Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (58 page)

As for First Lady Kim Song-ae’s other children, Kang Myong-do told me that Pyong-il’s elder sister Kim Byong-jin was the wife of a diplomat, Kim Kwang-sop, who at the time of our talk was ambassador to the Czech Republic. Kim Jong-il’s young stepbrother Kim Yong-il, Kang said, was living an isolated life in Pyongyang, having no job. The studious Kim Yong-il was enthusiastic about the social sciences as well as the electronics-related subjects he had studied. Unlike his elder brother Pyong-il, he had never been a political threat. But like Pyong-il he found that people avoided him. Rather than going abroad he was spending his days in his Pyongyang mansion, doing history. His one friend, by Kang’s account, was O Il-su, O Jin-u’s son. The two had studied together in East Germany.
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Hwang Jang-yop, who had left the Central Committee in 1965, returned in 1979 to find that the tone at the political heart of the country had changed drastically. Hwang’s close, sustained involvement with both Kims makes him one of the most important witnesses to the inner workings of the regime. His testimony after he defected to South Korea in 1997 was largely favorable in its appraisal of the way Kim Il-sung had run things up through the 1960s and beyond. But from 1974, when the Great Leader designated his son as heir, Hwang’s portrayal shows the country heading for disaster. The reason was partly a change in Kim Il-sung himself, who from that time “became increasingly conceited and turned sloppy in his work.”
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But the main problem, as Hwang discovered, was Kim Jong-il’s management style and, ultimately, his personality. Hwang had “worked from 1958 to 1965 as party secretary for ideology. “At that time, Kim Il-sung’s younger brother Kim Yong-ju was in charge of party affairs. But when I returned to the central committee in 1979 as the party central secretary, it was Kim Jong-il who was running the show. I was shocked by the numerous changes that had taken place during my long absence. Life in the central party before had been filled with joy and pride at working at the heart of the nation’s brain power, but life in the very same organization after my return was filled with unease and tension. I was constantly on my toes, fearful of getting hurt by the highly-charged wire of dictatorship so close at hand.”

Highly intensified surveillance even of top-ranking officials was one big change that Hwang immediately noticed. He found that a new headquarters party committee “specifically charged with controlling the lives of-workers in
the party central committee” had been established under Kim Jong-il, “various departments within it controlling the organizational or ideological lives of the party officials or carrying out secret intelligence activities.” Thenceforth, “the lives of workers in the party central committee were placed under two- to three-fold scrutiny and control at all times.”

Another thing Hwang noticed was a change in the style and tone of Central Committee meetings. In the earlier days when Kim Il-sung presided he “gave many positive examples to encourage the participants and refrained from too much criticism. He always emphasized that strengthening the positive could overcome the negative. In contrast, Kim Jong-il focused on criticizing bad points and encouraging mutual criticism among participants. It is only when a meeting is conducted in this manner that he claims that the meeting went well amid a revolutionary mood. Those who refrain from criticizing others during meetings are denounced because of their lack of revolutionary attitude, whereas those who loudly and harshly criticize others are praised for their revolutionary zeal and loyalty to the Great Leader.”

Hwang wrote that “Kim Jong-il is by nature a person who does not like living in harmony with others. He makes people fight against each other and depend only on him. Thus, when he talks about strengthening the organization, he means making strict rules to guarantee unconditional obedience to him and holding more meetings for officials to criticize each other. During mutual denunciation sessions, the yardstick used is the degree of one’s loyalty to Kim Jong-il. So the more party members criticize each other and fight among themselves, the greater Kim Jong-il’s authority becomes.”

At the mutual denunciation sessions, said Hwang, “even the smallest defect is blown out of proportions into a serious incident,” providing fodder for more elaborate “grand debates and ideological struggle rallies” to come. Then, “after making people bicker among themselves, Kim Jong-il would sit back and enjoy the fight.” His pattern was to repair to his office and watch on closed circuit television as his underlings laid into each other. Hwang came to believe that Kim actually took pleasure in harassing party officials.
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Kim Il-sung had done business mainly through face-to-face encounters, Hwang reported. But Kim Jong-il, having turned the meetings into loyalty tests, switched to doing actual business through paperwork. “Kim Jong-il established a system of getting each department to submit policy recommendations, which he would approve before implementation. It was a strict system, especially when it came to new or basic issues, which could never see the light of day unless the recommendations were submitted for his approval. This was a system that hardly existed during Kim Il-sung’s rule.”

