North Korea Under Kim Jong Il: From Consolidation to Systemic Dissonance

North Korea under Kim Jong Il From Consolidation to Systemic Dissonance

Sung Chull Kim

North Korea under Kim Jong Il

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North Korea under Kim Jong Il From Consolidation to Systemic Dissonance

Sung Chull Kim

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2006 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210-2384 Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kim, Sung Chull, 1956– North Korea under Kim Jong Il : from consolidation to systemic dissonance / Sung Chull Kim. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6927-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7914-6927-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Korea (North)—Politics and government. 2. Kim, Cho˘ng-il, 1942– . 3. Korea (North)—Foreign relations. 4. National security—Korea (North). 5. Political leadership—Korea (North). I. Title. JQ1729.5.A58K555 2007 951.9304'3—dc22

2006001295 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Tables and Figures Abbreviations Note on Romanization Preface 1. Introduction: A Conceptual Frame for Systemic Changes Emergence of the Systemic Identity of North Korea Embodiment of the System: Functional Differentiation Systemic Dissonance and Major Conjunctures Requirement for Systemic Viability: Openness Tour of the Book

vii ix xi xiii 1 3 10 13 24 26

2. Kim Jong Il: The Political Man and His Leadership Character 29 The Shaping of a Political Personality 31 The Political Man’s Road to Succession 41 Active-Negative Leadership Character 45 Implications for Systemic Changes 54 3. The Party’s Strengthening Discipline and Weakening Efficiency Kim Il Sung’s Legacy: From a Mass Party to an Institutionalized Party Kim Jong Il and Organizational Changes Party-Life Criticism as a Disciplinary Instrument The Declining Efficiency of the Party Dual Implications

57 59 65 69 75 79

4. Military-First Politics and Changes in Party-Military Relations 81 Power Dynamics and Party-Military Relations 83 Military-First Politics under Kim Jong Il 91 Institutional Differentiation between the Party and the Military 96 Relevance to Kim Jong Il’s Management Style 101

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5. Chuch’e in Transformation Chuch’e and Power Succession Socialism in Historical Development Estrangement from Marxism-Leninism On Capitalism and Opening Up Reflections on Chuch’e: With Special Reference to Systemic Identity 6. The Fluctuation of Economic Institutions and the Emergence of Entrepreneurship Institutions of Economic Management: Traditions and Their Dislocation Increased Local Latitude The Emergence of Private Entrepreneurs Informal Transition of Property Rights Implications for Systemic Dissonance

105 106 112 121 130 135

137 138 147 150 157 163

7. The Changing Roles of Intellectuals Socialist Transformation and Persecution of Intellectuals Socialist Mobilization and Changes in the Class Status of Intellectuals Kim Jong Il’s Rise and His Mobilization of Intellectuals The Perceived “Internal Enemy” in Times of Decaying Socialism Facilitation of the “Skip-Over Strategy”

165 166

183 186

8. Conclusion: Dilemmas of Opening Up Special Features of Systemic Dissonance Defiance in 2002

193 193 199

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

207 211 251 267

174 178

Contents

vii

Tables and Figures Table 1.1. Table 1.2. Figure 5.1.

Trends of Oil Imports and Energy Consumption, 1980–2002

21

Grain Imports and International Assistance, 1989–98

22

Development of Mode of Production: Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il’s Scheme

113

Authority Relations in the Sociopolitical Organism

125

Table 6.1.

Types of Property Rights Transitions

161

Table 8.1.

Degradation of Systemic Identity

195

Figure 5.2.

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Abbreviations ADB CC CCP CoCom DPRK IMF KAPF KCB KCIA KCNA KEDO KINU KPA LWR NDC PRC PSM SCH SPA SSA SYL WPK

Asian Development Bank Central Committee Chinese Communist Party Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls Democratic People’s Republic of Korea International Monetary Fund Korean Artists Proletarian Federation Korean Central Broadcast (of North Korea) Korea Central Intelligence Agency (of South Korea) Korea Central News Agency (of North Korea) Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization Korea Institute for National Unification Korean People’s Army light-water reactor National Defense Commission People’s Republic of China People’s Safety Ministry Safety Commanding Headquarters (in KPA) Supreme People’s Assembly State Security Agency Socialist Youth League Workers’ Party of Korea

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Note on Romanization In the romanization of titles of Korean sources and names of Koreans, this book adopts the McCune-Reischauer system, with the exception of commonly used spellings such as Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. In the ordering of given and family names, I have given Korean and Japanese names with the family name first and then the given name: for example, Pak HÆn-yÆng and Wada Haruki. However, names of Koreans who have written in English are cited in their Westernized form: for instance, Dae-Sook Suh and Byung Chul Koh.

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Preface It would be inappropriate to attribute North Korea’s nuclear diplomacy renewed in October 2002—and supported by the missile test in July 2006—either to the dictatorship of Kim Jong Il or to American sanctions alone. With regard to North Korea, there exists a huge intellectual gap between understanding the country’s diplomatic behavior patterns, on the one hand, and the individual leader factor or the international factor, on the other hand. The goal of this book is to fill this gap through a close examination of the transformation of the North Korean system under Kim Jong Il. Change in a system is not a simple product of stimuli-responses; rather, it stems from a host of differentiations within the system and of interactions between the system and its environment. North Korea in the past three decades of Kim Jong Il’s active engagement in politics, dating back to 1973, has experienced significant changes in its systemic identity, which had been based on the three reference points— socialist principles, anti-imperialism, and the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition. The country’s socialist principles mostly eroded, and both its diplomatic and its provocative approaches to the United States, the primary enemy, proved vain and deviated from the North’s original identity. Military-first politics constituted Kim Jong Il’s response to the situation, and it replaced the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition that had worked in the consolidation of monolithic power centered on the father-to-son succession. The second nuclear crisis that erupted in 2002 must be a consequence of the dilemma that had been confronting the North Korean system, over which Kim Jong Il had exerted his personal influence to effect a transformation. Covering chiefly the three decades from 1973 to 2002, this book explores the submerged elements of the system. This work was conceived four years ago, when I was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002–03. My experiences there were encouraging, and I would especially like to thank,

xiii

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Preface

of the many who helped me, Edward Friedman, Mark Beissinger, and Michael Barnett, who provided me with a warm environment in which I could concentrate on the research. Also, Edward Reed of the Center for East Asian Studies at the university facilitated my stay in various ways. Because my interest in socialist systems, including North Korea, dates back more than two decades, I am indebted to many teachers, colleagues, and friends. Chun In Young, Lee On-jook, and the late Rhee Yong Pil introduced me to critical approaches to Marxist and other social thought and international relations during my school days at Seoul National University. The scholarly leadership of the former presidents of the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), Lee Byoung-yong and Jeong Se-hyun, led me to a pool of information on North Korea and related issues. In writing the book, I have been grateful to old colleagues at KINU for their moral support and encouragement, and I apologize that space limitations prevent me from naming each of them. In completing this manuscript, I have benefited from the critical comments and invaluable suggestions in detail made by my longtime teacher Dorothy J. Solinger and old friends such as Park Jong-chul, Lee Kyo-duk, Park Hyeong-jung, Kim Philo, and Chon Hyun-joon. T. J. Cheng read each of the chapters and made very useful comments for the clarification of my analysis. Dae-Sook Suh read the entire manuscript and then provided me with extremely valuable suggestions about how to tighten the argument and clarify various facts. Bruce Cumings’s insights encouraged my writing on this topic. Several discussions with Wada Haruki enriched my ideas on the transformation of the North Korean system, especially the military-first politics. Talks with Kang In-duck, who worked in intelligence on North Korea and later served as minister in the Kim Dae-jung administration, provided me with information on the clandestine country in the early 1970s. In proposing the conceptual outlines of this work, Kenneth Bailey inspired me, particularly with regard to the notions of systems theory in general and of Niklas Luhmann in particular. My longtime teacher and friend David Easton not only taught me about systems theory but also shared with me his insights on this work. I am indebted to the International Society for Systems Sciences, where I have enjoyed the scholarly culture of creativity and learned from mentors such as James G. Miller and Ilya Prigogine and many distinguished scholars, such as G. A. Swanson, Ervin Laszlo, Len R. Troncale, Lane Tracy, and Peter Corning. I would like to express a deep gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments that allowed

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me to revise the manuscript. However, I should note that the analysis and any errors in this book are my own. I received help and assistance from a number of other people and institutions. My colleagues at the Hiroshima Peace Institute— Haruhiro Fukui, Motofumi Asai, Yuki Tanaka, Christian P. Scherrer, Kazumi Mizumoto, Narayanan Ganesan, Hitoshi Nagai, and Hiroko Takahashi—have helped me learn how to utilize sources in Japan, and private talks with them have sharpened my objective appraisal of the North Korean system. Kim Yong-hyun, Jeong Sei-jin, and Chung Young-chul helped me to search primary and secondary sources on North Korea. I am grateful to the librarians at KINU in Seoul and the Institute of Developing Economies in Chiba, Japan, for their kind assistance. Peter Seelig did a wonderful job making my manuscript more readable. Over the last decade, I have interviewed many refugees from North Korea. I wish that their dreams of peace on the Korean peninsula and of family reunion come true. In completing chapters 6 and 7, I have utilized (though extensively rewritten) articles that appeared previously in other places: “Fluctuating Institutions of Enterprise Management in North Korea: Prospects for Local Enterprise Reform,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 19, no. 1 (2003), published by Taylor and Francis, Ltd. (http://tandf.co.uk); and “Dynamism of Politics and Status of Intellectuals in North Korea,” Development and Society 31, no. 1 (2002), published by the Institute for Social Development and Policy Research, Seoul National University, respectively. I thank the publishers for permission to use them here. Also, in undertaking this work, I have benefited from the financial support of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (C-2-16510189). Special thanks go to Michael Rinella and Diane Ganeles of State University of New York Press for their excellent editorial direction. Finally, I would like to express appreciation to my aging mother and to my wife, Hyun Suk, and my two sons, Dalin and Joshua, for their support and patience in all senses. In accounting many events in North Korea, I quoted various primary sources, such as the works of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and articles in the newspapers and journals. All translations of them into English are my own.

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1

Introduction A Conceptual Frame for Systemic Changes

In general, there are two contrasting interpretations of North Korea’s provocative posture on its nuclear weapons program and the country’s launch of economic reform measures, both of which occurred in 2002. Emphasizing the pressure maintained by the outside world, one interpretation maintains that North Korea’s provocative security posture, particularly in terms of nuclear weapons development, should be attributed to the long isolation that has characterized this nation even after the breakdown of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. According to this view, since North Korea was devastated during the Korean War by American air bombing and was isolated by various forms of U.S.-imposed sanctions, Pyongyang has had no other way but to search for its own means for survival, including heavy military buildup and particularly nuclear development. The other interpretation posits that North Korea’s provocative posture is attributable to the nation’s regime, characterized by Kim Jong Il’s monolithic power. This interpretation, focusing on internal factors, underscores the point that the existing oppressive system has to act aggressively, employing external threats or confrontations as a centerpiece for internal political integration. Despite the two interpretations’ respective merits, it is fair to say that a country’s behavior pattern toward the outside world is based on a combination of external and internal factors. A security policy of a country as a system is not a simple response to stimuli from the 1

2

North Korea under Kim Jong Il

outside but a consequence of continuous interactions within the system and with its environment.1 The means whereby such interactions are channeled and the ways in which policy-making processes are nested are dependent on the capacities of the given system. In this respect, the understanding of North Korea’s external behavior pattern requires an investigation of the systemic dynamism of national identity formation and its reproduction and transformation. Systems theory, from which I adopt many concepts in this book, has contributed to the development of propositions on not only interactive relations between a system and its environment but also systemic dynamism. Employing concepts of systems theory, this book delves into an important question: Between 1973 and 2002, how have internal changes in North Korea under the expanding rule of Kim Jong Il structured the country’s apparently provocative—but actually defensive—diplomacy and recent economic reform measures? (The three-decade period starts with Kim Jong Il’s full involvement in the party’s organizational affairs in 1973 and extends through North Korea’s launch of economic reform measures and the emergence of the second nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula in 2002.) In order to answer this question, this book examines the origins, consolidation, and dissonance of North Korea’s systemic identity by illustrating various unofficial developments in that system. It is noteworthy that the examination of such changes pertaining to systemic identity involves consideration of interactions between the system and the environment. Two concepts need a brief definitional clarification for the convenience of the reader, even though they will be more fully discussed in the following parts.2 First, environment, in general, refers to either a composite of neighboring systems or a suprasystem that includes the given system and those neighbors.3 A system’s relations with its environment implies various forms of interactions—between the system and the environment and between subsystems of the system and the environment.4 Second, the system-environment interaction does not necessarily produce a smooth transition of the system. The asymmetrical characteristics of the interaction between a system and its environment—as Niklas Luhmann stated, “The environment is always more complex than the system itself”5—render the system vulnerable to fluctuations in the environment. Depending on the level of interactive capacity to cope with the environmental fluctuations, a system may or may not overcome various challenges and finally would experience either systemic evolution or dissonance.

Introduction

3

Emergence of the Systemic Identity of North Korea North Korea as a system Systems theory has posited that a system is open to the environment.6 This famous proposition about open systems has been considered a core element of the theory. According to this proposition, one can also posit, by hypothesis, a closed system by way of contrast. But without transactions of resources and information with the surrounding environment, a closed system cannot persist. Even though it was formulated in relation to the physical world in the early stages of systems theory, the proposition about open systems has subsequently undergone extensive applications to the social sciences.7 North Korea, just like other systems, is an open system in that it has to interact with its environment. Differences between democratic systems and nondemocratic systems like North Korea lie in the structure of that system, which channels degrees and patterns of interactions with the environment. Despite some conceptual advantages, the proposition about open systems by itself cannot account for a system’s various degrees of external differentiation or separation from an environment. In other words, the proposition does not detail how a system maintains its original identity to signify distinctiveness, while retaining interactions with the environment. The limitation of the proposition of open systems lies in that it does not help us explain both how the hard shell of the system develops and why internal contradictions emerge in the system later on. Moreover, the proposition of open systems alone is unable to account for the ways in which the system differentiates itself from its surroundings through self-reproduction, which may be regarded as inertia of its systemic identity. It is worth noting that the notion of autopoiesis—with which the social sciences community is more or less unfamiliar8—may provide us with a better configuration of the system’s differentiation and separation from its environment and of the system’s dynamics with relevance to system-environment interactions. Autopoiesis, whose rich meaning was intensively explored by Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, refers to an interactive network that recursively produces components that realize the network. Autopoiesis involves the maintaining and the strengthening of a given system’s essential variables, as long as the process of self-reproduction continues.9 The self-reproduction is a recursive process whereby the result of its own operations, as Niklas Luhmann noted, is used as the basis for further

4

North Korea under Kim Jong Il

operations. That is, when self-reproduction takes place, “what is undertaken is determined in part by what has occurred in earlier operations.”10 The notion of self-reproduction enhances the plausibility of systems theory by unifying individuality and identity, on the one hand, and interconnectedness and interpenetration through open interactions, on the other. A system is not closed, in a genuine sense, but externally differentiated from its environment in terms of organizational characteristics. The self-reproduction promotes systemic individuality and identity and maintains a certain degree of symmetry—or slows down the emergence of asymmetry—among subsystems or parts within a system. In this vein, John Mingers posited that a system is “organizationally” closed but “interactively” open.11 The emphasis on individuality and identity does not necessitate the closure of the system but implies differentiation or separation between the system and its environment, an implication that should be called external differentiation. Luhmann intensively utilized the notion of differentiation for not only external processes but internal processes, as well.12 He illuminated systemic identity by elaborating on the internal differentiation processes that enhance degrees of complexity.13 In other words, the system becomes more externally distinctive from the outside through internal reproduction of the components, while maintaining the relatively constant features of the system’s individuality. In this respect, it is fair to say that the internal differentiation is a requisite for the external differentiation of a given system and for the system’s distinguishable identity. The main objective of this book is to illustrate the thirty years of internal differentiation processes, both official and unofficial, between 1973 and 2002 in North Korea under Kim Jong Il’s rule. These processes have contributed to a gradual transition of the systemic identity that formed in the early Kim Il Sung era. The emergence of the North Korean system—commonly called state-building—started as Kim Il Sung and his Manchurian guerrillas returned from the far eastern regions of the Soviet Union in September 1945, which was three years before the formal launch of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in September 1948. The state-building involved both power competition and collaboration among the factions. Kim Il Sung and the Manchurian guerillas were challenged by the Yanan faction (headed by Kim Tu-bong and Ch’oe Ch’ang-ik), Soviet-conscripted Koreans (represented by HÆ Ka-i), and indigenous Communists, especially those from South Korea (led by Pak HÆn-yÆng). However, with the assistance of the Soviet army, which had entered northern Korea to disarm Japanese forces, Kim’s faction

Introduction

5

began to expand power in the newly formed interim government and the party. In the economic arena, they expanded their support among poor peasants through radical land reform enacted in February 1946. Furthermore, because the land reform drove the landlord class, a privileged class in the Japanese colonial period, into southern Korea, Kim and the Manchurian guerrillas faced very little resistance from the general public. In the affairs of ideology, the new holders of power in northern Korea officially adopted Marxism-Leninism in the process of rationalizing their rule over the society. In the intellectual arena, they established Kim Il Sung University and other training institutions where new intellectuals, party cadres, and administrative bureaucrats were educated, while they abolished the vestiges of Japanese intellectual traditions. For the emergence of a system in the northern part of Korea, a “comparison effect” between the northern and southern parts was an important factor.14 Helped by the American forces who occupied the southern part, Rhee Syngman, an independence movement leader with a doctoral degree from Princeton University, became the principal figure in the political arena. Rhee’s early political success should be attributed to his practical stance of mobilizing the support both of old bureaucrats, who came from the landlord class and were trained under Japanese colonial rule, and of the United States for the immediate building of a separate anti-Communist state in the South.15 In this way, two contrasting systems emerged: one in the northern part of the Korean peninsula and the other in the southern part after independence in August 1945.16 These two systems solidified the demarcation between the two geographic regions. In turn, the comparison effect, generated by the radical transformation in the North and the conservative transition in the South, reinforced the external differentiation between the two systems. Before the official launch of the two sovereign states on the Korean peninsula in 1948, the landlord class in the North moved to the South in order to escape political oppression, while the Communist leaders in Seoul crossed the border to the North in order to avoid repression under the American Military Government. The twoway flows further sharpened the external differentiation between the two emerging systems and finally brought about a serious confrontation that, by June 1950, culminated in the Korean War. Reference points of the systemic identity To account for its unique development path, one must take into account the recursive processes in the period of emergence of the North

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North Korea under Kim Jong Il

Korean system. The systemic emergence involves self-reproduction in which each subsystem or part produces properties that differ little or not at all from the properties of a given system.17 Because selfreproduction is a process that intensifies individuality and identity, there should be reference points18 whereby a particular mode of interaction legitimizes the relations not only among subsystems or parts but between a system and its environment, as well. At the phase of systemic emergence (state-building in this work), the object of reference in self-reproduction is fluid. Therefore, the emergence of a system may give rise to a pursuit of interpenetration among subsystems and, at the same time, establish a certain degree of internally differentiated functions at each subsystem level. Enhancing the degree by which North Korea differentiated itself from its environment, the system’s subunits interpenetrated one another with special reference to the following points: 1. Socialist principles of giving priority to public goods. This is the reference point that could be seen, at the time of North Korean system formation, in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in Communist China during the civil war. Processes of the embodiment of socialist principles—bureaucratization of the party-state, nationalization of major industries, land reform (later agricultural collectivization), and establishment of official ideology—have reproduced public ownership and the collectivist identity of human and material resources. The socialist principles not only extol the ideal of egalitarianism but also play important roles in binding the society together through such institutions as regular party-life criticisms and party committees. Furthermore, a unique application of socialist principles to the North Korean system contributed to ideological integration under the banner of Chuch’e (meaning “self-reliance” in Korean), and to the conversion of social groups, particularly intellectuals, into the working class. 2. Anti-imperialism. This reference point is based on North Korea’s antagonism to both the United States and its perceived puppet, South Korea. While the socialist principles above are in common with values attributable to other socialist systems, anti-imperialism was caused by unique historical experiences: the national division and the Korean War.19 Indeed, in North Korea they call it the “National Liberation War,” and say it was waged to free fellow Koreans in the South from American imperialism and Rhee Syngman’s dictatorship. The U.S. economic sanctions, imposed after the war, have strangled the North Korean economy and have contributed to a phobia about all

Introduction

7

things American.20 While being utilized for the integration of the society, this reference point has reproduced distinctive policy features of autarchy and isolation from the outside world. In formulating and advocating the unification policy of the Korean federation, this reference point provided Pyongyang with useful arguments about the withdrawal of American military forces from the Korean peninsula, cooperation among Korean people, and the grand unity of Koreans in the North, the South, and abroad. 3. The anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition. This tradition became a reference point in the process of Kim Il Sung and the Manchurian guerrilla faction’s monopolizing of power in the second half of the 1950s. The reference point is based both on the fact of the Kim-led armed resistance under Chinese command in the late 1930s and on the exaggeration of the fact.21 The significance of a political meaning therein was revealed by Kim Il Sung when he first proclaimed at the tenth anniversary commemoration of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) in February 1958 that the KPA was the successor of the Manchurian-based partisans’ tradition of the anti-Japanese armed struggle.22 Likewise, the reference point came to be coded in the party bylaws at the Fourth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) held in September 1961. They stated that “The WPK is the direct successor of the glorious revolutionary tradition achieved by the Korean Communists’ anti-Japanese armed struggle.”23 In April 1973, when preparations were underway for Kim Jong Il’s succession, O Chin-u, then chief of staff of the KPA, laid out this reference point of the DPRK’s identity by highly praising the anti-Japanese struggle.24 Combined with anti-imperialism, this reference point has continued since 1974 to create social uniformity with the slogan “the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Style in Production, Learning, and Life.” This slogan justified, in particular, the Kim family’s monolithic power and hereditary succession. In support of the existing power monopoly centered on Kim Jong Il, the reference point of the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition eliminated those potential groups that might have contributed to the enhancement of an interactive capacity of the system. The Kims’ monolithic power has suffocated the articulation of different voices or interests. It is notable that the upholding of the “military-first politics” after the death of its mentor, Kim Il Sung, in July 1994 has brought about a significant change in the meaning of this reference point. The main actor supporting the system has shifted in popular perception from guerrillas to the regular army.25

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North Korea under Kim Jong Il

All three reference points have been reflected in the Chuch’e idea, North Korea’s official ideology, which has been frequently regarded by outside observers as a composite of the most significant propositions regarding the uniqueness of the system. At the same time, it is noteworthy that these reference points are also embedded in the institutions and the behavior patterns of each subsystem. Furthermore, the reference points are closely associated with actors. That is, in the formation and maintenance of reference points, it matters seriously who rules on behalf of what. In this respect, it is indispensable to identify a link between actors and a system in general. Notably, systems theory admits the methodological necessity of “pragmatic holism and theoretical individualism” at the same time.26 It is impossible to trace all empirical interactions at the microlevel. The complexity of the interactions impedes us from giving a complete explanation of them. This situation compels us to seek out the assistance of the holistic approach when we are scrutinizing a given complexity. The holistic approach portrays a general configuration in which various types of questions regarding relationships between variables arise—that is, holism helps highlight those nodal points whereby variables have diverse interactive relations. Accounting for the complementary roles of the macro and the micro, the following chapters accordingly deal with the activities of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as well as subsystems and their institutions within which Kim and other types of actors have interacted with one another. The significance of actors in the embodiment of reference points in North Korean society was particularly distinctive in the period of the Korean War (1950–53). There are different interpretations about the characteristics of the war, but the most contentious debate has taken place between the advocates of the “civil war” theory and those of the “international war” theory. Bruce Cumings has represented the theory of civil war in his two-volume seminal work, The Origins of the Korean War, where the author underscores the rise of two ideologically divergent communities and their subsequent military provocations, even before the war broke out.27 According to this theory, the question of how the contrasting systems emerged is more significant than the inquiry into who triggered the all-out massive attack. The other interpretation, emphasizing international factors related to the Korean War, came to attract a good deal of scholarly attention, especially after many historical archives of the former Soviet Union became available in the 1990s. The theory of international war stresses the particular significance of Stalin and Mao’s assistance to Kim Il Sung’s initiation of the war. According to this theory, the war was an international war in

Introduction

9

which not only North Korea and South Korea but also major powers in Northeast Asia participated.28 A rigorous analysis of the debates on the origin of the Korean War reveals that the theory of international war complements the theory of civil war rather than vice versa. The process of severe external differentiation between the North and the South was intertwined with the engagement of the major powers in regional Cold War competition. The occupation of the North by the Red Army and that of the South by the United States forces was the first hard evidence of the backdrop of the Korean War as an international war. However, without taking into account the grip of power centered around Kim Il Sung and Rhee Syngman in the North and the South, respectively, one cannot characterize the Korean War. These leaders were the main actors who contributed to the development of divergent reference points after the national liberation in 1945 and further intensified the divergence during the war.29 In the North, in particular, it was a significant shift that Kim Il Sung launched attacks against other factions in the WPK by utilizing resources at his disposal and by exploiting tactical situations favorable to his political goals. Inasmuch as politics is a cause for the production of binding decisions that affect the authoritative allocation of social values,30 Kim Il Sung, thanks to the wartime consolidation of a strong party-state, was now able to disseminate those values embedded in the reference points, particularly socialist principles and anti-imperialism. A handy example of the swift dissemination of the socialist principles is the agricultural collectivization that was completed in 1956, three years after the end of the Korean War. Of course, Kim Il Sung’s dominance over the party-state was achieved only after power struggles, which culminated in August 1956, between Kim’s Manchurian guerillas, on the one hand, and the SovietKoreans and the Yanan faction, on the other hand. In the power struggle, the main resource for Kim’s faction, the Manchurian guerillas, was the military even before the war. Under the auspices of the Red Army, his faction became the only political faction that could secure armed forces. The Yanan faction, which had acquired a solid reputation for its anti-Japanese resistance in China, was disarmed as it crossed the border at the end of 1945.31 Soviet-Koreans and domestic Communists were composed of descendants of emigrants to the Soviet Union and of progressive intellectuals of southern origin, respectively. It is not surprising, then, that they had no chance to develop an armed power-base. Consequently, the Korean War expedited the process of systemic formation centered on Kim. Taking advantage of his official military position as the supreme commander

