Anna Fifield

Over the past year and a half, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has stepped into the global spotlight through high-profile summits with fellow leaders from China, Russia, South Korea, and of course the United States. But Kim himself, as a person, remains largely an enigma. In North Korea’s tightly controlled media environment, any stories touching on his personality, relationships, and early life are either shrouded in mystery or ludicrous propaganda. It’s arduous work to try and piece together a portrait of such a man.

Yet that’s exactly the task Anna Fifield took up in her latest book, The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un. Fifield, the Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post and formerly the Tokyo bureau chief, with a focus on Japan and the Koreas, digs into any and every available source for insights on Kim’s upbringing, personality, and ruthless approach to leadership. Her goal for the book, Fifield says, was “to shed some light on this mysterious man who poses such a large threat to the world.”

Knowing Kim the person has important implications for dealing with North Korea the country. Fifield discusses both in this interview with The Diplomat.

From an outside perspective, the cult of personality built up around Kim Jong Un and his family – including the grandiose language nodded to in the title of your book – looks ridiculous. After all your research for the book, including numerous trips to North Korea, what’s your sense on how this hagiography is received by the North Korean people?

It’s difficult to exaggerate how all-encompassing the personality cult is in North Korea, and that has not changed in the current generation. North Korean children are exposed to this idea that the Kims are quasi-deities from the minute they’re able to comprehend. These children sing songs about their great leaders, and they get candy on his birthday and chant thanks to him for it. It continues from this age onwards, through the education system and the state media. Five decades ago when Kim Il Sung was a strong and powerful leader and North Korea was doing relatively well, people believed in this propaganda. But not anymore. The overwhelming majority of North Koreans have seen media from the outside world – South Korean soap operas, Chinese action films – and they know that North Korea is not the socialist paradise they are constantly told it is.

Likewise, as the myths around the leaders have become more and more far-fetched, many people have realized that they are not true. One of the stories made up about Kim Jong Un when he was preparing to take over the leadership had it that he could shoot a gun and hit a lightbulb 100 yards away when he was a small child. A man I spoke to who had been a soldier in the North Korean army said everyone knew this was ridiculous. Every man in North Korea needs to do military service and every one of them will know that it is impossible for a small child to shoot a real gun, let alone with such accuracy.

So the regime has tried to be calibrated in its claims, to come up with tales that suggest Kim Jong Un is a divinely chosen leader while not going so far as to invite outright mockery. Even though many North Koreans bristle at the idea of a third-generation leader and know that the claims about him are fanciful, there is still no dissent in North Korea. There is no North Korean Solzhenitsyn, there is no samizdat literature, there is not even any graffiti.

When I asked one woman who told me about her disdain for the regime why North Koreans didn’t try to do anything about it, she told me that if you object to the system you don’t try to change it. You just try to escape. This is because the punishment system in North Korea is so draconian – if you criticize the regime, three generations of your family may be thrown in the gulag.

In your book, you note the contradiction between North Korean state propaganda against countries like the United States and Japan, and the private lives of the Kim family, filled with luxury goods, food, and entertainment options from these “imperialist aggressors.” Does the clear attraction of Western “soft power” hold any promise for future diplomacy with North Korea?

There have been small efforts over the years to use cultural and sports diplomacy to try to bridge the gap between North Korea and the United States. In 2008, I went to Pyongyang with the New York Philharmonic and watched as they played Gershwin and a sad Korean folk song to a theater full of North Koreans. It felt like a moment. It was not. There were things going on behind the scene – and a stroke looming for Kim Jong Il – that made sure this was not anything more than a concert.

The North Korean regime also makes sure to limit the potential contagion of this kind of soft power. So the number of people who are allowed to view these concerts or travel for international sports events or take part in artistic collaboration or get an education abroad is very, very small. The regime does not want the number of people who have had positive experiences with the outside world to reach a critical mass.

Still, despite the challenges, I think that we should be using cultural engagement and other opportunities for a nonpolitical, low stakes engagement with North Korea. There is so much distrust between the two sides. Every positive interaction can maybe have a cumulative effect and break down some of the resistance from both sides. Maybe it won’t work, but what I do know is that six decades of isolating North Korea has not worked either.

Did what you learned about Kim Jong Un in the course of writing this book shed any light on the “bromance” between him and U.S. President Donald Trump? Trump has insisted that the affection between himself and Kim is mutual and real – he famously joked they “fell in love.” How do you think Kim might be approaching that relationship?

