North Koreans have been introduced to their youthful new leader in a style that befits the last truly totalitarian state on earth. Kim Jong-un, the “Great Successor”, has been hailed variously as a martial genius and the “outstanding leader of our party, army and people”.
The rise of the younger Kim, officially 29 but possibly only 27, has mirrored his father’s physical decline: last year, while the “Dear Leader” ailed, the son was hastily made a four-star general and awarded a senior post in the military high command. When the armed forces bombarded a South Korean island with heavy artillery, before sinking one of their neighbour’s warships with a well-aimed torpedo, stories were circulated giving the new general the credit.
Not many countries would deliberately promote their future leader as a child soldier given to impulsive attacks on other countries. The portrayal of the younger Kim reveals much about the psychology of North Korea’s ossified regime, glorying in its own isolation and obduracy. In particular, it reveals the two principal strands of the impoverished state’s official ideology: militarism and an obsession with racial purity.
Thus North Korea spends about a third of its total gross national product on the armed forces, rendering it probably the most militarised state in the world. If Britain were to follow this example, we would have a defence budget exceeding £400 billion – significantly bigger than America’s. A country in which people eat roots and berries to avoid starvation has built a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Instead of being the world’s last Communist state, North Korea is best understood as a murderous laboratory for the utopian fantasies of the fascist Right. Its official propaganda glorifies the moral superiority of the Korean race, as compared with the decadence and depravity of the outside world. The North Korean people are portrayed as being almost childlike in their innocence and purity – so different from the amorality of their neighbours, supposedly corrupted by Western materialism and the corrosive influence of America.
In such a wicked world, Koreans cannot do without the protection and guidance of their benign rulers. So the official propaganda machine portrays the Kim dynasty as the indispensable shield for a country that is, in the words of one slogan, a “shrimp amongst whales”.
In The Cleanest Race, a study of North Korean propaganda, Brian Myers summed up the state’s official ideology: “The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.”
The “Great Successor” is now being moulded into this quixotic view of the world. But the state’s propagandists are encountering contradictions that even they may find it difficult to finesse. How can a man under 30 be portrayed as a parental figure? The young Kim might be a great general and military genius, but how can he possibly be a father to his embattled people?
Kim Jong-il was made heir apparent in 1980, giving him 14 years of preparation before he became the “Dear Leader” on the death of his father, Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea. The latest succession, by contrast, has only been in preparation for about a year, while the anointed Dauphin has not even had time to attain middle age.
As Pyongyang’s equivalent of the ministry of truth tries to resolve these inconvenient tangles, the world’s foreign ministries are pondering whether the transfer of power will also herald a change in North Korea’s foreign policy. Apparently anxious not to write off the younger Kim before he has even taken office, William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said: “This could be a turning point for North Korea. We hope that their new leadership will recognise that engagement with the international community offers the best prospect of improving the lives of ordinary North Korean people.”
But “engagement” with the outside world is precisely what North Korea’s leaders are programmed to avoid. Their entire world view, based upon their supposed racial supremacy, hails the virtue of resisting the blandishments of foreigners.
A smooth transfer of power to the younger Kim is more likely than not, according to John Swenson-Wright, associate fellow of the Asia programme at Chatham House. North Korea’s leaders have been “preparing for this for over a year”, he notes, giving a “70 per cent chance” of the succession going as planned.
But the new leader will be surrounded by generals, some of them veterans of the Korean War of 1950-53, and powerful politicians who were close to his father, notably Chang Sung-taek, vice-chairman of the national defence commission, who married the younger sister of the late Mr Kim.
“There are powerful competing political forces: the military, the party, the organs of the state,” Swenson-Wright says. “How this untested, inexperienced leader will hold the ring between these competing groups is impossible to say.”
He adds: “The military in general is the key player, perhaps the most influential player, in North Korean politics.”
Given all this, it seems highly unlikely that the new leader will have much room for manoeuvre. Even if he is minded to ease international tensions and consider domestic reform, the old men around him would probably combine to block any such ambitions. Mr Chang, in particular, may emerge as the power behind the throne in the style of the Regent of a medieval court.
China, the most important voice in the region and North Korea’s only real ally, appears to view the younger Kim as a man with whom it can do business. The new leader accompanied his father to Beijing in May to meet the Chinese leadership. Yesterday, the foreign ministry in Beijing issued a statement that seemed to warn off anyone trying to disrupt his succession. “We are sure the North Korean people will abide by Comrade Kim Jong-il’s will and unify under the leadership of Comrade Kim Jong-un,” it said.
What remains of North Korea’s economy is kept alive by Chinese aid. Yet the extent of Beijing’s leverage over its troublesome ally is often overestimated. Yes, China could sever all help for North Korea and trigger the final collapse of its neighbour’s economy. But all this would achieve would be an exodus of millions of refugees into China, while also threatening the foundations of a state that Beijing regards as a vital buffer against American influence.
In this context, North Korea’s very weakness is a diplomatic strength. China cannot exert economic pressure on its neighbour without bringing about its implosion, meaning that Beijing’s supposed leverage is largely illusory. So North Korea chose to become a nuclear-armed power in explicit defiance of China’s wishes and, for all the expressions of mutual esteem, relations between the two powers are complicated by tension and mistrust.
Insulated from outside pressure by their own spectacular economic failure, is there any chance of North Korea’s leaders choosing themselves to open up and reform?
Brian Myers believes that bellicose anti-Americanism and the sense that North Korea’s national mission is to resist the corruption of an evil world are the only ways for the regime to secure its legitimacy. If the younger Kim were ever to relinquish these battle cries in favour of an accommodation with Planet Earth, he would probably jeopardise the regime’s survival.
“The unpleasant truth,” Myers writes, “is that one can neither bully nor cajole a regime – least of all one with nuclear weapons – into committing political suicide.”
If North Korea’s leadership one day decides to “trade a heroic nationalist mission for mere economic growth”, it might just as well dissolve itself into South Korea and accept reunification on Seoul’s terms. So the succession from one Kim to the next is unlikely to ease the confrontation across Asia’s divided peninsula that has persisted for more than 60 years.
Reform may come, but only when human mortality sweeps away the pillars of the present regime. As the new leader is under 30, we may be in for a long wait.
Additional reporting by Malcolm Moore
