How Kim Jong Un’s 10-Year-Old Daughter Emerges Key Player In The Future Of North Korea: Report
It’s been only an year since North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un’s 10-year-old daughter got marked as the country’s propaganda star. As said by a recent report published by the Bloomberg, Kim Ju Ae had set up “a new course for North Korea”s propaganda apparatus”, from her appearance in the weapon launch last year.
The Kim regime is known obsessively secretive and the sudden introduction of Ju Ae to the public during the launch of Korean Hwasong-17 missile in November 2022 was a clear message. The weapon was designed to deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States (US) mainland. It was in the same year, North Korea rolled out eight stamps commemorating the country’s test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Among the eight, five of those stamps featured Ju Ae.
As said by the report, no other children of a North Korean leader had ever been shown “in such a fashion at such an early stage”. By presenting the school girl – in a puffy white winter-coat, hand-in-hand with her father, listening to his words – Kim Jong Un broke the tradition of keeping the leader”s children out of the public”s eye until they were a part of the state”s apparatus.
The report also added that, the girl had been labelled by the state media either as the “respected daughter” or as the “beloved child”. The regime is yet to disclose the official name of the kid, but is assumed to be Ju Ae. “South Korea”s spy agency has pegged her age at about 10 and believes her to be the second of three children between Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju”, claims the publication.
The public appearance of Kim’s daughter in state propaganda is a kind of reiterating the public that there is another generation waiting to run the family dynasty.
The Kim family, also known as the Kim dynasty, is a three-generation lineage of North Korean leadership. The family has been described as a de facto absolute monarchy or hereditary dictatorship. Kim Il Sung, the first leader of North Korea, came to power in 1948 after the end of Japanese rule. It was he who established the communist North Korean state with help of Soviet Union and China.
According to Bloomberg, the representation of Kim’s daughter also could be a message to the North Korean parents to support and protect children “from a US invasion”. But from the observations of Soo Kim, a former Korea analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, “The North Korean people are still starving and living under draconian repression – missiles or not. And unless Kim takes dramatic steps to improve the living conditions of his people and give them true freedom, their perceptions of Kim are unlikely to change fundamentally”.