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North Korea under Kim Jong Il

of the KPA during the war, Kim Il Sung could mobilize all the resources for the consolidation of his power in the party as well as for the conducting of the war. In contrast, most leaders of the southern faction became stigmatized for their failure to incite South Korean popular support for the KPA at the war’s outbreak, and for this reason, most of them were purged during the war period. In the same vein, the top leaders of the Soviet-Koreans were pushed away, one by one, from high posts in the party. Embodiment of the System: Functional Differentiation Systemic emergence is a process whereby a system externally differentiates itself from the environment and begins to have its own distinctive individuality and identity. Such external differentiation from the environment necessarily accompanies internal differentiation—that is, the self-reproduction of subunits in conformity with the emerging overall identity of the system which may be phrased as “higher institutionalization,” to use Samuel S. Kim’s term.32 The initial form of internal differentiation is a functional differentiation among subsystems. Systemic emergence pursues a common identity that characterizes the system as a whole and also it experiences internal complexity owing to the functional differentiation within the system. In North Korea, the impact of national division and the Korean War on the embodiment of the system was so enormous that socialist principles, antiAmericanism, and a sense of rivalry with the South penetrated into every subsystem. Also, the impact of the two events—along with the revival, in the early 1970s, of the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition— contributed to the rationalization of Kim Il Sung’s power and the succession to power of his son, Kim Jong Il. In light of these events, one asks, what kinds of subsystems should be accounted for? Subsystem refers to a set of interactions between people who are concerned with particular functions in a system. In each subsystem, a limited number of people exercise influence, especially in a nondemocratic country like North Korea. And yet, all members of the system are involved in the subsystem composite, either directly or indirectly. The four subsystems categorized here are the political, ideological, economic, and intellectual-cultural subsystems.33 At the stages of state-building and consolidation in North Korea, the political subsystem was the party-state under Kim Il Sung’s leadership, which played a leading role in the embodiment of the entire system. The ideological subsystem was Chuch’e, or self-reliance, which came to represent a “creative application of Marxism-Leninism to

Introduction

11

Korean society.” The economic subsystem was public ownership based on the collectivization of agriculture, industry, and commerce; and the intellectual-cultural subsystem involved the new genre of writings called “socialist realism,” which served the reproduction of values and knowledge in accordance with objectives of the party-state centered around Kim Il Sung. It is noteworthy that the emergence of these subsystems was a process of functional differentiation within the scope of embodiment of the three reference points mentioned before—socialist principles, anti-imperialism, and the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition. Political subsystem The political subsystem, the party-state in the socialist system, involves a generally authoritative allocation of collectivist values that are incorporated into the official ideology. The party-state has a hierarchical bureaucracy for the transmission of intentions and policies made by core party leaders to the cabinet and local organizations in the society. The subsystem does not allow for any alternative political organization but makes use of various party units as a nexus of the system. Thus, as T. H. Rigby noted, the socialist system exhibits monoorganizational characteristics.34 North Korea has maintained a peculiar form of the mono-organizational party-state, one that is based on an authority structure centered on the “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung and the “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il. It is noteworthy that one of the goals associated with the political subsystem is the expelling of U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula and the independent achievement of national unification.35 That is, the political subsystem not only adopted a mono-organizational party-state, as seen in the Soviet Union and China, but also has reflected those values embedded in the reference points of anti-imperialism and the North’s rivalry with the South. Ideological subsystem The ideology in socialist systems, in general, is known as MarxismLeninism and as Stalinism or Maoism, and that of North Korea is the application of Marxism-Leninism to the Korean situation known as the Chuch’e idea. Active participants in the ideology are limited to party cadres in propaganda and educational affairs, and the general public is also an important actor, even if passive, because the stability of the ideology depends on a relatively high degree of internalization among the people. More than often, it is exploited by the leaders for their own personality cult, as seen in the cases of Stalin and Mao. This

12

North Korea under Kim Jong Il

is also true in the case of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in North Korea. The Chuch’e idea surfaced in the mid-1950s amid the postwar power struggle between Kim Il Sung and other factions, and later evolved into an ideological composite of self-reliance during the period of SinoSoviet conflict in the 1960s. In 1974, Kim Jong Il formulated Kimilsungism, matching his father’s idea to Marxism-Leninism and Maoism; in turn, he became the exclusive authoritative interpreter of the ideology, unveiling the father-to-son power succession. Even though the propositions have undergone many changes over the last five decades, the Chuch’e idea has remained a constant conceptual tool in the indoctrination of the North Korean people, reproducing the systemic identity by referring to socialist principles, anti-imperialism, and the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition. Economic subsystem The economy of the socialist system is based on central planning, nationalization of the means of production, and rapid industrialization, characterized by a prioritization of heavy industry. The North Korean economy showed remarkable growth right after the Korean War, but has slowed down considerably since the late 1960s.36 There were several reasons for the limits on continuous growth: ideological constraints over economic reasoning, shrunken diplomatic behavior space in the midst of the Sino-Soviet conflict, a reliance on heavy industry due to interKorean tensions, and a drain on material and intellectual resources due to North Korea’s isolation. Since the mid-1980s, North Korea has initiated changes in its economy, such as its adoption of the Joint Venture Law and the independent accounting method in enterprise management, to cope with economic deterioration. However, Pyongyang implemented the joint venture and the independent accounting method without fulfilling any conditions for reform.37 In this respect, the initiatives are considered adjustment measures intended for minimal policy outcomes within the scope of a socialist economy.38 Intellectual-cultural subsystem The intellectual-cultural subsystem is a behavior set of intellectuals— a quasi class, to use the Leninist term—such as writers, artists, professors, teachers, researchers, technicians, physicians, and clerical workers. It should be pointed out that the role of intellectuals in bringing about a systemic change depends largely on not only cultural and educational policies but also the system’s previous historical tradition and

Introduction

13

the resulting international impact. In North Korea, the class policy on intellectuals was closely intertwined with both the division of Korea and the Korean War. Before the war, intellectuals of southern origin comprised a core element of the intellectual community in the North. But their linkage to the domestic Communist leaders of southern origin, who were purged during and after the war, left them under harsh surveillance. In the late 1950s, the WPK scrutinized and classified them through the intellectual policy called “Central Party’s Concentrated Guidance” and “Meetings for the Scrutinizing of Thoughts.” Intellectuals, and especially those of southern origin, completely lost their social status as members of a quasi class in the mid-1960s because of the class policy called “Revolutionizing Intellectuals and Converting Them to the Working Class.” This policy suffocated the capacity of intellectuals in the fields of engineering and the natural sciences, as well as the social sciences, while the party-state privileged—particularly with reference to the notion of Chuch’e—its ideological interpretation of academic concepts.39 In this way, national division and the Korean War, as well as the employment of socialist principles, have had a great impact on North Korea’s unique developmental path. The priority given to public goods in the Soviet Union and China worked as a general reference source for the functional differentiation of subsystems in the North Korean socialist system. At the same time, the developmental path, as manifested in Chuch’e, has characterized North Korea’s systemic isolation from the outside, because of Pyongyang’s antagonism toward perceived imperialism and because of its competition with the South. Systemic Dissonance and Major Conjunctures The North Korean system under Kim Jong Il is characterized not only by functional differentiation at four subsystem levels, as mentioned above, but also by the spread of unofficial spheres and the resulting systemic dissonance, both of which have appeared since the second half of the 1980s and intensified amid the breakdown of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and the famine in the mid-1990s. Systemic dissonance may be represented not only by the contradiction between the existing collectivist idea in the Chuch’e idea and the spread of private entrepreneurship and familism, but also by the seemingly serious repudiation of the reference points and its resultant degradation of systemic identity. In a sense, systemic dissonance may be regarded as a breakdown of Harry Eckstein’s notion of congruence. According to Eckstein,

14

North Korea under Kim Jong Il

congruence between the governmental authority pattern and other social authority patterns guarantees stability of a political system.40 By following this logic, one can say that in a socialist system like North Korea, systemic dissonance conceptually notes incongruence between officially authorized spheres and unofficially existing spheres, as seen in the second economy. But this is not quite enough to explain the systemic dissonance. Systemic dissonance involves not only the meaning of furthering discrepancy between the official sphere and the unofficial social sphere but also the connotation of the degradation of the overall identity of a given system, a situation that is, of course, caused by the discrepancy itself. In other words, systemic dissonance is an inclusive notion rather than incongruence. Systemic dissonance does not necessarily bring immediate breakdown of the system. But if the systemic dissonance is not followed by an adaptive process, like transformation of a certain reference point of the systemic identity, then the system will enter a critical phase. In order to account for systemic dissonance, it is necessary to examine in detail the processes of further internal differentiations that yield especially unofficial spheres and to investigate the processes of the latter spheres’ disassociation of the existing reference points. Internal differentiation and nature of unofficial spheres A system is not static but dynamic.41 As systems theorists have aptly noted, it is not just the continuation and preservation of identity in the face of change. There may occur structural changes with conservation of the system itself.42 In general, continuous internal differentiation may enhance the degree of a system’s viability. With internal differentiation, the system becomes a more flexible and adaptable one in coping with its environment. In this respect, a system that exhibits a high degree of internal differentiation appears, at first glance, to be unstable, but is durable in the long run. Such a highly internally differentiated system is exemplified by a democracy. As James March and Johan Olsen have written, a democracy is a “collection of loosely coupled institutional spheres with different purposes, logics, principles, and dynamics.”43 In other words, the internal differentiation in democracy increases internal diversity and dynamics whereby selforganizing networks among independent and autonomous actors are constructed. It is remarkable that internal differentiation is a result not necessarily of rational human choices but frequently of natural processes, regardless of system types. Even in a monolithic socialist system like North Korea, not all internal differentiation processes are a

Introduction

15

consequence of a top leader’s policy choices; many of them are unintended outcomes and therefore are called unofficial or illicit spheres. This is because the leader dominates the authority relations at the top but cannot control all the variables in the system. Whatever the form a system may have, the aging of a system results in various types of internal differentiation. In the socialist system, internal differentiation continues to occur, particularly in unofficial spheres. For instance, inequality may arise on the basis of cleavages between family background, income, education, or ethnicity;44 countercultures of youth or another specific generation may compete with the socialist culture; the underground market may appear to cover dysfunction in the official economy; and a new social hierarchy may come into being even after the revolutionary breakdown of an old social class. The sustainability of the system depends on how various forms of internal differentiation coexist with one another, while maintaining a certain degree of integrity that maintains systemic individuality in contrast to the environment. However, it should be noted that the internal differentiation has different meanings depending upon the system type, democratic or monolithic. In a democratic system, the internal differentiation develops a high interactive capacity, which is a requisite for systemic viability. This is so because the internal differentiation allows for diverse gatekeepers to deal with issues originating from the environment.45 A democratic system that is oriented toward internationalization and globalization is a system of a high degree of complexity. Examples of internal differentiation in this system are plentiful: the establishment of formal committees and informal research circles in the legislature, the dispersal of a peace movement group into many reconstruction volunteer groups and humanitarian aid projects, the separation of small businesses from a federation of business groups, and the diversification of academic associations in a discipline. Unlike socialist systems with monolithic power, this internal differentiation allows for diverse relations with neighboring systems. Mixed relations made by differentiated parts contribute to the interlocking of the democratic system with the environment. These relations let the system as a whole be viable in the context of a swift adaptation to rapid changes in the surroundings. That is, these relations allow for “coevolution,” to use Erich Jantsch’s term, between the system and its environment.46 It is not a surprise that there exists variety in the internal differentiation pattern, even among the systems categorized as the same democratic type. Depending on references for self-reproduction at the early stage of the systemic emergence, the internal differentiation

16

North Korea under Kim Jong Il

pattern and the ensuing complexity may be dissimilar with one another. It is noteworthy that the school of new institutionalism has presented a similar idea by invoking “path dependence” or “historical dependence.”47 These notions reflect the significance of the original individuality to which the processes of internal differentiation and self-reproduction always refer. That is, these notions in new institutionalism run parallel to the term of self-reproduction in systems theory. James March and Johan Olsen have used a comparative example to illustrate this. Even though the United States and Canada resemble each other more than they do other countries, their institutions differ consistently as a result of distinct historical experiences, starting from the American Revolution. Such a historical difference, with its origins to be found in the formation of the state, has continued to produce different political institutions with distinctive characteristic traits.48 March and Olsen say that the historically dependent institution contributes to the perpetuation of a given social tradition. In this way, each democratic system, by following unique references, may develop its own identity within a certain range of commonality. In contrast, imagine a case in which the political subsystem—for instance, the party-state in the Soviet Union, China under Mao, and North Korea under Kim Il Sung—would not admit further, indeed unofficial internal differentiation other than the functional differentiation of four subsystems. This would result in a degradation of the system’s viability, because of a lack of both interactive and selecting capacity to cope with the fluctuating environment. Even in a socialist system, it is necessary for its survival that the system accommodates unofficial internal differentiation, while maintaining a balance between the self-reproduction referring to the original identity for a certain degree of internal integrity, on the one hand, and the acceptance of a gradual transition in the original systemic identity and individuality, on the other. Prolonged disregard of unofficial internal differentiation in a socialist system should be attributed to the “politicization” of an entire system and to the “routinization of revolution” for development purposes, to borrow Richard Lowenthal’s terms.49 For the longevity of the party’s rule and mass mobilization, the political leadership, the socalled proletarian dictatorship, attempts to endlessly stimulate a societal uniformity that distinguishes the system from neighboring systems. Both the politicization of an entire system and the routinization of a revolution tend to sacrifice the evolution of the system toward greater complexity. When the party-state, the core of the political subsystem, neither welcomes nor officially acknowledges diverse internal differ-

Introduction

17

entiation, a given system will suffer from systemic monotonousness: power is concentrated in a few leaders in the Politburo and the Secretariat of the party; propaganda and ideological education are repeated for various forms of campaign marches; public ownership suppresses the profit-seeking incentives of individuals; and socialist literature displays a revolutionary model figure. Here we have no “withering away of the state”; instead, the party-state is something more than just one of four subsystems. The party-state comes to dominate the three other neighboring subsystems. The disregard of unofficial internal differentiation was evident in North Korea in the launch of economic reform measures in July 2002. The system had clearly become incapable of entertaining different kinds of relations with its neighboring systems by isolating itself from necessary information and resources from outside in a selective way. But even after the 2002 reform measures, North Korea has maintained a simple mechanism of input, conversion, output, and feedback. Such a straightforward mechanism, built around Kim Jong Il, has relied on the expertise and skills of the assorted parts much less than complex systems do. During and after the famine in the mid-1990s, there arose distinctive features of unofficial internal differentiation in North Korea. These internal differentiation processes came to be apparent in each subsystem, and Kim Jong Il alone could not resist them but had to acknowledge them. Here are several examples of them: • political subsystem: collapse of the WPK’s guiding role vs. relative autonomy of the military from the party. Even before the famine, not only the crippled economy but also the disciplining of the party deteriorated the party’s guiding role. But the nationwide famine in the mid-1900s further devastated the party’s guiding role on economic affairs, in particular. During and after the famine, the party lost the authority and legitimacy to compel the people to return to their workplaces. Within this unruly situation, not only have propaganda machines extolled the military as a protector of the existing system, but also Kim Jong Il has differentiated the military, as an institution, from the party in the name of the “military-first politics.” • ideological subsystem: collectivism and continuous revolution in the Chuch’e idea vs. familism and individualism in daily life. Despite the ideological education through both regular party-life criticism meetings and praise of the Ten Principles for the Establishment of the Chuch’e Idea, there has been little evidence of an internalization

18

North Korea under Kim Jong Il of collectivist and revolutionary values in the heart of the people. Instead, familism and individualism have flourished, and profitseeking behavior for individual survival has spread.

• economic subsystem: socialist economic institutions vs. institutionalization of unofficial commercial practices. The emergence of entrepreneurship, starting in the mid-1980s, has been accompanied by the erosion of significant aspects of public ownership. Unofficial contract relations between individuals and enterprises have become prevalent, replacing the socialist ownership mode with a new exercise of property rights on use, control, income, and even transfer. The 7-1 economic measures, undertaken in 2002, intended to accommodate, in part, the unofficial components within the official economy by raising salary and consumer price at the same time. But it could not help but foster the informal institutionalization of the new practices. • intellectual-cultural subsystem: the official policy for converting intellectuals to the working class vs. intellectuals’ status as a perceived potential “internal enemy.” By pointing out the role of intellectuals in the process of the breakdown of socialist systems in Eastern European countries, Kim Jong Il warned against their potential for being co-opted by imperialists. The disregard of unofficial internal differentiation in socialist systems and particularly in North Korea cannot extinguish the processes of change. If the internal differentiation is not admitted at the official level, it comes to multiply at the unofficial level. Such processes of unofficial internal differentiation and of prolonged negligence at the official level contribute to systemic dissonance. Unofficial internal differentiation in a subsystem necessarily brings about dual operations within each subsystem, which, in turn, come into conflict with the official spheres of other subsystems. For instance, in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and in China in the early reform period, the spread of a second economy—in which party-state bureaucratic corruption was involved—contrasted with public ownership and consequently yielded a systemwide asymmetrical relation owing to its incongruity with the official ideology of collectivism or egalitarianism.50 At any rate, the dual operation of subsystems, incurred by internal differentiation at the unofficial level, is necessarily accompanied by systemic dissonance. In North Korea, the unofficial internal differentiation and the ensuing systemic dissonance had

Introduction

19

appeared during the second half of the 1980s and became distinctive amid the famine in the 1990s. More importantly, systemic dissonance refers to the systemwide fluctuation caused by a serious degradation of the systemic identity. As noted earlier, there were three reference points that constituted the original identity and the individuality of the North Korean system and that externally differentiated the system from neighboring systems or the environment. Now, the unofficial internal differentiation in each subsystem came to be accompanied by partial disclaimers to the reference points: for example, some elements of socialist principles were discarded by permitting entrepreneurship and commercial practices, anti-imperialism was disclaimed by attempting to approach the United States and to expand the economic opening to the South, and the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition was replaced with the militarybased social order that is reflected in the “military-first politics.” In this respect, the systemic dissonance has involved a transitional phase in the emergence of a revised mode of systemic identity and individuality, while both pursuing other means of viability and distinguishing the system from others. There is a cautionary note about understanding the internal differentiation process. The terms unofficial and illicit belong to a perceptual text defined by a binary code that is an officially accepted moral artifact reflecting reference points. The rigid binary code in this system defines—from the official perspective—any deviant behavior as behavior that is morally wrong and harmful to the existing identity and individuality of the system. To define the unofficial sphere as immoral and harmful is a form of resistance to natural processes of internal differentiation. In North Korea, just as in other previous socialist systems, the most distinctive aspect of the duality caused by such a binary definitional situation has been the second economy. In the last two decades, as the party-state has officially left unacknowledged the existence of this second economy in daily life, there has been a dissonance between official identity and reality; that is, the second economy has continuously conflicted with the ideological doctrines of Chuch’e in North Korea. Furthermore, the second economy has eroded the legitimacy of the party-state guidance of society, because the party-state no longer gives out proper food rations. Given this extreme situation, it became impossible for bureaucrats to restrain themselves from involvement in the second economy. Harshly criticizing such involvement as corruption, the leadership in the first half of the 1990s led socialist campaigns against it.51

20

North Korea under Kim Jong Il

Major conjunctures As an open system, even if isolated, the North Korean system has had to cope with more or less unexpected internal and external fluctuations. What led the system to experience abrupt internal differentiation and systemic dissonance? There were two major conjunctures. One was the breakdown of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the other, the severe famine in the three consecutive years from 1996 through 1998. Without doubt, these conjunctures revealed North Korea’s vulnerability in the securing of materials that are essential for the maintenance of a country’s internal economy: energy and food. The collapse of the socialist bloc not only awakened North Korean leaders to a sense of crisis about the fate of socialism but also created a severe energy shortage, since the system had heavily relied on the Soviet Union and China for its oil imports. The data of the Korea National Statistical Office shows that as the amount of oil imports sharply declined at the beginning of the 1990s, energy consumption also fell (see table 1.1). Despite desperate efforts to increase coal production and to construct medium- and small-scale hydraulic power facilities since the end of the 1990s, the famine and its demobilization effect have hindered the concentration of labor power, which would be needed to resolve the energy shortage. Because North Korea’s political leaders consider military industries to be the most important strategic choice, they have tried to maintain the energy supply line to these industries as much as possible, reducing energy consumption among the general public. As a result, most North Koreans have been suffering from a shortage of energy more seriously than ever before. More importantly, the extreme famine starting in the mid-1990s weakened the capacity of the system. It is certain that the famine, not the shortage of energy (particularly oil), had the most devastating effect on the society. Because coal has been the main energy resource in North Korea, for the purpose of either electricity or fuel, the decrease in oil imports has contributed to deforestation and other negative environmental effects but has not grown so detrimental that it has strangled the life of the general public. However, the decline, by half, of the grain supply, which occurred between 1996 and 1998 (as seen in table 1.2), brought about a large number of deaths by starvation. As Nicholas Eberstadt has noted, the North Korean famine was an unprecedented one in the Communist countries that had already completed the socialist transformation—that is, land reform and agricultural collectivization.52 Among the many assessments of the death toll caused

Introduction

21

Table 1.1. Trends of Oil Imports and Energy Consumption, 1980–2002 Oil imports Total energy consumption (thousand barrels) (thousand TOE) 1980 1985 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002

15,393 14,369 18,472 11,142 6,670 6,861 3,694 2,851 4,376

21,013 24,940 23,963 20,450 17,870 15,836 14,030 15,687 15,638

Energy consumption (TOE/person) 1.19 1.31 1.19 0.98 0.84 0.73 0.64 0.71 0.70

NOTE (i) The energy is composed of coal (70%), oil (8%), and hydraulic power (12%) as of 2002. (ii) TOE is the abbreviation of Ton(s) of Oil Equivalent. Source: http:// kosis.nso.go.kr/cgi-bin/sws_999.cgi (accessed on March 11, 2005).

by the famine, a reliable statistical analysis, conducted by Lee Suk, estimated that between 1994 and 2000, the death toll reached 630,000– 690,000, at a narrow range, or 580,000–1,120,000, at a wide range.53 While this death rate is not so high as those of other famines in socialist countries, the impact of this famine on the North Korean system was so severe. An abrupt collapse of food security was followed by an exceptional urban famine. The urban famine had a special meaning with regard to internal differentiation in the unofficial sphere and to the ensuing systemic dissonance, because it must have demoralized the highly regarded class consciousness of the workers in this highly urbanized country.54 It has been said that special consideration for food distribution during the famine was given to the military, the residents of Pyongyang, and the people employed in priority enterprises. If this is true, then the most miserable victims of the famine were the workers in the second- and third-tier cities. In this regard, the famine produced enormous social and political effects and thus was apparently the core of the economic crisis in North Korea.55 The collapse of the socialist bloc, the decline of its energy supply, and the famine enormously influenced North Korea’s processes of internal differentiation at the unofficial level. The impact of the conjunctures was not limited to economic affairs: it extended to an extensive deurbanization process whereby urban residents scattered into the countryside, searching for food. The process brought a sharp decline

North Korea under Kim Jong Il

22

Table 1.2. Grain Imports and International Assistance, 1989–98 Total supply (S)

1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998

Imports

International assistance

million metric ton

million metric ton

% of (S)

million metric ton

% of (S)

8.61 8.73 8.10 7.17 4.22 3.57 3.86

0.38 0.55 1.56 1.15 1.54 0.56 1.01 1.11 1.45 1.50

13 18 7 14 26 41 39

0.32 0.30 0.84 0.75

4 7 24 19

Source: Suk Lee, Food Shortages and Economic Institutions in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Warwick, 2003), 268.

in the lingering effects of the collectivist idea, a mushrooming of entrepreneurship among the people, and a sense of crisis among political leaders. All these changes were closely related to the internal differentiation of each subsystem and to the emergence of systemic dissonance. Reform: Official accommodation of unofficial spheres Unofficial transition and systemic dissonance are normally followed by a “reform,” whose initial stage involves processes for the integration of the second economy into official policy.56 The reform undertaken in July 2002 exhibits a twofold meaning. On the one hand, the reform was initiated by the party-state’s decision to officially acknowledge the unofficial changes that had been flourishing, especially in the second half of the 1990s—mushrooming private entrepreneurship and the uncontrollable geographical mobility of the people in the critical juncture of the party’s rapid decline in its function and morale. On the other hand, the reform process, by officially permitting unofficial internal differentiation in the economy, has allowed for the dissemination of its effects to other subsystems; therefore, the reform has necessarily fostered a transition of systemic identity.57 It is also noteworthy that dissonance, in general, remains in the system even in the reform period, because the reform does not resolve much of the moral tension that exists. The reform accompanies a shift

Introduction

23

in the mode of the employment of the official binary moral code: from the application of a rigid socialist code to the establishment of a moderate code. As the range of variation in the mode of what is morally right extends, the corresponding range of what is morally wrong shrinks; however, there still exists a tension between the two modes.58 Given this situation, there emerges a gray zone, which might be called the “defeat of ideological and moral distinctiveness” in the transition economy, to use Yan Sun’s term, and to which the binary code cannot be strictly applied.59 There were two contrasting responses to such gray zones, as seen in socialist systems in transition. One is that local party cadres and local government officials in some regions, especially at the initial stage of reform, dare to adopt adventurous experiments. For example, in agricultural reform, Anhui Province in China and the Long An area in Vietnam became spearheads of reform in the early stage by adopting a broad interpretation of the indecisive guidelines. The Anhui area in China adopted a broad interpretation of the twenty-five articles on agriculture—in which the third plenary session of the Eleventh Central Committee (CC) of the party in 1978 agreed to correct old mistakes of “equal divisionism”—and moved forward to experiment with diverse forms of responsibility systems targeting productivity.60 Likewise, Long An in Vietnam, after the sixth plenary session of the Fourth CC in 1979, took a bold local initiative for wage and price changes that would reflect the economic situation. The success of this initiative compelled the central party not only to adopt Long An’s policy as an official policy but also to name it the “Long An model” in order to disseminate a message of spirit and experience.61 The other response is that apparatuses and bureaucrats of the party-state, unlike reform-oriented political leaders and the general public, often fall into a competency trap, retarding the transformation of institutional arrangements.62 The competency trap is a useful notion that may contribute to the understanding of those elements interfering with the swift transition of a lowly differentiated system. The competency trap here means that remaining old institutional arrangements slow down the pace of efforts to accommodate unofficial or informal spheres and resist a greater internal differentiation in the economy. They cling to previous norms and practices of the planned economy, because of either economic benefits of organizational survival or political and ideological factors. In the Chinese case, the competency trap involves advocacy of “institutional interests,” especially regarding the redistribution of resources.63 Bureaucrats of ministries in the central government compete