I think Kim Jong Un is very pragmatic about this relationship. He knows that he faces an American president unlike any before and probably unlike any in the future. Donald Trump has shown a willingness to carry out diplomacy in highly unorthodox ways and also a willingness to trust his gut, not his advisers. This presents a great opportunity for Kim Jong Un to try to make some progress on the problems that have been bedeviling this regime for decades. I don’t for a second think that Kim Jong Un is giving up his nuclear weapons – he feels he needs them for his security – but I do think he wants to do some kind of deal so he can get sanctions relief and keep the momentum in the economic changes that have been taking place in North Korea over the past few years. I certainly don’t think Kim Jong Un is in love with Donald Trump.

What do you think is the biggest misconception the outside world has about Kim Jong Un?

There is a widely held misconception that Kim Jong Un is a joke, that he is a cartoon character evil villain who has no idea what he’s doing. In 2017, Donald Trump called him “a total nut job.” Many people have held that view over the years, though maybe not in such colorful terms.

So I wanted to try to dispel the myth of the funny little dictator and show that Kim Jong Un is a very rational, savvy, and ruthless dictator. Exhibit A: the fact that he still in power. The odds were against him when he took over at the beginning of 2011, when he was only 27 years old. He had no qualifications or credentials other than his family line. But he has defied all of the expectations by acting in a very cunning and calculated way.

If we treat him as a joke, we underestimate the threat that he poses both to the outside world and to the 25 million people of North Korea. He wasn’t joking when he said he wanted to get a hydrogen bomb or intercontinental ballistic missiles. And he isn’t joking when he sends his detractors to a prison camp or a firing squad.

The Great Successor is not only the story of Kim Jong Un, but, importantly, the story of how North Korea has changed under his rule. What new trends stand out to you the most since Kim Jong Un succeeded his father in 2011?

The single biggest change in North Korea, not just in the past decade but in the past seven decades, it is the emergence of a vibrant private economy. This is still a theoretically communist state but the majority of people are now making their living through the markets and their own entrepreneurial zeal.

Markets began to emerge under Kim Jong Il after the famine of the 1990s out of necessity. Kim Jong Il begrudgingly tolerated these because the state could no longer provide for the people. But Kim Jong Un has allowed these markets to flourish. The number of marketplaces has more than doubled since he took control and they are now institutionalized in the state system.

The state builds marketplaces, charges rent, and levies taxes. It makes millions of dollars a day from these markets. But so too are North Korean people able to make more money than ever before, to fend for themselves and not depend on the state as they once did. This is a huge change. Kim Jong Un has allowed this to happen so that people can work themselves to a better standard of living – for which he, of course, takes all the credit. If he is going to sustain this improvement in living standards, he’s going to need to do more than just take the brakes off the economy. He needs proper trade and investment, and for that he needs the sanctions to be removed.

North Korea is one of the most closed-off societies on earth. How did you approach the unique challenge of writing about the “Supreme Leader” in a country where media and free expression is so tightly controlled?

Well, I didn’t get much from inside the country. Of course, on my visits to North Korea I tried to document the changes that have happened, especially in the capital, or “Pyonghattan” as it is sometimes now known. But I knew that everything I saw in Pyongyang was a carefully choreographed façade designed to show the country in the best possible light.

To find out about the real North Korea and the real Kim Jong Un, I traveled far and wide and tried to talk to as many people as I could. In Japan, I met the sushi chef who lived in the royal household when Kim Jong Un was a young boy. In Switzerland, I walked through his school grounds, sat outside his apartment, and leafed through his sixth grade curriculum. I tracked down his aunt and uncle, who had been his guardians in Switzerland then fled to the United States. They told me about what Kim Jong un was like as an adolescent.

To find out about what he’s done as the leader, I set about trying to meet everybody who had ever interacted with him. At the beginning that was a relatively short list of people, but it grew as time went on and Kim Jong Un began his charm offensive in 2018. But the most fascinating and insightful part of the reporting, I think, was all the time that I spent with people who had escaped from Kim Jong Un’s regime.

I met dozens of so-called “defectors” – I don’t like that pejorative term – and asked them about their life in the third Kim era. I tried to meet recent escapees on their way out, before they made it to South Korea. I even met one family in Thailand barely a week after they had escaped from North Korea.

I hope that by piecing together all of this testimony, I have been able to compile the most comprehensive account today of who Kim Jong Un is and how he became, and has remained, the leader of North Korea. This is not a biography. It’s impossible to write a biography about someone so unknown. But my goal was to shed some light on this mysterious man who poses such a large threat to the world.