Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  In fact he lived much of his life in the private world of a movie fan, locked up in a room with his celluloid and videotape images of the outside. After a trip to China in 1983, it appears that he seldom went abroad. Besides absorbing movie versions of foreign places, he had his women dress up once a week in the national costume of some country, serve him the cuisine of that country and make believe.

  Kim Jong-il’s responsibilities increased, so much so that the contrast of his behavior with the persona he needed to project became untenable. Eventually he himself would realize the need for a conscious effort to clean up his act. But that time did not come until the mid-1980s, when—already in his forties—he was placed in day-to-day charge of the party government and military. His youth and some signs that he harbored liberal views led to hopes that he would prove to be a reformer prince, but early evidence for that proposition was less than overwhelming.

  Especially through the first half of the 1980s, although he had started a family as early as 1977, Kim Jong-il continued an active schedule of relationships with women from the world of let’s pretend: actresses, dancers, members of his mansions corps. At the same time, according to Hwang Jang-yop, who was working for him in a high-ranking position in the party’s central committee, Kim would go to any length to portray himself in the public eye as “above reproach when it comes to women.” Hwang said Kim “forbade women to ride behind men on bicycles when out searching for food because it offended public morals. He even forbade women from riding bicycles on their own because he said it was unsightly.”

  If such decrees seem more ridiculous than sinister, consider the story told by Hwang, architect-engineer Kim Young-song and others about Woo In-hee, a promiscuous movie star who had received the title “people’s actress.” In 1980 she was making love in a garaged car—the engine and heater running—-with a Korean returnee from Japan. Both were overcome by carbon monoxide and the man died. When Woo recovered, authorities interrogated her to obtain a list of men with whom she had been intimate. The story goes that Kim Jong-il then ordered her execution by shooting. Hwang wrote, “It is rumored that the main reason for deciding to kill Woo was that she had crumbled under interrogation and confessed to having slept with Kim Jong-il.2

  While many elite North Koreans had heard about Woo, the rumors about Kim Jong-il’s involvement with her awaited confirmation. The evidence was a little better in the case of another woman who talked out of school. A Happy Corps member was irate because it was time for her retirement and she had not been assigned a husband like the other retirees. She let off steam by complaining to acquaintances that Kim Jong-il “is propagandized as a holy, pure, godlike type, but he’s nothing like that.” Former political prisoner Ahn Hyuk told me he had met the woman in his prison camp and heard directly from her about this.

  (It was Ahn, drawing on what he said that woman prisoner had told him, who said that “Kim Jong-il didn’t go overseas any more, so they would have national nights. On India night, the Happy Corps would wear Indian sari and he would eat Indian food. The next time they might be gotten up as geishas.” But former official Kang Myong-do told the Seoul newspaper JoongAng Ilbo that Kim did make some unannounced pleasure trips up until the mid-1980s. “He would take his private jet to Hong Kong, Macao, stay in the top hotels, eat Chinese delicacies including sparrow specialties.”)

  My point in dwelling on the Kims’ sex lives at some length is to show that a great many North Koreans were affected by the rulers’ systematic, even official, exploitation of girls and young women. I mentioned President Bill Clinton and Prince Charles earlier. Many people would argue that the news media and, in Clinton’s case, political opponents were too keen to expose what were essentially private acts between consenting adults, the sort of affairs that many countrymen who were far less exalted like-wise engaged in. I doubt that many who have read this far would offer such an argument on behalf of the Kims.

  Sometimes it was men who suffered from Kim’s womanizing, if that term can be used for such intricately organized hunting and gathering. One former official told me the story of Kang Yon-ok, a beautiful woman who “was able to make her acting debut because she was Kim Jong-il’s mistress. Kim Jong-il kept her from age seventeen to twenty-nine. He set her up to marry an actor, Yi Sung-nam. Yi didn’t know she wasn’t a virgin. He was upset when he discovered she wasn’t, and taunted her. She had promised not to talk about her background, but she felt she had to tell him. He was furious. He spoke to his friends, asking: ‘How could Kim Jong-il do this?’ Now he’s in a prison camp. Lots of people in North Korea know this story.”

