Recent defectors hold Kim Jong-un in lower regard, report shows

North Koreans who fled their repressive homeland in recent years have expressed greater negative sentiment than earlier defectors regarding regime leader Kim Jong-un and the legitimacy of his family's hereditary hold on power in a recent report.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un talks to his daughter Kim Ju-ae in this photo released by Pyongyang's state-controlled Korean Central News Agency on April 14, 2023. [YONHAP]

North Koreans who fled their repressive homeland in recent years have expressed greater negative sentiment than earlier defectors regarding regime leader Kim Jong-un and the legitimacy of his family's hereditary hold on power in a report released by South Korea's Unification Ministry on Tuesday.

The 280-page report on the economic and social situation in the North, which was compiled based on interviews with 6,351 defectors between 2013 and 2022, highlighted long-running changes under way within the North’s closed society, particularly the growing importance of markets for North Koreans to make a living.

According to the report, 43.8 percent of all defectors said they disapproved of Kim Jong-un’s rise to power in 2011 while they were still living in the North. Of those who fled the North between 2016 and 2020, a higher proportion, 56.3 percent, said they disliked Kim.

“Negative public sentiment [in the North] toward leadership succession based on the so-called ‘Paektu bloodline’ has increased, and this perception appears to have gained momentum since Kim Jong-un took control,” the report showed.

North Korean state propaganda frequently refers to Kim’s family as the “Paektu bloodline” based on the claim that Kim’s father and predecessor, Kim Jong-il, was born in a secret guerrilla camp on the slopes of Mount Paektu, the highest peak on the Korean Peninsula, in the waning years of the Japanese colonial occupation.

However, records show that Kim Jong-il was born in Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East in 1941, while his father and regime founder Kim Il Sung was in training with the Soviet military alongside Chinese communists.

The views expressed by defectors in the report may not represent the general North Korean populace, as 81.8 percent of respondents were women and 82.1 percent were residents of the four economically deprived northern provinces bordering China before their defection.

However, their responses could bode trouble for the regime’s apparent efforts to highlight Kim Jong-un’s daughter, Kim Ju-ae, as his “most likely successor,” which is the South Korean National Intelligence Service’s assessment.

While the North has never formally relinquished its commitment to socialism to safeguard the regime’s independence and economic autonomy, defectors interviewed for the report said that North Koreans engage in more activities in the unofficial private sector to cope with economic hardship and obtain necessities.

Such activities include smuggling, selling, and bartering goods at markets, farming land they are not permitted to use, and working in housing construction.

Over 90 percent of defectors noted that they needed markets to survive, while 68.1 percent said their primary source of income came from outside of their state-assigned jobs.

According to the report, the private sector is now a significant source of not only food and clothing for North Koreans but also “healthcare, education, transportation and information infrastructure.”

As the importance of markets has grown, so has the status of women, according to the report.

Even though men in North Korea’s patriarchal society are expected to show up to their state-assigned places of employment despite the meager wages, women are given greater leeway to engage in other moneymaking activities, increasing their economic leverage.

According to the report, this change in status has led women to delay marriage or seek divorce, and the fertility rate has declined.

As much as the regime has ramped up internal controls to prevent the inflow of outside information that it sees as destabilizing, 83.3 percent of defectors who fled between 2016 and 2020 said they had consumed foreign media while they were still in the North, compared to just 8.4 percent of those who fled before 2000.

People in their 20s and 30s comprised 54.8 percent of defectors interviewed for the report.

Just over a third of defectors said they possessed mobile phones when they were in the North, but the vast majority said access to the internet was virtually impossible and that they viewed movies or dramas produced in South Korea and other countries via USBs and other devices.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]