Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (66 page)

Kim Il-sung got personally involved in the new propaganda push on his designated heir’s behalf. According to Hwang Jang-yop, the former party ideology secretary, with the success of the intensified efforts to glorify the senior Kim’s revolutionary career “the stage was set for the birth of the first legend about Kim Jong-il—his birth in 1942 in a secret encampment in Mount Paektu. Kim Il-sung was enjoying a holiday in the resort in Samjiyeon when he summoned the people who had participated in the partisan struggle and ordered them to find the site of the secret camp in Mount Paektu where Kim Jong-il was born. Obviously they could not find something that did not exist. So Kim Il-sung said that he would have to do it himself. He looked around and picked a scenic spot and claimed that that was where the secret encampment had been. He then named the mountain peak behind it ‘Jongilbong’ (Jong-il Peak). The Party History Center obtained a huge granite rock and carved the word ‘Jongilbong’ on it. Then they accomplished the difficult task of hoisting the rock up the Jongilbong and attaching it there. Underneath the rock they built a hut called ‘Home of the Mount Paektu secret encampment’ and went around claiming that this hut was where Kim Il-sung had lived with Kim Jong-suk. This was where he had planted the red flag indicating the commander’s headquarters and directed the partisan struggle. And this was where Kim Jong-il was born. He supposedly grew up in this hut listening to the sounds of gunshots of the partisans.” One of Hwang’s jobs was supervising the Party History Center, he wrote.
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Kim Jong-il was credited with having been the advocate of the policy of mobilizing masses of workers to complete construction projects at breakneck speed. In October 1974 “when the economy was faced with many difficulties,” Kim Il-sung convened a meeting of the Party Central Committee’s politburo. “At that time Mr. Kim Jong-il set forward the policy of waging ‘speed battles’ to overcome the economic difficulties,” a pro-Pyongyang newspaper in Tokyo reported later. Others pointed out the obstacles, but “it was his firm conviction that there was nothing that could not be overcome if the inexhaustible power and energy of the masses were mobilized. On October 5 of the same year, in order to fulfill the annual assignments of economic construction, Mr. Kim Jong-il proposed to start a ‘70-day battle’ in the national economy”
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Such “speed battles” became the trademark of Kim Jong-il’s leadership style, both in contruction and in the general operation of the economy. Looking back at the end of 1980 on the accomplishments of that year, for example, North Korea’s Central News Agency credited the “dazzling ray of guidance”—Kim Jong-il, of course—-with a construction “speed campaign” in which “grandiose monumental creations … have sprung up everywhere.” All those “great monuments of the era of the Workers’ Party, which were built in the land of paradise under the outstretched hand of guidance, are gifts of great love which could be provided only by the Respected and Beloved Leader [Kim Il-sung] and the Benevolent Party Center.”

Upholding his father’s “architectural esthetic,” Kim Jong-il focused his energies on massive urban-development projects in Pyongyang. “The young secretary completely transformed the capital” by 1979, throwing up hospitals, an indoor stadium and the Mansudae Art Theater. Changgwang Street, lined with new twenty- to thirty-story apartment blocks, normally would have taken three or four years to build but went up in ten months in 1980, the regime boasted.
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Even though he already had received his father’s approval to become the successor, Kim Jong-il continued his elaborate and expensive flattery of Kim Il-sung. As when he was a youngster, the son was accustomed to doing as he wished—and ordinary mortals generally were not prepared to stand in his way. “Formally, the Supreme People’s Assembly is the highest sovereign organization in North Korea,” one former high-ranking official said. “In reality, even if it sets a budget, Kim Jong-il will demand unreasonable expenses for constructing such projects as villas, the Juche Tower or the Arch of Triumph. Cases of unplanned expenses are frequent. Although there are times when experts spin around in circles, pointing out these expenses, there is no one who can act as a restraining force.” The former official added: “Most citizens are unaware of these non-productive expenditures. However, even if they harbor dissatisfaction, is there anyone who could express this dissatisfaction and make an issue out of it? This non-productive investment was an
important cause of the economic predicament North Korea fell into in the latter half of the 1980s. The waste was caused by the political environment leading up to the transfer of power to Kim Jong-il.
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In 1983 officials of Chongryon, the pro-Pyongyang association of Korean residents in Japan, which functions as a sort of de facto embassy in the absence of diplomatic relations between Japan and North Korea, invited me to a movie screening. It would be the Japan premiere of a documentary film depicting a visit to China by Kim Jong-il.

