In her new book, “The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un,” the journalist Anna Fifield examines the life of North Korea’s dictator. Since Kim Jong Il’s death, in 2011, his son has presided over some small-market reforms to the North Korean economy, the development of its nuclear program, the continued brutalization of the country’s people, and, recently, a surprisingly warm relationship with President Trump. But Fifield also examines Kim’s early life, including unexpected Japanese influences, his often lonely adolescence and schooling in Switzerland, and his passion for machines and aviation. In doing so, she helps explain how he was able to take over the country at the age of twenty-seven and govern with ruthlessness and surprising adroitness.
I recently spoke by phone with Fifield, who is the Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Kim’s complicated relationship with China, whether he has any ideology beyond power, and the dangers of trying to achieve economic reform while keeping a dictatorship intact.
You put forth this idea in the book that Kim Jong Un has a greater need to deliver change for his people than his father ever did because of their respective circumstances. Why is that, and how do you think that’s influenced his regime?
When his father, Kim Jong Il, took over the leadership, in 1994, North Korea was in really terrible shape. It had just lost its founding President; it had lost its benefactor in the Soviet Union, which had just collapsed. China was on this phenomenal transformation and wasn’t the Communist big brother that it once had been. Also, North Korea was on the brink of a devastating famine that would go on to kill as much as ten per cent of the population. So Kim Jong Il couldn’t risk changing anything. He knew that he needed just to hang on for another twenty or so years, and maybe he could hold onto power and keep the country, the regime, intact.
Kim Jong Un doesn’t have that luxury, because he inherited a country that was in much better shape. The famine had long since passed, and North Korea was getting by much better than it had before. He was twenty-seven years old, and if he lives as long as his grandfather or his father he could be the premier for thirty or forty or even fifty years. So for him the idea of just muddling through wasn’t an option.
Also, after the famine, North Korea had allowed some nascent market activity to take place. That contributed to a little more wealth in the country, or a little less poverty. So people had started to experience slightly rising living standards. I think what Kim Jong Un has done is try to accelerate that. He tried to make it seem like life is getting better for everybody in North Korea and, therefore, to be able to say, “I’m the right guy for this job.” He will rest his legitimacy on that and, hopefully, from his perspective, stay in power for decades to come.
You write in the book, “Kim Jong Un was signaling to the outside world—but, most importantly, to his own people—that this was his vision. It was the clearest indication yet that the North Korean leader didn’t want to be a dull Stalinist dictator. He wanted to be a developmental dictator of the kind that has flourished in other parts of Asia.” What do you mean by that, and how does it fit into what you were just saying?
I think that he does recognize the need for his country to modernize and for him to try to keep up with some of North Korea’s neighbors. Every North Korean escapee that I have met has seen a South Korean or a Chinese film or soap opera or something, so they all know that life in the outside world is much better and that people elsewhere are much richer than they are in North Korea. So I think Kim Jong Un knows that he needs to try to create a sense that things in North Korea are getting better; maybe they’re not catching up with South Korea, but they are not falling any further behind.
I think he wants to be able to grow the economy a bit, but continue to be a strongman all the while, in a similar way to maybe Singapore. The Lee family has been holding power for pretty much five decades there. It’s a very different situation, but I can see that that is the kind of model that Kim Jong Un would look at and see how this country has managed to have economic transformation without any political reform. Having said that, I do not think that North Korea is about to turn into Singapore, but I think that he sees some things in that model that he admires.
To go in that direction would require at least some political reform or at least some change in Kim’s power and life style. Do you think that those are things he’d be willing to do?
Absolutely not. I think if he was going to try to do anything like that, that would be suicidal for him and his regime. I don’t think that North Korea could even do Chinese-style reform and opening, which is very little, and it’s getting less by the day here. In China and Vietnam, they have had leaders with different surnames, so even while the Communist Party may stay in power, there has at least been some kind of jockeying for the top position. I think if Kim Jong Un opened up the leadership to that kind of scrutiny or that kind of conflict, it would be very, very difficult for him to continue to stay in power. So it’s really a tricky balancing act to try to manage now, because he does want economic change, but only enough to keep living standards rising, not so much to destabilize his power.
