Kim Jong-un’s Daughter, Kim Ju-ae, 13, a Likely Successor, Is Learning the Arts of War and Statecraft

The Kim dynasty endures in the fast-growing form of a 13-year-old girl whom her doting father shows off at every chance. It’s all part of her education in the ways and wiles of one of the world’s most secretive, harshest communist dictatorships. We can’t be sure the name of the girl is Ju-ae, but that’s what was reported by the erstwhile Chicago Bulls basketball star Dennis Rodman. He held her in his arms when he was visiting Pyongyang at the invitation of her father, Kim Jong-un, in 2013. Daddy has, in any event, been tutoring his daughter in the art of war ever since showing her off at a missile launch when she was nine years old.Since then, Mr. Kim has treated her not just to more missile launches but to lessons at rifle and pistol ranges and, most recently, in driving a tank, which requires both brains and brawn. Yet just what magic was it that “Ju -ae” had to have displayed to get her father to bestow such attention on her, to put her pictures in North Korean newspapers and magazines and then to have her charming image spread worldwide via the regime’s Korean Central News Agency?Why, if he’s so often pictured with the girl, is her name and relationship to him yet to be disclosed? The rise of Ju-ae is more remarkable considering that her mother, Ri Sol-ju, is reported to have two other children, an older son and a daughter, also believed to be slightly older. Conventionally, in accordance with Korean tradition, a son would rank ahead of a daughter, particularly if the son is older, but Ju-ae may have the intellect to go with the charm, qualities she’d need to flourish and survive in a system in which the ruler may order imprisonment and execution for those who dare defy him — or her. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service insists Ju-ae is not only in line to succeed her 43-year-old father, who has been unable to control his weight, and is now publicizing her image more than ever. The fact that he doesn’t officially disclose her name, or even her identity as his daughter, seems irrelevant to intelligence analysts. There is, however, one problem. For several years, before Ju-ae’s debut in the North Korean press, her father’s younger sister, Kim Yo-jong, was widely reported as a potential successor. Aunt Yo-jong has gained global publicity as the outspoken voice for the regime, willing to shower invective and insults on the North’s enemies, America, South Korea, and Japan. She appears to have gained still more power with her recent promotion to a ministerial-level position as a director of the ruling Workers’ Party, of which big brother is general secretary. “Ju-ae’s Succession Risks Bloodshed With Kim Yo-jong,” headlines South Korea’s biggest newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, predicting that “a conflict between Kim Ju-ae and Kim Yo-jong, the deputy director of the Workers’ Party, could emerge.” Some analysts, however, doubt speculation of a rift, now or later. “I continue to believe she is the loyal servant and political partner of her brother. I see no evidence of rivalry or resentment between the two. Quite the contrary,” a former top American diplomat in Seoul, Evans Revere, told the Sun. In that spirit, Aunt Yo-jong is assumed to be schooling Ju-ae in the complexities of statecraft and governance. As the girl grows up surrounded by tutors and guardians, however, the history of North Korean high-level intrigue suggests that competition for power at the highest level is almost inevitable. Kim Jong-un, born in 1983 or 1984, was not yet 30 when his father, Kim Jong-il, named him a four-star general in 2010, confirming that he had long since bypassed his older brother, Kim Yong-chul, who had been educated in the same school in Switzerland but loved to play a guitar and was once spotted at an Eric Clapton concert in Singapore. Kim Jong-Il’s oldest son, Kim Jong-nam, born to a different mother, had long since fallen into disfavor after having been arrested in Japan in 2001 traveling with two women and a four-year-old boy on a fake passport under a Chinese name. Kim Jong-nam may have aspired to replace Kim Jong-un until Mr. Kim ordered his assassination in 2017 in a horrifying attack in which nerve gas was smeared on his face as he was about to fly from Kuala Lumpur back to Macao.Then there was Kim Jong-un’s uncle-in-law, Jang Song-thaek, married to Kim Jong-il’s younger sister. He was the country’s second-ranking leader under Kim Jong-il, but Kim Jong-un saw him as a threat and had him executed in December 2013.For now, Aunt Yo-jong is showing no signs of discord, Mr. Revere said. Kim Jong-un “relies on her to speak authoritatively on issues he deems important enough to deserve top-level comment.”“She does so confidently, which tells me she knows he will have her back,” Mr. Revere said. “I see no sign of palace intrigue or jealousy that might pit her against the young heir-apparent,” Referencing Winston Churchill’s take on the goings-on inside the Kremlin during Soviet rule, Mr. Revere added: “The inner circle in Pyongyang is, as Churchill once put it in a different context, ‘A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’”

Kim Jong-un’s Daughter, Kim Ju-ae, 13, a Likely Successor, Is Learning the Arts of War and Statecraft

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