anticorruption drive to root out the ideologically weak, the speech was a powerful reminder to all officialdom of how important it was to maintain vigor, purity of purpose, and momentum toward a Kim-led nuclear North Korea.
They were also expected to be physically fit and ready for war. In July 2014, as Kim smoked cigarettes, with his prominent belly jutting out, he ordered commanding officers of the North Korean navy to strip and swim in the ocean. “The commanding officers are not qualified if they lack physical ability,” he said, “no matter what good ideological and moral qualities they have and no matter how high military and technological qualifications they are possessed of as they should stand in the [vanguard] of the combat ranks.” Regime media indicated that Kim was pleased with the swimming drill, but one can imagine how some of the older officers might have worried about how they would perform and feared for their future if they were not up to Kim’s exacting standards. Earlier that year, Kim had also commanded a sixty-seven-year-old senior army official to fly a fighter jet. Kim observed scores of other such drills, whether they were artillery firings, archery contests, or air force units mobilizing night infiltration capabilities, not only to demonstrate his hands-on approach to military readiness but also to show these senior military leaders—and their underlings—who was really in control.
Kim has frequently called out ineffectiveness and publicized it, in contrast to his father, who kept regime deficiencies mostly under wraps. Kim has not held back from private and open criticism. During an inspection of an amusement park in 2012, he berated officials for the poor state of the facilities and said that their attitude toward the park’s physical state was a reflection of their attitude toward the people and their lack of ideological vigor and presumably loyalty to him. Describing the incident, regime media reported, “Spotting weeds sprouting between pavement blocks…Kim Jong Un personally plucked them one by one with a frustrated look and said in an enraged tone: how could functionaries not see this; if the functionaries in charge of managing the funfair had a master-like attitude, affection for their work sites, and a conscience for serving the people, how could they work like this?” One can imagine the horror and fear of those standing around their leader as he bent down to weed the ground himself, wondering what their fate might be as he spit out, “I had no idea the park could be so pitiful.”
In a much more serious incident, possibly hundreds of people died in 2014 when a twenty-three-story apartment building—one of the structures built to fulfill Kim’s desire to turn the capital into a modern metropolis—collapsed in Pyongyang. Kim grieved intensely, according to the regime media that publicized the tragedy, yet another unprecedented move by the regime to be “transparent.” Kim “sat up all night, feeling pained after being told about the accident,” a senior official said. An undoubtedly livid Kim forced his uniformed senior officials, including his seventy-year-old minister of public security and others more than twice his age, to bow in contrition in front of the residents of the building and the district.
No official, high or low, was safe from Kim’s inspections. During a 2015 tour through a terrapin farm, an angry and frustrated Kim chastised the managers for the facility’s “serious shortcomings” and for not paying enough attention to the teachings of Kim Jong Il, who had intended terrapin farms to “provide the people with tasty and nutritious terrapin widely known as a precious tonic from olden times.” Their fault lay not just in their technical incompetence but in their “outmoded way of thinking,” suggesting that they had not yet adopted Kim’s innovative and modern style of improving the lives of the people. Shortly after his visit, Kim reportedly had the manager of the farm executed, spurring fear in lower-level officials that they, too, are in the crosshairs of Kim’s wrath if they do not perform to his satisfaction and do not show sufficient loyalty.
The leaders of the older generation were convenient scapegoats for insufficient progress in advancing Kim’s priorities, never mind the inadequacies of resources, the rampant corruption that encouraged faulty construction, or Kim’s unrealistic expectations. But Jang’s execution and Kim’s desire to humiliate the leadership, almost all of whom are more than twice his age, may also point to a thin-skinned young man with an outsize view of himself, who during his entire life was coddled and heard nothing