You have moments in the book where he acts awkward or is lonely. Did researching his early life give you any sympathy for him, or change your perception of him in some way?
I don’t think I’d use the word sympathy, but certainly I think that he had very few other options than to turn out this way, if any at all. He was born into this incredibly dysfunctional family with, obviously, a very brutal streak running through his father and grandfather. Growing up in this extremely abnormal way, totally isolated from other élites, as well as from the general population, he may very well not have known the situation in which his countrymen were living, in which other ten-year-old kids were living in North Korea in the mid-nineties. He was raised for this job in many ways.
So, yeah, I think he had no other option, really, than to turn out this way. When he was named as his father’s successor, a lot of people thought that because he had spent time in Switzerland that he would be this open-minded reformer. I actually think it’s the exact opposite that was the case and that, because he lived in Switzerland and he’s seen how democracy or egalitarianism worked, he realized that if he was going to live anywhere else he would be an entirely normal and not-special human being. He would have to fend for himself. I think that this experience in Switzerland probably simply hardened his resolve to keep this system intact and to continue to be the king of his realm.
One thing that you kept underlining in your book were Japanese influences on him, which I had no idea about. Why were they important?
In North Korea, anybody who had anything to do with the Japanese “imperialists,” as they’re called there, during the colonial occupation of the first half of the twentieth century, is considered very hostile to the regime and is relegated to the far-flung parts of the north of the country. But Kim Jong Un’s mother was actually born in Japan. She was ethnically Korean, and there had been a flow of Koreans through Japan during that colonial period. She had been born there and went to elementary school in Japan, spoke Japanese, had a Japanese name. It wasn’t until she was a teen-ager that her parents decided to join the migration back to North Korea.
This part of his life is completely missing from all North Korean history books. I very much doubt North Koreans would know this about him at all. It would certainly disqualify him to be the leader of the system. Then, while Kim Jong Un was a child, his father hired a sushi chef to come over from Japan to slice up fish for the royal family. This man, this very eccentric character called Kenji Fujimoto, who I met a couple of times, was in the royal household and travelled with them around the country to all the various residential compounds. Kim Jong Un spent quite a lot of time with him and seems to have taken to him a bit. During that period when he was a child there were a couple of times when Kim Jong Un showed some knowledge of Japanese—either words or characters or things he wanted to know about Japan. Also, his mother took him and his older brother on trips to Japan, where they went to Tokyo Disneyland. Like many kids in Asia and America, they grew up thinking that Japanese culture and Japanese technology were really cool and something to admire.
To come back to the present, you refer to him as a “small-coalition leader,” or “someone who keeps his regime stable through the support of relatively few well-rewarded people while letting the rest of the population languish.” How has he managed to keep the support of these few people at the top when he is also known to murder them?
He has very assiduously gone about making sure that those people are well cared for, are making money. Their lives have definitely gotten a lot better under Kim Jong Un. I don’t think it’s contradictory at all that he is showing people, If you play your cards right and remain loyal to me you can be richly rewarded and you can flourish in my system. But to anybody who harbors ideas about building up their own faction or their own power base, freelancing or just generally running afoul of the system, there’s a very powerful deterrent message that Kim Jong Un sent early on by having his own uncle very publicly executed.
I’m sure that all the people at the top of the regime know exactly what happened with that. I think he’s balancing fear and adoration to try to keep these people together. I think that the people at the top, having seen that he’s so ruthless, that he will dispatch with his own uncle—who, for the record, helped him manage this transition and consolidate his grip on power—know the lengths that he’s going to, that no one is safe.
It’s often said that North Korea’s most important relationship is with China. Do you see much of a difference in the way that Kim has tried to manage that relationship from the way his father did?
