DPRK Forum

Maybe there could be some way to understand how the next leader (if the government remains until then) will be groomed for leadership by looking at how Kim Il Sung groomed Kim Jong Il for the job. While not a lot is known what went on behind closed doors in the decision making process, there are some interesting articles and papers on the path to leadership. We shall look at the Policy Elites paper which tells the story of the succession pretty well. Also, there is sopme new information I ran into on the history of how North Korea was formed by the Soviets. While this may not give insight to the next possible succession because of the differences on how things were handled with Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, it is still interesting to see how the first dynastic succession in the history of communism took place.

We shall look into an interesting section called “Inside North Korea’s Black Box: Reversing the Optics” by Alexandre Y. Mansourov. I happen to disagree a lot with the assessments because it seems to disagree with other economic writings I happen to agree with. To me, North Korea has not really recovered from the famine of the mid-to late 1990’s, and only tried to present a paradise front. Of course, the current floods did not help either, but that happened after the paper was written, so that cannot be used against the author obviously. However, the economic changes in North Korea are not really the focus of this posting, it is how the transition from Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il took place.

Continue reading ‘The Path to Succession: Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il (totally re-written and revised)’