by the regime that Kim has supernatural powers. Certainly recognizing that as the young come of age they become even more removed from the war and the need for North Korea’s continued isolation, he is systematically creating an education infrastructure that seeks to shape their minds. As several North Korea watchers have found, the regime has directed its propaganda and education efforts toward creating a new generation of loyalists by reviving children’s and youth organizations and intensifying indoctrination. A North Korean high school syllabus shows that the regime has instituted a three-year course on Kim Jong Un’s early life, totaling eighty-one classroom hours. In 2014, the regime released childhood photos of Kim wearing a general’s uniform, pointing out that he was an expert marksman with a pistol at the age of three and had learned seven languages, and that as a teenager “discovered new geographical features” of North Korea and was an erudite scholar of military leaders.
Christopher Richardson, a researcher who focuses on how childhood is experienced in North Korea, points out that the regime is seeking to paint Kim as a child genius with “messianic destiny” and the natural heir to the revolution. In addition to extolling Kim’s brilliance, the aim is to show the youth how they can be like him, in the way that Christians, for example, exhort their believers to walk in the way of their god. They, too, can help advance the revolution by following their leader. They, too, with their youthful vigor, idealism, and purity, can drive the country forward, safe in the knowledge that their leader has provided the ultimate protection through his possession of nuclear weapons.
In 2015, Oliver Wainwright booked a trip to Pyongyang with a Beijing-based tour company and traveled through the city for ten days, along with three North Koreans who were there to make sure he would not do anything subversive. Despite the surveillance of his minders, he was able to photograph the capital in rich detail, offering poignant observations from his perspective as an expert in architecture and the arts. He wrote that in every new building “there is a peculiarly consistent style of preschool colour schemes and shiny synthetic surfaces, the pastel palettes and axial symmetry giving an eerie feeling of walking into a Wes Anderson film set”—quirky, escapist, and saturated with color. Wainwright described it as “architecture as anaesthetic, a powerful tool for the state to infantilise its people.” He’s right. For Kim and his generation, people who came of age in a nuclear North Korea, combining images of a nation in a perpetual state of war—posters, statues, military parades—with the pastel wonderland of leisure and consumption makes complete sense. Infantilization of the North Korean people is intentional, and a logical outgrowth of extreme repression, in which the regime has the power to dictate where one lives, marries, works, and plays, subsuming their individual desires to those of their leader.
But as Kim peddles upscale apartments and appliances to the elite, he can’t help but create hope and generate more desire for luxury and leisure that must be satisfied. Kim has linked his legitimacy to improving people’s lives, so he has to keep delivering on his promises. Hope is powerful—not only can it help people adapt to their surroundings and deal with inefficiencies and obstacles, but it can also lead to discontent, with the potential to send the entire construct crumbling, physically and metaphorically, slowly or spectacularly. Rüdiger Frank, a German expert on North Korea, has pondered whether North Korea will go the way of the Soviet Union or East Germany:
North Koreans are now as materialistic, greedy and unsatisfied as their comrades in the Soviet Union and East Germany once were….North Korea has begun playing the capitalists’ game, and it has gone much further than most European socialist countries ever went. Shortages are not the dominant issue anymore, and access to almost anything is guaranteed—as long as one has enough money.
Defector interviews reveal some of that dissatisfaction, including the frustration born of being unable to advance. One defector who left in 2014 said in a Washington Post interview, “I wanted to progress in life, I wanted to go to university, but because my mother had defected to China, it looked like I wouldn’t be able to go any further.” A twenty-five-year-old who was thwarted from pursuing his dream as a result of having family living in China said, “I was ambitious. I wanted to be a party member and enjoy all the opportunities that