24

North Korea under Kim Jong Il

and speak on behalf of their organizations in a horizontal sense, whereas officials in the local government compete with bureaucrats of the related ministries in a vertical sense.64 A second form of the competency trap is the bureaucracy’s hesitation to accept the reform orientation. As Dorothy J. Solinger termed it, the “bureaucratic tendency” contributes to the persistent presentation of a conservative and control-focused strain during the first years of reform. The bureaucrats continuously attempt to insulate the state’s fiscal capacity—for instance, state treasury benefits—from any productivity increase elicited by reform measures.65 A third form is the “political safety device,” which concerns bureaucrats’ hesitation to take on adventurous tasks because of their limited scope in the expression of loyalty to the existing system. Despite intending to maximize profits in the transitional phase, the bureaucrats feel politically safe by following the conservative norms that dictate a strict stance against liberal modes of behavior. For the middle range of bureaucrats in North Korea, this willing association with previous official norms remains particularly strong, owing to the ideologically based education about the widely feared “yellow wind” (the capitalist effect from the South) and to North Koreans’ abhorrence of American influence that, it is believed, too strongly constrains their behavior space. Requirement for Systemic Viability: Openness The central logic of the relationship between internal differentiation and complexity, on the one hand, and systemic viability, on the other, lies in the openness of a system, especially through each part’s diverse interactions with the outside, as well as system-level relations to the environment.66 In a highly differentiated system, individual parts with expertise and skills in certain fields may directly cope with neighboring systems. The relations increase the openness of the system to the environment. While maintaining the identity and individuality of a system, the selectivity of differentiated parts alleviates the system’s vulnerability to fluctuations in the environment and heightens an interactive capacity and viability. Without depending on arbitrary decisions at the top, differentiated parts utilize their own specific knowledge and knowhow. The differentiated parts may screen and sort information and resources from outside before transmitting them—producing demands or pressures, in a political sense—to the policy-making circle. In other words, the processes of input, conversion, output, and feedback occur in diverse ways in the system. For this reason, a highly internally

Introduction

25

differentiated system with openness may have a safety device that buffers shocks produced by fluctuations in the environment. In contrast, the continuous neglect of unofficial internal differentiation, accompanied by prolonged systemic dissonance, calcifies the system and decreases the interactive capacity that enables it to cope with changes in the environment. The above discussion on openness in an internally differentiated system may promote a more rigorous understanding of the current internal hardships and provocative security postures in North Korea. Political leaders there have led the movement toward isolation, and in turn, the isolation has further constrained the development of channels of interaction with neighboring systems. The uniformity of the system, whose identity and individuality are embodied in the reference points, has retarded the diversification in subsystems and in the system as a whole. In North Korea’s relations to the outside world, the function of selection has mainly relied on the top level of the partystate alone. Neglect of unofficial internal differentiation has prevented the cabinet and the party’s auxiliary organizations from developing specific expertise and skills for interactions with the environment.67 In this way, the structuration of a low interactive capacity correlates with the overall retardation of the adaptation, even when the partystate intends to open the system and, thus, to enhance its viability. Indeed, North Korea has attempted to attract foreign direct investment since the early 1990s but could not achieve the results that it had intended. In 1991, it established a special economic zone in Najin-SÆnbong, a northeast area strategically located at the border with China and Russia. However, the special economic zone failed to capture the attention of foreign companies essentially because of the low profile of management expertise and skills. Frequently, it is said that the backwardness of infrastructure, such as telecommunications, the water supply, electricity, roads, and railroads, has impeded the introduction of foreign direct investment in the special economic zone. Indeed, the most important factor hindering the opening has been the lack of an interactive counterpart that could deal with and buffer shocks from the outside. As Bradley Babson, a former World Bank officer, has noted, it is precisely this lack of interaction that constitutes the most urgent issue facing North Korean bureaucrats—an issue that requires a substantive change in mind-set. Babson experienced the many difficulties in doing business with North Koreans, and underlying these difficulties was invariably the lack of North Korean counterparts possessing skills in foreign currency management, investment planning, statistics, and so on.68 To neglect the development of these skills is, for North Korea, to

26

North Korea under Kim Jong Il

ensure that their capacity remains low. Rather than engage in novel approaches to the solving of existing problems, the bureaucrats tend to cling to obsolete methods for political reasons, including a desire to maintain their present privileges and to avoid the stigma of being labeled capitalist traitors or liberals. In this respect, the North Korean case, as with other transition system cases such as Vietnam and China, reveals that, in regards to reform and opening, the human and institutional factors turn out to be more urgent than the infrastructure factors. As a consequence, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) usually stress the importance of aid for technical assistance, like the training of bureaucrats in economic and legal affairs that relate to international commercial laws and practices, even before official membership is given to the recipient country. In fact, the construction of infrastructure requiring large and numerous loans would occur only after the potential recipient country fulfills the qualifications for receiving technical assistances from those financial institutions and then registers for official membership in these institutions. In sum, in the given situation of systemic dissonance, the scope and the means of the opening must be a precarious issue for North Korea under Kim Jong Il. And yet, the opening is a requirement of the viability of the system as a whole. In view of the reference points, the United States is the primary enemy and, at the same time, the key to the solution of Pyongyang’s diplomatic isolation. In other words, North Korea’s isolation is not equivalent to its intended closedness. In a limited sense, there has existed a certain leeway about openness even in the solidified autarky system. The limited openness has been motivated not only by outside organizations knocking at the door but also by internal demands for access to the outside.69 The illicit profit-seeking activities by “foreign currency earners” since the early 1990s illustrate the latter case, whereas international humanitarian assistance during the famine period of the mid-1990s exemplifies the former case. In other words, both unofficial internal differentiation and international aid have been two sources of North Korea’s limited opening. Meanwhile, taking advantage of South Korea’s engagement policy, called the Sunshine Policy, North Korea has practiced a kind of “detour diplomacy” to ultimately access the United States and to induce foreign resources. Tour of the Book Viewing North Korea as a system, this book investigates processes of internal differentiation in the four subsystems—the political, ideologi-

Introduction

27

cal, economic, and intellectual-cultural—between 1973 and 2002, the period that begins with Kim Jong Il’s rise as de facto heir apparent to his father, Kim Il Sung, and concludes with North Korea’s adoption of economic reform measures on the domestic front and the eruption of the second nuclear crisis on the diplomatic front. An analysis of the internal differentiation illuminates eventually the essential and relevant ways in which the systemwide dissonance gradually repudiates the reference points of the systemic identity: namely, socialist principles, anti-imperialism, and the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition. The three chapters (2, 3, and 4) investigate changes in the political subsystem. Chapter 2 examines the actor Kim Jong Il, the most fundamental element for the operation of the subsystem. The chapter surveys Kim’s growth as a political man and then examines the relationship between his political personality and his active-negative leadership character. Chapter 3 examines the core political organization, the WPK, particularly its strengthening discipline but weakening efficiency, which dates from Kim Jong Il’s first involvement in the party’s organizational affairs in 1973. Chapter 4 illustrates institutional differentiation between the party and the military. It highlights the “military-first politics” whereby Kim Jong Il has applied a strategy of divide-and-rule especially since the rapid decline of the WPK’s guiding role in times of the famine and the subsequent economic collapse. The following three chapters (5, 6, and 7) illustrate the transformation of the ideological, economic, and intellectual-cultural subsystems, respectively. Chapter 5 analyzes the processes in which the propositions of Chuch’e that had begun with a creative application of Marxism-Leninism gradually deviated from their orthodox doctrine, as the human-centered worldview and the sociopolitical organism propositions made abundantly clear. Chapter 6 illustrates that the emergence of private entrepreneurs and their commercial practices have contributed to the internal differentiation between the official and the unofficial, a situation that then forced the state to adopt the 7-1 economic reform measures in 2002. Chapter 7 examines intellectuals in terms of their changing status and their changing role as respondents to political dynamism. It analyzes also the “skip-over strategy” on information technology, with which North Korea has attempted to confront its economic deterioration, and the implications of the strategy for the status of intellectuals. Finally, chapter 8 concludes with the special features of systemic dissonance by highlighting the degradation of the original national identity—that is, the three reference points—and then to the domestic and external constraints that have limited the scope of North Korea’s

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opening, a requisite for system viability. The chapter also points out that the second nuclear crisis, which erupted in 2002 when North Korea admitted to having a uranium enrichment program, reflected the dilemmas plaguing the system: on the one hand, a scarcely explored interactive capacity; on the other hand, the limitations of “detour diplomacy” by way of South Korea and Western countries, a diplomacy that ultimately pursues access to the United States.

2

Kim Jong Il The Political Man and His Leadership Character

An adequate understanding of Kim Jong Il’s emergence as a political man will help us to assess a unique feature of the authority structure of the party-state and to identify and understand the continuity and changes of systemic identity. The study of political leadership is to examine a complex phenomenon that contains certain unique characteristics, as well as generalized factors.1 Given that Kim Jong Il has been the leader of a secretive and autocratic system, the uniqueness of his leadership characteristics should be stronger and more significant than that of anyone else in the contemporary world. This uniqueness does not actually diminish the necessity of inquiry into the subject; rather, it encourages an analysis of the relationship between Kim’s political personality and his leadership character, on the one hand, and the internal and external differentiation processes of the system, on the other. In other words, a relatively high significance of the leadership compels us to examine not simply its policy implications but also the means contributing to the dissonance in the unique identity of the North Korean system. Kim Jong Il was only thirty-one years old when, in September 1973, he assumed the position of party secretary in charge of organization affairs and, simultaneously, propaganda and agitation affairs— the chief position in the party. This position enabled him to become the authoritative interpreter of the ideas developed by his father, Kim Il Sung. Since that time, no political figure has rivaled Kim Jong Il. 29

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North Korea under Kim Jong Il

Kim’s elevation to the position second only to that of his father at the Sixth Congress of the WPK in 1980 swept away any doubt regarding the father-to-son hereditary succession. The political status of Kim Jong Il at the age of thirty-eight in 1980 might be comparable to that of the young Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and the equally young Mao Zedong in China. Stalin was forty-eight years old in 1927, when he defeated his opponent Nikolai Bukharin by officially adopting a heavy-industry-oriented development strategy at the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.2 Mao was forty-one years old in 1934, when he led the Long March, which is now depicted as the historical event underlying Mao’s consolidation of political power and his rural-based revolutionary strategy.3 Kim Jong Il’s image as a leader has been so strongly imprinted in the minds of twenty-three million people that no other hero in history, with the exception of his father, has been able to challenge his prestige in North Korea. In view of the hereditary succession, some might mistakenly compare the status of Kim Jong Il to that of kings in the ChosÆn dynasty and especially to YÆnsan’gun, a late fifteenthcentury tyrannical king. This comparison to Kim’s retention of a ruler’s legitimacy may be based on the recognition that Kim exercises arbitrary power and on Max Weber’s notion of patrimonial tradition.4 These presumptions are inaccurate. Rather, his power has stemmed from not only a hereditary succession from his father but also his nature as a political man. His status and power have been both inherited and cultivated. Therefore, rather than treat Kim Jong Il as a fortunate successor, it is necessary to examine his experiences in the period of his growth and to investigate their relevance to his leadership character in later years. One’s understanding of Kim Jong Il might benefit from a kind of political psychology approach. This approach was pioneered by Harold D. Lasswell and others who posited that personal traits for political man, or political personality, develop from the rationalization of private motives in terms of public interests.5 Labeled the “compensatory striving hypothesis” by Glenn D. Paige, a focal point in the discussion of political man lies in depicting how psychological deprivation in the early days of one’s life forms political personality in the later days of one’s political career and implicitly influences the operation of the system as a whole.6 While such studies concerning political leaders’ psychological motivations attract our special attention,7 one problem confronting the empirical analysis of political leaders’ motivations is the difficulty of how to identify complex cause-and-effect relations. Diverse motiva-

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tions and experiences influence the form of political personality, and these factors are particularly difficult to grasp in cases where researchers have limited information about the political actor’s past experiences. Kim Jong Il’s case belongs to this genre. As an alternative strategy I will point out the unique modes of his experiences—shown in the periods of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—in order to explain the formation of his political personality, and then try to establish a relationship between his political personality and his leadership character. Even though this strategy has limited utility, it helps us illuminate how a political actor’s motivations in youth interact with the actor’s leadership style. The Shaping of a Political Personality Psychologist David G. Winter uses the following analogy to describe the impact of a politician’s personality on politics: While it is easy to think of personality as a static set of fixed “qualities,” a more modern conception would view personality as an array of capacities or dispositions that may be engaged, primed, or brought forward depending on the demands of the situation and a person’s own “executive apparatus.” On this view, personality is like a personal computer: with some relatively fixed “hardware” characteristics and also many “software” applications, each of which can be “opened” or “closed” by the operator—some running in a “window” at the center of the screen, others available in the immediate background “windows,” and a few running almost undetected in the “deeper” background.8 Likewise, various types of “windows” of the operator Kim Jong Il must have functioned in a way that aligns significant parts of the existing system with one another: institutions of the party-state, relations between the party and the military, the transformation of the official ideology of Chuch’e, the launch of reform measures, and the control of intellectuals. The structurally constrained scope that Kim Jong Il inherited from his father has seemingly worked as the undetected deeper background window, whereas the personality of Kim Jong Il, cultivated during his growth, has been like a running window at the center and immediate background windows. In this section, I will trace some unique traits in his youth that appear relevant to the formation of these windows.

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North Korea under Kim Jong Il

Childhood: Trust-building defect There have been various interpretations of Kim Jong Il’s birth, particularly of the birthplace itself. But it is generally accepted that Kim Jong Il—his Russian name was Yura—was born to Kim Il Sung and Kim ChÆng-suk on the base of the Soviet Eighty-eighth Brigade at Vyatskoe, or Vyatsk, located near Khabarovsk in the far eastern part of Russia, on February 16, 1942.9 However, North Korea has maintained that Kim was born in the secret military barracks at Mt. Paektu, which has long been considered the spiritual symbol for Koreans, just as Mt. Fuji is for Japanese. It was on February 15, 1982 that Nodong Sinmun, the North Korean party organ, publicized the assertion that Kim’s birthplace was the wooden barracks that had been used for the headquarters of the anti-Japanese revolutionary army led by Kim Il Sung. In order to support this assertion, North Korean propaganda has claimed that Kim’s mother, Kim ChÆng-suk, stayed in the barracks at Mt. Paektu between June 1941 and March 1943 and that she led the anti-Japanese guerillas residing in the northern part of Korea and the Mt. Paektu area.10 It was reasonable for North Korea to identify Mt. Paektu, with its tradition of sacredness, as Kim Jong Il’s birthplace so as to create a mythical image of him. Remarkably, Kim’s birthplace was publicized at the beginning of the 1980s, when the society was colored by the unitary ideology of Chuch’e, which promotes an abhorrence of dependence on foreign influence. The myth of Mt. Paektu as Kim’s birthplace was systematically repeated in the book entitled Leader Kim Jong Il, written by Korean-Japanese biographers in 198411 and again in Kim Il Sung’s autobiography, Living with a Century, written in 1998.12 It is noteworthy that North Korea’s interpretation on Kim Jong Il’s birthplace is related to the glorifying of Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla activities in Manchuria. It is said that Kim Il Sung smuggled himself into Korea to command the anti-Japanese struggle and that, during this period, his wife gave birth to Kim Jong Il. It is also said that Kim Il Sung moved around the Tumen River area and crossed the river to supervise the secret camps and organizations on Mt. Paektu, which were led by Kim’s wife. This story is intended to capitalize on Kim Il Sung’s career as a leader of anti-Japanese resistance on the Korean peninsula in the early 1940s. As Dae-Sook Suh has aptly noted, Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla accomplishments were impressive but, at the same time, were exaggerated. Indeed, Kim retreated into the Soviet Union to escape the pursuing Japanese forces in spring 1941, a fact that exposes as false the myth of Kim Jong Il’s birthplace.13 In view of the fact that the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition was officially established in

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the first half of the 1970s, it is understandable that the creation of the myth followed the advent of the tradition chronologically. Kim Jong Il’s childhood was not an average one. The poor health of his mother prevented her from breast-feeding her baby boy. As a substitute, a wet nurse by the name of Yi Chae-dÆk breast-fed Kim. He was fortunate, as well, to be surrounded by Kim Il Sung’s comrades and to grow up in an environment of affection. According to the testimony of Sin KyÆng-hwan, a former North Korean party cadre on South Korean affairs who defected to Seoul, those comrades such as ChÆn Mun-sÆp, Cho MyÆng-nok, and Paek Hak-nim treated Kim Jong Il as a symbol of hope during the period of hardships accompanying the forces’ retreat to the Red Army and considered him a younger brother or a nephew in their homeland.14 It is presumable that in this affectionate environment, Kim learned organizational integrity and loyalty as well as comradeship. It is presumable also that such childhood experiences familiarized Kim with the military and infused in him a desire to exercise military leadership. For Kim Jong Il, one of the most painful experiences to beset him was the death of his mother in September 1949, when he was seven years old. It is not an easy task to identify how and to what extent this event affected the formation of Kim’s political personality. On the one hand, Kim attempted to avoid any appearance of sorrowfulness and made efforts to appear dauntless. Indeed, he demonstrated maturity in taking care of his sister, Kim KyÆng-h„i. He spared no pain in helping her to commute to and from kindergarten. On the other hand, it is said that Kim Il Sung’s comrades sometimes admonished him for misbehavior and often made an effort to comfort him when he was sad or upset.15 These stories suggest that Kim Jong Il often behaved defiantly and that he felt depressed from time to time, even though it is not clear what the underlying reasons were. The death of Kim’s mother must have been a significant event in the formation of his political personality not simply because her passing left him filled with sorrow but also because its aftermath magnified in him the contradictory emotions of love and hate. After his mother’s death, two women took on many chores in Kim’s household. One woman was Kim SÆng-ae, a telephone operator in Kim Il Sung’s office building, and the other was Hong Ki-yÆn, the daughter of Hong MyÆng-h„i, who wrote the famous novel Yim Ko˘k-cho˘ng.16 In fall 1952, when Kim Jong Il was ten years old, Kim Il Sung on the suggestion of his comrades married Kim SÆng-ae, who was only fourteen years older than the junior Kim. There is no document detailing Kim Il Sung’s remarriage, and it is probable that it took place informally, instead of

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North Korea under Kim Jong Il

at a formal wedding ceremony. There might be two reasons for the informality: One is the Korean tradition of marrying a second wife in an intimate setting with close relatives and friends in attendance, and the other is a tense social and political situation in the midst of the Korean War.17 At any rate, it must have been a shock for young Kim Jong Il to have a stepmother whom he had considered his mother’s secretary or like an elder sister working in his father’s office building. Kim Jong Il resented this fact and tried to offset this shock by dropping by the house of his uncle, Kim YÆng-ju.18 Kim Jong Il’s hatred supposedly deepened when his stepmother gave birth to a half sister and a half brother in 1953 and 1954, respectively. In other words, during his childhood, the sorrow that Kim felt at his mother’s death turned into hatred of his stepmother and her children. Rumors regarding defiant behavior spread among partisan comrades of Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Il’s only sister, Kim KyÆng-h„i, endured great friction with her stepmother, because the latter was partial to her own children. This situation provides further evidence that Kim Jong Il felt antagonism toward his stepmother, half sister, and half brother, and, more than before, he felt affection for his own sister. It can be said that, in this regard, Kim Jong Il’s childhood suffered from a trust-building defect caused not simply by the loss of his mother’s love but also by resentfulness of his stepmother and her children.19 A childhood like this should be closely related to the fostering of contrasts in one’s personality: distrust, hatred, and competition, on the one hand, and extreme affection, on the other. How does the notion of the oedipus complex, an important notion in psychoanalysis, interpret the formation of Kim Jong Il’s political personality? Drawing from the Greek myth, Sigmund Freud developed this notion as an explanation of human psychological development. By the oedipus complex is meant a boy’s tendency not only to seek his mother’s affection and to try to monopolize her presence in his childhood but also to view his father as a competitor and to have a vague desire to kill—to eliminate the presence of—his father. Such development in a boy’s childhood brings him into conflict with his father, but the boy typically recognizes the father’s dominant power and attempts to assimilate himself to the father’s power and authority. Freud said that this complex is a normal process of personality development, one that allows the boy to gradually obtain moral consciousness—to resolve this stage of the oedipus complex. It seems that Kim Jong Il’s experience of his mother’s early death fostered the transition from the first stage, characterized by a boy’s antagonism toward his father, to the next stage, characterized by the boy’s assimi-

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lation of himself into the father’s authority and the development of his own moral consciousness. In other words, in partly offsetting the antagonism toward his father through the hatred of his stepmother and her children, he could resolve the oedipus complex. Indeed, Kim in his adolescence attempted to be close to his father as much as he could and, throughout his youth, upheld his father’s authority by extolling the elder Kim’s past revolutionary resistance against Japanese forces. These displays of affection were, in part, the younger Kim’s attempts to expand his power and to enhance his status as the heir apparent. In other words, Kim Jong Il’s goal-oriented behavior of seeking and expanding power appears to be compatible with his attachment and adherence to his father. In this regard, it seems inappropriate to attribute the shaping of Kim’s unique political personality solely to the oedipus complex. Adolescence: Eye-opening leadership Because of the Korean War and his status as the top leader’s son, Kim Jong Il had an unusual educational experience during his adolescence. After his graduation from a one-year kindergarten program, in September 1950 Kim entered into an elementary division of the Man’gyÆngdae Revolutionary Academy, established for children of veterans and of victims of the anti-Japanese struggle. During the Korean War, however, as the success of the Incheon landing operation led by General Douglas MacArthur brought about a remarkable turnaround of the situation in favor of the advancement of the South Korean army and American-led U.N. forces into the northern part of Korea, Kim Jong Il and his younger sister left Pyongyang for Jilin Province in northeast China, where they spent two years attending the Jilin Academy. Right after the end of the war, he returned to Pyongyang to finish elementary school. He graduated from Pyongyang First Middle School and Namsan Higher Middle School in 1957 and 1960, respectively. It is known that, at these academic institutions, Kim studied various subjects such as politics, economics, literature, arts, and military affairs. In particular, he received special tutoring in the social sciences.20 It should be noted that Kim could cultivate a political grounding through the affectionate support from his father’s partisan comrades and through frequent foreign travels. Kim Jong Il accompanied these elders on business trips and went with them to party activities, during which Kim became acquainted with the management and administration of political affairs. In addition, he had chances to travel abroad, especially to the Soviet Union and China, through which he could

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North Korea under Kim Jong Il

extend his views of the world. For this reason, Cho Yong-hwan has speculated in his analysis of Kim Jong Il that Kim might have studied at the Air Force Academy in East Germany and might have been trained as a helicopter pilot in the Soviet Union.21 But there is no evidence that he experienced such military training. These speculations are attributable to his frequent unofficial trips abroad and to the propaganda of his military leadership in later years. The characteristics of Kim Jong Il as a political man were already evident in his seventeenth year, when he, as an observer, accompanied Kim Il Sung to the Twenty-first Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1959. In his autobiography published in Seoul, Hwang Chang-yÆp—then a professor at Kim Il Sung University and now a citizen of South Korea (he defected in 1996)—has mentioned Kim Jong Il’s idiosyncratic behavior.22 According to Hwang, Kim was very smart and showed an interest in many things. He raised various questions about Kim Il Sung University and its academic programs. Kim’s inquiries were so broad as to include various fields in the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences. His enthusiasm for knowledge might have originated from not only a curiosity in academic subjects but also his familiarity with Kim Il Sung’s political orientation. That is, the junior Kim, as the eldest son of a political leader possessing monolithic power, intended to broaden his knowledge base to meet his father’s policy demands. Hwang also noted that Kim, as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, was precocious in showing an interest in exercising leadership. During his trip to the Soviet Union, Kim made efforts to take care of his father and showed his capacity to manage the attendance team. He physically supported his father, who was a relatively young and strong man of only forty-seven years, by helping him into his shoes and by assisting him to stand up and walk. For Hwang, this was behavior that seemingly went beyond just affection between a father and a son. When Kim Il Sung went out for official meetings with Moscow leaders, Kim Jong Il summoned a meeting of his father’s attendants, including an adjutant, a medical doctor, and a nurse, so as to be debriefed by them and to give instructions to them for the next round of schedules. Because this was Kim Il Sung’s official trip as head of state, the leader was accompanied by the party’s Political Committee members and by state officials, who could have supervised Kim Il Sung’s attendants. Despite the supervisors’ presence, Kim Jong Il volunteered to exercise his leadership by leading the attendant team. It is not clear whether this behavior should be attributed to his management capacity, to his early passion for power, or to both, but it is apparent that, in any event, the junior Kim intended to be close to the senior Kim.