  The former official added that Pyongyang elite circles believed actress Kang as well as others among Kim’s mistresses had become pregnant by Kim before he married them off to other men, and subsequently had given birth to his children. The official mentioned in this regard famous actresses Hong Yung-hui (“who played the title role in the movie The Flower Girl), O Mi-ran and Ji Yung-bok. Although specific confirmation of such rumors is elusive, it is indisputable that Kim did take time out of the busy schedule of the country’s co-ruler to involve himself in matchmaking—traditionally the job of parents. Consider the following story—this one from an official biography— of a hastily arranged marriage:

  One evening in January 1980, a woman anti-Japanese veteran was telephoned in her office by Kim Jong-il and was told to come to him at once. … Some days previously, Kim Jong-il, who had heard that she had a son who was old enough to get married, chose a fiancée for … her son, who was serving in the army after graduating from a military academy, and asked her opinion. She immediately agreed with Kim Jong-il’s choice and was grateful for his kindness, which was as great as the warmth shown by parents to their son. Remembering his care, the veteran fighter wondered, while she was in the car, how she would thank him when she met the man who had been worried about her family. Before she realized it, the car pulled into the grounds of a building.

  But she found something else to surprise her when she entered the room. Her son and married daughter were already there. “Oh, my what are you doing here?” Her daughter told her what had happened. Kim Jong-il had sent for her because of her son’s marriage. After he had heard the opinions of both the lad and the girl as well as the parents of both sides, Kim Jong-il had thought that, because they all agreed about the marriage, it would be a good idea to have an engagement party. This was why they had been sent for. …

  Kim Jong-il was highly delighted to see her, and shook her hand ?warmly He told her that he had sent for her because he wanted to decide on her son’s betrothed and hold the engagement party and then set the date of their marriage. Then he asked her for her opinion. She thanked him heartily, saying that they had no greater honor that that of having the engagement party in the presence of Kim Jong-il. They would not mind if they did not have a wedding party, she added. She said they would take the memorable engagement party as being a wedding party. Kim Jong-il thanked her and told an official to prepare the wedding party.3

  Mean-while, the regime’s ideologists were working hard to develop a theoretical basis for the succession. As ultimately spelled out, it involved these propositions: First, it was necessary to have a successor to Kim Il-sung, because “the struggle of the working class and the masses of people is too prolonged and too complicated to be completed in one generation.” Second, the heir must be someone endowed with “boundless loyalty to the Great Leader, which takes the form of a complete knowledge and understanding of the revolutionary thought of the Leader; dedication to the working-class and people’s interests; and complete inheritance of the Great Leader’s illustrious leadership and a full embodiment of his lofty moral virtues.4 Of course, only one person combined all these virtues.

  Kim Il-sung played Confucian ethics for all they were worth to justify the hereditary elite he established and his plans for dynastic rule of the country. It was at least partially for that purpose that the regime’s propagandists—now headed by his son—glorified the
elder Kim’s parents, uncles, grandparents and even his great-grandfather as patriot leaders. “All of the world’s people ought to learn from the record of struggle established by the Kim family,” Radio Pyongyang told listeners in 1977. “The people of the world envy the Korean people who have such a family as their leaders. Therefore we must be loyal and devoted to the Kim family and their shining tradition.”5

  In fact, of course, not all the people of the world—and not even all the people of the communist world—-were swept away with envy. An American Korea specialist went to China in the early 1980s and discussed North Korea with Chinese Pyongyang-watchers. He kept trying to get their opinion on the dynasty in Pyongyang, but the Chinese were hesitant to talk about it. Finally the host said, “Let’s go to lunch and stop talking about this. But before we go I will say one thing. We communist theoreticians have a difficult time categorizing this system. Is it feudal socialism or socialist feudalism?”

