金正恩의 권력세습은 아직 未完成이다 = North Korea’s Dynastic Succession Still Remains Incomplete, if Not Provisional

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Victor Cha could not be more correct to me when, in his essay entitled “Kim Jong Il Is No Reformer” carried by the September/October issue of the Foreign Policy, a U.S. bimonthly academic journal, he saw absolutely no hope for Kim Jong Un’s North Korea to take the path toward opening and reform.
After 8 months from the passing of Kim Jong Il in December last year, Kim Jong Un, the late Kim Jong Il’s own deathbed choice, at the age of 28, for yet another round of hereditary transfer of power in North Korea, does not appear to have consolidated sufficient political foothold enough to allow him to seriously consider major policy changes. Kim Jong Un is found forced, at least for the moment, to satisfy himself with half titles such as ‘First Secretary’ of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) and ‘First Chairman’ of the National Defense Council (NDC), while ‘Supreme Commander’ of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) is the only full title that he has been allowed to acquire. All told, Kim Jong Un’s rise to the top of North Korea’s power structure appears as yet remaining incomplete, if not provisional.
It is noteworthy that, when he succeeded his father, Kim Il Sung, in 1994, as North Korea’s ‘Great Leader II’, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un’s father, satisfied both of the requirements of one of the time-old rules of the game applied to most of the hereditary successions of power in Asian dynasties; he was Kim Il Sung’s ‘eldest’ son mothered by Kim Il Sung’s ‘legitimate’ wife, Kim Jong Sook. By contrast, Kim Jong Un meets neither of these requirements as the ‘youngest’ of Kim Jong Il’s three known sons, mothered by one of his father’s numerous mistresses as a dancer from a family of Korean residents in Japan who migrated to North Korea in 1950s.
It is interesting to note that, while North Korea spent no time to launch a concerted public relations campaign to idolize Kim Jong Il’s long-deceased natural mother, Kim Jong Sook, as part of his own deification as soon as his father passed away in 1994, Kim Jong Un’s caretakers today are found extremely reluctant, if not hesitant, to unleash a campaign to idolize the junior’s deceased natural mother, Koh Young Hee by name, probably indicating the possibility that they are regarding her questionable backgrounds as harmful to Kim Jong Un’s deification.
In addition, Kim Jong Un also lacks in ‘revolutionary credits’ in a country where ‘revolutionary credits,’ whether real, forged or imaginary, count absolutely to qualify a ‘Great Leader’. While Kim Il Sung boasted a record, grossly bloated as it was, of armed anti-Japanese struggles in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula and Kim Jong Il spent more than twenty years laboriously building up a charisma of his own, Kim Jong Un has no record of past achievements except that he used to play a king pin as a tot.
For these and other reasons, we may have the need to revisit some of the cases of failed attempts of hereditary succession of power in past dynasties in Asia if we were to be foresighted enough to be able to do some fortune telling about the fate of Kim Jong Un’s North Korea.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• [English Abstract]