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According to Hwang, Kim Jong Il exhibited unusually fervent pride in his nation, North Korea. There is an anecdote about this. When Kim visited Moscow State University during his trip with his father, a Soviet party official in charge of Korean affairs inquired into the possibility of Kim’s intention to study at the university after his graduation from higher middle school in Pyongyang. Kim said no and added that North Korea had a very prestigious university, Kim Il Sung University. He said that he would continue to study at this university in his own country.23 Because North Korea at the end of the 1950s implemented the notion of Chuch’e and independence, it is imaginable that Kim’s stated admiration for Kim Il Sung University paralleled North Korea’s social atmosphere. At the same time, Kim’s stay in Pyongyang for higher education and his postgraduate career were evidences of his desire to adhere to his father. Because he felt competition with, and antagonism toward, his stepmother and her children, it seems that Kim sought to live in Pyongyang to have as much access as possible to his father, the source of essential power.24 In this way, Kim Jong Il during his adolescence began to emerge as a political man marked by curiosity, enthusiasm, pride, and more importantly a strong desire for access to power. Youth: Growth of a political man As a young man, Kim Jong Il started to learn politics in an intensive manner. When he was a student at Kim Il Sung University, Kim had an exceptional chance to expand his policy-oriented knowledge. Not only did the university provide him with special arrangements for his political training, but also his uncle Kim YÆng-ju, then first deputy director of the Organization and Guidance Department of the WPK, organized an advisory group made up of Kim Il Sung’s staff and resident experts. The advisory group often gave Kim Jong Il the special task of writing on party affairs and policy issues. This delegation of responsibility was unusual—to speak more appropriately, impossible—for a college student, and only the younger Kim could get away with such a feat. In 1962, Kim as a junior-level student wrote a manuscript on the party’s role in local economies, entitled “The Legitimacy of Our Party’s Instruction for the Development of a Local Economy.” It is said that the central party utilized this article as a basic source at the meeting of local party cadres and bureaucrats on economic affairs in August of that year.25 Kim Jong Il also extended his views on political affairs by accompanying Kim Il Sung’s “on-spot guidance” tours, travels abroad, and attendance at party and cabinet meetings. The on-spot guidance tours

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North Korea under Kim Jong Il

enriched Kim Jong Il’s understanding of the real economy and effective modes of guidance and instruction, and provided him with both experience and useful information. The travels abroad with his father contributed to an enhancement of the younger Kim’s discernment of, and his sensibilities toward, international affairs. Furthermore, he as a junior and senior at college attended the sessions of crucial decisionmaking bodies of the party-state, such as the WPK’s Political Committee and Central Committee meetings, cabinet meetings, the Supreme People’s Assembly sessions, and military-related meetings. It is likely that through participation in these meetings, he made the acquaintance of high-ranking officials and delved into fundamental issues concerning domestic and international affairs, as well as had the chance to acquire knowledge on decision-making procedures. Above all, Kim demonstrated his aptitude for guidance. In accompanying his father’s on-spot guidance tours, Kim practiced a similar role as instructor. For instance, when he followed his father’s local guidance tour in South HamgyÆng Province and Yanggang Province, Kim made a separate visit to a town in P’ungsan County in August 1963. He stopped at a grocery store and, as his father usually did, gave the locals instructions on how to improve the living standard of peasants. Not only did Kim take samples of soy sauce and bean paste at the store, but he showed them to his father and explained their relation to needed improvements in the dietary life of countryside residents. He then broached this issue at an official meeting in Pyongyang. In addition, Kim portrayed himself as a model of benevolent leadership. According to one telling anecdote, Kim’s leadership image came to the fore when, as a college student, he participated in a reconstruction campaign for Pyongyang on a chilly and snowy day. Witnessing a truck slip into the mud, he contacted the Special Guard Corps and mobilized some of its troops to help the truck back onto the roadway. A book written by a Korean-Japanese affiliated with North Korea described Kim’s heroic action by declaring that “he threw his body into the mud and snow.”26 Such forthright practices of political leadership were often accompanied by an improper exercise of power. For a college student, his arbitrary intervention was apparent in the affairs of the party committee at Kim Il Sung University. The operation of the university-level party committee was normally reserved for a group of school and party authorities, such as the university president, college deans, and full-time party cadres sent from the central party. However, Kim arbitrated the activities of the university, particularly in the Socialist Youth League. Given that the league was a de facto student body at

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the university level, it is evident that Kim’s arbitrary intervention reflected his prevailing influence on his peers and his elders. In this way, Kim Jong Il not only imitated his father’s political leadership but also attempted to portray himself to others as the “benevolent son of the general secretary of the WPK.” This audacious political behavior should not be separated from the trust-building defect that occurred in his childhood under his stepmother. Kim’s attempt to build up an image of himself as a benevolent leader must have been related to the sense of competition and the contrasting emotions of affection and hatred that were cultivated in the depressive psychological situation of his early years. As soon as he graduated from the university, Kim started his career as a political man. He got his first job at the central party. In September 1964, he was appointed to a guidance personnel position in the Central Guidance Division of the Organization and Guidance Department in the WPK. Guidance personnel refers to professional party cadres who, by themselves, organize certain tasks and who sometimes supervise lower party units. With this position, Kim was now able to utilize the party’s power and conduct his own duties independently. His major duty was the dissemination of Kim Il Sung’s instructions and the party’s documents to the general public. For this purpose, he handled literature and arts, publications, and broadcasting, all of which were not only his favorite fields but also significant subjects for the personality cult of his father and for his own image-building. Even before his elevation to the position of party secretary in charge of organization and propaganda and agitation in September 1973, Kim Jong Il experienced some positions that were closely related to the secretary post. In February 1966, he moved his position as one of the guidance personnel from the Organization and Guidance Department to an equivalent rank at the Propaganda and Agitation Department. In February 1968, he was named director of the Movie and Arts Division in this department. In March 1969, he returned to the Organization and Guidance Department and was elevated to the position of deputy director of the department. In October 1970, he moved again to the position of deputy director in charge of culture and arts in the Propaganda and Agitation Department. In other words, the first ten years of Kim’s political career were characterized by skyrocketing mobility between two core departments in the party. Profiting from these positions, Kim took on the ambitious task of exalting the history of the revolutionary struggle led by Kim Il Sung and his guerrilla comrades during the Japanese colonial period. He founded the P’ibada Opera Group in July 1971 (P’ibada means “the

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North Korea under Kim Jong Il

sea of blood” in Korean and symbolizes Koreans’ bloody armed struggle against the Japanese forces in Manchuria). The opera group under the guidance of Kim Jong Il produced five revolutionary operas that have been considered classical works of art in North Korea: P’ibada, Flower-Selling Girl, The Party’s Sincere Daughter, Tell, Oh Forest! and Song of Mt. Ku˘mgang. It is not easy to tell how much artistic value they have, especially from the perspective of Western and traditional Korean musical arts. But it is certain that they have maintained a lofty political significance in North Korea, since the operas have been so frequently performed for the political education of the general public. In the case of P’ibada, the number of public performances exceeded fifteen hundred by the end of 2002, which translates roughly to fifty times per year since the establishment of the opera group.27 The revolutionary operas have not only enhanced the publicity surrounding Kim Il Sung’s leadership in the resistance to the Japanese occupation but also highlighted the great sacrifice of the partisans under Kim’s leadership. It is said that after the preview of P’ibada, all the old guerrilla leaders watching the performance could not stop themselves from weeping as they reflected on their past fierce struggle against the notorious Japanese Kantogun unit in Manchuria. For Kim Jong Il, the political benefits that came from the choreographed honoring of Korea’s revolutionary history were obviously enormous. Not only did Kim win himself support relative to the succession issue, but also this revolutionary product has directly contributed to a sense of the legitimacy of the party-state among the people of North Korea, which has been in fierce competition with the South. In Communist countries, in general, the top leader makes every effort to maintain the system and, to this end, strives to ensure that organizational strength and propaganda affairs are neatly intertwined with one another. Propaganda is a tool that legitimates the system by dressing up the official ideology, whereas organizational binding involves an internalization of ideology through a solidification of multilayered control mechanisms. This is the reason that core political leaders in power typically never yield their control of organization and propaganda affairs to other competing or potentially emerging groups in the party-state. In this respect, it was natural for Kim Jong Il, who grew up as a political man, to have experienced those positions in the Propaganda and Agitation Department and the Organization and Guidance Department, both of which have had political importance for system maintenance. His brilliant political performance in the different positions consequently boosted his heir-apparent status, in particular, and the persistence of an orderly authority structure, centered on Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, in general.

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The Political Man’s Road to Succession The timing The year 1973 was an important historical juncture both for Kim Jong Il as a political leader and for the North Korean system as a whole. Although there exist disagreements on assessing the timing of Kim Jong Il’s rise as de facto successor to his father, there should be no question that his appointment as a party secretary in 1973 allowed him to gain power, particularly over the party’s organizational affairs. According to Suzuki Masayuki, a Japanese expert on North Korea, Kim Jong Il was appointed to the position of a party secretary in charge of organization and propaganda and agitation at the seventh plenary session of the Fifth CC of the WPK, held in September 1973. Suzuki argues that Kim climbed still further at the Political Committee (whose name was changed to Politburo in 1980) meeting in February 1974, the meeting that decided the double appointment of Kim as a committee member and a party secretary in charge of the party, the cabinet, and the military.28 For Suzuki, these appointments were historic political events in North Korean politics on the grounds that Kim could utilize the positions not only for extending his power base in the party and state apparatuses but also for launching ideological initiatives to idolize his father, Kim Il Sung. Another assessment slightly differs from that of Suzuki. Kim Yong-kyu, a former North Korean spy who had been able to access unpublicized materials in the closed society, maintains that Kim Jong Il was appointed to the secretary position not in September but in February 1973. Or so he remembers it. When Kim Yong-kyu was receiving clandestine training at the Political School of the WPK in February 1973, Kim In-mo, then the party secretary of the school, instructed the spy trainees that Kim Jong Il had been appointed to be the party secretary in charge of organization and propaganda and agitation. Kim Yong-kyu mentions that the instruction in February was followed by every spy trainee’s solemn declaration of loyalty to both Kim Il Sung and the “party center,” which was a mysterious word indicating Kim Jong Il throughout the early 1970s.29 Considering the above assessments together, it is highly probable that Kim Jong Il’s appointment as a party secretary was already decided at the Political Committee meeting in February and was voted, even if merely as a formality, at the closed plenary session of the CC in September. This two-step procedure was quite an acceptable practice in a society where informal politics, in general, and personal loyalty and intimate ties, in particular, are more significant than a formal

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anointment.30 In view of the fact that the Political Committee was dominated by Kim Il Sung and the Manchurian guerrilla comrades, such as Ch’oe Yong-gÆn, Kim Il, Pak SÆng-ch’Æl, Ch’oe HyÆn, O Chin-u, and SÆ Ch’Æl, there was no obstacle at all for an informal arrangement for the appointment of Kim Jong Il as a party secretary at the February meeting. And yet, this informal arrangement was followed by the formal appointment procedure at the CC meeting in September in compliance with the WKP’s bylaw that stipulates that “election of party secretaries are made at the CC meetings of the party.”31 Who were active supporters for Kim’s positions at this significant time? To what extent was Kim Il Sung involved in the succession process? Regarding these questions, there are different accounts. Hwang Chang-yÆp, a former secretary of the WPK, maintains that Kim Il Sung had an orchestrating role in the succession and made related judgments on the basis of Kim Jong Il’s skillful sidelining of potential competitors, including Kim YÆng-ju, who is Kim Il Sung’s younger brother and Kim Jong Il’s uncle. According to Hwang, Kim Jong Il contributed to the consolidation of Kim Il Sung’s cult by purging, in 1967 and 1968, his father’s former associates, the so-called Kapsan faction centered on Pak K„m-ch’Æl and Yi Hyo-sun, on the charge that they had been building a bureaucratic kingdom in the party; in reality, they were purged from the party for their failure to adequately worship Kim Il Sung. Of the many who were purged later, two of the most important were the secretary of propaganda, Kim To-man, and the secretary of international affairs, Pak Yong-guk, who were considered the left and right arms of Kim YÆng-ju. Insofar as Kim YÆng-ju was then in charge of all organizational affairs of the WPK, the purge, allegedly ordered by Kim Il Sung, must have been a serious blow to Kim YÆng-ju himself, a potential—but never an actual—competitor to Kim Jong Il.32 Hwang’s point underscores Kim Il Sung’s role in facilitating Kim Jong Il’s involvement in the political game, while sacrificing even Kim YÆng-ju. Observing Kim Jong Il’s successful performance, Kim Il Sung came to seriously consider his son’s succession to the top leadership position of North Korea. A critical problem with Hwang’s point is that (as Dae-Sook Suh has pointed out), there is little evidence that Kim Jong Il was involved in the purge of the Kapsan leaders, including his uncle’s confidants.33 From the fact that Kim Jong Il worked in the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the WPK between 1966 and 1968, one may reason that the younger Kim prepared the propagation of his father’s personality cult rather than was directly engaged in the purges of top party officials.

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On the other hand, there is evidence to support the belief that Kim Il Sung had made a final pronouncement on the succession issue on the basis of his partisan comrades’ recommendations. Sin KyÆnghwan, a former cadre on South Korean affairs at the WPK, testifies that there was a significant degree of personal ties between Kim Jong Il and the former guerrilla leaders who had committed themselves to a lifetime loyalty to Kim Il Sung.34 Not only had the guerrilla comrades, as substitutes for a natural mother, taken care of Kim Jong Il, but they had also come to be very impressed by Kim’s political performance, particularly by his interweaving of their past struggle against the Japanese into socialist arts, particularly the revolutionary operas. The guerrilla comrades proposed that North Korea should arrange the succession ahead of time in order to avoid the political disorder that, owing to institutional deficiencies, had accompanied shifts in both the Soviet Union’s top elite and in China’s top elite. At a secret meeting held in December 1972, right after the formal disclosure of the sixth plenary session of the Fifth CC of the WPK, Ch’oe Yong-gÆn and Kim Il were quoted as saying, “In the Soviet Union, there was a disturbance after the death of Stalin, and there emerged a revisionist idea because of the absence of a distinct figure who could match Stalin’s political leadership. In China, the Cultural Revolution as a political struggle occurred because the succession was inadequately prepared. Later, China decided on Lin Biao as the successor to Mao Zedong. However, the political disorder that erupted after the Lin Biao Incident continues to manifest itself in anti-Lin and anti-Confucian movements.”35 Even though there were no specific references to Kim Jong Il at the meeting, it is apparent that the guerrilla comrades already were focusing on the father-to-son succession issue. This was a year before the appointment of Kim Jong Il to the position of a party secretary and a year after the first public performance of the revolutionary opera P’ibada, which highlighted the bloody guerrilla warfare in Manchuria against Japanese colonial rule. Therefore, it is fair to say that the guerrilla comrades’ active roles in, and their foresight regarding, the succession issue were attributable to the timing of Kim Jong Il’s emergence as the de facto heir apparent in 1973. Qualifications for succession It appears that the father’s confidence in his son’s political leadership was the crucial factor in the decision about the succession. But while a political decision at the top is a necessary condition for a succession, it does not account for the whole story. In the history of Korea’s ancient

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hereditary successions, there were kings who chose not the eldest son as the successor but the brightest son. For instance, T’aejo, the first king of the ChosÆn dynasty, at first transferred his throne to the second son, ChÆngjong, but later allowed his fifth son, T’aejong, to take over the power. In a similar fashion, T’aejong transferred the throne to the third son, who later became the Great King Sejong, the inventor of the Korean alphabet, Han’g„l. Therefore, the choice of a successor even in the days of hereditary succession was sometimes based on political talent that, it was hoped, would lead to the orderly management of the country. As I discussed earlier, Kim Jong Il as a political man grew to acquire the characteristic traits of a leader, in general, and a passion for power, in particular. Also, Kim’s actual involvement in the power competition, whether explicit or implicit, was crucial for the decision on the succession. Right after the decision of succession was made in September 1973, Kim Jong Il demonstrated his political talent in launching an authoritative interpretation of the Chuch’e idea and in spreading the logic of uninterrupted revolution from generation to generation. Kim made every attempt to establish his father’s idea of Chuch’e as the monolithic ideology of the party and ultimately of the society.36 Also, with his elevation in power, the notion of continuous revolution developed into the Three Great Revolutions in Thought, Technology, and Culture. These tasks were enacted by work teams composed not only of party cadres but also of young college students. The work teams were under the control of the designated successor, Kim Jong Il. Accordingly, the launch of the Three Great Revolutions resulted in an expansion of Kim’s power by replacing old cadres in state-owned enterprises and collective farms with enthusiastic youth. Since the revolution in ideological affairs had been the most important task among the three revolutions, the rise of Kim Jong Il guaranteed the dissemination of Chuch’e and its high status. In turn, the junior Kim praised the idea of his father as “an idea that provided solutions to problems arising in a new age different from the era that gave rise to Marxism-Leninism.”37 As heir apparent, the junior Kim’s commitment to the spread of the leader’s idea was quite similar to that of Lin Biao during the early stage of the Cultural Revolution in China. Just as Lin turned the military into a politicized instrument to spread Maoism, Kim Jong Il fully mobilized the work teams to impose the Chuch’e idea on North Korea. One difference is that even though Lin was a designated successor to Mao, his power was limited, not only because Mao himself had constrained Lin’s behavioral space but also because Lin remained as

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a defense minister under the premiership of Zhou Enlai.38 In short, Kim had no competitor, whereas Lin had been checked by Mao and Zhou. Active-Negative Leadership Character A model figure of active-negative character It would be useful for us to inquire into how Kim Jong Il’s political personality, which evolved during his early years, has influenced his leadership character. James D. Barber’s work on American presidential character gives us some insights into this kind of issue. According to Barber, personality does not determine style of leadership or of management; instead, personality influences general patterns of a political leader’s character. His analytic model may be a useful tool for an investigation of the relation between Kim’s background and his present leadership character. In Barber’s model, four types of leadership character exist according to two criteria: active versus passive and positive versus negative. The criterion of active versus passive depends on the degree of a politician’s investment of energy in, and adhesiveness to, a given job, whereas that of positive versus negative depends on the degree of happiness and enjoyment experienced in political life. The four types are the active-positive character, in which a politician feels productive and satisfactory in the job; the active-negative character, in which one adheres to power and its maintenance because of low satisfaction from the actual result of active engagement; the passive-positive character, in which a politician is interested in getting support and affection for the achievement of an optimistic objective; and the passive-negative character, in which one carries out the duties of a job to fulfill an obligation and considers morality and ethics the most important values.39 Considering Kim Jong Il’s behavior pattern in power, one can infer that, of the four types, he has the active-negative leadership character. Just as this model indicates that there is an internal contradiction between the intense effort and the low emotional reward for that effort, so too is there evidence that Kim, although he has made every effort to establish an organizational discipline in the party and to strengthen the personality cult of Kim Il Sung, has failed to find satisfaction in the results. Such discrepancy between investment of energy and low emotional reward has surfaced in Kim’s speeches: Of the many that were made, one was aired by the state’s central broadcast in December 1995, and the other was delivered to high-ranking party

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cadres on the occasion of a graduation ceremony at Kim Il Sung University in December 1996. Revolutionaries should continue to defend and support the Great Leader [Kim Il Sung]’s thought and works and his revolutionary achievements. In history, imperialists and betrayers of the revolutionary cause fiercely attacked both the top leader of the working class and his revolutionary predecessors and opposed socialist accomplishments. . . . Modern revisionists and betrayers of socialism have attempted to defile the leader and his revolutionary predecessors and to abolish their achievements and finally have pursued the distortion and collapse of socialism.40 I have assisted in works of the Great Leader since the 1960s. But I cannot find anybody who helps my work sincerely. I am working alone. If the professional party cadres in the Central Committee do not help my job, they are useless. During the National Liberation War [the Korean War], the Central Committee did not play its proper role in support of the Great Leader. It seems that the Central Committee nowadays is likely to repeat its inadequate exercise of duties. Of course, I do not believe that it will turn out so badly. The central party may become a decrepit party or a dead party, provided the cadres do not work hard or in a proper way.41 The period in which he gave these speeches was one of the most challenging since he started his career in the party after his college graduation. The death of his father, Kim Il Sung, generated a public panic in 1994, and a chronic shortage of food developed into widespread starvation owing to natural disasters—that is, droughts and floods—in the three years following 1995. The morale and discipline of the party eroded rapidly. Presumably, the cadres who advocated the revolutionary cause lost much of their passion in this disastrous situation. Furthermore, the party’s role in the policy arena, particularly the guiding of economic affairs, almost stopped. Because the most significant thing for the people was to survive the famine, there was no economy for the WPK to plan and supervise. Factories and enterprises stopped operating, with the exception of military industries, because there were neither workers nor raw materials. Schools and hospitals discontinued their services because there were neither students for enrollment nor medical supplies for patients. Given this

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situation, there was no space in which the party could play a dominant role in the famine-stricken society, and in turn, it is understandable that Kim Jong Il felt helpless and lonely. In the speeches, however, Kim’s depression went beyond a simple emotional vulnerability caused by a disastrous social situation. Kim’s dichotomous understanding of history as consisting of revolutionaries and betrayers reflected the divergence between his twenty-year commitment to the party’s organizational affairs and the actual sense of reward that he felt from contributing to North Korean socialism. Reflecting on the factional strife that spread during the Korean War, he warned against a possible repetition of party malfunction. Indeed, although the morale of the cadres had significantly deteriorated, there still remained an ideological orientation guided by Chuch’e, even in a minimal sense, in the famine-stricken society. The party had lost control of its economic affairs but still worked to control and scrutinize the society. The loss of the party’s policy-making role and the deterioration of revolutionary morale did not necessarily translate into the party’s overall collapse. But it seems that Kim’s sense of reward for his long-standing commitment to North Korea’s political apparatus was nearing collapse. Interestingly, Kim Jong Il’s leadership character seems to be different from that of his father, Kim Il Sung, who apparently possessed an active-positive leadership character. It appears that Kim Il Sung’s positive makeup led him to insist on the complete realization of socialist ideology. His consistency in ideological commitment may be exemplified by a letter he wrote in February 1994 for the commemoration of the thirtieth year of the proclamation of the Socialist Agriculture Thesis. In the 1994 letter, he repeated an argument that he had made thirty years earlier on the transformation of collective ownership in agricultural cooperatives into state ownership.42 Moreover, Kim Il Sung considered the Chuch’e idea the most valuable asset of the system and made every effort to spread the idea throughout developing countries during the 1970s and 1980s. Hwang Chang-yÆp, the former secretary of international affairs in the WPK, was an instrument for that purpose, owing to Hwang’s marvelous talent in ideological matters. Kim Il Sung was primarily concerned with a realization of the ideals of a classless society and egalitarianism. In contrast, Kim Jong Il’s negative makeup has compelled him to project his sense of self onto the public’s eye. Even though he has valued the Chuch’e idea, the junior Kim has arbitrarily changed the propositions of the ideology, especially after his father’s death, to serve his personal objectives.

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Sources and features of active-negative character How is Kim Jong Il’s active-negative leadership character related to his background, to his growth as a political man? Despite the incompleteness of the data, particularly on Kim’s psychological world, it is possible for us to detect a correlation between his background growth and his leadership character, a correlation that can assist us in identifying clues to North Korea’s foreign policy, as well as the general operations of the system. ACTIVE

ELEMENT

The active element of Kim Jong Il’s leadership character apparently stems from his zeal to acquire information and knowledge and his energetic passion for political affairs. It is said that Kim’s zeal was accompanied by training he underwent to develop speed-reading abilities, essentially based on concentration, in his college days. According to the former minister of foreign affairs HÆ Tam, Kim had read two books—Victor Hugo’s Les miserables and Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.—in a half day.43 Furthermore, by fully utilizing his status as the eldest son of the general secretary of the WPK, Kim not only established his own image as a benevolent leader but also impressed prospective supporters of his succession to supreme power. Considering that he has conducted sixty to seventy on-spot guidance tours per year—five or six times per month on average—after his father’s death, it seems that he remains as energetic as ever in the pursuit of his leadership duties. Also, considering that he reads several hundred pages of reports every day, it is obvious that Kim’s thirst for information and knowledge is enormous.44 The psychiatrist Rhee Kun-hoo has stated that with more than a twenty-yearlong preparation period for his succession, Kim could develop skills to deal with the issues surrounding him and to restrain any emotional impulses that might interfere with the leader’s active engagement in political business.45 That is, the training of a politician, along with his political personality, could facilitate the leadership character that strengthens the politician’s greater commitment to political affairs. It is noteworthy that the active element in Kim Jong Il’s leadership character, his particularly energetic passion, has been inseparable from meticulous calculations and thorough analyses of political affairs.46 For example, Kim Jong Il’s meticulous calculations appeared in his approach to the constitutional revision of 1998. In contrast to expectations from inside and outside North Korea, his constitutional

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revisions divided the functions of the state into three tiers: the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA), the cabinet, and the National Defense Commission (NDC). But this formal functional division has implied neither authority endorsement nor a division of powers. Insofar as he places the highest priority on the security of the existing system, Kim excludes any possibility of power decentralization.47 First of all, the newly revised constitution eliminates the position of state president, previously assumed by the late Kim Il Sung, and transferred that position’s formal role to the chairman of the Standing Committee of the SPA. Kim Jong Il invented the latter post in order to have it formally represent the state of the DPRK but not to have it exercise actual power. The chairman of the SPA is a nominal state head who receives foreign ambassadors’ credentials and who greets foreign visitors (Article 111). Second, the constitution states that the prime minister of the cabinet shall—as the head of the institution for administrative implementation of the highest sovereignty and for overall management of state affairs—represent the government of the DPRK (Article 117). This statement sounds a little bit odd, because it offers no clear differentiation between the state head and the government head but indicates that the cabinet has more power than before in policy planning and policy implementation, particularly in economic affairs. The highlight of the constitutional revision lies in the expansion of the NDC’s role. The constitution states that the NDC shall exercise the highest military command over both state sovereignty and overall defense affairs (Article 100). Remarkably, Kim Jong Il himself assumed the position of commission chairman. Instead of taking the nominal posts, Kim took the top position of military affairs, assigning two other positions to loyal experts of no political ambition. The revision of the constitution reflects scrupulous calculations on Kim’s part, whereby he exercises supreme power but shares responsibilities. Such an approach had already appeared in contemporary Chinese politics. With the chairman of the CCP’s Central Military Committee, Deng Xiaoping had exercised power behind two general secretaries of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang between 1981 and 1989. In short, there can be no doubt that Kim has been in full charge of military affairs, as well as important domestic and foreign affairs, even under the new constitution of 1998. In foreign affairs, particularly in relations to the United States, Kim Jong Il’s active involvement and meticulous calculations have resulted in reverses and delays in decision-making. Consider his decision-making regarding the opening of an American liaison office

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in Pyongyang in 1995. The Agreed Framework on North Korea’s nuclear issue, drafted by the United States and North Korea in Geneva in 1994, assured North Korea that it would be provided two lightwater nuclear reactors in compensation for Pyongyang’s freezing of its nuclear facilities. At the working-level talks, these countries reached an agreement on the establishment of liaison offices in the two capitals. The Armistice Agreement, although it put a practical end to the Korean War in July 1953, had not stopped the war, in a legal sense, for the four decades preceding the Geneva Agreed Framework. Therefore, the opening of a representative office in an enemy country’s capital would have had a significant meaning of reconciliation if it had occurred. Along with some other reasons, however, Kim Jong Il’s cautious assessment of the political costs and benefits blocked progress in both the reconciliation process and the further development of the bilateral relationship. It is said that, at that time, the United States was interested in the establishment of its liaison office at the former East German Embassy and inquired seriously into its possibility to Pyongyang authorities. In a response, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs submitted a proposal to Kim Jong Il on the prospects of allowing the American government to open the office. Kim reversed his decision five times, finally rejecting the proposed opening: first, he agreed to the opening; second, he ordered a reassessment of the effects, both positive and negative; third, he issued instructions for reconsideration; fourth, he approved the opening; fifth, he reexamined the political costs and benefits; and finally he rejected the proposal.48 Kim’s careful calculations, in addition to the sheer number and scale of matters he confronts, impede a timely decision. Thus, when the 2000 presidential campaign in the United States was nearing its final stages, North Korea decided to enter into direct negotiations with the Clinton administration on the missile issue. The two adversaries exchanged envoys to deal with the issue, but it was too late to reach a binding agreement. The North Korean negotiators, as well as the Clinton team, were not prepared to make a commitment, even though the two sides reached a tentative agreement concerning a ban on exports of North Korea’s missile technology in exchange for American security guarantees for North Korea. It seems that on the North Korean end, the failure to reach a binding agreement was not simply attributable to Kim’s meticulous and vigilant calculation of the costs and benefits of the missile deal but also to the overwhelming burden that he shouldered in his decision-making tasks in the short period of time before the presidential election in the United States.