  Lies quickly engulfed the young Kim, as they had his father. Indeed, his own official personality cult is even more ludicrous in its excess than Kim Il-sung’s, because propagandists had far less to work with. In the case of the elder Kim, the regime’s sycophantic biographers needed only a few steps from recounting his actual guerrilla war record during the 1930s to casting him as a magical general who could cross rivers by walking on fallen leaves. When it came to the son, though, a lack of tangible achievements made constructing a towering image more difficult. After all, Kim Jong-il fought in neither the anti-Japanese resistance nor the Korean War. Casting about for alternative legends to glorify the man who would be Great Leader but who had little apparent Great Leadership to his credit, the Pyongyang regime settled on the title of “genius.”6

  Kim Il-sung got personally involved in the new propaganda push on his designated heir’s behalf. According to Hwang Jang-yop, the former party ideology secretary, with the success of the intensified efforts to glorify the senior Kim’s revolutionary career “the stage was set for the birth of the first legend about Kim Jong-il—his birth in 1942 in a secret encampment in Mount Paektu. Kim Il-sung was enjoying a holiday in the resort in Samjiyeon when he summoned the people who had participated in the partisan struggle and ordered them to find the site of the secret camp in Mount Paektu where Kim Jong-il was born. Obviously they could not find something that did not exist. So Kim Il-sung said that he would have to do it himself. He looked around and picked a scenic spot and claimed that that was where the secret encampment had been. He then named the mountain peak behind it ‘Jongilbong’ (Jong-il Peak). The Party History Center obtained a huge granite rock and carved the word ‘Jongilbong’ on it. Then they accomplished the difficult task of hoisting the rock up the Jongilbong and attaching it there. Underneath the rock they built a hut called ‘Home of the Mount Paektu secret encampment’ and went around claiming that this hut was where Kim Il-sung had lived with Kim Jong-suk. This was where he had planted the red flag indicating the commander’s headquarters and directed the partisan struggle. And this was where Kim Jong-il was born. He supposedly grew up in this hut listening to the sounds of gunshots of the partisans.” One of Hwang’s jobs was supervising the Party History Center, he wrote.7

  ***

  Kim Jong-il was credited with having been the advocate of the policy of mobilizing masses of workers to complete construction projects at breakneck speed. In October 1974 “when the economy was faced with many difficulties,” Kim Il-sung convened a meeting of the Party Central Committee’s politburo. “At that time Mr. Kim Jong-il set forward the policy of waging ‘speed battles’ to overcome the economic difficulties,” a pro-Pyongyang newspaper in Tokyo reported later. Others pointed out the obstacles, but “it was his firm conviction that there was nothing that could not be overcome if the inexhaustible power and energy of the masses were mobilized. On October 5 of the same year, in order to fulfill the annual assignments of economic construction, Mr. Kim Jong-il proposed to start a ‘70-day battle’ in the national economy”8

  Such “speed battles” became the trademark of Kim Jong-il’s leadership style, both in contruction and in the general operation of the economy. Looking back at the end of 1980 on the accomplishments of that year, for example, North Korea’s Central News Agency credited the “dazzling ray of guidance”—Kim Jong-il, of course—-with a construction “speed campaign” in which “grandiose monumental creations … have sprung up everywhere.” All those “great monuments of the era of the Workers’ Party, which were built in the land of paradise under the outstretched hand of guidance, are gifts of great love which could be provided only by the Respected and Beloved Leader [Kim Il-sung] and the Benevolent Party Center.”