It was not exactly the lazy man’s approach to governing. “No matter how busy he was, Kim Jong-il would personally read all the recommendations submitted and provide his comments or conclusions,” said Hwang. “For important documents submitted personally by the party secretaries, he would
put the approved documents in his special envelope, write the recipient’s name on it, and seal it before passing it to the secretary in charge. All this constitutes a huge workload, but Kim Jong-il never passes this work to someone else but handles it personally.”

Kim instituted a simple system of priorities regarding his rulings on the documents submitted to him, Hwang said. “Those with Kim Jong-il’s signature and date of approval written on it by Kim Jong-il himself become legal documents that must be put into action at all costs. A document with only the date of approval on it is returned to the bureau that submitted it, and the bureau can see to its execution at its discretion. A document that has neither date nor signature but only two lines means that it does not matter one way or other; it is up to the bureau that submitted it to execute or cancel the plan. Besides these weekly reports, important bureaus fax papers to Kim Jong-il whenever necessary to gain his approval.”

Like others who had worked in the higher levels of the regime, Hwang noted Kim Jong-il’s penchant for holding drinking parties. But Hwang put them in context as “an important element in Kim Jong-il’s style of politics,” not merely a recreational outlet. “He throws such parties frequently, and summons artists to perform in them. These parties were probably the means through which Kim Jong-il formed his group of vassals. By inviting his trusted subordinates to a party, he can observe their personalities at close range and imbue them with pride at being close attendants of the Great Leader. But since it is a drinking party, it is often the case that those who enjoy drinking are invited more often than others. Sometimes, gossip or passing remarks at these parties can become official policies the next day. At these drinking parties, those who get drunk only need to be respectful to Kim Jong-il; they can say anything they like to anyone regardless of his title. So in a way Kim Jong-il’s system of sole leadership is strictly implemented at these parties.”

Although the parties had a business function from Kim’s point of view, they inevitably led to some drunken policy making. Kim at his parties would occasionally issue orders so odd that they could not be carried out, Hwang said. “Kim Jong-il is more than capable of making quick and accurate calculations guided by self-interest, but he is also fickle and impatient, resulting in spontaneous and irrational instructions. For example, he commanded everyone who went on overseas business trips to wear watches made in the watch factories of Pyongyang as a mark of North Korea’s self-reliant economy. But the problem was that the watches made in Pyongyang were of very low quality, and so everyone was reluctant to wear them when traveling abroad. He also gave instructions for women to wear the traditional Korean costume in black and white, but no one follows these instructions except the women working in the party Central Committee.”

The fact that Kim insisted on giving personal approval to every policy did not deter him from punishing whoever had proposed a policy that
eventually caused him regret, Hwang observed. “There was once when the manager in charge of documenting the Great Leader’s instructions at the Organization and Guidance Bureau got the professors of Kim Il-sung University to write a fifteen-volume [set of] Kim Jong-il literature (100 percent fake, of course) in order to publicize that Kim Jong-il was an industrious ideologist even as a student. The manager submitted every draft for Kim Jong-il’s approval before publication. But later, when it was pointed out that the works could end up strengthening the authority of one individual [other than himself], Kim Jong-il punished the manager and the professors who authored the works, and ordered that the contents be completely revised.”

One difference between the two Kims that Hwang noticed concerned formality. As we have seen, Kim Il-sung from his partisan days expected obedience from his subordinates. Still, the elder Kim was not one to insist on elaborate, needless formalilty Hwang said. “But Kim Jong-il has initiated numerous formalities to guarantee the people’s absolute obedience to the Great Leader. Whenever there are important functions or events, he would get people to pay their utmost respect to the Great Leader by writing and offering up grand speeches swearing allegiance to the Great Leader or congratulating him. He also ordered ceremonies for people to lay wreaths at the foot of Kim Il-sung’s statue or at the martyrs’ tomb. Every festive occasion, workers are made to hold ‘pledge gatherings,’ where they start the gatherings with songs exalting first Kim Il-sung and then Kim Jong-il and end the gatherings with songs wishing the two Kims long life and good health.”