Kim Jong Il NEGATIVE

51

ELEMENT

Kim Jong Il’s leadership character has revealed a negative element, as well. It should be cautioned that the negative element does not necessarily disqualify the leadership, in general, as Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George have noted. Different combinations of elements yield diverse types of leadership character but do not determine the qualification or disqualification of a political leader.49 Indeed, the more important thing is to identify the sources of the unique elements and the ways in which these elements are projected in the exercise of leadership. It seems that Kim’s negative element originated from the trust-building defect that characterized his childhood after the death of his mother. I noted earlier the lack of maternal affection imprinted on the young boy. In the older Kim Jong Il, that led to streaks of competition and jealousy, as well as distrust, which became increasingly apparent in the development of his political personality. In particular, there appeared emotions that wavered between hostility against his stepmother and her children, on the one hand, and affection for his only sister, Kim KyÆng-h„i, on the other. These contrasting emotions have contributed to Kim’s unshakable allegiance to his father and to power. Despite possible opportunities to study abroad, particularly in Moscow, he declined them, preferring to pursue his education in North Korea. After all, as the eldest son of the Great Leader, he could receive a highly qualified education through a specially arranged teaching team in his homeland. But more importantly, he felt the need to stay as close as possible to his father, while separating his half brother, Kim P’yÆng-il, from his father. It is widely known that Kim P’yÆng-il has spent his political career, after discharge from military service, as an ambassador to Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Bulgaria, Finland, and Poland since the late 1980s. Even though Kim P’yÆng-il is considered to be and treated as a royal family member, he is tightly checked by the party and the intelligence agency under Kim Jong Il’s control. One of the most startling manifestations of Kim Jong Il’s trustbuilding defect was his disgrace before a group of women band members in 1983. This was depicted by the abducted South Korean actor Sin Sang-ok, who had helped Kim’s favorite film production team and later escaped to the West. One night, at a party attended by highranking party faithful and Kim himself, the band team chanted “Long Live Dear Leader Kim Jong Il!” In his autobiography, Sin stated, “Kim Jong Il responded to their chanting and then gestured for them to stop

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it, but they continued making eccentric noises. Suddenly, Kim Jong Il made an unexpected comment, shaking my left hand back and forth. “Mr. Sin, this is a lie. It is an imposture.” Although the comment was made after some drinks had been consumed, it sounded genuine to me. . . . It must be true that he sees things for what they really are.”50 Considering that Sin is one of only a handful of people who, over a relatively long period of time, have had close access to Kim Jong Il, it is reasonable to conclude that Kim does indeed distrust those people who praise him. In other words, Kim is suspicious of even those whom the party-state under his control has both indoctrinated to be subordinate to the regime and provided with privileges to create loyalty to Kim.51 Defense mechanism against discrepancy How has Kim Jong Il dealt with the tensions that exist between an active engagement in politics and the negative sense of reward that follows the investment of all this energy? Psychoanalysts utilize the term defense mechanism in explaining responses to emotional conflict and refer specifically to restraint, reaction formation, rationalization, projection, displacement, and regression as examples of such a psychological mechanism. Among the defense mechanism’s many modes, restraint is a typical type of subconscious response that enables the conscious mind to either ignore or reject sources of tension. The restraint is usually supported by the defense mechanism’s other modes: reaction formation leads to behavior that is superficially distinct from— and therefore a disguise of—actual intention; rationalization justifies real intention by finding other seemingly defensible reasons; projection attributes sources of tension to external factors; displacement substitutes an innocuous object for the object inspiring reaction; and regression returns a person to a childish and familiar response pattern in coping with difficulties.52 Kim as a political man developed his own defense mechanism for alleviating internal contradiction and for exploring a possible means of external consistency in appearance. His defense mechanism is a combination of rationalization, projection, and displacement. The rationalization and the projection may be found in the maneuvering of the “military-first politics,” whereby he rationalizes his intention to maintain power but attributes the hardships of the people solely to American imperialism and its hostile policy toward Pyongyang. A cautionary note is necessary here. The military-first politics is not a simple mechanism explored for the defense of Kim Jong Il’s emotional conflict alone.

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As will be seen in chapter 4, the military-first politics and the militarization of the North Korean system have had their own institutional significance as a bulwark of the existing system. That is, the militaryfirst politics originated not only from Kim’s defensive motivation regarding the active-negative leadership character, but also from the centrality of the military as an institution in times of crisis. On the other hand, Kim Jong Il’s defense mechanism, particularly displacement, is well reflected in the political style of his slogans: “broad-minded politics” and “generous politics.” Indeed, Kim’s style reveals examples of his protective mind-set. For instance, Kim has initiated several huge architectural structures in Pyongyang since the early 1980s, when he officially became the second-highest-ranking leader in the party. On Kim’s order, North Korea established the Chuch’e Idea Tower and the KaesÆn Arch in April 1982 in commemoration of his father’s seventieth birthday. The Chuch’e Idea Tower has a height of 170 meters, which allows it to overlook Pyongyang and the suburbs, whereas the KaesÆn Arch is a North Korean replica of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. North Korean people are particularly proud of the fact that the KaesÆn Arch was designed to be ten meters higher than the original Arc de Triomphe in France. Also, in 2001 Kim ordered the construction of the Commemorating Tower of the Three Great Constitutions for National Unification, a year after the NorthSouth summit talks in Pyongyang. North Korean guides are proud of the vast scale and delicate stone-carved decorations of this arch-type tower through which high-ranking cadres’ old or new Mercedes cars race toward the city’s downtown. North Korean propaganda machines repeatedly assert that these grand architectural feats are products of the Dear Leader’s boldness and broad-minded management style. There are some other examples of Kim’s “broad-minded politics” and “generous politics.” Kim Jong Il has shown his generosity to the people he likes. At the time of a completion ceremony for a joint venture company, KyÆngh„ng Foreigners’ Store, in July 1987, Kim invited his attendants to select items that they wished to have. It seems that Kim wanted to thank the people who had expended every effort in the construction of the store. Kim watched them pick small, inexpensive items like fountain pens and souvenirs, and then displayed his generosity by intervening in the modest shopping spree, selecting for the attendants expensive home appliances such as refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, and cameras, and declaring that only broad-minded people could carry out grand revolutionary tasks. Of course, those attendants, who would have been grateful even for small gifts, were surprised by Kim’s bighearted gesture. On another

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occasion an Italian businessman, Carlo Baeli, visited North Korea. At a party where both Kim and Baeli were in attendance, the North Korean leader recognized that his Italian visitor was particularly fond of the mushroom dish. Then, Kim ordered his staff to load Baeli’s return plane with tons of these special mushrooms. Such cases exemplify the particular defensive mechanism of displacement that characterizes, in Kim’s life, the gap between investment and reward. Seemingly bold and gallant gestures that symbolize to the people their leader’s benevolence are, in fact, an effort by the leader to bridge the gap between an exertion of effort and a perceived deficit of reward. Implications for Systemic Changes To date, scholars on North Korea have completed no encompassing scheme that identifies a relationship between Kim Jong Il’s motivation and his leadership character, because of the incompleteness of the available information about his past. However, a portrait of his growth, even within a limited scope, helps us illuminate the formation of a political man. To recapitulate: The early loss of his mother and her maternal affection apparently fostered in him a distrust of his surroundings, particularly after the elder Kim Il Sung’s remarriage to Kim SÆng-ae. As a consequence, Kim Jong Il associated himself with his father and his father’s power as much as possible. He developed useful skills by portraying himself as the benevolent son of the Great Leader, his father. He then exploited his newfound elevated status to gain close access to the center of power and finally to inherit his father’s power. He was a political man who extolled the anti-Japanese Manchurian guerilla activities of his father and guerrilla comrades and transformed Kim Il Sung’s idea into Kimilsungism, which symbolically paralleled Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism. In this respect, it is fair to say that North Korea’s hereditary succession, a unique phenomenon in the socialist world, was not a simple gift from the elder Kim but a result of the younger Kim’s strenuous pursuit of power. Thereby, Kim Jong Il not only came to occupy the heart of North Korea’s power but also to place himself at the nodal point of systemic consolidation in the era of power transition. Kim Jong Il has been a political man who actively invests energy in the decision-making associated with various affairs; yet, he is convinced that his exertions have failed to bring about a satisfactory compensation. This leadership character typifies the active-negative model. It seems fortunate for Kim that he was born the eldest son of Kim Il

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Sung and had two decades of political training before the succession. He could thus discover a defense mechanism to dissolve the escalating and accumulating emotional pressures caused by the discrepancy between his invested efforts and the perceived rewards. This defense mechanism has been well reflected in Kim Jong Il’s emotional preoccupation with grandiosity, which is apparent in his “broad-minded politics” and his “generous politics.” In other words, the negative element of the leadership character has been dissipated by the defensive mechanism to a certain extent. Kim Jong Il’s political personality and his leadership character have some implications for systemic changes in North Korea. In domestic affairs, the political man Kim Jong Il must have (though unintentionally) virtually facilitated systemic transformation by helping to change the previous reference points of the DPRK’s identity. First of all, as soon as he engaged in party politics in the early 1970s, Kim stressed the WPK’s discipline instead of its role of policy transmission (see chapter 3). Ironically, this emphasis on discipline resulted in an erosion of the party’s power and legitimacy, as the famine-stricken economy in the mid-1990s made regular party-life criticism impossible. What emerged from the situation was the “military-first politics,” whereby Kim pressed the strategic choice of divide-and-rule on the military and the party (as seen in chapter 4). The party’s prevalence was relatively undermined and the military’s institutional autonomy, even if in a relative sense, became highlighted. Second, Kim’s strenuous efforts have brought about diverse interpretations of the Chuch’e idea during his thirty-year rule. They range from Kimilsungism to human-centeredness, to sociopolitical organism, to Socialism in Our Own Style, and to the Strong State. At the same time, Kim’s enthusiasm for information and knowledge, coupled with his energetic engagement in on-spot guidance tours, expanded his views on market economics as well as on socialist economic principles. He has recognized the sustainability of capitalism through interdependence between countries and through markets and multinational corporations, and he has exhibited an elastic conception of the opening-up process, which has been centered on geographically select areas (see chapter 5). Indeed, Kim officially accommodated unofficial spheres of the socialist economy into the 7-1 economic reform measures in 2002. The reform measures reflected economic realities by inaugurating wage and price increases, greater responsibility for management, and the introduction of general markets (chapter 6). In this way, ideological and economic subsystems have become more complex than before and have created a greater space of ambiguity

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and uncertainty wherein socialist principles coexist with commercial practices that await legalization. On the other hand, in external affairs, Kim has made multipurposive efforts to approach the United States, even though the North Korean propaganda machine has continued to reproduce anti-Americanism in the hearts of the people. Kim Jong Il’s vigorous and tireless character accounts for North Korea’s attempts to build a new diplomacy— which may be called “detour diplomacy”—for the purpose of its own survival in the short run and its access to its adversary, the United States, in the long run. The historic summit between the two Korean leaders in 2000 and South Korean president Kim Dae-jung’s engagement policy facilitated the detour diplomacy to a certain extent. Kim Jong Il’s detour diplomacy, by way of South Korea, Japan, and Western countries, represents changes in how North Korea preserves its systemic identity. But repeated failures of the diplomacy have made it difficult to reach any real progress in the relationship between the two adversaries, as seen in the second nuclear crisis that erupted in 2002 (see the concluding chapter).

3

The Party’s Strengthening Discipline and Weakening Efficiency After Kim Jong Il assumed the position of party secretary in charge of organization and propaganda affairs in September 1973, his involvement in party affairs enhanced their organizational strength and discipline. The Workers’ Party of Korea before and after Kim Jong Il’s emergence might have remained the same in that Kim Il Sung continued to exercise monolithic power. However, the WPK after 1973 was different from its previous incarnation in the sense that Kim Il Sung’s power was sustained by his son’s firm grasp of the party’s top-down hierarchy. With his elevated position in the party, Kim Jong Il rigidly implemented two policies: an enhancement of the role of full-time party cadres in local and administrative units and a strengthening of party-life criticism in every unit of the workplace, as well as in the party. This establishment of a strong disciplinary tradition in the party contributed to the maintenance of social control, to some extent, even during crises. It has become an important foundation for the persistence of the existing authority structure centered on the father and the son. Kim Jong Il’s rise to power and the simultaneous establishment of an unprecedented disciplinary tradition in the WPK were closely associated with the reproduction of two reference points of North Korea’s systemic identity (see chapter 1): one was anti-imperialism, including system competition with the South as well as animosity toward the United States, and the other was the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition, which legitimized the monolithic power of Kim Il Sung and a handful of guerrilla comrades. At the particular juncture of Kim Jong Il’s elevation in the political arena, political development in the 57

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South reinforced the North’s systemic identity and then encouraged North Korea to consolidate its own path of political development. The emergence of Kim Jong Il and his grasp of power in the party paralleled the consolidation of authoritarianism led by Park Chung-hee in South Korea.1 While South Korea adopted the 1972 Yushin Constitution, which provided President Park Chung-hee with maximal emergency power, North Korea adopted the 1972 Socialist Constitution, which placed Kim Il Sung in the post of state president and his loyal bureaucrats in key positions of the various state apparatuses. A similar pattern, then, characterized the development of dictatorship in the two Koreas and heightened animosity between them, especially after they had tried but failed to peacefully resolve their hostile relations. In the midst of détente between the United States and China and between Japan and China, the two Koreas issued the July 4 Joint Declaration in 1972, a landmark agreement for both the closure of hostile relations and movement toward a peaceful unification. However, the declaration and the following dialogue were disrupted by an incident in which Kim Dae-jung, the prominent opposition competitor in the 1971 presidential election involving Park, was abducted in Tokyo by members of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) and forcefully repatriated to Seoul in August 1973. For Park, Kim Dae-jung’s stay in Japan and his advocacy there of democracy in South Korea was politically burdensome. But North Korea started to criticize the fact that Yi Hu-rak, the director of the KCIA and, as such, a South Korean representative for the July 4 Joint Declaration, was involved in the covert incident; shortly thereafter, North Korea declared a suspension of the inter-Korean dialogue. The North’s charges against the South immediately triggered a countercharge by the South, and mutual criticism finally led to the deadlock of the inter-Korean dialogue.2 Indeed, the animosity between the two Koreas became even more evident, as North Vietnam defeated its southern counterpart in 1975 and carried out a policy of military adventurism in Cambodia in 1978. As a consequence, the two Koreas not only were again estranged from each other but also legitimated their own paths leading to the consolidation of monolithic power. To understand the developmental path of North Korean politics, specifically the consolidation of the WPK’s power between the mid1970s and the mid-1980s, one should address the following questions: What did Kim Jong Il inherit from Kim Il Sung in the party’s organizational affairs? In particular, how did the party committee and the policy governing full-time cadres make the party’s organizational discipline under junior Kim’s purview different from that under his

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father’s? And was the party with organizational discipline efficient enough to produce policies that would promote systemic viability? These questions are closely related to the discussions surrounding the transformation of party-military relations. Kim Il Sung’s Legacy: From a Mass Party to an Institutionalized Party What characterized the party at the time of Kim Jong Il’s initial rise to power in 1973? In order to explore this matter, let us start with a discussion of the institutionalization of the WPK under Kim Il Sung’s leadership. It is clear that Kim Il Sung’s authority prevailed throughout the society; however, it took him a long time to eradicate opposition and to institutionalize the party on the basis of his own personality and preferences. Envisioning a mass party Preparing to build the party-state, Kim Il Sung quoted Joseph Stalin’s statement that “cadres decide everything,” and thrust the cadre policy into the forefront of issues needing attention.3 The first problem was that trained workers were in extraordinarily short supply. Kim Il Sung himself realized the severity of this problem, saying in June 1946 that “if we have about five-hundred trained cadres, then we can dispatch one hundred to each of the five provinces to solve the shortage problem. But we do not have such trained cadres.”4 Accordingly, he started to establish schools for the educating of bureaucrats who would be appointed to the party, the military, and the cabinet. In February 1946, Pyongyang Institute opened its doors to students who would soon become relatively high-ranking military leaders, and three months later, the Training Institute for Security Officers and the Central Party School began schooling military officers and party cadres, respectively.5 In July of the same year, the Central School for High Ranking Cadre opened for the purpose of educating cabinet officials. It is notable that most students of these institutions were newly recruited not from farmers and working class laborers but from foreign or indigenous Communists. Their factional origins were so diverse that they ranged from Soviet-Koreans and Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla group to Yanan veterans and domestic Communists. From the viewpoint of Kim Il Sung and Soviet Red Army leaders at that juncture, it was not a serious matter what their background might be. The important objective of the education was to rearm these already hardened students with the

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single-hearted spirit of nation building, liquidating their old-group affiliations as much as possible. With the exception of that of the Soviet-Koreans, the knowledge level of these students was so low as to exclude comprehension of even the basic notions of Marxism-Leninism. For instance, these “trained” cadres could not understand the elementary implications of the proletariat and hegemony, as Kim Il Sung once noted.6 Moreover, most students, with the exception of the soldiers belonging to the Yanan faction, were unable to read Chinese characters. This was unusual for Koreans, who, regardless of family background, normally became literate in Chinese through their early-childhood study of classical Chinese literature. Because the returnees and underground Communists had participated, early on, in the resistance movement against Japanese colonialism, they found that they had been deprived of a chance to study Chinese characters. Given this situation, instructors were unable to teach them any theoretical content of Marxist-Leninist doctrines. Consequently, for the five years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Korean War, the most salient political task for Kim Il Sung and his associates was to build a mass party. Of course, the students of the early educational institutions were supposed to play a leading role in this party. It is, however, apparent that the difficult procedures leading to party membership interfered with the building of a mass party. Despite his advantageous political status, which derived in large part from the support of the Red Army, Kim Il Sung was not in full command of party affairs. As Lee Jong-suk has aptly noted, Kim Il Sung’s power before the Korean War “looked solid” but “remained unsolidified” in the party.7 At that time, the party’s organizational matters were in the hands of the Soviet-Koreans, most of whom were first- or second-generation Korean immigrants residing in the Russian Far East and later relocated to Central Asia. The Soviet-Koreans came from Russian territory, as did Kim’s partisan group, but the former political group was not so cohesive as the latter. The Soviet-Koreans consisted of experienced Soviet party cadres or rank-and-file officials; therefore, they were already familiar with the ins and outs of documentation and procedures, a skill that turned out to be a great advantage. At the same time, they had been conscripted by Soviet authorities and sent to Pyongyang, so there was no concrete collective identity among them. At any rate, since Kim’s partisan group and the Yanan faction consisted of veterans and guerrillas, the Soviet-Koreans alone had a relatively rich pool of Communists who were acquainted not only with Leninist party principles but also with the establishment of a party hierarchy and membership affairs.

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Among the Soviet-Koreans, HÆ Ka-i—Aleksei Ivanovich Hegai was his Russian name—was the most prominent leader and was actually responsible for the conscription and the discipline of the party members. Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on North Korean affairs, described HÆ as a “forgotten founding father” of the WPK—“forgotten” because of his mysterious death in 1953, a presumable assassination by Kim’s faction. HÆ had survived poverty in childhood and adolescence and experienced the Soviets’ severe persecution of minority cadres during Stalin’s Great Purges before rising to the position of deputy party secretary at the construction works of the Farhad hydroelectric power station near Tashkent in 1943.8 After entering Pyongyang, the Red Army supported HÆ’s rapid promotion to first secretary, the party’s second-highest position, for the institutionalization of the newly forming party’s rules and regulations. Owing to his background and experiences, he immediately received the nickname “professor of party affairs,” which has two different connotations, one being a compliment to his encyclopedic knowledge and the other being a reference to stiffness in his management style. In fact, Kim Il Sung and HÆ Ka-i disagreed with each other on the degree of strictness that should characterize the acceptance process governing party membership. In order to expand the party, Kim maintained that, in the selecting of party members, preferential leniency should be granted to uneducated workers. However, following the established tradition in the Soviet Union’s party membership, HÆ threatened Kim’s optimistic embrace of a mass party and a united front by discriminating on the basis of social background, that is, by favoring the working class, and by following meticulous procedures for the identification of a candidate’s acquaintance with revolutionary theories and the candidate’s past careers. Such friction between Kim and HÆ finally developed into the former’s attack against the latter during the Korean War.9 Realization of a mass party In the political sphere, the Korean War turned the tide in favor of Kim Il Sung, who gained more power in the party than he had had before the war’s start. In 1951, HÆ Ka-i was accused by Kim of building an elitist party and was demoted from his prestigious position of first secretary of the central party to the position of deputy prime minister of the cabinet. Kim’s provocation of this serious assault centered on the “party ID cards controversy,” in which HÆ had maintained strict rules for the reentry into the party of those previous members who had lost their membership cards during the North Korean army’s

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retreat.10 Without doubt, his demotion counterbalanced the power in the party by providing Kim with more political weight. Moreover, Kim was able to achieve his objective of a mass party. From June 1950 to December 1952, some 450,000 members were newly recruited by the party. Given that the period witnessed an extraordinary number of human casualties, it is surprising that this massive recruitment effort yielded such an impressive total. And given the extraordinary number of new recruits, it should come as no surprise that the educational level of the new members was poor—indeed, half of these recruits were illiterate.11 At any rate, a generalized version of Kim Il Sung’s ideal of a mass party surfaced during the war, and a more refined version took root after the demotion of his rival, HÆ Ka-i. Kim’s assault against Communists of southern origin—who had no foreign supporter in the domestic political struggle—brought about a successful expansion of his power in the party. By attributing the failure of the war to the Communists of southern origin, Kim gradually, and successfully, phased out prominent figures of the Workers’ Party of South Korea. But the purge of HÆ, the head of the Soviet-Koreans, was a precious victory to Kim, because Kim could now look forward to the institutionalization of his own mass party. Institutionalization of the party committee Meanwhile, Kim Il Sung attempted to institutionalize the party organization in the military. Even before the war, there had existed a political organization in the armed forces, the so-called Cultural Bureau. In July 1950, a month after the war broke out, the Cultural Bureau was instructed to establish the Council of Party Members at the low level of military units. The bureau’s leadership intended to select and utilize the core party members of each unit for the swift implementation of military orders. Also, the bureau made a secret order that encouraged the bureau cadres at the level of combat units to recruit model soldiers into the party in order to stimulate morale during the war.12 However, it was Kim Il Sung’s concluding speech at the Political Committee meeting in October 1950 that generated momentum for the organizational shift in the military. Following his instructions, the Political Commission was established in the Defense Ministry, and a political division was installed in every unit. It is generally accepted that in the Leninist tradition, the military is led by the party, and it was in the war period that this tradition became established in North Korea.13

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It was only after the war that the party’s control over the military and workplaces was institutionalized. The institutionalization, publicly termed the “party’s guidance” in North Korea, was achieved by the establishment of a party committee in every party unit. This expression, “party’s guidance,” literally meant that a party unit, whether in the military or in the workplace, guides the overall direction of the affiliated organization’s operation. It is remarkable that the expression referred not to unilateral surveillance or supervision but to an active consultation and engagement with members of the organization.14 This method of guidance for the penetration into individuals occupying the lower social strata was implemented in the context of the “revolutionary mass line.” The party’s guidance needed an institutional mechanism, the party committee, as a nonstanding organization. The party committee emphasized a collective leadership in which not only party cadres or political officers but also managerial staff and top engineers at the production workplace or commanders in the military participated. For the purpose of collective leadership, the party committee was also required to include among its ranks enthusiastic model workers who had party membership. Despite the existence of the party committee in the previous period, Kim Il Sung, who was distressed by the war but politically successful because of it, set off on a new initiative to disseminate this institution throughout North Korean society, right after the Central Committee meeting held in March 1954. There were two reasons for his initiative. The first reason was the desire to avoid errors caused by managers’ monopolization of the decision-making function in factories and enterprises. Pointing out the problems arising from the rule-of-thumb estimates made by managers in production processes, the distribution of labor, and the design of work schedules, Kim Il Sung stressed the importance of collective efforts to correct routine mistakes. He was quoted as saying, “In the factories, mines, fisheries, and forests supervised by such managers, a finger-counting method still prevails in the production process. There are some cases in which [with the maldistribution of manpower] twenty workers cheer the completion of a certain task that took them four or five hours, a task that actually requires only one worker for one full day. Likewise, one hundred workers hurrah the completion of one task that took them one day, a task that can be finished by five to six workers in two or three days.”15 Owing to the seriousness of the war-torn economy and the persistence of labor shortages, the effective mobilization and exploitation of the labor force was one of the most significant tasks for the economic recovery, and to Kim, the

