable, or less known, sites. So getting to the citation, that is real, is basically dead.

China's response has changed, been contradictory, and has mostly become vague sentiments of anti-Chinese interests.

It went from numerous, well established, media outlets, to me being able to only find this trash article about the censorship on trash newsweek.

The framing is real shit, but the direct info about Li, and what happened are there. However it was originally reported in Caixin, which is a mainstream Chinese financial paper. It wasn't even a hit piece. The guy was citing their demographics issues, plateauing growth, aging population, stress on funds to elderly, etc. He even says that the CCP is very competent in that regard, and projected that, taking this information into mind, they could still double their GDP in record time.

https://www.newsweek.com/china-article-censorship-1-billion-people-monthly-income-2000-yuan-poverty-1856031

They did lift millions of people out of poverty, provided those people qualify to live in a T1 city.

Yeah, I've seen that. They love to post up graphs of life expectancy, income, etc, and show it going up and up after the revolutions. It kind of loses its steam when you put those graphs next to the graphs of life expectancy, income, etc, worldwide, during that same time period, and they all go up together as a more or less unified grouping as agriculture and medicine improved and the technology boosted up the whole world.

You fell for clickbait. If you read it, you notice that they basically debunk the title

At what point did I fall for it?

All three charts measure different things, yes. I suspect that "Our World in Data" is converting some more complex metrics into "estimated deaths per 100,000" to have an apples to apples comparison, and doing it badly in this case, since their numbers are so different from other sources. It could be also that they just can't get good numerical data out of North Korea. Some sources don't even quote numbers because there would be too much guesswork involved.

But I definitely wouldn't count that, or "deaths are being categorized differently by the government" as a sign that this isn't wrong. The literal death rate from malnutrition in North Korea is far from negligible like it is in China, Vietnam, or the US (even with it going up in the US). You don't have 20% of your children with stunted growth without some of them being too weak to make it and dying of some condition due to malnutrition. And that absolutely haunting video of the starving North Korean woman gathering grass, who died shortly after the interview, is from 2010.