In these circumstances, North Koreans must “hold frequent meetings just to write up pledges of loyalty or letters of gratitude to the Great Leader,” Hwang said. “On the night of New Year’s Eve, a year-end party is held on a national scale. Kim Jong-il does not attend this official party but holds his own private one with his regular party-goers and cohorts. Then at 12 midnight or dawn of New Year’s Day, he would fax out to each bureau director a brief New Year greeting along the lines of, ‘Everyone worked hard last year. Let us work even harder to achieve greater victory this year.’ Consequently, the bureau directors must report for work even on New Year’s Day to hold ceremonies to receive Kim Jong-il’s message and send a suitable reply in the form of resolutions or pledges of loyalty. That is the way Kim Jong-il prefers to do things.”

Two of Kim Jong-il’s least attractive qualities, Hwang found, were se-cretiveness and jealousy. “Whenever there is a gathering, Kim Jong-il always emphasizes two things. One is keeping the party’s secrets, and the other is refraining from pinning one’s hopes on any individual official. This is a reflection of Kim Jong-il’s personality; he prefers secrecy to openness, and is jealous of other people’s good fortune.” The secretiveness might have had something to do with Kim Jong-il’s well-known penchant for staying out of the public eye. “Kim Jong-il does not like to meet people on official business or
make public speeches, and prefers gathering his cohorts for parties to holding official functions. He prefers working at night to working in the day.”

Kim Jong-il’s “pathological” jealousy was another quality not shared with his late father, Hwang said. “Kim Il-sung was not jealous of subordinates who were loyal to him. He disliked conceited people, but he was never jealous of those who were faithful to him just because they had the public’s trust. But in the case of Kim Jong-il, he becomes jealous of even his loyal subordinates if they gain popularity among the masses. He even dislikes the good fortune of other countries, and becomes jealous of leaders in other countries who are known to be popular with the people. This trait may well be closely related to his thoroughly egotistic viewpoint of ideology.”

Kim found a curious way of justifying his jealousy in ideological terms. As Hwang related, Kim “says that he opposes the worship of any individual. He is the Great Leader of the people and therefore not an individual, but the rest of the party officials are considered individuals since they are not the Great Leader. For example, if a party secretary in charge of a certain district wins the confidence of the residents, he will surely get the secretary replaced. And from time to time, he would purge officials by labeling them anti-revolutionaries who induce illusions about individuals.”

Whether it was out of jealousy or simple security concerns or both, Hwang noted that “Kim Jong-il forbids any relationship that does not revolve around him. He condemns family orientation or regionalism as hotbeds of sectarianism, and opposes all forms of socializing including class reunions. He is even against people forming bonds based on teacher-student or senior-junior relationships. He demands that people maintain close relationships with those close to the Great Leader and keep those not close to the Great Leader at arm’s length. He also set up thorough measures to marginalize certain people such as his step-siblings born of Kim Il-sung’s second wife from the power circle and to keep them from relating to the masses. Not a few people were stripped of their titles and expelled for accepting gifts or letters from Kim Jong-il’s step-siblings. So even ordinary people avoid anyone blacklisted for marginalization.”

The corollary was deference due to Kim’s own household, Hwang reported. “Kim Jong-il becomes furious when his loved ones are not given the hospitality due them. He loves the dancing troupe that entertains him. The dancers are meant only for Kim Jong-il’s eyes, but when in a generous mood, he would allow Party Central Committee members to watch the performances. There was once when he ordered an ideological struggle rally because the party officials did not clap hard enough during a performance. After that incident, party officials who attend performances by Kim Jong-il’s favorite artists make sure that they clap long and loud. They have to keep up the applause through several curtain calls and can only leave their seats when the performers no longer respond to their applause.”