It’s true that China has an interest in keeping North Korea intact like no other country, and that that has been the No. 1 priority of China over the decades, but this idea that they’re really close is, I think, misguided. The North Korean leaders cannot stand the Chinese; there is no love lost there whatsoever. In fact, they resent how dependent they are on China. Kim Jong Un’s father knew that he had to at least pretend to be interested, at least pretend to be respectful to the Chinese leaders, so very early on he would go out on these tours around China looking at factories and doing all the things that he was supposed to do to pretend that he was interested in Chinese-style reform.
Kim Jong Un didn’t bother with any of that kind of stuff. It took him well over five years to make it to China, to see the leaders and pay his respects and be the obedient little brother next door. Not only that, but he also actively sought to defy and humiliate Xi Jinping during those first years. There was a big G-20 meeting in China that Xi Jinping was hosting, and Kim Jong Un fired off a bunch of missiles that had that city within range. He has paid almost no price for that whatsoever. Xi Jinping still had the strategic interest there and couldn’t pursue anything that would risk the collapse of the regime.
Has Xi tried to change China’s North Korea policy at all?
I think the thing that changed during 2017 was that suddenly there was the prospect of war. I think the Chinese really struggled to make sense of what Donald Trump was saying, of “fire and fury” and all of the threats that were emanating from Washington. It was that year that they really started to implement sanctions like they never had before, to show Trump that they were serious and that sanctions were an effective tool for dealing with North Korea and that there was no need to go in and strike. That was a big change from the Chinese perspective.
But the moment that Trump and Kim decided that they would have this summit and start talking, the whole rationale for maximum pressure was over. I think China really took their foot off the gas at that stage. Kim Jong Un, for all of his efforts to ignore Xi Jinping over the years, was savvy enough to know he needed to come to Beijing first before he met anybody else and to clear things with Xi Jinping. I don’t for a second think that the relationship between Xi and Kim is good, but I think that they have both been pragmatic about it.
Does anything surprise you about Kim’s relationship with Trump?
I’m not surprised that he’s been holding these summits and embarking on this diplomatic path now, because that makes perfect sense for him, if you know he’s trying to get sanctions off. That is the strategic thing to do. I’m surprised actually at how good he has been at it. He does seem to be naturally charismatic in some way, and I don’t say that as a compliment. I mean that in his leadership style he does seem to be able to turn on the charm and say the right things.
He won over President Trump, at least at the beginning. I think it shows that he’s not some nutjob. He is capable of being manipulative and tactical in his engagements with other leaders. He made a quite genius move along the way in sending his sister to the Olympics in South Korea, because she charmed a lot of people. She wasn’t people’s idea of what a North Korean princess would be like. She seemed very modest and humble and demure, and people responded well to that.
When you were reporting this book, did anything make you think that Kim had ideals or an ideology beyond staying in power?
No, that is his ideology. The North Korean self-reliance ideology is very, very thin; there’s nothing to it whatsoever, as I write in the book. The entry in the North Korean encyclopedia for the Juche Tower [a monument in Pyongyang] is twice as long as the entry for the Juche ideology itself, the self-reliance ideology. His No. 1 goal in life and everything that he does in North Korea is all focussed around staying in power and keeping the system intact for his family and the people around him.
Was there any time when you were reporting this where you felt like you got a sense that he deeply cared about something or someone?
Yeah, I think the fascination with machines and airplanes in particular is something that he’s continued throughout his life. We know that as a child he used to love flying model airplanes, and we’ve seen footage of him released by North Korean state media of him flying aircrafts now. He’s got air strips near his residences so he can fly himself in and around the country. He is a real aviation geek, I guess.
One of the things I find really interesting, which I’ve just not been able to find any information about, is the relationship with his older brother and his sister. The three of them seem to be very close. His older brother remained in North Korea, doesn’t have a public role in the regime, and is never seen in public. He wasn’t at their father’s funeral, but he’s still there. I’ve talked to people who have seen him on the beach when Dennis Rodman was there and have hung out with him. I’m kind of fascinated by this loyalty within the family and what the relationship is between the three of them, who were all thrown together into this really abnormal situation and all of whom lost their mother at a very young age.
