it is also used to personally enrich individuals. While the elite buy expensive Western luxury brands, including Chanel and Dior, dine at high-end restaurants, and reside in high-rises, people outside the capital live very different lives. Suki Kim, a journalist who went undercover as a teacher at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, witnessed this stark contrast firsthand. During a rare excursion outside the city, she recalled seeing men at a construction site “with hollowed eyes and sunken cheeks, clothing tattered, heads shaved, looking like Nazi concentration camp victims.” Despite U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718 (2006), which prohibited the sale of luxury goods to North Korea, Italy in 2010 confiscated cognac and whiskey worth around $17,000 and equipment for a thousand-person theater valued at nearly $200,000. In 2013, North Korea imported around $650 million worth of luxury goods, more than twice the annual amount that Kim Jong Il imported during his rule. That number soared to $800 million in 2014 and dropped to $640 million in 2017. The 2014 U.N. report also showed how North Korea over the years tried to procure a dozen Mercedes-Benz vehicles, music recording equipment, cosmetics, and a dozen pianos no doubt intended for the upper crust in Pyongyang. Subsequent investigations revealed the continuous flow of luxury items, including ski equipment and vodka. And in 2019, Pyongyang showed off in its state media a newly renovated department store that sold Swiss watches, Dyson and Bosch appliances, and other consumer electronics.
Given the amount of money at stake, even as U.S. and international sanctions put pressure on the North Koreans’ ability to make money through licit and illicit means, it’s not surprising that Kim would try to ensure that he alone controls who has access to power and privilege. These purges create new bases of support and prevent networks from ossifying, keep everyone guessing and on their toes, and demonstrate that the elites’ political, economic, and social benefits are directly linked to their loyalty to the regime, thereby tethering their livelihoods to Kim’s success. The lesson for those living in the Kim Jong Un regime is that it’s okay to make money, but don’t forget who you work for and who is in control.
Another benefit of Kim’s systematic purges is the way they replace older officials with younger leaders, perhaps to match his new, modern outlook and to inject fresh blood into a system dominated by men in their seventies and eighties. The current leadership is younger—South Korean reports indicate that Kim’s generational shift had reduced the average age of the inner circle from seventy-six to sixty-two—and in his first two years, Kim replaced half of the 218 party heads, ministers, and military officials. But a reservoir of even younger officials is poised to serve Kim Jong Un in the decades to come. These “princes” and “princesses” wield influence as a result of their familial and financial networks and form Kim’s own base of support as he cultivates a new generation that is beholden to him and not his predecessors. Perhaps he sees them as less wedded to the old ways of conducting business—literally and figuratively—and more pliable and risk tolerant.
There have been signs of Kim’s disdain for the older generations and their corresponding attitude toward governance. His sushi chef and childhood playmate, Fujimoto, saw a teenage Kim kick and taunt an elderly former aide to his grandfather; the aide had no choice but to take the abuse. And Kim’s viciousness extended well into his adulthood. An official from South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy said in 2014 that “when analyzing Kim’s lip movements during his chats with elderly party members on television, it is not rare to find him insulting them with foul language.” Just months after the Jang execution, Kim made a speech of more than six thousand words decrying the lack of ideological fervor, stating that “even a rolling stone may gather moss,” probably referring to elite officials who have become too complacent in their positions. In a rebuke to his officials, Kim denounced the “ideologically degenerate” who had become “inwardly contaminated with bourgeois ideology and culture” and allowed themselves to be “overcome with fear [of] the imperialists.” They cowered and wavered, he implied, even as Kim was facing down the United States with a successful satellite launch in December 2012 and a nuclear test in February 2013 and refusing to back down in spite of increasing sanctions pressure and isolation. In the context of the Jang aftermath and the ensuing