That was an irresistible invitation at a time when North Korea was very much in the news. The country had just sent commandos to Burma to bomb a South Korean delegation. Failing to harm the South’s president, the North Korean agents killed four of his cabinet members and thirteen other officials. Among those who died in Rangoon was Kim Jae-ik, a brilliant, Stanford-educated economist—in my estimation the best and brightest of the technocrats involved in planning the South’s economic miracle. After my 1979 visit to North Korea I had traveled to Seoul to compare notes with South Korean officials. Talking about the North was still a strong taboo, however, and every official I visited contrived to change the subject—except for Kim Jae-ik. I actually went to see him to talk about another topic, South Korea’s economic plans. But when he heard I had just come from the North he was so excited that he kept me in his office for several hours, picking my brain about what I had learned there. In the fall of 1983, when I saw Kim Jae-ik’s name on the Rangoon fatalities list, I felt personal loss. (It was only much later that various sources, among them former party secretary Hwang Jang-yop,
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suggested that Kim Jong-il had ordered the attack. Some analysts say his father still retained the main supervisory role over major initiatives in inter-Korean and foreign affairs.)

I duly attended the screening and reviewed the film as follows for my employer at the time,
The Asian Wall Street Journal,
and its U.S. parent newspaper:

TOKYO—Is the virtual crown prince of communist North Korea a candidate for an early heart attack? Does he lack a skill so essential to a political leader as speechmaking? Did he harbor doubts about the intentions of North Korea’s Chinese allies—doubts that Beijing sought to allay with almost two weeks of marathon banquets, talks, sightseeing and (literal) hand-holding? With President Reagan due to visit the other Korea this coming weekend, such questions may be of at least passing interest to Americans.

A North Korean documentary film, “Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s visit to China,” which premiered in English here, chronicles a June
visit to China by Kim Jong-il, President Kim Il-sung’s 41-year-old son and designated successor. It gives tantalizing clues to the personality abilities, attitudes and health of a leader little known outside his largely closed country. And it provides hints of North Korean and Chinese policy trends at a time when tension in Northeast Asia is heightened by the Rangoon bomb that killed 17 South Korean officials and by the earlier Soviet downing of a South Korean jetliner.

The younger Mr. Kim is secretary of the Korean Workers’ (Communist) Party. He visited China June 1–12. The trip wasn’t announced until after his return.

The two-hour film describes the visit as “unofficial.” Yet it makes clear that the Chinese went all out to give their guest treatment befitting an officially visiting head of state. At every arrival and sendoff during a rail trip that took him to several east-coast cities, his hosts stage-managed the sort of adulation by supposedly joyous crowds of-well--wishers he is accustomed to at home—-where both he and his father are treated as godlike cult figures of superhuman brilliance and accomplishments.

The film covers only ceremonial and social parts of Mr. Kim’s meetings with Chinese officials, who included Deng Xiaoping, Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang and Premier Zhao Zhiyang. But it covers those parts interminably and in the process supports some observations and some educated guesses:

Young Mr. Kim has a heroic abdominal overhang of the sort known outside sober North Korea as a beer belly. Despite a discreet tailoring job on the gunmetal-blue Mao-style tunics he wore, he looked in the film to be perhaps 40 to 50 pounds overweight. He smokes filtertipped cigarettes. In Beijing he slowed going up some steep steps and looked out of breath. A Chinese soldier accompanying him offered an arm, but he refused it. Most doctors would counsel dieting and exercise to reduce the chances of high blood presure, heart attack, stroke or other illness.

(On the other hand, his father carries similar bulk and also is a smoker, and he passed his 71st birthday this year. And there must be political advantages in looking like his father—-which he does, except for his sylishly permed hair, right down to the boyishly round face seen in old photos of the elder Mr. Kim.)