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party committee was a tool with which his leadership could avert managerial mistakes. The second reason was to clarify the party secretary’s responsibilities for daily production affairs through the institution of the party committee, where the manager and core staff would articulate constructive inputs in the decision-making process.16 After Kim Il Sung made on-spot guidance tours at Ch’Ængsan-ri Collective Farm and Daean Electrical Factory in 1960 and 1961, respectively, the institution of the party committee in workplaces spread widely. While emphasizing the importance of the revolutionary mass line, these workplaces became the model for the integration of party cadres, managerial officials, technicians, and workers through the party committee. The party’s guidance through the party committee was also applied to the Korean People’s Army. Special references were made to it in Kim Il Sung’s speech for the tenth anniversary of the KPA on February 8 and in his concluding speech at the Central Committee of the WPK on March 8, 1958.17 Not only the Defense Ministry but also every corps, division, and regiment came to have a party committee. As a result, commanders of the corps and divisions and political officers—who had participated in neither party meetings nor party-life criticism meetings—were now required to be present at the party committee meetings. The party committees in the military were designed for the incorporation of the commandership into the party’s organizational guidance and replaced the previously simple supervisory role of the party unit over the corresponding combat unit. But a significant reason for the introduction of the committee in the military during the late 1950s was to check the unleashed power of the Political Commission over the lower party units in the military, specifically Ch’oe Chong-hak’s personal influence. As head of the Political Commission, Ch’oe dominated the party organization in the KPA through a vertical line of instructions and reports, so that it appeared that the party in the military was partly independent from the WPK.18 Such a phenomenon was intolerable both to those who subscribed to the Leninist tradition of the party-military relationship and to Kim Il Sung himself. The institution of the party committee might have been the most effective solution to this problem, because the committee consisted of, from one end, political officers and, from the other, commanders and high-ranking military officers, all of whom could voice practical ideas, if not conflicting interests, within the boundaries of the central party’s policy guidelines. That is, the party committee blocked the concentration of hierarchical political power in the military by

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permitting vertical interactions, even if within a limited scope, between political officers and combat commanders. Kim Jong Il and Organizational Changes After assuming the position of party secretary in charge of organization and propaganda in 1973, Kim Jong Il prioritized the enhancing of organizational discipline, which he hoped would lead to organizational renovation and reinforced ideological indoctrination. Since 1974, organizational penetration into every aspect of society has become a tradition belonging to the WPK. As seen in a Nodong Sinmun article on August 5, 1974, instructions from the “party center”—meaning Kim Jong Il, at that time—had become guidelines for the organizational life of party members.19 Furthermore, the party committee, as a formal collective decision-making body, has functioned to integrate political and production affairs into workplaces. One of the most distinctive legacies passed down from Kim Il Sung might be the institutionalization of party committees, later strengthened by Kim Jong Il for various political considerations, especially for the leadership’s dissemination of his father’s ideas and for the deepening of the party’s social control. It is noteworthy that the task of strengthening the party’s organizational discipline came to be undertaken in the midst of the official establishment of the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition in North Korean society. Since 1974, this tradition has been practiced faithfully and has constituted the most widespread work model in North Korea. The anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition has meant, especially in the workplace, that party cadres should patronize, as it were, the laypeople in order to stimulate their political awareness and to teach them revolutionary loyalty, while breaking old ritual and hierarchical norms. This newly emphasized work method was not so different from that of the Ch’Ængsan-ri Method, which originated from Kim Il Sung’s visit, in February 1960, to the collective farm located in KangsÆ County of South P’yÆngan Province. The Ch’Ængsan-ri Method is a work method that stresses the party cadres’ teaching of and learning from workers in the latter’s workplaces.20 But with the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition, North Korean propaganda presented a more detailed scheme of the method. The Nodong Sinmun editorial on June 8, 1974, propagated the message that party cadres should practice the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition by working in a lower unit for “five days” and by preparing follow-up work at the office for “two days.” Another editorial, published on July 15, stated that there should be “no exception” to the

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practice of the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition, which was now interpreted as an instrument for the full implementation of Kim Il Sung’s instructions and the party’s guidance. Given that the guerrilla tradition was celebrated in the theater in terms of revolutionary musical operas by Kim Jong Il in the early 1970s, it makes sense that tradition became the model method that every workplace had to follow. Full-time party cadres The role of full-time party cadres became more important than ever before. A full-time party cadre is a professional career party bureaucrat who is appointed by either the headquarters in Pyongyang or provincial parties and who receives a salary from the party regardless of the organizational affiliation. Full-time party cadres are different from plain party members, who simply assist in party-related works and who carry out their occupational duties almost exclusively in their own workplace, which pays their salaries. The cadres are accountable to the headquarters, either of the central party or the provincial party, instead of to their workplace. (There is little reason to call the professional party cadres who work in the WPK headquarters full-time appointments. Their main job is obviously to deal with party affairs such as personnel, organization, propaganda, surveillance, and industrial policy. Therefore, in this context, the term full-time party cadres refers to career party bureaucrats who serve in local party units or in “nonparty workplaces”—the administrative, economic, and industrial sectors—where they act as a microcosm of the central party.) Whatever their affiliation may be, their full-time duties are confined to party affairs alone. Whatever their rank may be, full-time party cadres are involved in the organizing of party committee meetings and the disciplining of ordinary workers as well as of other regular and candidate party members in the workplace. In this respect, their status is very different from that of not only regular administrators, workers, and farmers but also of plain party members belonging to the same workplaces. Full-time party cadres existed even before Kim Jong Il’s political emergence. County party secretaries and elementary party secretaries were appointed only after careful investigation of their family backgrounds and career performances. These thorough investigations were necessary for the higher party organizations, because they were located at the nodal point from which the decisions made by top party leaders were transmitted to the real production levels of society— administrative units, collective farms, and state-owned enterprises and factories. While preserving this tradition of careful background exami-

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nations, Kim Jong Il reinforced the selection of all the full-time party cadres. Their family and ideological profiles were investigated by the Organization and Guidance Department and then reviewed by the Secretariat of the WPK.21 At any rate, the full-time party cadres became the core of the party unit, particularly in nonparty workplaces. They were loyal to the party and voiced their commitment to the official ideology of Chuch’e. They were disciplined and competent in comparison to old cadres. From the perspective of the authority structure of the partystate, the policy governing the hiring and managing of full-time party cadres brought about several tangible results. Above all, by fostering the formal role of party committees, the role of the cadres in these committees came to be central in the guiding and implementing of the central party’s policy line. Previously, there had existed frequent informalities characterizing the party secretary’s predominant influence over the workplace—informalities that were due to the status of party committees as nonstanding organizations. For instance, the party secretary had exercised arbitrary power over the managerial work of factories, despite formal divisions of labor between the party secretary and the manager. However, with the increasing participation of fulltime party cadres in the party affairs of workplaces since Kim Jong Il’s rise to power in the party, the formal role of the party committee as a collective body was also emphasized, although this did not give rise to a sensible change in the party’s prevalence of power over managerial offices. The full-time party cadres instigated a new trend in the organizational life of workers as well as of party members. In the old days, the weak party organization had encouraged flimsy distinctions between the roles of party cadres and those of administrative officials in the cabinet, commanders in the military, and managers in factories and enterprises. This situation had interfered with the party’s authority, particularly in disciplinary affairs. This was evident in the workplaces, where party-related tasks were assisted by managerial workers. Later, the implementation of the full-time party cadre policy created a clear distinction between party affairs and managerial affairs, and more importantly, party-life criticism meetings became a significant instrument for the disciplinary work in every workplace. Organizational renovation Kim Jong Il’s attempt to implement the full-time party cadre policy paralleled the organizational renovation in state apparatuses. The party

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unit belonging to the State Council (that is, the cabinet) underwent a change in mid-1974. Criticizing the ministers, vice-ministers, and highranking bureaucrats of the State Council for their neglect of disciplinary education, Kim gave the order that full-time party cadres who are sent from the central party should completely control the disciplinary training of the state bureaucrats. According to him, the State Council was not a production workplace but an institution centered on administrative work, so that the main job of the party unit residing there should concern not the guidance of policy issues but the supervision of high-ranking officials’ organizational life.22 This suggests that there was a special aspect of the party unit’s role in the State Council and, more generally, in state apparatuses. Beforehand, the major tasks of the party unit had been both the supervision of organizational affairs and the guided implementation of the central party’s policy principles in the institution to which the unit belonged.23 But Kim now placed greater emphasis on the party unit’s role in organizational affairs than on its role in policy issue guidance. At any rate, the party settled on strict disciplinary activity in the State Council. The disciplinary activity included weekly party-life criticism, Tuesday studies, Wednesday lectures, Friday work, Saturday studies, and two hours of daily study. Without doubt, the disciplinary activity has been conducted by the full-time party cadres. At the same time, Kim initiated the renovation of the party hierarchies corresponding to the administrative hierarchies of the State Council. In the past, a lower-level administration often had a party unit whose size and level paralleled the size and level of party units belonging to higher-level administrations. For instance, a committee or a ministry that had several bureaus retained an elementary party committee, whereas a bureau with a group of manual workers for dealing with resource materials had an elementary party committee of the same size. But now, the hierarchical inconsistency was corrected, and party units came to parallel administrative orders. Kim Jong Il’s adhesion to the party’s organizational renovation was tantamount to a life-and-death struggle, so he ordered the organization department of every party committee in the provinces, cities, and counties to initiate such organizational missions as party-life criticism and ideological education and to portray them as principal duties in the lives of party members. This measure had to be implemented “even if the heavens split open,” as Kim put it.24 Consequently, the organizational discipline of the party has indeed strengthened since the mid-1970s. The meetings for party-life criticism have become weekly events in every party cell. However, compared to the previous monthly

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practice, the new meeting is a burdensome responsibility for the bureaucrats and the workers who, having party membership, have been obliged to attend weekly party meetings.25 It is noteworthy that as the party’s disciplinary work has become the most significant element of party affairs, the power of the party’s full-time cadres has strengthened. This has also been true in the military, so that political officers have come to exercise more power than before. Kim Jong Il’s other initiative for the renovation of the party took place at the workplace level. Included in the composition of workplace-based party committees were model workers with party membership as well as full-time party cadres and managerial officials. This diversification of sorts was due to the belief that managerial officials should be aware of production processes and working conditions and should be trained for so-called revolutionizing and working-classization in the workplace. The movement of learning from model workers had started in the mid-1960s, but it has inspired renewed interest since the early 1970s. Because revolutionary fanaticism had apparently faded away in the wake of three decades of socialist consolidation, the party under Kim Jong Il’s influence called new attention to the brainwashing of high-ranking bureaucrats. This movement has required administrative officials to extol the virtues of the slogan “revolutionizing and working-classization” and to participate, either voluntarily or by force, in labor-intensive workplaces such as mines, steel mills, collective farms, and factories. The duration of an official’s residence at one of these camps ranges from one month to one year. And back in the workplace, model workers with party membership are now mobilized, as the full-time party cadres have been, to create a milieu of revolutionary fervor, especially targeting old party members. Innovations in the party in the early 1970s were aimed at an enhancement of organizational discipline and hierarchical principles that would revitalize socialist moral commitment among old party members and managerial officials. Party-Life Criticism as a Disciplinary Instrument In the preservation of North Korea’s existing party-state, party-life criticism has been the essential element. This regular organizational exercise has allowed the party to scrutinize its members’ every activity. As a practice, party-life criticism is not unique to North Korea but universal to all socialist systems. And yet, the practice in North Korea was distinctive in content and intensity. First, the content has included references not only to the socialist prioritization of public goods but

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also to the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition and anti-imperialism. At the end of the 1960s, the personality cult of Kim Il Sung became another significant part of the content. As a document, the “Ten Principles for the Establishment of the Chuch’e Idea” is the quintessential summary of this personality cult. When examining their own personal behavior and criticizing others’ wrongdoings and mistakes, all participants in party-life criticism should refer to these ten principles. The Nodong Sinmun editorial of February 18, 1974, noted that “the spirit of anti-Japanese guerrillas reveals that there is no right to die before the full completion of the Great Leader’s instructions,” so that it is clear that all activities related to party-life are founded on the personality cult of Kim Il Sung.26 Second, the organizational practice is intense in the sense that it starts with weekly meetings that follow strict rules. For instance, reports to higher units are mandatory, and violations of this rule result in severe penalties. The above distinctive features surfaced as Kim Jong Il began to amass power in the party in the early 1970s. The elementary party unit is a real front unit for the guidance of production, training, and education, as well as of the quarterly partylife criticism itself.27 An elementary party unit may be established in the administrative unit ri (subunit of the county), or battalion in the military, or a sizable state-owned enterprise that consists of more than thirty-one party members. A cautionary note should be sounded at the outset. Although the defense and foreign ministries occupy the same ministerial level, the party unit of the one is different from that of the other, both in size and in organizational structure. Above all, the military has more party members than does the diplomatic apparatus. All military officers are party members, since they are the elite in North Korean society in terms of their family background and social achievement. Also, a significant percentage of soldiers are either party members or candidates for membership. Furthermore, the Defense Ministry has its own party organization, the Political Commission, which has various departments and functions quite similar to the center of the WPK. While the daily affairs of the Political Commission receive their instructions from the Organization and Guidance Department of the WPK, the former deals with corresponding party works in the military: appointments, ideological education, party-life criticism, and so on. In North Korea, only a few institutions—the Defense Ministry, the Railroads Ministry, and the People’s Safety Ministry—feature political commissions, whereas other institutions and workplaces have no political commission system and, instead, host dispatched full-time party cadres. In any event, just as the party operates in relation to the political system as a whole, so the Political Commission

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operates in relation to the military as a whole. Likewise, just as the full-time party cadres operate in relation to administrative units and workplaces in society, so the political officers operate in relation to the administrative and combat units in the military. The case of the External Affairs Bureau of the Defense Ministry Every military-unit level—in the army, that means from the corps, infantry division, regiment, and battalion to the company—has a corresponding party unit. For example, a battalion has an elementary party unit, whereas a company has a party cell, the lowest and smallest party organization. The Political Commission of the Defense Ministry controls various levels of party units, and in turn, party units are in charge of the practical management of their corresponding party committees, a nonstanding formal organization for collective leadership. In the headquarters of the Defense Ministry, there are several bureaus, each of which has an elementary party unit. Each bureau with officers and soldiers working for administrative affairs contains an elementary party unit—the same level that affiliates with a combat battalion. Having no other command and administrative functions, the secretary and the deputy secretaries of each elementary party unit are political officers specializing solely in party affairs. In the External Affairs Bureau in the Defense Ministry, the elementary party unit consists of an elementary party secretary (colonel, political officer) and two deputy secretaries in charge of organization and propaganda, respectively (lieutenant colonel, political officers). With these political officers as core members, altogether thirteen members compose an elementary party committee. This means that in the elementary party committee, there are, in addition to political officers, commanding officers—the bureau commander (brigadier general), two deputy commanders of the bureau, and seven department chiefs (colonels). The elementary party committee is a formal organization that discusses all the administrative works related to the military’s overall external affairs and that superintends disciplinary affairs in the bureau itself. Because the elementary party committee cannot be frequently summoned, the elementary party executive committee deals with personnel matters and disciplinary punishment. The elementary party executive committee, whose operations are an abbreviated form of the operations typical of the elementary party committee, deals with issues requiring informality, secrecy, and concentration. In the case of the External Affairs Bureau, the elementary party executive committee includes the elementary party secretary, two deputy secretaries, a

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bureau commander, two deputy commanders of the bureau, and a few core department chiefs. There are three types of party-life criticism in the military in general: every other day, weekly, and quarterly types. (The yearly meeting is simply the fourth quarterly meeting.) The every other day party-life criticism is applied to the art-related party members—those belonging to military band units and to propaganda and agitation units—and is meant to prevent these units from being contaminated by ideological liberalism.28 The weekly party-life criticism is a feature of every party cell and is meant to promote the political education of party members at the company level. The quarterly party-life criticism takes place at the elementary party unit, and is associated with the combat battalion level. Let us examine the party-life criticism in the External Affairs Bureau that deals with military exchanges with other socialist countries.29 Party members of each department of the bureau compose a party cell that is usually led by the cell secretary, a position that is concurrently occupied by the deputy chief of a department in the bureau. This means that the secretary of the party cell is not a political officer. At the party cell’s weekly party-life criticism, each member should engage in self-criticism for a few minutes and is required to encourage mutual criticism among, and of, others. The party-life criticism takes place on Saturday mornings for less than twenty minutes. In proceeding with the self-criticism, each participant is expected to quote the Ten Principles for the Establishment of the Chuch’e Idea and to criticize his or her own errors in front of others. The meeting ends with the cell secretary’s concluding remarks concerning these matters. From time to time, members of the elementary party’s executive committee come down to the party cell’s weekly criticism in order to supervise and guide it. Sometimes, political officers sent from the Political Commission of the Defense Ministry attend the weekly criticism meeting to scrutinize participants’ attitudes toward the criticism and to compile a report for the commission. The quarterly party-life criticism takes place in the general assembly of the elementary party committee at the External Affairs Bureau level. This quarterly criticism meeting is a formally arranged and carefully previewed event, in which seven or eight political officers prepare and read scripts concerning self-criticism and mutual criticism with others in advance. The elementary party secretary, as a political officer, prepares the procedure two weeks before the meeting. The party secretary reads all the documents and makes corrections; furthermore, he or she sometimes summons, well in

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advance of the quarterly criticism meeting, the elementary party executive committee for a discussion about the agenda and procedures. The quarterly party-life criticism takes three or four hours and is normally held on Sunday. The quarterly party-life criticism starts with the selection of a presiding committee for the meeting itself. The presiding committee is a temporary body that is different from the elementary party’s executive committee. The presiding committee consists of the party secretary, deputy party secretaries, the commander of the bureau, and an outside observer. The outside members are usually political officers of the Political Commission. For instance, in the quarterly party-life criticism, either the director (lieutenant general) or the assistant director (major general) of the Organization Department of the Political Commission in the Defense Ministry participates as an outside observer. After the selection of the presiding committee, the party-life criticism begins with the reading of both the Ten Principles for the Establishment of the Chuch’e Idea and the party secretary’s report. The main content of the report consists of errors and problems regarding the party members themselves and the management of the party organization in the past quarter. In principle, officers are the main object of self-criticism and mutual criticism, but sometimes soldiers who have committed serious errors are involved. The officers or soldiers who engage in self-criticism do not have the right to criticize others, a procedure that differentiates the quarterly meeting from the weekly meeting. The elementary party secretary punishes offenders by handing out disciplinary penalties such as cautions, warnings, serious warnings, and expulsions from the party, depending on the severity of the error. Those who suffer disciplinary penalties or expulsion from the party may lose a chance at promotion and upward mobility and forfeit the privilege of business travel abroad. In the Defense Ministry, the political officers rarely engage in self-criticism in front of soldiers. At the corps and infantry division levels, the political department—that is, the party unit—has enough political officers in number to compose cells and an elementary party unit where they hold their own party-life criticism meetings. The political officers working at the regiment and battalion levels practice their party-life criticism at the elementary party committee meetings instead of at the regular party-life criticism meetings, which both officers and soldiers attend. This shows that the status of political officers is privileged and that their party-related responsibilities in the military are considered prestigious.

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The case of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs In the case of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, party organization is under the supervision of the central party but belongs to the party organization of an administrative unit, that is, the party committee of the Central District in Pyongyang. The party organization of the ministry, in size, is an elementary party unit, which does not have the function of party membership registration that both the district party unit and the county party unit have. In other words, the party organization of the Foreign Ministry is a lower party unit than either the district party in major cities or the county party. Following Kim Jong Il’s instructions that the central party should dispatch full-time party cadres to the party units above the elementary party level of the state apparatuses, the party unit in the Foreign Ministry has maintained one party secretary and at least two deputy party secretaries in charge of organization and propaganda affairs. In addition, the Foreign Ministry party unit has four or five low-ranking full-time party cadres in the organization and propaganda departments. The executive elementary party committee consists of the party secretary, two deputy party secretaries, the foreign minister, the first vice-minister, a few viceministers, a few core bureau directors, the head of the ministry unit of the Socialist Youth League (now the Kim Il Sung Youth League), and the head of the ministry unit of the Trade Union. The elementary party committee—which is more formal than the executive committee but nonstanding in its status—includes, in addition to members of the executive committee, other vice-ministers and bureau directors who are not members of the executive committee. Under the elementary party unit, there are several party cells, each of which is a party unit of each bureau of the ministry. The secretary of the party cell is selected from the bureau’s deputy directors and some core department chiefs, who are not full-time party cadres but career diplomats. The major task of the ministry’s party unit is to guide the partylife criticism meetings and to control the organizational activities of the diplomats and other employees, most of whom are party members owing to their privileged family background. As in the Defense Ministry, the party-life criticism meetings in the Foreign Ministry occur weekly, monthly, and quarterly (with the yearly concluding meeting replacing the fourth quarterly meeting). In the case of the Foreign Ministry, the weekly criticism meeting takes place on the first hour of the Monday workday. It begins with quotations from Kim Il Sung’s and Kim Jong Il’s instructions and then moves on to participants’ selfcriticism, which reflects on past organizational errors and personal

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mistakes and analyzes ideological deficiencies. The meeting concludes with resolutions. Because the meeting occurs at the bureau level, the mutual criticism among the bureau members, in reality, is not so serious, even though it is formally required. In contrast, the quarterly party-life criticism meeting, which occurs at the ministry’s elementary party level, generates a very strict and gloomy mood, according to HyÆn SÆng-il, a former North Korean diplomat who later found asylum in South Korea.30 The party secretary orchestrates the meeting by ordering cell party secretaries to scrutinize the scripted self-criticism and mutual criticism concerning violations of organizational norms and rules. Also, the party secretary treats harshly the accidents reported from other agencies, such as the People’s Safety Ministry (PSM) and the State Security Agency (SSA). At the self-criticism and mutual criticism sessions, participants and designated discussants are expected to point out faults and errors by following the principle that “Sharpness is a virtue, whereas mercy is a vice.” It is said that the latter principle is based on Kim Jong Il’s own remarks, as noted in the WPK’s theoretical journal, Ku˘lloja, in April 1974: “Party cadres should establish a strict tradition of criticism of organizational life, as the ‘party center’ [apparently meaning Kim Jong Il] presented, and should correct their wrongdoing and mistakes not in a peaceful atmosphere but through sharp mutual criticism and selfcriticism.”31 Because of the seriousness of the criticism, it is said that the quarterly party-life criticism meeting at the elementary party level often takes more than a day.32 The examples of the two ministries show that the central party’s control over state apparatuses—namely, the party’s guidance—operates not simply through a supervised implementation of the party’s guidelines but by permeating every unit and every rank. By leading party-life criticism, full-time party cadres incorporate officers, soldiers, diplomats, and other state employees into the party’s organizational leadership. This process differs from that of the 1960s, when leeway in party-life criticism was granted to high-ranking officials such as ministers, vice-ministers, commanders, division chiefs, and so on. The Declining Efficiency of the Party In the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, the party won discipline owing to organizational and disciplinary renovations. This achievement was well depicted in an article in Ku˘lloja in May 1985 entitled “Discipline Is the Life of the Party,” which states that “[t]he legitimacy and life of the ideological theory and policies of our

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party are already completely proved by the revolutionary practices of the 1970s and 1980s.” But it is an exaggeration to say that the strengthening of discipline has guaranteed the efficient operation of the socialist system. Discipline is not the same as efficiency. The emphasis on discipline has increased the degree of rigidness characterizing the interactions between party cadres and bureaucrats or workers. The discipline has fostered an atmosphere in which ritual phrases of the Chuch’e idea are aired in the auditorium during party-life criticism meetings. It is a difficult task to identify the degree to which party members have internalized the outward manifestations of discipline and have accepted as true the Chuch’e idea. No doubt the public and private suppression of both free speech and personal preferences have contributed to the disguising of people’s genuine wishes and inclinations. “Preference falsification”—to use Timur Kuran’s term—has probably prevailed.33 There is some evidence of the inefficient operation of disciplined party organizations in workplaces, and some of this evidence predates the plunge of party morale during the famine in the 1990s. A limitation revealed itself, for instance, with regard to the party committee’s formal role as a collective decision-making body charged with overseeing efficient administration and production as well as with leading party-life criticism meetings. The party committee meetings became huge ceremonial occasions that eventually combined full-time party cadres and top managerial officials with model party-member workers and leaders of the Socialist Youth League and the Trade Union. Because the daily affairs and party-life works were prepared by the full-time cadres, the collective body actually was nothing but a rubberstamp organization following the texts that they had been furnished with. This was faciliated by the fact that the party committee is a nonstanding body. Therefore, the role of the collective body became— and continues to be—a mere formality. The institution of the party committee blurred the rights and the duties of party cadres with those of administrative or managerial officials. On the one hand, the party leaders exercised maximum power in an informal way as well as at the formal meetings of party committees and executive party committees.34 In addition to supervising the implementation of the central party’s policy guidelines, the party leaders engaged in every single process and personal affair in the workplace. Through this informal mechanism, they subjugated the administrative and managerial officials who were officially responsible for the operation of state apparatuses, enterprises, and factories. That is, because party cadres could informally exercise their power in

