Every authoritarian regime, particularly a dynastic one, at some point has to face the question of succession. North Korea is no exception. And it appears that the Kim regime, now in its third generation under Kim Jong Un, is planning for the future.
This week, South Korea’s spy agency confirmed that Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, Kim Ju Ae, has been anointed as his successor. It is worth being sceptical about this. Whilst Kim Ju Ae’s rise is not unlikely, the only person who can confirm the truth is the Supreme Leader himself.
The 13-to-14-year-old Kim Ju Ae has certainly been very visible over the past year, even accompanying her daddy to a missile launch. When her father visited Beijing on 3 September last year to attend China’s Victory Day celebrations, observers were somewhat surprised when, after the corpulent Kim Jong Un disembarked from his train, he was followed by young Ju Ae. One New Year’s Day, Ju Ae accompanied her mother and father to the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, a mausoleum for North Korea’s first and second leaders, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.
Confirming Ju Ae’s rising importance, North Korean state media referred to her as ‘respected daughter’ in February 2023. Kim Jong Un only earned this honorific after he was confirmed as the third North Korean leader. In 2024, she and her father featured on a North Korean stamp, watching the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile in November 2022. Ju Ae is clearly a contender to be the next leader of the country.
At the same time, the young Kim is not the only possible successor. She has only just entered her teenage years. Her aunt – Kim Jong Un’s younger sister – Kim Yo Jong has quickly risen up the ranks of the North Korean elite and become, as the scholar Sung-Yoon Lee eruditely put it, North Korea’s ‘nuclear despotess’.
Having been deputy director of the ruling party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department since 2014 – responsible for disseminating North Korean propaganda – Yo Jong is even more vitriolic than her brother. When he was incapacitated with coronavirus, his sister took his place and issued acerbic statements about South Korea and the United States. Were Kim Jong Un to drop dead tomorrow, immediate power would likely be transferred to his more experienced sister than his young daughter.
It might seem strange for a woman to become the leader of such a patriarchal country as North Korea. But for the Kim regime, the treasured ‘Baekdu bloodline’, named after the highest mountain in the country, matters more than a pair of chromosomes. The next North Korean leader has to be a Kim. The key question is which Kim it will be.
When it comes to getting reliable information about the North Korean Supreme Leader and his family, the hermit kingdom lives up to its name. Only three years ago, South Korea’s intelligence agency revealed that Kim Jong Un has other children, the eldest of whom (born two to three years before Kim Ju Ae) is a son. Next to nothing is known about him. The world only discovered about the prospect of a fourth-generation Kim when the blabbermouth friend of Kim Jong Un, the retired US basketball player Dennis Rodman, revealed in 2013 that Kim’s wife, Ri Sol Ju, had given birth to a daughter. Rodman did not say whether he had seen a son, and as was the case during the early years of its nuclear programme, Pyongyang’s strategy was to neither confirm nor deny.
Looking back at North Korea’s past leadership transitions suggests what the future might hold. Although Kim Jong Il was anointed as the successor to Kim Il Sung in 1980, 14 years before his father’s death, nobody knew Kim Jong Un’s identity or his future role until he was appointed as the equivalent of a four-star general in September 2010. Fifteen months later, he would be announced as the ‘great successor’ and led the coffin of his father through Pyongyang’s snow-covered streets.
The rest is history. Kim Jong Un has become the most successful North Korean leader to date. He has clamped down on domestic dissent; taken advantage of the Ukraine war to reap benefits from Russia and China; and continued to develop his ‘treasured sword’ of nuclear weapons whilst also funnelling cash for his slush fund through cyberwarfare.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean he will be able to ensure his chosen successor will lead the country after his death. If there is one other lesson from North Korean history it is that no one is completely safe, even within the Kim family. After all, it was Kim Jong Un himself who ordered the killing of both his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, in 2012, and his half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, in 2017. It is not clear if a similar battle between niece and aunt will eventually emerge. Or how the eventual victor will stamp their own legacy on the nuclear hermit kingdom for years to come.
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