How North Korea Built a Single Person Government Around a Personality Cult?

[정일영]

[The Korean Odyssey]

*How was North Korea able to create a powerful system of one-person rule unlike anywhere else in the modern world? @iStock

Il Young Jeong

Research Professor_Institute of Social Sciences_Sogang University

Do we really understand North Korea as it is? Often the information we can acquire about the country is contradictory, seeming to describe vastly different North Koreas. Perhaps we are all peering through a hazy looking glass and seeing our own biases and expectations reflected in our interpretations.

The question I would like to put forward is tied to the fundamental question driving many people’s curiosity about North Korea: “How was North Korea able to create a powerful system of one-person rule unlike anywhere else in the modern world?” What has allowed this system to exercise stable control of a country that has been in a constant state of crisis since the end of the Korean War?

The Historical Context for North Korea’s System of One Person Rule

In the early to mid 1990s, a period of economic hardship that led to mass starvation and defection, known as the “Arduous March,” shook North Korean society to its core. According to South Korea’s National Statistics Office, North Korea’s population dropped by about 600,000 people at the time as a result of starvation-driven deaths and defections. Yet, there have been no confirmed reports of any kind of notable civil disturbance or public protests during the Arduous March period. At the time, the international community predicted that North Korea’s collapse was imminent, but the system of one person rule remains alive and well today. How is this possible?

I believe that in order to understand the current unusual – one might even say, exceptional – system of one person rule in North Korea, we must first properly understand the context of how that system was formed under Kim Il Sung in the aftermath of the Korean War. It is essential to begin by exploring the ways in which the Korean War influenced North Korea’s political system.

Generally speaking, war creates a set of special political circumstances that tend to strengthen governmental authority, particularly those of the military’s commander-in-chief. Active war with ongoing conflict with an enemy creates an atmosphere that allows the state to exert strict control over society and place limits on citizens’ freedoms. However, it is hard to draw a simple line of cause-and-effect between these general characteristics of wartime governance and North Korea’s oppressive system of one-man rule. For examples, the nature of the war’s outbreaks and conflicts, how the conflict unfolds, and particular incidents during the war can all lead to radically different governments and political systems after the war.

Three Special Characteristics of the Korean War that Enabled Kim Il Sung’s One Man Rule

I believe we can point to three main unique characteristics of the Korean War that made it possible for Kim Il Sung to establish a system of one-man governance.

The first of these characteristics is the fact that North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25th, 1950, but North Korea claimed at the time that the war began with South Korea invading the North (under the incitement of the American imperialists). North Korea continues to perpetuate this distortion of history and teaches citizens that the Korean War was a defensive war to protect the homeland from an American imperialist invasion. The Korean War undoubtedly began with the North’s invasion of the South. If anything, Kim Il Sung should be held responsible for the failure of the Korean War. And yet, North Korea claims itself to be a victim of invasion and glorifies Kim Il Sung as a hero who defended his homeland against the world hegemon American imperialists.

This myth of a “hero” who protected the homeland from the American imperialists created a group of some five million Koreans who had suffered immensely during Korean War and were now, albeit perhaps unconsciously, loyal to Kim Il Sung. This loyal class was responsible for helping elevate Kim Il Sung to new heights. In this way, Kim Il Sung came to be deified as the ‘brain’ of the North Korean socio-political organism.

The second key factor was that Kim Il Sung was able to use the Korean War to wipe out his political competitors and competing authorities. Right at the onset of the war, Kim Il Sung took advantage of the special wartime circumstances to exercise his power as the Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) to set about purging his political opponents. Kim ruthlessly got rid of the Soviet-aligned Central Committee First Secretary Ho Ka-I and the members of the Chinese-leaning “Yan’an faction.” He also accused the head of the South Korean communist party and a major rival of his, Pak Hon-yong, of being a spy for the American imperialists and had him arrested and executed for his supposed crimes. (The “Soviet faction” was largely composed of Soviet-Koreans who had entered the Peninsula during the Soviet occupation towards the end of WWII and entered the North Korean Communist Party on the basis of their membership in the Soviet Communist Party. The “Yan’an faction” refers to Koreans who had fought against the Japanese in the Yan’an area of China alongside the Chinese Communist Party.)