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an organization, they often escaped the formal responsibilities of guiding and facilitating administrative and production affairs.35 On the other hand, administrative and managerial officials who were deprived of their role and power by party leaders came to surrender their formal rights and duties in the administrative and managerial processes. The less power they had in the party committees’ formal meetings, the more they were reluctant to present creative and adventurous ideas.36 For the officials, it was safe to repeatedly refer to the ideological doctrine, the Chuch’e idea. To adhere to its precepts signified loyalty to the party and to the existing system, even if neither was innovative or creative. In this way, both party cadres and administrative or managerial officials indeed conflated their rights and duties and, furthermore, attempted to avoid responsibility for a negative result, such as a failure to fulfill a production quota or an administrative duty. In this unclear system of responsibilities, the collective leadership of the party committee apparently yielded to moral hazard. Proof of the party organization’s inefficient operation has flowed from the work-team movement of the Three Great Revolutions, which was launched in the areas of thought, technology, and culture in 1974.37 The primary task of the work-team movement was to use organizational strength in order to enhance the personality cult of Kim Il Sung and to disseminate his ideas throughout the country. But, another important task was to eliminate the bureaucratic pathology plaguing the party. The launch of the work-team movement of the Three Great Revolutions immediately followed Kim Jong Il’s attempt to renovate party organization and to advance discipline. It seems that the embarkation of the work-team movement was a repercussion of various bureaucratic pathologies. The first was the structural problem of funneling effect, which means that central party’s intentions were filtered out in the form of instructions at the various levels of the party hierarchy and that, at the party’s lower levels, the implementation of these instructions resembled only slightly the original intentions. This pathology was not unique to North Korea but is a normal problem afflicting bureaucracies in general. Nevertheless, in North Korea, the bureaucratism, formalism, empiricism, and prudentialism of old party cadres were harshly criticized by the work teams of the Three Great Revolutions. The second bureaucratic pathology was the behavioral problem of bureaucratic deviance. Bureaucratic deviance has typically appeared as corruption, such as bribes and embezzlement. The third bureaucratic pathology, and the most important was the competency trap. As March and Olsen have noted, an institution that falls prey to the

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competency trap tends to follow the path to which it has become accustomed, even though a more efficient and effective path might be available.38 In their strict disciplinary atmosphere, North Korean bureaucrats have tended to be risk averse, passive, and inactive, following a concealed behavior rule, according to which “The Leftist error is safer than the rightist one.”39 Any person who commits a rightist error would likely be stigmatized as an opportunist, a traitor, a bourgeois element, and a defeatist, whereas a person who commits a leftist error would survive in a political sense.40 The central party and Kim Jong Il recognized these pathological problems, and immediately thereafter, the work teams began their surveillance of party cadres and state officials. The work teams were composed of young college graduates, college students, and party cadres and received their instructions chiefly from the Department of the Work Teams of the Three Great Revolutions, which was part of the WPK. In this respect, the work teams’ cure for bureaucratic pathology may fall into the “external remedial” category, as Harry Harding puts it.41 Just as their nicknames—“royal guards” and “commandos” of the party—indicate, the work teams resided in every workplace so as to send review reports to party headquarters through a separate reporting channel. The reports included assessments on both the wrongdoings and the accomplishments of party cadres. The party cadres were responsible for basic social control, and the work-team movement was a layer of the control mechanism for the targeted supervision of the party organization. The fact that the multilayered control mechanism was necessary for Kim Jong Il and the WPK in the 1970s indicates that even the most rigorous party discipline could not improve the overall efficiency of the operation of the party-state. The reach of the work teams’ power peaked in the second half of the 1970s. In a sense, their power came to exceed that of party cadres. After all, Kim Jong Il ordered workteam members to update him on their findings so that he could check the extent to which the party’s guidelines had penetrated the lower social strata.42 Notably, the control capacity of the work teams has significantly declined since the second half of the 1980s. Even though bureaucratic deviance grew so severe that it derailed the normal operations of the official economy, there is no evidence that the Three Great Revolutions’ work-team movement responded to the problem effectively. In fact, members of the work teams themselves were selfinterestedly participating in corrupt practices, frequently colluding with party cadres and ignoring strict moral codes of conduct. This phenomenon stands in stark contrast with the original intentions underlying

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the establishment of work teams. As a consequence, the party abolished the work teams in the mid-1990s, and this can be verified by the fact that the official propaganda has not mentioned the activities of the work teams since 1996. Kim Jong Il himself acknowledged publicly the problem of discipline per se in 1984, that is, a decade after he had launched the organizational renovation of the party. In a letter sent to cadres of the central party, Kim severely criticized bureaucrats of the State Council for cringing before higher officials and for seeking personal favors from the upper ranks. He noted that “this improper behavior comes from sectarianism that should be attributed to the lack of correct organizational viewpoints.”43 According to him, if the organizational principle were established in the State Council, bureaucrats should respond by following the principle but not by subordinating themselves to superiors. At any rate, from the assessment made by Kim himself, it seems that the original objective of the organizational discipline was not so satisfactory. Dual Implications Owing to strict party-life criticism meetings led by full-time party cadres, the party established a disciplinary tradition of unprecedented strength in the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. The failure of the first attempt to realize inter-Korean reconciliation in the early 1970s contributed to the consolidation of monolithic authority structures in both the North and the South. In North Korea, confrontations with and hostility toward the South encouraged the evolution of a unique party-state whereby Kim Il Sung and his Chuch’e idea were extolled. In this political situation, the party committee under Kim Jong Il’s rule was the most useful institutional mechanism for the idolization of Kim and the expansion of his power in party affairs. However, the disciplinary tradition was not accompanied by efficiency in the party-state’s general operations. Despite the enhanced organizational discipline created by party-life criticism meetings, the party was unable to play a guiding role in the improvement of administrative efficiency. Furthermore, despite the widespread appearance in the party organ Nodong Sinmun and in Ku˘lloja during the 1970s and the 1980s of intense propaganda campaigns and blunt slogans extolling the virtues of increased economic productivity, there is little evidence that the party and its corresponding institution, the party committee, successfully generated decisions and efforts that boosted productivity.44

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Afflicted by bureaucratic pathology, the party cadres moved in ways that the higher-ranking leaders had not originally intended. Responding to the strict discipline that permeated every facet of their occupations, the party cadres tended to calculate how long a new policy would survive and whether any risk-taking would be involved, particularly in terms of ideological commitment and loyalty to the system and to the leader Kim Jong Il. Instead of proposing a new and innovative idea, they frequently looked for a safe path; that is, they towed the socialist line in public, even though, in practice, they refrained from a total commitment to socialist legal provisions. Party cadres ritually mumbled the mottos, maxims, and slogans of the official ideology of Chuch’e. These behavior patterns disguised their actual view of the world. However, during the famine and its aftermath in the 1990s, both the general public and party cadres came to reveal their genuine views, which were individualistic and self-interested. But it is noteworthy that the strict, even if inefficient, organizational discipline protected the system during the national crisis between 1994 and 1998. Right after the death of Kim Il Sung in July 1994, there arose skepticism about the systemic viability of North Korea as a whole. With the founding father’s death, many analysts, especially Western observers, predicted that the system was doomed. A severe famine in the following years strengthened this belief in the unlikelihood of North Korea’s survival. It is true that North Korea suffered some of its most severe hardships in the mid-1990s, just as it declared the “Arduous March” for the integration of society. The discontinuation of food distribution contributed to the decline of the party’s legitimacy. The party began to lose the authority not only to force the people to commit to their formally assigned works but also to block profit-seeking activities, which meant the difference between life and death for the average people. But as mentioned, the famine did not result in a drastic breakdown of the WPK; with Kim Jong Il’s energetic efforts, the central party had been able to reinforce its organizational penetration into every corner of society. Despite the erosion of socialist morale in the WPK during this time of crisis, the institutionalized reporting channels of the party hierarchy contributed to the maintenance of its surveillance capacity.

4

Military-First Politics and Changes in Party-Military Relations One of the most distinctive internal differentiation processes that have been occurring in the political subsystem, the party-state, may be the “military-first politics.” The military-first politics purports that the Korean People’s Army is to be the state’s leading institution—it is to be placed at the forefront of all other party-state apparatuses. The military-first politics also maintains that the armed forces preserve the nation’s highest spirit and morale by maintaining the political subsystem, in particular, and the entire North Korean system, in general. However it is framed, the military-first politics indicates the military’s relative institutional autonomy from the party and the institutional differentiation between the party and the military. Also, the militaryfirst politics has brought about a significant change in one of the reference points of systemic identity: the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition. As Wada Haruki has aptly noted, the military-first politics has replaced the morale and spirit of the guerrilla—whose armed resistance in Manchuria was symbolically venerated at the theater of revolutionary musical operas—with those of the regular army, the KPA.1 In light of the serious decline that has affected the efficiency of the party’s guidance over society, the notion of the military-first politics attracts special attention both within and outside North Korea. The military has remained in perfect order, even during the national crisis that was caused by the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994 and the famine from 1996 through 1998. This reality might constitute a model of loyalty for North Koreans. Accordingly, propaganda machines of the party have actively disseminated messages exalting military 81

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discipline and military morale since about 1995. The image of the military’s leading status in the post-Kim Il Sung era is such that scholars in the field need to extract from it the implicit meanings corresponding to the operation of the political system: that is, whether any significant change has occurred in the authority structure centered on the party-military relation. Because Kim Jong Il seems to exercise monolithic power continuously, it is not reasonable to assert that the military prevails in the political arena. Military power neither dominates the Workers’ Party of Korea nor replaces the latter’s unique role in societal surveillance at the lower levels. As previously mentioned, the party has maintained the capacity of social control, to a certain extent, and did so even during the period of severe starvation. But it is obvious that Kim Jong Il has not simply relied on the armed forces for the purposes of defense and national security but also expanded the roles played by the armed forces in the enhancement of the system’s viability as a whole, as Dae-Sook Suh has pointed out.2 Kim has strengthened the diverse images and functions of the KPA for both domestic and external purposes. Especially during the famine, the military visibly contributed to the national economy, including the construction of power plants and the managing of collective farms. It is interesting to note that North Korea seems to deliberately, but cautiously, use the military-first politics to create an image of the military as a hard-liner; and North Korea uses this image to strengthen its hand at negotiation talks concerning nuclear weapons development.3 For instance, at the third Six-Party Talks, a North Korean representative mentioned on June 24, 2004, that a “certain sector” of the society wanted to produce nuclear weapons and conduct a nuclear test, a statement suggesting to other participants that negotiations with Pyongyang would not be an easy task.4 Without doubt, the North Korean representative intended to deliver a message that the certain sector in question was the military and that the latter never strays from its uncompromising stance on nuclear weapons development. Whatever the military’s status in North Korean domestic politics may be, this diplomatic statement might have originated from Kim Jong Il’s desire to obtain additional concessions from the United States by transmitting his intention to continue the weapons development. In connection to North Korea’s military-first politics, it is necessary to delve into not only its institutional backgrounds but also its implications for the mode of reproduction pertaining to the systemwide identity and especially to the characteristic traits of party-military relations. Accordingly, this chapter will account for how party-military

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relations have functioned in the clandestine society and what kinds of changes the military-first politics has brought about in an institutional sense. Power Dynamics and Party-Military Relations The military’s relative autonomy, 1945–57 At the stage of state-building, North Korea did not host a close institutional interconnectedness between the party and the military, a situation that contrasted with the Chinese and the Vietnamese cases. The Communist parties in these countries took over their own countries only after severe resistance—against Japanese imperial forces and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army in the Chinese case, and against French, American, and South Vietnamese forces in the Vietnamese case. During these Communist forces’ struggle to take control, the ideal of the party for an egalitarian society was compatible with a military strategy for defeating enemies. The party had to pursue two objectives: to expel the enemy and to establish an egalitarian society. Consequently, the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 was both a military conquest of the entire mainland and a series of party-imposed nationwide land reforms. Likewise, the Vietnamese socialist unification in 1975 represented a victory of its unique military strategy and triumphantly paved a way for the Communist Party’s socialist transformation of the South. Owing to the interconnectedness of the two organizations’ goals, the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist parties’ networks penetrated into their respective armed forces, whether they were regular or guerrilla units, and neatly interwove with military organizations. It is noteworthy that in these countries, the leading forces supportive of nation-state building were those groups that exhibited relative cohesiveness and integrity in their ideological orientation and social background. In contrast, the independence of Korea from Japan and the two state-building projects in the divided Korea stemmed not from any political group that could lay claim to a decisive military victory but from the U.S.-led Allied Forces that defeated Japan. In the North, Kim Il Sung with his guerrilla comrades conducted anti-Japanese resistance in Manchuria, but they were not a political force possessing military influence that was sufficiently vital to dominate the political scene. In fact, North Korea’s state-building was completed by an alliance among various factions that represented diverse social backgrounds.5 Even though Kim’s Soviet-sponsored Manchurian guerrillas

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gained the upper hand in the party, the diversity in the composition of the party constrained, or delayed, Kim’s power concentration in the party, a situation that in turn limited Kim’s overall exercise of power in the political scene, including the military. In this regard, it is correct to say that the party’s control over the military as an institution was restricted in the period ranging from independence to the Korean War, that is, from August 1945 to June 1950.6 The party and the military developed their own approaches. The degree of institutional interconnectedness between the party and the military paralleled the degree of the Kim Il Sung faction’s power in the party. In other words, the party’s incorporation of the military, whatever the means and methods might have been, was linked to Kim’s control in the political arena. The war, by generating important momentum, provided Kim Il Sung and the Manchurian partisans with a chance to wield greater power in the party, as well as in the military. In the party, the domestic faction, centered on Pak HÆn-yÆng, was almost in a state of collapse, and the Soviet faction, led by HÆ Ka-i, was so weakened that Kim Il Sung had no prominent figure with whom to contend. More importantly, after Kim gained more power in the party, his followers and he initiated the establishment of party organizations in the military. The politicization of the military and the militarization of the party were common in Vietnam and China during their armed struggles, and the same process took hold in North Korea during the first year of the Korean War. In October 1950 Kim, at a Political Committee meeting, delivered a concluding speech about how to conduct party work in the military.7 Following Kim’s instruction, the Political Commission was established in the KPA, and a political division was installed in every army unit for party-based operations. These political units in the military became the leading organizations especially for political education that would generate a single-minded spirit, discipline, and morale among the soldiers, who were discouraged and in retreat because of the horrific and indiscriminate air bombings conducted by the United States Air Force. However, what should be noted is that as Kim’s power was somewhat constrained by other factions during the war and the postwar period in the 1950s, the party-military institutional connection had a limitation. The war was a total war in the sense that not only Kim’s partisan associates but also Soviet-Koreans, Yanan veterans, and even indigenous Communists conducted military operations in different fields. The Soviet-Koreans in the cabinet focused on logistics and staff affairs, Yanan veterans took part in the battlefields, and the

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domestic faction before the purge concentrated on the guerrilla warfare in the South.8 Inasmuch as the role was divided, the power was dispersed, to some extent, among the factions, even though Kim Il Sung maintained a privileged status. There is no real evidence that the institutional interconnectedness between the party and the KPA during the war had reached the level it did from the late 1950s to the years following Kim Jong Il’s grasp of party power in 1973. It was not until the August Incident in 1956 that factional strife provided Kim Il Sung with sufficient momentum for a major victory over the Yanan faction and the Soviet-Koreans. The incident began with the latter’s somewhat organized challenge to Kim Il Sung’s concentration of power and his industrial policy favoring only heavy industries. In the party, Kim led a counterattack and purged prominent leaders of the factions on the charge of “antiparty and antirevolution agitations.” The purged leaders were Ch’oe Ch’ang-ik, Yun Kong-h„m, SÆ Hwi, Yi P’il-gyu, and Kim Tu-bong of the Yanan faction and Pak Ch’ang-ok of the Soviet-Koreans. The purge in the party was followed by another round of purges that centered on the military. They targeted those generals who had had any kind of connection with the Yanan leaders. The head of the Political Commission in the Defense Ministry, Ch’oe Chong-hak, was removed in 1958 on charges that he had been expanding his political influence in the military. Also, a divisional commander, Chang P’yÆngsan, was eliminated on charges of plotting a coup d’état for the August Incident. Two generals from the War College, Kim Il-ch’Æng and Kim Il-gyu, were purged for having challenged the thesis that the KPA was an army of the party that had inherited Kim Il Sung’s glorious guerilla tradition. Related to this incident, the commandant of the War College, Pang Ho-san, and Vice Defense Minister Kim Ung were also removed from their positions.9 In retrospect, the purges of party leaders and army generals were proof that despite Kim’s gradual acquisition of power, an institutional penetration of the party into military units had yet to materialize. That is, for four to five years after the end of the war, the evolution of party power in the military was separate, to some extent, from the evolution of the WPK headquarters. The institutionalization of party-military relations, 1958–74 To Kim Il Sung, the installation of the party committee in the military was the first solution to the lack of a connection between the WPK and the party organization of the KPA. In March 1958, owing to Kim’s

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instructions for the establishment of party committees at all levels in the KPA (from headquarters to corps, division, regiment, battalion, and company levels), not only political officers but also commanders came to join the collective leadership under the principle of the socalled party’s guidance, and these interactions created both vertical and horizontal checks, as well as opportunities for the party to report on and to guide the military.10 As a result, the power of both the Political Commission of the KPA and the commission’s hierarchy in the field army units came to be leashed to a complex network centered around the party committees. The second solution was the establishment of the Military Committee in the WPK’s Central Committee, following the decision made by the fifth plenary session of the Fourth CC in 1962. The Military Committee, which developed into the Central Military Committee in 1982,11 was the organization in the party that supervised and guided overall military affairs. Kim Il Sung, with this organization, now achieved his goal—the party’s incorporation of the military—at least in an institutional sense. The party organizations came to be embodied in the military, and a military-related organization was installed in the WPK. The party’s institutionalized incorporation of the military was further concretized in 1969 by the introduction of the body of political commissars. Given the fact that political commissars were introduced right after the surge in militarism and the 1968 purge, it appears that this body was a response to these political events: namely, the military’s defiance relative to the party. This situation merits some explanation. In the midst of the confrontation between the North and the South, two North Korean militant leaders—Kim Ch’ang-bong, the defense minister, and HÆ Pong-hak, former head of the Political Commission in the KPA and then the director of the Department of South Korean Affairs in the WPK—gained a great deal of power and led a series of armed infiltrations targeting the presidential residence of the Blue House (in Seoul) and the Ulchin and Samch’Æk areas (on the east coast of the Korean peninsula). These operations were severely criticized as “military adventurism” by Kim Il Sung, and the two military leaders disappeared from the political scene in 1969. It is apparent that this purge, the political demise of Kim and HÆ, was closely related to party-military relations. The rise and fall of Kim Ch’ang-bong and his associates is comparable to the case of the former Soviet defense minister Marshal Georgi Zhukov. Zhukov saved Nikita Khrushchev from the carefully calibrated plan that Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich developed to oust Khrushchev in June 1957. Khrushchev, in danger, had Zhukov arrest the conspirators on charges that

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they had entered into an antiparty group. But in October of the same year, Zhukov was purged on the basis of several accusations, including that he had cultivated a personality cult in the army, that he exercised unlimited power comparable to Bonapartism, and that he had established a central school for special forces without acquiring CC approval. The Russian military expert Brian D. Taylor has noted that Zhukov’s purge was inspired by his commitment to his profession and, consequently, his neglect of party or political work in the military.12 Likewise, Kim Ch’ang-bong and HÆ Pong-hak supported Kim Il Sung’s military power until they were purged, at which point they had to face charges similar to those that toppled Zhukov. It is said that Kim Il Sung denounced the armed infiltration into the South at the Party Committee of the KPA, which was held from January 6 to 14, 1969. Kim and HÆ specifically were denounced by Kim Il Sung for their attempt to alienate the party from the military while instigating a military clique and antiparty heroism. In addition, they were charged with building—in defiance of the party’s four military guidelines— special forces numbering some two hundred thousand for infiltration operations into the South.13 Both the Soviet case and the North Korean case hinged, then, on the clash between military professionalism and the party’s engagement in the military. After the purge of Kim and HÆ, political commissars were nominated at the corps, division, and regiment levels, and political guiding officers were appointed at the battalion and company levels. The role of the political commissars was significant, because they were authorized to cosign on all military documents and thus came to share official military power with the commanders.14 It is noteworthy that afterward some high-ranking party officials, who had risen to these ranks through professional party careers, received appointments to political commissar positions and to political organizations in the military and later returned to WPK organizations. Of the many such officials, Kim SÆng-gap, Yi Tong-ch’un, and Yi Pong-wÆn exemplified the interorganizational appointment. Kim SÆnggap rose to the position of second party secretary of Pyongyang in 1969 because he was a younger brother of Kim SÆng-ae, Kim Il Sung’s second wife. He was appointed to be political commissar of Navy Command Headquarters in 1974 and later was appointed to be deputy director of the People’s Committee of South Hwanghae Province. Yi Tong-ch’un, formerly secretary of the North HamgyÆng Province Party, became political commissar of the Second Corps of the KPA in 1972. He went on to be secretary of Chagang Province Party and finally political commissar of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il’s bodyguard

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division. Similarly, Yi Pong-wÆn, who had learned from his experience as secretary of South Hwanghae Province Party and as a CC member of the WPK since 1974, was named deputy director of the Organization and Guidance Department of the WPK in 1980, and then he became the Political Commission’s deputy head in charge of organizational affairs in the KPA in 1986. After a decade of service in the military, he was transferred in 1997 to the position of chairman of the Inspection Committee in the WPK.15 The opposite has occurred, too. Some experienced professional political officers in the military transferred to the Organization and Guidance Department of the WPK. These transfers facilitated party affairs in the military, owing to the officers’ familiarity with military procedures and practices. In this way, the interorganizational appointments supported the realization of greater party control over the army. The complete incorporation of the military by the WPK, in terms of both institutional structures and personnel affairs, was followed by the emergence of the so-called guerrilla state, to use Wada Haruki’s term.16 Since 1974, North Korean propaganda has chanted the slogan of “the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Style in Production, Learning, and Life.” This rhetorical emphasis has reflected a shift in the party’s constellation of power. That is, after the military adventurism and the resulting purge at the end of the 1960s, core members of the Manchurian group— particularly Kim Il Sung’s close associates who had belonged to the First Route Army of the anti-Japanese resistance forces in the part of southern Manchuria bordering the Tumen River—declared a complete victory at the Fifth Congress of the WPK in November 1970.17 Kim and his Manchurian faction now came to reassert that the North Korean system originated from the “revolutionary” tradition of anti-Japanese guerrillas led by Kim himself. In this context, Kim Jong Il rose as the de facto successor to his father, not only with the Manchurian partisan leaders’ support but also with the widespread support generated by the junior Kim’s effective direction of several revolutionary operas that triggered powerful memories in the aging leaders. Three events coincided with one another in the late 1960s and the early 1970s: the completion of the party’s incorporation of the military, the consolidation of the core Manchurian faction’s power in the party, and the launch of a unique version of a militarist work ethic, characterized by the chant “Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Style.” (In this respect, it was natural that in 1978, North Korea changed the date of the anniversary of the KPA’s establishment from February 8 to April 25. The reasoning behind this change was that the origin of the KPA—actually established on February 8, 1948—could be traced back

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to the Anti-Japanese People’s Guerrillas, established on April 25, 1932.)18 At any rate, taking advantage of this confluence of circumstances, Kim Jong Il rose to dominate the organizational affairs of the WPK. To bolster party-military relations, he developed clear job assignments for the various party organizations, elevating the power of the Organization and Guidance Department of the WPK. Kim Jong Il’s exercise of party power over the military, 1970s to 80s After 1973, Kim made a great effort to strengthen the party’s discipline, particularly the Organization and Guidance Department of the WPK, which augmented his control over the military, as well. This department is not a simple unit but a core part of the headquarters of the party. It deals with organizational affairs (such as the appointment and the dismissal of high-ranking party cadres, the development of guiding principles for ideological education, and the inspection of other departments of the party and state apparatuses), which of course includes those of the military. While there are many policy-related departments in the party headquarters, they are subordinated to the Organization and Guidance Department, and its organizational influence permeates the policy departments. For instance, the Machine Industry Department in the WPK, which guides and supervises the Machine Industry Ministry in the cabinet, is under the guidance of the Organization and Guidance Department, because the latter has exclusive rights over the appointment of appropriate professional cadres to key positions in the department and the ministry and over inspections related to these cadres’ performance and wrongdoings. Thus, the Organization and Guidance Department is called “the party in the party,” and Kim Jong Il remained the party secretary in charge of organization and propaganda affairs until he assumed the position of general secretary in 1997.19 Given that the secretarial position leads the Organization and Guidance Department and the Propaganda and Agitation Department, it is understandable that Kim remained a party secretary before occupying the position of general secretary. Two special organizations in the Organization and Guidance Department manifest the party’s institutional control over the military.20 On the one hand, the Thirteenth Division of Party-Life Guidance has been in charge of the Political Commission of the army. The Political Commission is the highest organization for party affairs in the military, whereas it should be guided by a division of the WPK headquarters. The duties of the Thirteenth Division are to supervise and instruct the Political Commission and to receive reports from it.

