accounts that further illustrate the effects of marketization and information penetration. A twenty-five-year-old is described as watching DVDs of Chinese, Russian, Indian, and South Korean soap operas. A thirty-seven-year-old contemporary of Jong Un’s recalled ninety minutes of ideological training every day in which “they would tell us that we needed to make sacrifices in our daily lives so they could build these weapons and protect our country, keep the nation safe. I was so sick and tired of hearing about all this revolutionary history.” A forty-year-old said, “We would hear about how Kim Jong Un had done this and this and that [he] was working so hard for the party and for the nation and for the people…but this exaggeration was just too much. It just didn’t make sense.” There were fissures in the alleged socialist paradise. Ha-Young, whose story is told by Jieun Baek, said, “I hung out with the popular girls at school and ignored other people who didn’t have as much money as us, or didn’t dress as well.”
The reality for the vast majority of North Koreans is a shocking contradiction of this image of paradise that the regime has been trying to advance. The country is still poor, even as Kim and the elites spend hundreds of millions of dollars on showy monuments and luxury items. The United Nations in 2019 reported that of the 25 million citizens, nearly 11 million are undernourished, 140,000 children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition or wasting, and nearly 20 percent of children are stunted, making these citizens more vulnerable to diseases such as tuberculosis. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that millions do not have access to basic sanitation facilities or clean water.
Kim’s recognition of the cognitive dissonance between government propaganda and lived realities might be driving his efforts to create “Pyonghattan,” a way to combat fraying ties between the jangmadang generation and the regime, and keep the state relevant despite the decimation of the public distribution system. But if people are not convinced by soft power, Kim has all of the tools of repression built by his grandfather and his father to enforce compliance. Against the backdrop of his pastel wonderland, he rules through terror and repression, and the terrorized and the repressed will have little choice but to feed Kim’s illusions and expectations, his grandiose visions of himself, and of North Korea’s destiny.
Entering his third year in power in 2014, Kim Jong Un delivered his annual New Year’s address. He paid his obligatory respect to the revolutionary martyrs and extolled his father and his grandfather. Kim also lauded the party, the military, and the people for advancing the policy of byungjin that he had laid out the previous year, and celebrated the ideological fervor of the people whose “blood-sealed ties…have reached a new, higher stage.” But he also called for intensified ideological training, stamping out anything that might “infringe on the unity of the Party and revolutionary ranks and undermine their single-hearted unity.” Kim’s focus on the “mental strength of the masses” reflected on an event that had happened just a few days before, during which, as he triumphantly claimed, “our Party detected and purged the anti-Party, counterrevolutionary factionalists.”
That cancer on the body politic was none other than Kim’s uncle Jang Song Thaek, the husband of his father’s beloved and trusted sister Kim Kyong Hui. Just two years into his reign, Kim had his uncle executed, reportedly by antiaircraft guns, a shocking public humiliation that reverberated across the globe, as Washington, Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo wondered what this would mean for whatever constraints existed to tame Jong Un’s behavior. Even by the standards of North Korean brutality, it was unprecedented that a family member would be treated in this way. The execution of Jang so early in Kim’s rule was a defining moment. It hinted at the young leader’s boldness, confidence, brutality, and high tolerance for risk.
THE FALL
When Jong Un took over in 2011, Jang Song Thaek’s prospects looked secure and indeed quite promising. After all, he was married to the new leader’s aunt, Kim Kyong Hui, Kim Jong Il’s trusted confidante, who had faithfully supported her brother throughout his rise and nearly twenty years of rule. Jang had become part of the family despite the wishes of Kim Il Sung, who opposed the match. Kyong Hui was besotted with Jang, who was funny and charismatic, from the moment they’d met at Kim Il Sung University in the 1960s. Tall, masculine, and