After the war, the Soviet and Yan’an factions used their remaining authority to attempt a revolt against Kim Il Sung at the August 1956 Party Plenary Session, but the revolt ended in failure. Following the so-called “August Faction Incident,” the leaders of the Yan’an faction fled into exiled in China while members of the Soviet faction returned to the Soviet Union. The social investigation that Kim Il Sung launched in the aftermath of the August Faction Incident provided the opportunity to purge political figures with origins in the South Korean Communist Party, including Pak Hyon-yong. Kim Il Sung came out as the indisputable victor of the August Faction Incident, and the resultant purges wiped out any further political competitors or competing influences and began his system of one-man rule.

The third and final factor is that the nature of occupation at the beginning of the Korean War served as a basis for establishing an oppressive social control system based in the North Korean government’s wartime behavior. While the North experienced early victories at the beginning of the war and pushed the Unified Nations Command (UNC) forces into retreat as far as the Nakdong River, UNC forces soon pushed the battlefront all the way back up to the Yalu River following an amphibious landing at Incheon in mid-September 1950. From then until January 1951 when joint North Korean and Chinese forces launched their re-occupation of Seoul, North Korean residents in the occupied area spent three months under UNC control. When North Korean forces recaptured these areas, they sought out residents who had cooperated with or aided the invading forces and branded these individuals as enemy collaborators through mass public trials. This served as the basis for the creation of a system of social classes based on resident’s behavior during the period of occupation.

Following the war, the North Korean conducted a wide scale social investigation that re-classified all North Korean residents into one of three broad classes: core, wavering, and hostile. The core class was thought to be fiercely loyal to Kim Il Sung and included members of the Korean People’s Army, party members, and the families of fallen Korean War soldiers. On the other hand, members of the hostile class were forcibly relocated or experienced serious limits on their social activities, including being barred from promotions. Since the Korean War had not ended but rather been suspended, the war “continued,” as did the oppressive social control system exercised during wartime. Kim Il Sung would then go on to establish his system of one-man rule by purging his political rivals and competing influences, protecting the five million members of his loyal class, and entrapping and restricting the members of the hostile class inside a dense network of surveillance.

Why Change in North Korea Should Begin from the Top

North Korea’s unprecedented system of one-man rule brings to mind the panopticon concept, first proposed by Jeremy Bentham. The panopticon refers to a theoretical surveillance system characterized by one-way surveillance of a group of prisoners, who are in turn divided up horizontally across a latticework of cells so that they cannot communicate with each other. North Korea established its own panopticon-style structural mechanisms of control and surveillance following the war, and the resulting one-man system of rule and the panopticon’s core elements remain in place today.

We often talk about change in North Korea. In response to North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, the international community has slapped the Kim regime with unprecedentedly strict sanctions. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many in the international community anticipated that North Korea would not be able to endure any longer. Yet, North Korea endured. The country continues to be plagued by economic crisis, but the system of one-man rule remains strong.

Since the aforementioned August incident, the Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and now Kim Jong Un regimes have not encountered political rivals, competing influences, or even the political diversity capable of challenging their iron grip on authority. The class of regime loyalists, concentrated in Pyongyang, remain loyal to the leader. Ultimately, sanctions and efforts to isolate North Korea only cause greater suffering for everyday North Koreans with only limited ability to exert change on the one-man system. North Korea’s one-man system can endure isolation and outside pressure precisely because the system was the product of struggle against outside, especially American imperialist, forces.

Then, how would it be possible to bring about change in North Korea? First, war must be removed as an option. If war is removed from the picture, there will be a chance to try to persuade the North Korean leadership to practice reforms, at least in the short-term. If we think about the North Korean people over the North Korean government and focus on their rights and freedoms, we must be able to negotiate with that one-man system in order to bring about change in the system itself. Changes in North Korea will become a reality when the leader changes and when, as result, the ruling elite diversifies and becomes less homogenous. In this process of diversifying North Korea’s political power, the system may begin to answer to the needs of the North Korean people themselves.

*IL-Young Jeong is a research professor at Sogang University in Seoul. His key research interests include North Korea's social control system, inter-Korean relations, and peace on the Korean Peninsula.