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Since disciplinary work became one of the most significant objectives of organizational affairs in the 1970s, the Thirteenth Division has distributed the guidelines of party-life to and for the highest commanders. Overseeing this project are several full-time party cadres who, dispatched from party headquarters, directly supervise party affairs in the Political Commission. On the other hand, the Fourth Division of Cadres has dealt with the personnel affairs of the army relating to anyone higher than commanders and political commissars of the regiment level. This division does not have final decision-making power over the appointment and dismissal of such officials, but it investigates subjects, documenting their professional profiles, examining their family backgrounds, and assessing their records. On the basis of these results, the Secretariat of the WPK’s Central Committee formally handles personnel issues, even though all the appointments, transfers, and dismissals are to be authorized by Kim Jong Il.21 Just like the Thirteenth Division of Party-Life Guidance, the Fourth Division of Cadres consists of those cadres who have had political commissar experience. This shows that the party has carefully managed to incorporate the army by using interorganizational appointments. In sum, it took the party a long time to successfully incorporate the KPA. The party and the military started as two different institutions in 1945, and the interconnectedness between them ended with the embodiment of each in the other, a situation that, by 1969, left the party in a position of dominance over the military. The turning points in the incorporation were (a) the establishment of political units in the military in 1950, that is, during the Korean War; (b) the installation of a party committee in 1958; and (c) both the introduction of a body of political commissars in 1969 and the interorganizational appointments afterward. Remarkably, the party’s complete incorporation of the military was in accordance with Kim Il Sung and the core Manchurian group’s control of all power in the political arena. During the Korean War, the party had experienced limitations in its influence over the army, not only because, early on during the war, power was dispersed among party factions, but also because all the factions contributed to the military effort in their own way, ranging from combat and logistics to political affairs and guerrilla warfare. Even after the war, the establishment of the party committee could not guarantee the party’s guidance of—that is, penetration into—the armed forces. It was successful in an institutional sense but not in a practical sense, because of the empowerment of a group devoted to “military adventurism” in the tense mood of the Cold War in the late 1960s. The complete incor-

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poration came about with the interorganizational personnel appointments between the party and the military, especially Kim Il Sung’s appointment of highly regarded professional party officials to political commissar positions in the KPA. Military-First Politics under Kim Jong Il In the socialist system where the single mass party traditionally dominates other institutions including the military, it may be an abnormal phenomenon for the military to be vehemently propagated as a safeguard of the entire system, as seen in the military-first politics. Thus, it is necessary to delve into the question of how and why North Korea came to articulate military-first politics in its public discourse. Process of propagation In North Korea, the military-first politics has become prevalent in public discourse, including in the media, since the mid-1990s, the years of systemic crisis caused by Kim Il Sung’s death in July 1994 and the extreme famine afterward. On January 1, 1995, the successor, Kim Jong Il, visited the 214th Army Unit as a symbolic gesture of his credibility and his interest in the military. It is reasonable to infer that during North Korea’s national funeral, as it were, he visited military barracks to incite their support. At the same time, the visit had a significant meaning that cannot be interpreted as a simple political gesture. The North Korean media depicted the 1995 visit to the military unit as the origin of the military-first politics.22 While every corner of the country was suffering from the severe famine, an editorial in the WPK’s daily newspaper, Nodong Sinmun, commemorated Kim Jong Il’s fifty-fifth birthday on February 16, 1997, and quoted the leader as stating, “Without the army, there exists no people, no state, and no party.” This statement accompanied an extensive initiation into Kim’s leadership style, according to which he has positioned the military at the forefront of social construction, both morally and economically, as well as of national defense. Indeed, the army played a significant economic role in farming, land regulation, and the construction of power plants in 1997. In accordance with its economic contributions, the so-called revolutionary spirit of the army became an important catchword in documents and slogans. A program of the Korean Central Broadcasting (KCB) in October 1997, aired on the eve of Kim Jong Il’s inauguration as general secretary of the WPK, disseminated his instructions that “the principle of ‘military

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first and workers later’ should be kept even if the economic situation severely deteriorates.”23 In the following year, an editorial on the KCB characterized Kim Jong Il’s ruling style as military-first politics and asserted that he managed the country by placing the military in the forefront during the difficult period.24 In June 1999, Nodong Sinmun and Ku˘lloja published “Our Party’s Military-First Politics Is Undefeatable,” a joint editorial that explicitly described the meaning of the notion. The editorial stated that military-first politics is a ruling style according to which the KPA is not only the central pillar for national defense but also the nation’s ideological vanguard, and the centrality of the military should be valued in all the activities of the party, the state, and the society.25 In short, it became clear that an essential component of the discourse centering on the military-first politics was that the KPA is not simply an institution for national security but a forerunner for socioeconomic rebuilding, as well. This discursive component manifested a prioritization of the military in the overall system. Background KIM’S

GRASP OF MILITARY POWER

What is the background of the promulgation of the military-first politics? Above all, Kim Jong Il’s private control of the military became the fundamental basis of the dissemination of the notion. Without Kim’s firm influence over the military, the propaganda could neither present the idea nor provide the military with a new image for the moral bulwark and the economic rebuilding needed during times of crisis. After the fall of Communist systems in Eastern Europe, Kim Jong Il assumed important posts related to the military commandership: in 1990, first vice chairman of the National Defense Commission; in 1991, supreme commander of the KPA; in 1992, marshal of the KPA; and in 1993, chairman of the NDC. In 1998, under the revised constitution, he took the seat of chairman of the NDC again. Kim, who has no army experience per se, utilized those posts for the promotion of his military commandership. For example, in the capacity of first vice chairman of the NDC, in April 1992, Kim promoted Defense Minister O Chin-u from vice marshal to marshal, and the chief of the general staff, Ch’oe Kwang, and seven others from general to vice marshal. Furthermore, the scale of the promotion was so big that 129 generals got one more star on their shoulders and that some five hundred colonels were promoted to brigadier generals.26

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Kim Jong Il’s grasp of military leadership, in particular, and power, in general, was accompanied by a significant change in the depiction of the status of the military. The party’s theoretical journal Ku˘lloja in April 1988 published an article, written by Yi Pong-wÆn, entitled “The KPA Is the Undefeatable Revolutionary Unit for Protecting the Party’s Achievements.” In the article, Yi, then deputy head of the Political Commission of the KPA, followed the traditional interpretation of the military as the WPK’s armed guard and as the Great Leader Kim Il Sung’s armed forces. However, in 1992, the military became the significant apparatus of Kim Jong Il’s power. The Nodong Sinmun editorial on February 16, 1992, entitled “For the Commemoration of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il’s 50th Birthday,” stated that the WPK, the Republic (that is, the state), the people, and the KPA trusted him absolutely. This unusual coverage of Kim Jong Il on the front page of the party organ indicated that he was in full command of the leadership positions in North Korea’s most powerful apparatuses. In other words, the status of the military changed from being the party’s bulwark to being Kim Jong Il’s safeguard. The military-first politics has become Kim Jong Il’s ruling method of choice, deviating from the previous practice of the WPK’s control over the military. The militaryfirst politics is closely related to Kim’s solid grasp of power in the military, as well as in the party. LOYALTY

VACUUM

The military-first politics was a deliberate response to a potential loyalty vacuum that occurred upon Kim Il Sung’s demise. Since he was considered the founding father of the DPRK, his death gave rise to a sense of free-floating obedience among the people despite his cautious preparation for the succession of his son. Kim Il Sung had received from the people an almost unquestionable acceptance of his authority. Such acceptance of a certain leader’s authority, in general, comes from the fulfillment of a mixture of conditions, such as legitimacy, fear, habit, and expediency, and the particular mixture varies from system to system and from time to time.27 In North Korea, the late Kim successfully captured popular conviction in his rule, a conviction that depended largely on the legitimacy originating from his anti-Japanese guerrilla experience, the fear caused by clandestine informant surveillance, the habit inculcated by organizational life, the “Ten Principles for the Establishment of the Chuch’e Idea,” and the expediency related to social mobility for the privileged class or personal security for

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the so-called wavering class. In contrast, Kim Jong Il had not, at the time of his father’s death, fully presented his own popular image as the leader of the country. In the eyes of the public, a crisis situation requires strong leadership characterized by extraordinary qualifications. Autocratic leaders use crisis situations for the creation of an image of leadership qualifications to draw support from the public. In such a case, popularity does not really matter.28 A quantitative study of the crisis level, which the author and others conducted right after Kim Il Sung’s death, shows that defectors from North Korea had dual views on the fatherto-son succession. The people generally accepted the prearranged political succession, whereas they showed, even though without much criticism, relatively low approval of Kim Jong Il’s qualifications for the leadership position. The study demonstrates that the people in times of crisis supported the succession in an institutional sense even though there was no succinct point generating among the people moral convictions of loyalty to the younger Kim.29 This was why North Korean propaganda instruments upheld the “accomplishment of the dying injunctions” of the late Kim for three years after his death, a scenario that mirrored the Confucian tradition for mourning periods. One might say that even after his death Kim Il Sung continued to rule for three years under the slogan of “Our beloved leader Kim Il Sung will be with us forever.” Given this situation, Kim Jong Il and his associates adopted a policy that, by placing the military in his hands, contributed to the maintenance of social order during a critical period. More importantly, by displaying the image of firm leadership over the military, Kim’s propaganda machine could transform the floating obedience of the public into stable support for the new leader, Kim Jong Il, and the socialist system as a whole. DECLINE

OF THE PARTY’S FUNCTION AND LEGITIMACY

The prioritization of the military reflects the relative decline in the WPK’s functions, caused in part by the continuous decline of party efficiency itself and in part by Kim’s personalized exercise of power. The functions of the party deteriorated to the point that top decisionmaking institutions could not effectively carry out their assigned tasks. The last CC meeting of the party was held in March 1993, and since then, there have been no such meetings. The malfunction of these decision-making and approval-rendering organizations does not necessarily mean that party work broke down completely; however, it does imply that the party no longer acts as a collective decision-making

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and approval-rendering body. Instead, Kim Jong Il’s personalized operation of the party and related behavior might originate from his distrust of others and from his inclination to extend his trust chiefly to those people whom he has personally selected for various highranking positions. The Secretariat, as an organization, and secretaries, as mediators, have simply carried out his instructions. The former secretary of international affairs of the WPK, Hwang Chang-yÆp, testified that the importance of the Secretariat, compared to that of the Politburo, has increased in accordance with Kim Jong Il’s tendency to nullify the collective bodies of the WPK.30 We should, however, keep in mind that the Secretariat and its secretaries neither have any latitude in policy-making nor act as a substitute for the functions of either the Politburo or the CC. They can make reports and proposals to Kim Jong Il and implement approved proposals, but their roles are so compartmentalized that they cannot realize overall policy coordination, which may be achieved in the collective decision-making body. The party’s malfunction should be attributed to the long process of declining efficiency (as discussed in chapter 3), particularly in the policy arena. This decline accelerated during the famine period. The morale of the party suddenly collapsed to such a degree that the party no longer served as an effective means by which the policy lines of top leaders could be transmitted. The situation amounted to an institutional emergency, according to Kim Jong Il’s assessment of the party, made in a speech delivered at the graduation ceremony at Kim Il Sung University in December 1996. He mentioned the grave situation surrounding the party’s dwindling efficacy, while praising the spirit of the army.31 At any rate, it was true that the famine and starvation contributed to the paralysis of the party’s policy functions. Schools and factories were closed, because the search for food was the most urgent survival issue for the people. At that time, an unusual floating population came into existence. Itinerant merchants who served as links between cities and the countryside worked often to equalize the food shortage situation. Since not only the absolute shortage of food but also the uneven distribution of food exacerbated the starvation, the travelers helped to lessen the further worsening of the situation.32 The merchants inherited neither specific skills nor useful connections from their parents. After the nationalization of commerce before the Korean War and the collectivization of agriculture after the war, merchants had no chance to hone their skills and ply their trade. But the famine drove North Koreans to embrace profit-seeking activities for survival. In light of this situation, the party’s role as policy-makers, particularly in relation to production, devolved into a series of pronouncements containing empty

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words. Also, the famine deteriorated the party’s organizational discipline. Indeed, no longer able to perform their required party-life criticism, party members had to decrease the frequency of these activities from once a week to once a month.33 Institutional Differentiation between the Party and the Military The party-military relation in the age of the military-first politics is a deviant form from traditional Leninist doctrine. In the Leninist tradition, the highest leading group participates in the collective decisionmaking body, such as the Politburo and the Military Committee in the WPK, in dealing with the affairs of military personnel, the defense industry, military strategy, and resource mobilization. In accordance with agreed-upon decisions, the Secretariat and the departments in the party plan details for policy implementation, maintaining close contact with party organizations in the military through institutionalized channels. Meanwhile, the party organizations of the military, in general, and political commissars and political officers, in particular, are supposed to transmit the party headquarters’ policy line to various ranks of the army units and supervise the implementation process. But the North Korean case of the military-first politics has derailed this procedure. The party organizations in the KPA are under the personal control of Kim Jong Il and are, in a strict sense, relatively autonomous from the party’s guidance. Therefore, instead of channeling decisions through institutional arrangements between the party and the military, Kim has preferred to give instructions to the military directly. In other words, Kim has made a strategic choice of divide-andrule in ruling both the party and the military, and this choice has been accompanied by media’s propagation of the leading role of the military. Divide-and-rule “Military-first politics” is not a simple slogan for prompting a social order based on relentless loyalty; rather, it reflects an institutional differentiation between the party and the military. Kim Jong Il has attempted to rule the party and the military separately. That is, Kim adopted the divide-and-rule strategy during a critical period, hoping it might enable him to avert or limit the coupling effect, particularly in a negative sense, between the two institutions.34 The coupling effect was well explained by Herbert A. Simon. When one assembles parts (for instance, the parts of a watch), a twostep procedure whereby one first aggregates the parts into groups and

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then assembles these groups is a more effective way to prevent interruptions from occurring in the environment than a one-step procedure whereby one assembles the parts one by one from the beginning.35 The post-Kim Il Sung period represented such a fluctuation in the environment: there were free–floating obedience, food shortages and starvation, and unexpected social mobility. Kim Jong Il, as the policymaker, attempted to prevent each institution from being exacerbated by another’s negative influences. Indeed, he was afraid that a substantial degradation of the party’s morale and efficiency might negatively affect the military. This fear was well founded, because the party, having been empowered since Kim Jong Il’s active engagement in its organizational affairs, institutionalized the army’s personnel affairs and political education affairs. However, as the party was now no longer in a position to lead the military, the best strategic choice for Kim was to separately dominate them and, thus, to avoid the coupling effect’s negative implications. This situation raises a theoretical issue: whether or not the divideand-rule strategy has brought about a significant shift in the partymilitary relation. The conclusion is this: Kim’s divide-and-rule strategy brought about a moderate change in the relation, but this change has not created any conflict of interest between the two institutions. In other words, whether or not to adopt the divide-and-rule strategy is a leader’s choice, not a consequence of either institutional conflicts or attempts by the military to intervene in politics. A theoretical division over the party-military relation centers on whether the military is autonomous from or contradictory to the values of the party. Among the many models of interinstitutional relations in socialist systems, three have attracted serious scholarly attention: Roman Kolkowicz’s conflict model, William E. Odom’s institutional congruence model, and Timothy J. Colton’s participatory model.36 An explanatory weakness common to all three models is that they do not pay enough attention to the diverse histories that, to a great extent, determine how the party-military relation evolves in a socialist system. A party-military relation is dynamic, and a rigorous model should identify the essential features, either formal or informal, of a transformation. In general, a rigorous model should differentiate a substantial element from secondary elements.37 Rather than settle for a dichotomous account of conflict or harmony, it should be presumed that the developmental process of the party-military relation is different from time to time and from system to system. The resistance against foreign forces or the opposition in a civil war, as seen in Vietnam and China, respectively, may—from the

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outset—contribute to the harmonious development of the two institutions. Also, a party’s gradual incorporation of the military, even without any external enemy, may also be conducive to the congruence between them. Whether or not the military has independent economic resources for either manipulating or influencing national politics can also significantly affect party-military relations. In North Korea, the KPA’s war experiences from 1950 to 1953 strengthened its connection to the party; and in later years, the gradual institutionalization of party committees and political commissars in the military deepened the partymilitary interconnectedness. Furthermore, military industries have been under the tight control of top leaders, including Kim’s family and ChÆn PyÆng-ho, the party secretary in charge of military industries. In this respect, there is no reason to say that the military developed interests or values that might be contradictory to those of the party. Such things as the continuous deterioration of the party’s efficiency, which began in the second half of 1980s, and Kim Jong Il’s assumption of the commandership and consequent expansion of power in the military, which began in the early 1990s, enhanced the utility of the divide-and-rule strategy in the post-Kim Il Sung period of national crisis. The leadership’s division of, and rule over, the two institutions may be traced back to the time when Kim Jong Il first occupied the position of supreme commander of the KPA in December 1991. In 1992, right after his appointment, he made a very symbolic political statement: “I read the Choso˘n Inmin’gun [the KPA’s daily newspaper] in the morning before reading Nodong Sinmun [the WPK’s daily newspaper].”38 His assumption of the commandership was followed by a shift in the practices of the party-military relation. Hwang Chang-yÆp, former secretary of the WPK, mentioned that the party’s departments lost direct contact with the army, particularly with the Political Commission of the KPA. According to him, the international department of the WPK had previously sent materials on intelligence analysis regarding foreign affairs to the Political Commission. About the time that Kim assumed the position of supreme commander, the party organization’s involvement in the military’s political affairs started to diminish gradually.39 The shift in the practices of North Korea’s interinstitutional relations was, in part, related to Kim Jong Il’s tendency to personalize power and to scrap formal institutional procedures, particularly those codified in party regulations and the constitution. For example, the appointment of Kim to the position of supreme commander of the KPA in 1991 violated the 1972 constitution, still effective at that time, which stated that the state chairman, Kim Il Sung, who represented

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the sovereignty of the nation-state, should assume the highest military commandership. Acknowledging this legal breach, the North Korean government revised the constitution in 1992 and justified Kim Jong Il’s assumption of the commandership. In this revised constitution, the previous arrangement of the state chairman’s concurrent positions of supreme commander and chairman of the National Defense Commission (Article 93 of the 1972 constitution) no longer existed. Also, the revised constitution prearranged junior Kim’s new appointment as chairman of the NDC in 1993. According to the 1992 constitution, the NDC oversaw overall defense and personnel affairs, which had previously belonged to the Central People’s Committee (Article 103 of the 1972 constitution). Another revision of the constitution was made in 1998. The newly revised constitution eliminated two previously existing organizations: the state president and the Central People’s Committee. As a consequence, the highest position for Kim Jong Il was that of chairman of the National Defense Commission. It is noteworthy that the 1998 constitution clearly identified the commission as “the highest military guidance organization of state sovereignty” (Article 100) and declared that the chairman’s role is to provide “leadership over all armed forces and guidance over all defense affairs” (Article 102). Evidence was presented that the chairman is de facto the highest post of the state. In 1998, Kim YÆng-nam—the formal state head as chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly—delivered his commemorating speech for Kim Jong Il’s reappointment to the position of NDC chairman. In the speech, the old associate of Kim Jong Il mentioned that the NDC chairman is “the highest state position that not only protects the socialist fatherland’s state system and the people’s fate through its leadership over all political, military, and economic affairs but also leads the tasks to solidify and develop national defense capability and overall national power.”40 In other words, the two constitutional revisions in 1992 and 1998 aimed both to rationalize a previous breach of the pre-revision constitution and to extend Kim’s military power. Kim Jong Il’s personalizing of power and his scrapping of institutional arrangements did not stop here. The appointment of Kim to the position of general secretary in 1997 was made not by selection at the CC but with a “recommendation” from the CC and the Central Military Committee of the WPK. This practice derailed the existing party bylaws, which had been effective since 1980. All these things have generated skepticism as to whether institutional arrangements effectively work in the political arena.

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In sum, the immediate objective of Kim Jong Il’s divide-and-rule strategy was to save the military from the desperate situation brought on by the party’s declining efficiency. Remarkably, the strategy was intended for an institutional differentiation between the party and the military, without an alteration in the party’s nominal guidance. As Hsiao-shih Cheng noted in a study of the Chinese military, this kind of phenomenon blurs the party’s guidance over the military.41 China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Cuba in the mid-1960s, Poland in the early 1980s, and the Soviet Union in the last years of Gorbachev’s rule had already exemplified a transition of the party-military relation without violating the formal principle of the party’s leading role. That is, the North Korean case is not the sole example of an expansion in a military’s relative autonomy in a party-military relation, even though variations of degree certainly exist from case to case. Myth and reality With regard to the institutional differentiation between the party and the military, there is speculation—reaching almost mythical proportions—that conflicts in North Korea’s decision-making process pit the hard-liners against the soft-liners and that the military has a monopoly on the hard-liners. This speculation derives from North Korean negotiators’ postures, according to which it is presumed that the military exerts every effort to articulate its independent interests in the decisionmaking arena. But this speculation cannot be true. Consider the North Korean nuclear issue and the return of an American helicopter pilot in 1994. In the rounds of talks between North Korea and the United States in 1994, Pyongyang negotiators maintained that there was an obstacle to the realization of an agreement wherein North Korea would accept both a freeze on its nuclear program and two light water reactors from the U.S. side. They stated that the obstacle was the hard-line military. Likewise, in December of the same year, a U.S. Army helicopter was shot down over the northern side of the Demilitarized Zone, and U.S. Representative Bill Richardson visited Pyongyang in order to negotiate the return of the survivor, Chief Warrant Officer Bobby Hall. At that time, North Korean Foreign Ministry officials told Richardson that the case was in the hands of the less sympathetic military command and that Hall’s return was being delayed because of the military’s hard-line stance, even though the Foreign Ministry wanted an immediate release. North Korea in the two cases certainly attempted to suggest that there are internal conflicts between different groups delineated along

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institutional lines. Furthermore, as Gordon Skilling has pointed out in regard to the former Soviet Union, the socialist system also may operate according to the dictates of group politics.42 From a group politics perspective, one may presume that differing interpretations have appeared in Pyongyang during the handling of specific issues. However, little compelling evidence has been detected that proves that the military opposed the negotiation processes of the two cases mentioned above: the Agreed Framework and the resolution of the helicopter incident. The military had no particular reason to adopt a hard-line posture over the building of new energy facilities. North Korean negotiators’ statements about an internal conflict were likely brought up as a bargaining chip that might win North Korea more concessions from the United States during the negotiation process of the Agreed Framework.43 In the same vein, the return of the American pilot took time not only because he first underwent interrogation in North Korean army barracks but also because of the time-consuming hierarchical procedures that make the resolution of substantial matters dependent on the decisions of the meticulously deliberate Kim.44 In dealing with such significant diplomatic issues as nuclear agreement and the return of an American pilot, the institutions cannot independently articulate contentious policy choices. In explaining the North Korean case, instead of Skilling’s proposition of conflict-oriented group politics, Jerry Hough’s assumption of pluralist standpoints “within a certain institutionalized framework” seems more plausible in the sense that the voices of two ministries might be processed through some technical means.45 If this is true, the military does not dominate North Korea nor advocate divisive voices in decision-making processes. Relevance to Kim Jong Il’s Management Style The military-first politics has had an enormous effect on the operation of the political system under Kim Jong Il. It involves a unique constellation of authorities among diverse state apparatuses. In particular, it involves the management style centered on Kim. Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George have presented three useful models on the management style: the formalistic model, the competitive model, and the collegial model.46 In the formalistic model, hierarchy is an important criterion for decision-making procedures and communications between institutions and bureaucrats. All information and ideas concentrate in the hands of the top leader, and at the same time, instructions and policies are up to the leader. A problem is that the leader might be

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overloaded with decision-making tasks. In the competitive model, the competition—instead of the hierarchy or relative expertise—between diverse institutions is a central concern for the leader. In terms of policy options, there is no clear distinction between institutions’ actual roles and their official roles, and this state of affairs enables the leader to select, without hindrance, preferred policy choices. In the collegial model, bureaucrats and staff participate in the decision-making process not as experts but as generalists who present their views and exchange ideas. The coordination and the adjustment of policies are the most distinctive features of this model. Kim Jong Il’s case does not exactly fit any of George and George’s models; rather, the case of the military-first politics corresponds, it seems, to a mixture of formalistic and competitive models. On the one hand, elements of the formalistic model correspond to the fact that Kim controls various institutions separately, depending on the hierarchical bureaucratic mechanism in question. He personally dominates the WPK, the KPA, the State Security Agency (the intelligence organization), and the People’s Safety Ministry (the public police agency), and he gathers information and intelligence from them. He provides them with organizational independence to some extent; however, he does not allow for free communication among themselves except on procedural matters. On the other hand, competitive elements are also embedded in the political system. Similar roles are frequently granted to different institutions in the process of idea development, policy option development, and their implementation. For example, the SSA, the PSM, and intelligence agency in the KPA may compete with one another for the opportunity to realize the same end. Kim may allow coordination among them if there exists a cross-institutional interest; however, such a process may be ignored in the case of a special mission. This practice often yields a violation of the official rule of division of labor among institutions. Paralleling the competitive elements is the fact that the actual hierarchy of the top-ranking officials is different from that of their official positions. It is remarkable that the power hierarchy, usually publicized in ceremonies, of the three top leaders of the military is an unusual sight in the eyes of outside observers. The head of the Political Commission of the KPA, Cho MyÆng-nok, and the chief of the general staff of the KPA, Kim YÆng-ch’un, are higher than the defense minister, Kim Il-ch’Æl, in the power hierarchy. This situation clearly differs from what it was in Kim Il Sung’s era, when the defense minister, O Chin-u, concurrently held the position of head of the Political Commission. Under Kim Jong Il’s rule, the tripartite relationship at

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the top of the military does not allow any of the three to enjoy a prominent status in military affairs. In addition, the younger Kim does not grant full authority to the formal heads of organizations involved in decision-making processes. He keeps in contact with the second and third levels of the organization’s hierarchy. A handy example is the relationship among First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun, and the chairman of the Standing Committee of the SPA, Kim YÆng-nam. While Paek and Kim represent the ministry and the state head, respectively, they perform ritual roles such as meeting with foreign diplomats, attending international gatherings, and delivering ceremonial speeches. In contrast, even though his rank is low relative to the formal titles of Kim and Paek, Kang not only has close access to Kim Jong Il but also plays the role of Kim’s idea man. In line with the competitive model, Kim sends instructions about secret missions to different institutions. Many of these instructions concern the surveillance of suspected disloyal elements. Traditionally, the SSA has a clandestine mission of collecting information that might be related to potential antistate activities or to any collective actions that might destabilize the social order. Also, the PSM, formerly the Social Safety Ministry, belongs to the cabinet and has played diverse roles, ranging from law enforcement to prison management. However, one should note that with the military-first politics of the past decade, the Safety Commanding Headquarters (SCH) in the KPA has expanded its surveillance power not only in the military but throughout the general public, as well. For instance, according to the diplomats who defected to South Korea during their service in Third World countries, the SCH inspected North Korean embassies in those countries.47 Previously, the SCH of the military paralleled the SSA in society, and this fact suggests that, in terms of behavior space, the SCH’s scope was smaller than that of the SSA. The SCH started as a bureau in the Department of the Chief of the General Staff in the KPA. However, in 1997 the SCH separated from the latter to become an independent institution.48 It seems that the expanding behavior space of the SCH has triggered competition between the SSA and the SCH, especially when the latter is involved in social affairs, despite its formal status as an organization belonging to the KPA. Furthermore, the SCH’s expanding behavior space came into conflict, to some extent, with political departments in the military. Political officers and safety officers are assigned to every hierarchical level in military units. The political officers deal with party affairs openly, whereas the safety officers undertake covert activities by gathering

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information on and scrutinizing the actions of army officers. Even though political officers and safety officers are supposed to collaborate with each other, their roles overlap insofar as they concern the security of, and loyalty to, the existing system and Kim Jong Il. The object of the SCH’s surveillance is both combat officers and political officers, so that tension often develops between the SCH’s units and the Political Commission’s units.49 Since there are party units in SCH units, just as in other organizations, it would appear that the tension between these organizations is abnormal.

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Chuch’e in Transformation T