  Upholding his father’s “architectural esthetic,” Kim Jong-il focused his energies on massive urban-development projects in Pyongyang. “The young secretary completely transformed the capital” by 1979, throwing up hospitals, an indoor stadium and the Mansudae Art Theater. Changgwang Street, lined with new twenty- to thirty-story apartment blocks, normally would have taken three or four years to build but went up in ten months in 1980, the regime boasted.9

  Even though he already had received his father’s approval to become the successor, Kim Jong-il continued his elaborate and expensive flattery of Kim Il-sung. As when he was a youngster, the son was accustomed to doing as he wished—and ordinary mortals generally were not prepared to stand in his way. “Formally, the Supreme People’s Assembly is the highest sovereign organization in North Korea,” one former high-ranking official said. “In reality, even if it sets a budget, Kim Jong-il will demand unreasonable expenses for constructing such projects as villas, the Juche Tower or the Arch of Triumph. Cases of unplanned expenses are frequent. Although there are times when experts spin around in circles, pointing out these expenses, there is no one who can act as a restraining force.” The former official added: “Most citizens are unaware of these non-productive expenditures. However, even if they harbor dissatisfaction, is there anyone who could express this dissatisfaction and make an issue out of it? This non-productive investment was an important cause of the economic predicament North Korea fell into in the latter half of the 1980s. The waste was caused by the political environment leading up to the transfer of power to Kim Jong-il.10

  In 1983 officials of Chongryon, the pro-Pyongyang association of Korean residents in Japan, which functions as a sort of de facto embassy in the absence of diplomatic relations between Japan and North Korea, invited me to a movie screening. It would be the Japan premiere of a documentary film depicting a visit to China by Kim Jong-il.

  That was an irresistible invitation at a time when North Korea was very much in the news. The country had just sent commandos to Burma to bomb a South Korean delegation. Failing to harm the South’s president, the North Korean agents killed four of his cabinet members and thirteen other officials. Among those who died in Rangoon was Kim Jae-ik, a brilliant, Stanford-educated economist—in my estimation the best and brightest of the technocrats involved in planning the South’s economic miracle. After my 1979 visit to North Korea I had traveled to Seoul to compare notes with South Korean officials. Talking about the North was still a strong taboo, however, and every official I visited contrived to change the subject—except for Kim Jae-ik. I actually went to see him to talk about another topic, South Korea’s economic plans. But when he heard I had just come from the North he was so excited that he kept me in his office for several hours, picking my brain about what I had learned there. In the fall of 1983, when I saw Kim Jae-ik’s name on the Rangoon fatalities list, I felt personal loss. (It was only much later that various sources, among them former party secretary Hwang Jang-yop,11 suggested that Kim Jong-il had ordered the attack. Some analysts say his father still retained the main supervisory role over major initiatives in inter-Korean and foreign affairs.)

  I duly attended the screening and reviewed the film as follows for my employer at the time, The Asian Wall Street Journal, and its U.S. parent newspaper:

  TOKYO—Is the vir
tual crown prince of communist North Korea a candidate for an early heart attack? Does he lack a skill so essential to a political leader as speechmaking? Did he harbor doubts about the intentions of North Korea’s Chinese allies—doubts that Beijing sought to allay with almost two weeks of marathon banquets, talks, sightseeing and (literal) hand-holding? With President Reagan due to visit the other Korea this coming weekend, such questions may be of at least passing interest to Americans.

  A North Korean documentary film, “Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s visit to China,” which premiered in English here, chronicles a June visit to China by Kim Jong-il, President Kim Il-sung’s 41-year-old son and designated successor. It gives tantalizing clues to the personality abilities, attitudes and health of a leader little known outside his largely closed country. And it provides hints of North Korean and Chinese policy trends at a time when tension in Northeast Asia is heightened by the Rangoon bomb that killed 17 South Korean officials and by the earlier Soviet downing of a South Korean jetliner.

  The younger Mr. Kim is secretary of the Korean Workers’ (Communist) Party. He visited China June 1–12. The trip wasn’t announced until after his return.

  The two-hour film describes the visit as “unofficial.” Yet it makes clear that the Chinese went all out to give their guest treatment befitting an officially visiting head of state. At every arrival and sendoff during a rail trip that took him to several east-coast cities, his hosts stage-managed the sort of adulation by supposedly joyous crowds of-well--wishers he is accustomed to at home—-where both he and his father are treated as godlike cult figures of superhuman brilliance and accomplishments.