Last November, North Korea conducted a successful test of its largest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) — the Hwasong-17 or what some experts have named the “monster missile.” While the test made clear how far Pyongyang’s ballistic missile program has advanced lately, the spectacle was quickly upstaged by a pair of unlikely attendees on the launch: Ri Sol-ju, the 33 year-old wife of North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, and their 9-year-old daughter Kim Ju-ae.
This was the primary public appearance of any of Kim’s children, of which he’s believed to have three – a son and two daughters. But all of the “bring your daughter to work” jokes aside, Kim Ju-ae, the younger daughter, has now made two appearances at notable military functions: a November photo op with the Hwasong-17 team together with an undated tour of a missile factory.
Which raises questions on Kim’s daughter — who was introduced to the world by ex-basketballer Dennis Rodman during one in every of his infamous North Korea tours a decade ago: Why this child and why now?
![Kim and his daughter at another missiles inspection. Little is known about the North Korea leader's immediate family or why he's chosen to present Kim Ju Ae to the public rather than his two other children.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/Kim-Jong-Un-daughter-01.jpg?w=1024)
Some experts, in fact, have speculated that Kim Ju-ae’s elevated public profile is likely to be tied to family succession planning. But her appearances are more likely a part of a highly choreographed propaganda narrative aimed toward elevating his father’s political image.
Unlike his father, Kim Jong-il, who led North Korea from 1994 until his death in 2011, Kim Jong-un has at all times presented himself as a person of the people. It’s a tactic he learned from his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, who ruled the nation from its founding in 1948 till his death in 1994.
![Young Kim Ju Ae first came to public light after she was](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/dennis-rodman-Kim-Jong-Un-01.jpg?w=1024)
The younger Kim bears a striking resemblance to his grandfather and is commonly similarly portrayed in state media posing with employees and soldiers — sometimes with locked arms and even in full embraces. Like his grandfather, Kim Jong-un has tried to seem approachable and anxious about his people. In 2017, there was even an unusual image of a strategic forces officer riding piggyback on Kim as they celebrated the launch of a recent rocket engine.
“Kim Jong-un’s media team has succeeded in portraying their boss because the man of the people,” says Alexandre Mansourov, Adjunct Associate Professor on the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. “His public activities and associated imagery ring the bell with unusual folks within the North and produce him closer to their each day lives.”
![Kim Jong-un's inner circle includes his 33 year-old wife Ri Sol-ju, with whom he's often spotted in](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/Kim-Jong-Un-wife-01.jpg?w=1024)
A serious component of that life is Kim’s family. From the start of his rule, Kim has often had his wife, Ri Sol-ju, by his side at state functions and overseas trips. His sister, 35-year-old Kim Yo-jong, can be in constant orbit, almost at all times at his side or within the background in public, gaining helpful experience in state and military affairs.
Many North Korea watchers have speculated that Kim’s sister — relatively than his young daughter — is definitely being groomed as a successor. But others, like Doug Bandow, a senior fellow on the Cato Institute, have suggested this seems “unlikely” in a system where “political power” has been “overwhelmingly male, and society stays deeply patriarchal.” Add to that Kim Yo-jong can be very close in age to her brother.
![Also often by Kim Jong-un's side is his 35-year-old Kim Yo-jong. Some North Korea-watchers have speculated that she could one day succeed her brother. But their similar age and North Korea's traditional, patriarchal culture suggest this is unlikely to happen.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/Kim-Yo-Jong-07.jpg?w=1024)
Also like his grandfather, Kim Jong-un enjoys being photographed surrounded by children, a national paterfamilias frequently appearing in orphanages and festivals embraced by children smiling or in tears. This visual strategy has been accompanied by a growing use of the term “fatherly Marshal” in state media, describing Kim as a “benevolent father of a giant family of the entire country.”
Michael Madden, a Nonresident Fellow with the 38 North Program on the Stimson Center, says these images feel without delay exalting and commonplace. They play into “official ideology that depicts the Suryong [Great Leader] because the protective and loving father of socialist Korea,” explains Madden, referring to Kim by his traditional title. A recent photo op, as an illustration, shows Kim visiting a military site and inspecting the “bathhouse and food of the soldiers like their real father would do.”
![Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of Kim Jong-un, fell out of favor with the regime and was assassinated in 2017 following years in exile. Kim Jong Nam is seen here in an undated pic in Shanghai.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/kim-jong-nam-03.jpg?w=1024)
Kim’s avuncular aura couldn’t feel more different than his far less-social father. Today, rather than a dour dictator like Kim Jong-il, the son leads a recent era where the military stays essential, but so, too, is the welfare of the North Koreans themselves (among the poorest people on the planet). And nothing says father greater than Kim being photographed along with his own young child.
In fact, images of young Kim Ju-ae do excess of just reveal fatherly affection. Additionally they reflect a shifting narrative across the country’s WMD program. Politically isolated and crippled by economic sanctions, North Korea has paid a steep price for build up its nuclear arsenal. His daughter’s presence on the “monster missile” launch — and the resulting global press — give intending to that price while suggesting it serves a better purpose.
“Kim Jong-un desires to balance [North Korea’s] repute of being an aggressive country with nukes,” says Ken Gause, director of Strategy, Policy, Plans and Programs Division on the Center for Naval Evaluation. “By showing his wife and daughter on the missile launch, it portrays Kim as steward of his nuclear program which is defensive, meant to guard his family and his people.”