The younger Mr. Kim may dislike public speaking. He appeared to lack talent for it. When welcoming speeches were made to him and his party during the trip, he almost always left the replies to underlings. When he did make a speech he stood reading it without expression, his head down. He made neither gestures nor eye contact
with the audience. This is curious, since North Korean spokesmen in Tokyo have praised the oratorical skills of the “dear leader.”

Mr. Kim seemed unsmilingly ill at ease or haughty on occasion during the first days in China. But by the time his trip ended, the film showed him positively glowing. It is possible that in the beginning he simply suffered from the usual shock experienced by a visitor unaccustomed to the mammoth banquets with which the Chinese stuff their guests. But it is more likely he took a-while to decide whether to trust his hosts. Chinese leaders, only recently rid of the personality cult and nepotism of the late Chairman Mao Zedong, had been slow to recognize the junior Mr. Kim publicly as successor to his father’s even more extravagant personality cult. And there had been hints of a softening in China’s stance toward the North’s mortal enemy, South Korea. When his stiffness turned to relaxation, and even an animated charm, around mid-way in the visit, it is a good bet he was responding not just to the lavish hospitality but mainly to promises of support, implied or expressed.

The film was made originally in Korean, which indicates it was intended to give the home folks the message that China was recognizing the younger Mr. Kim as heir to his father. Like the very expensive continuing propaganda campaign to portray the father as a leader revered world-wide for his sagacity, this effort testifies that in North Korea there still are doubters, if not overt opponents, of “Kimilsungism” and its provision for an hereditary succession. For several years, North Korea’s officials and spokesmen have seemed extremely sensitive to foreign criticism of the Kim clan’s nepotism, and this hasn’t changed. One of the unofficial spokesmen for North Korea, who arranged the film premiere, pointedly struck up a conversation with me about my very young son. “So you have a successor now,” the spokesman said. “Do you want him to be a journalist like you?”

The Chinese were able to swallow their very strong misgivings and embrace the scion of so un-Marxist an institution as a dynasty. That shows once again how susceptible they are to Kim Il-sung’s playing off of China against the Soviet Union. The film shows how literally that term “embrace” can be taken. Hu Yaobang, the main official negotiating with Mr. Kim, had at least five sessions with him. And Mr. Hu went for the hard sell. On two occasions the film shows him trying to link arms with Mr. Kim. Both times Mr. Kim resisted. Eventually, Mr. Hu’s determined overtures prevailed and they strolled along holding hands.

Finally, the film is yet another demonstration that North Korea’s propaganda is the most heavy-handed in the world. The documentary
unmercifully subjects viewers to every railway station arrival demonstration, every fervent fare-well, every banquet toast. Eleven sets of talks and banquets are described as having occurred in atmospheres characterized by combinations of qualities from this list: cordial, serious, comradely and friendly. The cameraman throughout the long trip never failed to lean out of the train window just after a departure and film the train snaking around a curve ahead, and the editor never failed to leave the clichéd scene in. All this belies a 1980 desrip-tion of Mr. Kim by North Korea’s spokesmen here as the country’s Alfred Hitchcock, as an artistic film director in his own right who transformed the country’s cinema even as he gave “personal guidance” to many musicians, dancers and jugglers.

The film showing was arranged and invitations sent before the explosion in Rangoon. It is a document that hints at the state of mind of North Korea’s leadership in the months just before the bombing: perhaps an enhanced confidence resulting from China’s overtures.
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I heard subsequently that the highest-level Chongryon official involved in inviting me to the screening had been required to answer to his superiors for my review. According to one account, he nearly lost his job over it. Our relationship cooled decidedly after that. I was told by another official in the Chongryon Tokyo headquarters more than five years later that the incident still was held against me, and was remembered in connection with my continuing applications to revisit North Korea. Mean-while, after that China journey Kim Jong-il took few publicized trips abroad.
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But the China visit’s diplomatic success could be seen in de facto Chinese support for his status— and, soon, in Soviet public recognition that he would be the successor.