hit in China with her fashionable looks” during that first visit to Beijing in March. The paper reported that Chinese Internet users were full of praise for Ri’s appearance, to the chagrin of the Chinese censors, who promptly removed all discussions of Ri from social media platforms that favored her over President Xi’s wife. On Weibo, one of China’s biggest social media platforms, one post gushed, “Ri Sol-ju is indeed beautiful and amiable. I can tell she would be good at ‘first-lady diplomacy.’ ” Another post compared her to South Korean celebrities—Chinese viewers are avid consumers of South Korean movies, music, and sitcoms—and said that Ri was “as pretty as Song Hye-kyo,” a well-known South Korean actor who is popular in China. For the most part, the three outfits she wore during the meetings won approval. A camel-colored cropped jacket and matching skirt, a green dress with a white jacket, and an ivory peplum jacket with flared three-quarter-length sleeves garnered rave reviews. Stylishly dressed, smiling graciously with Xi and Peng, and waving warmly at the Chinese leader and his wife as she and Kim got into their car to leave Beijing, Ri imparted a friendly and familiar tone to a state visit, as if she and her husband were a young couple leaving a dinner party at a much older neighbor’s house.
Ri also garnered favorable attention when she and Kim Jung-sook, South Korea’s First Lady, held their own meetings during the third Moon–Kim summit in Pyongyang. While their husbands dealt with state affairs, the two women visited the Pyongyang University of Music and Dance—perhaps in acknowledgment of their shared history in music (Kim studied vocal music at South Korea’s Kyung Hee University). They also visited the city’s Okryu Children’s Hospital. Their tours of educational and medical institutions in Pyongyang showed off North Korea’s modern facilities, providing an appropriate, apolitical, and noncontroversial backdrop. The venues also highlighted the normality of North Korea, allowing the nuclear and ballistic missile programs, the executions and purges, and the military threats to fade into the background.
Kim Jong Un and Ri Sol Ju’s marriage is thus a metaphor for the byungjin policy, the organic, natural union of militarism and economic development, and a promise for the future of North Korea and its place as an equal on the world stage. She smoothed the edges of what could have been contentious leadership meetings, taking media attention away from North Korea’s nuclear weapons and assassinations and directing it toward her hair and clothing, a young female presence allowing for opportunities for soft power engagement and offering—or teasing—the promise of a different North Korea, more peaceful, pliant, and charming.
FAMILY PLANNING
The regime’s glorification of Ri and her growing public profile provide some clues about Kim’s intentions for the future. Kim is well aware of the machinations of various groups to jockey for supremacy through alliances with potential successors, given his own experience as the son of a father who had multiple children with multiple wives and consorts. Ri’s public elevation may be a deliberate attempt to fend off any potential challengers and preempt any further palace intrigue by securing Kim and Ri’s union as the only legitimate one, thereby ensuring that their offspring will succeed him. It suggests that even in his midthirties Kim is planning for the long haul and plotting a strategy for the duration of not just his life but his children’s lives as well. The couple have at least one confirmed child whom Dennis Rodman held on his second visit; but according to South Korean government information, they have two others. And given Kim’s evident desire to hand down an independent, powerful North Korea, nuclear weapons will surely be a part of his successor’s inheritance.
Of course, Ri’s own status and prestige depend completely on Kim. Without him, she would be just another performer with a pretty face. And while she has supported his desire to re-create North Korea’s brand and supplemented the image he wants to project to the outside world, Kim’s ultimate validation would come from another man—Donald Trump. In June 2018, Kim would get what his grandfather and his father were never able to obtain—a meeting with a sitting U.S. president.
Kim’s meetings with presidents Xi and Moon were mere opening acts for the main event: his summit with Donald Trump. When Trump, who had once dreamed of going into show business instead of real estate, having planned to study filmmaking, according to biographer Tim O’Brien, met Kim Jong Un, the son of a cinephile