![Current North Korea leader Kim Jong-un is similar in both look and image to his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, who led the nation from its founding in 1948 until his death in 1994. Kim Il-sung is seen here during an official visit to Warsaw in 1984.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/Kim-Il-Sung-04.jpg?w=983)
Kim’s subtle evolution from baby-faced upstart to paternal leader coincides with a muscular recent tone across the nation’s nukes. As an illustration, when North Korea announced its revised nuclear law in September 2022 — which for the primary time spelled out conditions for preemptive nuclear use — Kim emphasized that the country would “never denuclearize,” “a line had been drawn,” and “there can not be any bargaining over nuclear weapons.”
Rachel Minyoung Lee, a senior analyst for the Open Nuclear Network, notes that “normally, if North Korea wanted to go away some wiggle room [for future negotiations], it is going to use conditional expressions like ‘so long as’ or ‘if’ when referring to its nuclear weapons program.” But that conditionality now appears gone. Kim and his daughter watching the ICBM launch and touring the missile factory reinforce the notion that the nukes, like young Kim Ju-ae, are here to remain.
![Kim Il-sung, center, in a classic propaganda image, with his son and successor Kim Jong Il at his side surrounded by adoring young people. Kim Jong Il is the father of current North Korea leader Kim Jong-un.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/Kim-Il-Sung-02.jpg?w=1024)
Nonetheless, there stays the likelihood that Ju-ae’s appearances have been less about legacy and more about boosting domestic support for North Korea’s seemingly relentless missile tests. Back in 2017, the regime raised eyebrows when it launched 24 rockets, sparking on the time the infamous “fire and fury” responses from the Trump administration. Last 12 months North Korea launched greater than 90 missiles. Indeed, amid economic hardships exacerbated by sanctions, border closures and limited trade on account of COVID, sources corresponding to Radio Free Asia have reported on grumbling amongst unusual North Koreans about how the authorities keep launching missiles while most of the people “are desperately struggling to make ends meet without delay.”
![Icy and stone-faced, former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il (photographed on a trip to Russian in 2011) had a far lower-profile public image than his son. Some speculate it's because he maintained numerous wives and households.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/Kim-Jong-Il-03.jpg?w=1024)
Madden notes that Ju-ae’s appearances might have been more about trying to alter negative public opinion concerning the testing. Anecdotal reports from unofficial sources, he said, suggest that she has been received positively by domestic audiences.
The history of how generations of Kims have been portrayed within the media is mixed. Through the long rule of Kim Il-sung, his second wife, Kim Song-ae, (stepmother to Kim Jong-il and Kim Kyong-hui), served as first lady from 1963-1974 and was energetic in North Korean political life, heading the ladies’s union and participating in state affairs. Her children were also relatively influential in political circles. But Kim Song-ae’s public profile began to fade within the late Nineteen Seventies after her stepson, Kim Jong-il, was designated Kim Il-sung’s successor.
![Like his grandfather, Kim Jong-un has a penchant for appearing with adoring (often crying) young people, such as these female soldiers in 2014.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/Kim-Jong-Un-01.jpg?w=1024)
Through the mid-Nineteen Nineties, Kim Jong-il was way more secretive about his family. Based on Madden, much of this was because Kim had multiple wives and households, which might have been viewed as “scandalous and offensive amongst wider elites and the North Korean public.” No less than two of those wives had “problematic backgrounds.” “Kim Jong-nam’s mother was born in South Korea and was divorced,” he explains, “and Kim Jong-un’s mother was born in Japan.”
Despite the recent photo ops, Kim’s long-term plan for his children’s public personas stays unclear. And the reasoning around why he selected to disclose Kim Ju-ae — relatively than the opposite two children and even all of his children — is unknown. Perhaps he favors her more. Or possibly because, due to Rodman, she is the one one in every of his children already known to the surface world. Back in 2013 in an interview about his visit to North Korea, Rodman described Kim as an “awesome guy” and a “good dad” to his “baby daughter named Ju-ae.”
![Crippling sanctions from its nuclear arms program and the ongoing economic chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic have made North Korea one of the world's poorest nations. Ordinary people such as these two in the city of North Pyongan are beginning to question the cost of endless missile tests in the face of ongoing austerity.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/poor-north-korean-02.jpg?w=1024)
![Ultimately, no one but Kim Jong-un really knows why he's begun parading his daughter (here at the Hwasong-17 launch last year) in public. But it appears that the young girl, like North Korea's missile program, aren't going anywhere.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/Kim-Jong-Un-daughter-04.jpg?w=1024)
While Kim Jong-un’s wife and sister are managing to retain their positive public images, members of the family who could potentially challenge Kim’s authority haven’t fared so well. His uncle-in-law Jang Song-thaek was arrested and executed in 2013, and half brother Kim Jong-nam was famously assassinated within the Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017. His other half siblings are rarely seen or discussed in state media, although his aunt occasionally appears seated with Kim and his wife at major state events.
As with nearly all the things else about North Korea, there are few clues as to when (or even when) the Kim offspring will return to the general public arena. But Kim Ju-ae’s recent public debut reflects a recent confidence in her father and the choices he’s made about North Korea’s WMD trajectory. As Mansourov notes, Kim might need brought his daughter to signal “our nuclear-missile arsenal is here to remain eternally, to not be bargained away.” If he’s correct, getting North Korea back to the nuclear negotiations table might be no easy feat.
Jenny Town is a Senior Fellow on the Stimson Center and the Co-founder and Director of 38 North.