Kim Jong Un’s triumph: the rise and rise of North Korea’s dictator

“Whatever you make of his grotesque politics, his execrable human rights record and his lamentable physical condition, Kim Jong Un is one of the most brilliantly successful national leaders in the world,” said Richard Lloyd Parry in The Times. When he succeeded his late father as head of the hermit kingdom in 2011, plenty of people wrote the young leader off as a weak and “callow fattie” who’d be gone within months.

Since then, Kim has purged his potential domestic challengers (including, allegedly, ordering the killing of an elder sibling with a nerve agent); established his own powerful cult of personality in North Korea; and built up a nuclear arsenal that has significantly strengthened his standing on the world stage.

‘Diplomatic victory’

That rise in influence reached its apogee last week, said Katsuji Nakazawa in The Nikkei (Tokyo), when Kim, 41, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with two of Asia’s most powerful leaders, China’s President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, at the massive military parade in Beijing. To be given equal billing with Putin was a huge “diplomatic victory”.

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Kim had arrived in China in his own unique style, said Tetsuya Fujita in the same paper – travelling the 800-odd miles between Pyongyang and Beijing in an armoured train equipped with a special lavatory “to prevent the leak of any biometric data”. As he moved around the Chinese capital, aides wiped down every surface he’d touched, to stop foreign intelligence agencies from being able to gather any traces of his DNA.

‘Respected child’

The most striking aspect of Kim’s visit, though, said Roland Oliphant in The Daily Telegraph, is that he was accompanied almost everywhere by his 12-year-old daughter. Her name – at least according to ex-basketball player (and unofficial personal envoy to North Korea) Dennis Rodman – is Kim Ju Ae; though the North Korean press only refers to her as “respected child”. She often looks more “Bond villain than pre-teen” (on one previous outing she sported a fur-lined leather trench coat and gloves). But with her near-constant presence at Kim’s side, there is growing evidence she is being groomed to succeed her father as leader of the nuclear-armed nation. She is now potentially “the most powerful – and dangerous – girl in the world”.

Of course, there may be a more cynical reason Kim takes her everywhere, said Julian Ryall in Deutsche Welle (Bonn). The reclusive leader is famously fearful of assassination; “one theory”, says an expert, “is that he keeps his daughter close in the belief that the US would not be willing to kill her as well”.

‘A de facto nuclear power’

Kim’s triumphant tour of China culminated in a one-to-one summit with President Xi, said Choe Sang-Hun in The New York Times. And tellingly, this time Xi made no effort to pressure his neighbour into removing his nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula. Kim’s main mission is complete: his rogue nation is now effectively accepted by both China and Russia “as a de facto nuclear power”. His economy is also experiencing a dramatic uplift, said Choo Jae-woo in The Korea Times (Seoul), thanks in large part to the war in Ukraine. Putin and Kim have become “blood allies”, after the latter sent 14,000 North Korean troops to fight alongside Russian soldiers in that conflict. In return, Kremlin gold is flooding into North Korea, to pay for millions of shells. Last week, Russia, China and North Korea also struck a trilateral agreement to make their new alliance more “economically formidable”.

All in all, the trio that stood on the podium at Tiananmen Square make for a sinister new force in global politics, said Lina Chang in Asia Times (Hong Kong). But I wouldn’t overplay their new relationship too much. Things between North Korea and China in particular blow “hot and cold”. Remember, it wasn’t long ago that Kim described China’s attempt to reform his country’s economy as a “filthy wind of bourgeois liberty”.