The rise of the ‘Morning-Star King’

Against the backdrop of Britain’s first football team tour of North Korea, the Hermit Kingdom remains as secretive as ever in choosing the next leader. Experts have noted the importance for Pyongyang of choosing an obediant leader who will extend the hold on power exercised by the Kim dynasty since Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea and Juche ideology. Where will the regime head in the build-up to the all-important 2012 Kim centenary?

When the Middlesbrough Ladies footballers returned from a sporting visit to North Korea in September 2010, centre-back Rachael Hine called the 4-day trip “a whirlwind” and “absolutely amazing”.  Millions were said to have watched highlights from their games on television, and the visitors drew six times more spectators than had turned up at their most successful game back home — against Arsenal Ladies.

The unusual cross-cultural connection dates from 1966 when an underdog North Korean team staged one of the most spectacular upsets in World Cup history by sending home the favoured Italian team at Middlesbrough’s Ayresome Park in a preliminary round. No Asian team had advanced so far in the soccer World Cup and the feat was celebrated in the 2002 documentary The Game of their Lives.

The sporting bond did not, however, give the present Middlesbrough Ladies any privileged glimpse into what is one of the secretive state’s most unfathomable processes — leadership succession.

At the time of their visit, speculation among Korea watchers about a likely successor to the 68-year-old “dear leader”, Kim Jong-il, was rife. Believed to have suffered a stroke two years ago and to be in poor health, Kim Jong-il had given little indication of whom he favoured to take his place.

According to the official Korean Central News Agency, on a visit to China in August 2010 Kim Jong-il took in sites connected with his father and told Chinese president Hu Jintao, “It is our important historical mission to hand over to the rising generation the baton of the traditional friendship.”

In late September, on the eve of the largest political meeting in North Korea for 30 years, the Workers’ Party assembly, Kim Jong-il’s youngest son Kim Jong-un was made a four-star general — an appointment that has been read as a sign that the army is still considered more powerful that the party in this fragile and unpredictable nation. A short time later, he became deputy chair of the Central Military Commission of the Workers’ Party and a member of the Central Committee.

Chang Song-taek, the husband of Kim Jong-il’s sister, Kim Kyong-hui, and the second most powerful man in the country, is thought to have been picked as a mentor for the future leader. Kim Kyong-hui was also promoted at the assembly in a move seen as binding her husband even closer to the interests of the Kim dynasty. Some go so far as to consider Kim Kyong-hui, who reportedly has a “drinking problem” and an explosive temper, as a key person in the country’s future leadership clique.

Yun Duk-kim, a North Korea specialist at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul, considers such machinations will not go down well in the North because dynastic succession contradicts the state’s Communist ideology.

“It’s difficult for people to show their displeasure, of course. It’s a totalitarian system. They just obey,” the New York Times quoted him as saying.

Andrei Lankov, from Seoul’s Koomin University, suggests that it is precisely because Kim Jong-un is inexperienced that he has been chosen as heir apparent.

“People around Kim Jong-il want him to be replaced by an obedient leader when he dies, a sort of rubber-stamp dictator,” Lankov told the BBC’s John Sudworth.

For Victor Cha, director of Asian studies at Georgetown University, the question was whether North Korea would resort to high-risk foreign policy stunts to hold the regime together. “They were already unstable as it was, and this succession issue makes them even more unpredictable”, says Cha.

Others suggest that China may exert a steadying influence. It is known to have helped relieve food and energy shortages in North Korea and to have blunted the effect of international sanctions aimed to deter the North from the development of nuclear weapons.

“What China is most concerned about is stability, namely stability in North Korea, the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia”, says Xu Wenji, a North Korea specialist at China’s Jilin University.

The BBC’s John Simpson speculates that the gradual filling of politburo seats that have been unoccupied for years may be an attempt to assert the power of the Party over the military. In which case, says Simpson, China may well be shaping events.

“There have been clear signs that China would like North Korea to develop in very much the same way as China itself did in the 1970s and 80s, leading to the rampant and highly successful state-controlled capitalism of recent years.

“The main architect of this change was Deng Xiaoping. Interestingly, his only formal official position for years was his control over the military committee of China’s Communist Party: not very different from the most important of the young Kim Jong-un’s new jobs.”

It may be a stretch to mention Kim Jong-un — his mother reportedly called him the “Morning Star King” — in the same sentence as the undeniably astute Deng Xiaoping. More evidence of his ability will be needed, and it may be some time in coming. Until a few weeks ago many North Koreans didn’t even know that Kim Jong-un existed.

Succession North-Korea style

Kim Jong-il’s assumption of power in the Hermit Kingdom in 1994 was a smooth, almost stately affair. Kim Jong-il’s father, Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea, had been grooming him for office since about 1971.

The succession was publicly announced at the Sixth Party Congress in 1980. In 1993, after a series of increasingly important positions in the political hierarchy spanning 22 years, he was appointed president and chair of the National Defence Commission, with command of the country’s armed forces. The following year, on 8 July, 1994, his father died.

In 1997 Kim Jong-il became general secretary of the Korean Workers’ Party. He has not, however, taken the title of president. That role fell vacant at the death of Kim Il-sung and was finally abolished in September 1998 by the Supreme People’s Assembly.

The September 2010 Party assembly was the first in 30 years, and succession planning has no doubt a special significance this close to 2012 — a date with enormous resonance in North Korea. The country is getting ready to mark the centenary of the birth of Kim Il-sung on 15 April 2012. Kim Jong-il has declared that for North Korea 2012 will be the year to “open the grand gates to becoming a rising superpower”. This has had one bizarre consequence: according to Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper, Koreans caught watching smuggled copies of the apocalyptic Western movie “2012” have been arrested and face prison sentences.

Unlike Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il has been slow to designate an heir apparent. His half brother, Kim Pyong-il, a potential rival and successor, was neutralised through a series of diplomatic postings overseas, most recently in Poland.

Kim Jong-il, who is believed to have been married three times, is said to have at least two sons and two daughters along with up to nine illegitimate children by other women.

With no recognised process for choosing future leaders outside the Kim family, and with the dynasty propped up by a carefully nurtured personality cult, it is possible that Kim Jong-il’s death might cause the collapse of the entire political apparatus.

Nevertheless, the family networks that have thrived in what is a highly nepotistic regime, may provide the necessary stability for a transition, provided the chosen successor is not so weak that his legitimacy is undermined.

- by Vaughan Yarwood
Photos sourced from Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

Related pages:

 

Last updated: 04 November 2010